Douglas Gerber is a 'passion and customer service' consultant and was formerly an executive with Kodak and Pepsico. He has lived in Hong Kong for 13 years and worked in Asia for more than 20 Years. I'm originally from Oregon and I went to a school called Thunderbird, which is an international business school. Straight out of there I joined Kodak. I was with Kodak for 20 years, and was posted to Mexico, Singapore, Indonesia, Taiwan, Japan, the mainland and Hong Kong. Then I joined Pepsico in 1998 as vice-president for sales to focus on the greater China market. I was developing the sales network and handling all the big customers such as Wal-Mart and Carrefour and KFC, Hard Rock Cafe. I hired about 2,500 salespeople to build up their capability. It was very exciting. But then I kind of came to a halfway point where I started looking at my life. I was getting burned out, spending a lot of time travelling and in meetings and dealing with e-mails, generally doing things I didn't really enjoy. I was looking back on my days, and I asked myself: 'How many of these days are great days?' I found I was spending only about 10 or 15 per cent of those days as great days and I had about 5 or 10 per cent which were lousy days and the rest mediocre. So you've got 80 per cent of your days that are mediocre. I figured that for the rest of my life I didn't want to be living 80 per cent of my days as mediocre days. I looked at why I was not excited about what I was doing? It was a great company, a great job but most of my time was spent in meetings, on e-mail and internal stuff, and what I really loved doing was being with the customer and also empowering people and motivating them. I was spending only about 10 per cent of my time doing that stuff. Then I looked around other organisations and I found that it was the same everywhere. I figured out that there's a real need for people to get focused on what they love doing as opposed to just doing what needs to be done. At the end of the day people are getting stressed out and losing that sense of interest and passion. So what I started looking at is how do you get people from that 10 per cent up to 30 per cent, or even 40 per cent? If you can do that then you can dramatically change the whole experience of their work, not only productivity but also creativity. I imagine if you have people in roles that they really love doing, they're going to be amazingly creative. People should figure out what they enjoy doing and build their skills around that, but our education system is not geared for that. People are still going, 'I want to be an accountant because the money's good, or my dad was a doctor and I'm good at this. I have a gift, I'm talented at this.' But then they get into it and they don't enjoy it. I decided to create a company that focused on helping companies and individuals find their passion and motivating them with that. I studied a lot of different systems and used my own common sense to come up with the strategies I use. Most people don't know what it is that they love doing. I go into companies and I work with them to assess their staff, it's very objective and analytical. I've also created a workshop for individuals where they spend 21/2 days working on the question, 'What is it I love doing?' When you walk out you have clarity of vision. Most people don't switch jobs, they just tune their work to make it a more enjoyable thing. Maybe they delegate some of the work, maybe they change roles. You'd think it would be something where you'd see mainly people in their 30s or 40s, but actually I am getting a lot of people in their 20s - they're going through what has been called a quarter-century crisis. All these people in their 20s are talking like people in their 40s and it has a lot to do with the way the labour market has changed, people just don't have that sense of career security any more.
