This is our monthly e-message to people who are interested in leading their lives with passion. Each month we will send you a short note with information, stories, examples, and practical things you can do to lead your life, work, and organizations with passion.

Leading With Passion
We like the term ‘leading with passion,’ because it has two very significant, but related meanings. The first suggests leading off with passion. That is, making the very first priority in your life to live, work, and play passionately, and to fully embrace every possible moment. Second, it means that we can lead our organizations, teams, and projects with passion – creating passionate work environments by transferring our own enthusiasm for the organization to all others who come into contact with it.

What We Can Learn From Darlene Ryan, Founder, President and CEO of PharmaFab
PharmaFab, created in 1994, had sales of $30,000 in 1995 which grew to around $20,000,000 in 2002.. An INC 500 company with an average 400% annual growth rate, PharmaFab is a contract manufacturer of solid dose and liquid formulations for the branded and generic pharmaceutical industry.

Darlene Ryan, with her dad and brother, started the company absolutely from scratch after all three had been suddenly fired by another company. Three weeks after they started the company, her dad was diagnosed with lung cancer and given two months to live (with a 2% chance of making it two years). He made it two years and one day.

It would have been easy for Darlene to view herself as a victim and to either give up or to seek revenge upon the company that had sacked her. Instead she made a success of her life and an excellent workplace for the folks who work for her. There are five key ideas we can learn from Darlene about leading with passion.

Forget About the Past
“When we started PharmaFab,” Darlene says, “ we swore we would never treat another human being the way we were treated.” They decided not to spend money or effort suing the other company, but to focus on moving forward. They were out to prove they could treat employees and customers right, to be ethical to the core and still beat the competition. How much of your time, energy, and focus is spent trying to ‘get’ the folks who ‘got’ you, or in living in the past?

Create A Workplace Where You’d Love To Be
“What I do is build a workplace where I myself want to go to work every day, that is more fun than anyplace else I can imagine,” she says.

Darlene actually moved someone from her HR department into a new position. The position’s unofficial title is “Chief Nurturer” for the company – she is there to make Darlene more accessible, to make the employees feel welcomed and “nurtured,” and to increase contributions to the community.

Make Work Significant – Leaders are Meaning-Makers
Cranking out hundreds of thousands of pills might not seem much more interesting than shoveling sand, but leading with passion involves helping employees to understand the significance of what they do, no matter how trivial the work may seem.

“I believe it is my job to assign meaning to what we do,” Darlene says, “ to help people see that what we do is not just to punch tablets from a machine. Rather, what we do is help people get healthy -- we help grandmothers and children and everybody else.”

Take Time for Reflection and Learning
Too often, companies think they have to demand that employees spend every second ‘producing.’ Real value comes from giving people time to think and learn.

Every Tuesday morning, for example, at 9 a.m. is "focus time" for PharmaFab’s management team. For one hour the phones and computers are turned off, and nobody is allowed to talk to anyone else. They spend that one hour reading, watching a business videotape (Jim Collins' Good to Great, for example), or thinking about how to make life easier a year from now when they're twice as big. Monday afternoons at 1, they have collaborative time, where they do the same thing except with one other person.

How much time do your employees actually have to share, learn from each other, and reflect?

Keep Your Eye On the (Company) Ball
Some executives seem to measure their success by the latest merger or acquisition, and forget about the company operation itself. With all of PharmaFab’s success, Darlene was tempted down that road herself. Her management team spent six months working on a deal to bring millions of dollars of equity investment into the company – with the increased risk of losing the company if things didn’t work out. And it was obvious that the company’s results were suffering through lack of management attention.

So Darlene told her team that she had decided to walk away from the transaction.

“What I got from that team,“ she says, “was pure love and support -- our consultant says he has never seen anything like it. Several of them actually hugged me to say that they were just glad that I was "back" with them, focused on the company instead of the transaction.” She called the experience both inspiring and wonderful. If you asked your employees, would they say you were selling out, or buying in to your company?

Footnote – Follow Your Great Joy
We met Darlene at a presentation we made for the INC 500 conference. In our presentations Patsy tells a story about refinding her passion for ballet. Darlene – one of the most successful, and doubtless busy, corporate leaders in the country - told us not long ago that:

I also want you to know that I now have my clarinet in my office. I was an avid and recognized clarinetist in high school and started college on a clarinet scholarship but put it down sometime during college and hadn't picked it up again until very recently (nearly 30 years later). I brought it into my office recently and have been trying to come in early and practice a Mozart concerto. I've arranged for a friend to simultaneously practice the piano accompaniment and we are going to put it all together soon. I was inspired by Patricia's story last year, so I wanted you both to know that I am once again deriving joy and stress relief from something I had set aside all of these years.

What are you doing to live your passion each day – and to create work environments where people love to come to work?

Find more out about PharmaFab at www.pharmafab.com.

Leading with Passion is a regular communication from Michael Kroth and Patricia Boverie. Michael and Patricia have been researching passionate work since 1999, and their book, Transforming Work: The Five Keys to Achieving and Sustaining Trust, Commitment, and Passion in the Workplace, is about the indispensable necessity of passion for personal and organizational success in the workplace.

© Copyright 2003, All Rights Reserved Patricia Boverie and Michael Kroth