Passion emerges when one has the freedom and opportunity to pursue one's dream. The significance of this is that there is no correlation between dreaming and one's environment. A person in the inner city who has never gone mountain climbing can dream about scaling Mt. Everest. The real challenge for the leader in building a high-performance organization is to find ways to transform dreams into realities, not only for himself or herself, but for everyone in the organization. If entrepreneurs do that, then remarkable things really can happen.
Passion can take unconventional, but very practical form in entrepreneurial ventures.
Jack Stack, chairman and CEO of Springfield ReManufacturing Corporation in Springfield, Missouri, and the other 119 employee owners of the company translated their passion into a clear, concise and convincing purpose for SRC when they took over a company in desperate straits twelve years ago. They never have. I am convinced that commitment, real commitment, comes from a feeling of ownership about what one is doing. If you think about it, each of us owns our own dreams. These dreams give purpose to our lives.