Sit Near The Fire by Harry Beckwith

It started on a visit to Microsoft. I entered Building 26 of what were then 28 on the seemingly endless Redmond campus, and felt something. I realized I had felt that before.

It had come on a visit to Nike, years before, on my first of many visits to pick up some prototype shoes which they had me test in the early 80s. Nike employees were passionate. That feeling was so intense, in fact, that when their director of marketing Rob Strasser left Nike to assume the same role at rival Adidas, most Nike employees, when they would see Rob approaching on a Portland sidewalk, would cross to the other side to avoid him.

I felt that fire in Milwaukee, too, when I entered the headquarters of Harley-Davidson.

These companies share a palpable trait: passion. I am far from alone in recognizing it.

Ian Anderson, former CEO of Unilver, had seen it, too. When I mentioned my encounters with passion to him late one evening in 1998, Ian's entire body rose up in response. "You are so right," he said, in his unforgettable Scottish brogue. "When you walk into the great companies, you can feel it...it's incandescent," Ian said, while glowing himself.

Jim Collins has seen it, too. In Good to Great, he concluded from his diligent research that great companies focus on whatever they can do better than anyone else, on that which drives them economically -- and about which they feel truly passionate.

Two other professors -- a group more inclined to focus on process than feelings -- noticed it, too. In their influential 1994 book Competing for the Future, Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad observed that every successful company must articulate a statement of strategic intent that "contains pathos and passion."

Collins, at least one reporter and I all have detected the passion at one of Colllins's good-to-great companies, Gillette, too. "People who aren't passionate need not apply," a Wall Street Journal reporter wrote in a story explaining the failure of an outstanding business school graduate to land a job with Gillette. The candidate's failing? He lacked passion for deodorant.

Anyone intrigued by Gillette's passion for seemingly banal tasks like flossing and shaving should explore the story of the company's creation of the Mach 3 razor and its successor, the Mach 3 Turbo. (Check the The New Yorker archives for an excellent article.) But you still may ask, what difference has their passion made to customers? To answer that, shave just once with a Turbo. As Mr. Anderson would say, the experience borders on the incandescent.

Increasingly, I find myself seeking out passionate companies, on the theory that they will thrive and take me along for the ride. And thankfully, I still feel that passion, 24 years into this fascinating career.