Enthusiasm is about making changes
"Why wouldn't a company want to approach any important audience with all the excitement of a Billy Graham crusade?" - James Kilts
It's time to rethink "enthusiasm." The word has been shanghaied by rah-rah backslappers; it's in danger of being shrunken to the come-on bonhomie of the barker and the pitchman. When such a standard of enthusiasm is applied at work, the workplace becomes life inside an all-day infomercial.
A lot of this definition derives from our only remaining common cultural experience - sports. But even so, if you could pick one coach to play for, who would it be? For me, it has to be the legend, UCLA's John Wooden. Was he enthusiastic? He spent games sitting on the bench with his arms folded, looking like a guy waiting for his muffler to be replaced.
What got me thinking about enthusiasm and work was reading "Doing What Matters" by James Kilts (with John Manfredi and Robert Lorber). That's where I found the line about the Billy Graham crusade. I spoke with Kilts and asked about the reference. He laughed, saying, "My minister loved it." Then, when asked about his definition of "enthusiasm," he added, "It's all about convincing people you want change, and that they have the tools and permission to change."
Later he mentioned that corporate employees "feel change is given lip service and that those who actually take action get shot." But let's stop to notice the implicit formula: Enthusiasm equals change, not noise or cutesiness. CHANGE equals enthusiasm.
So how do you convince people that you really want them to implement change and that it isn't just lip service? Kilts offers a marvelous case study. When he took over Gillette, the company was bogged down in bureaucracy, with cost ratios far exceeding those of comparable companies. For one thing, he discovered that the company had more than 24,000 SKUs. (These are "stock-keeping units," the ID number for each variation of a product - a red three-pack of razor blades would have a different SKU than a blue three-pack, and so on, 24,000 times.) A company needs to warehouse and inventory all these different subsets of its products, which is costly, of course. However, anyone who has worked in consumer goods knows that it's easier to create new versions of a product than it is to kill off old ones. Kilts described for me the early off-site meeting in which he brought up the SKU problem. He said: "I was told, 'Oh that's one thing you don't have to worry about - we're aware of the problem and we're on top of it. We have a crossfunctional task force and an outside consulting firm.' "
If you've been around corpo-speak, such a sentence is scary, not reassuring. (Who put the "funk" in "crossfunctional task force"?) Kilts understood this, and immediately asked, "How many SKUs have you taken out in the past year?" This yielded an embarrassed silence, which ended with "none."
Kilts then said, "If you can't do it, then get me a print-out and a red Magic Marker, and we'll get it done right now." The result was an agreement that the SKU task force would actually undertake the task and would identify half of the SKUs to be cut. (By the time Kilts left the company, the 24,000 SKUs were down to 7,000.)
Now THAT's how you convince people you really do want change. But I don't want to leave the impression that Kilts's victory was a matter of posturing or bullying; no, it was a matter of preparation and determination. Kilts was able to ask the hard questions because he'd spent weeks researching the company's problems before his first meeting with his new employees. He knew that costs had to be reduced, and from the first meeting he could insist on the company "doing what matters," because he knew what mattered, and they knew that he knew.
So let's agree on a new definition of enthusiasm; it isn't about cheerleading but change-leading, not easy slogans but hard questions. Enthusiasm's chief characteristic is not cuteness or bounciness but steeliness. And that's how John Wooden, with his rolled-up papers and folded arms, was the most enthusiastic coach in history.
Dale Dauten is a syndicated columnist. He can be reached at dale@dauten.com. 