MANAGEMENT SPECIAL .........................GENERATION FLUX'S SECRET WEAPON (2)

GENERATION FLUX'S SECRET WEAPON (2)

In a world of rapid change and great uncertainty, the greatest competitive advantage of all may be at your very core.

EMBRACE THE CREATIVE EDGE

Backstage in Romania, Jared Leto has a few spare minutes--not to talk about acting, which earned him an Oscar for his role in Dallas Buyers Club, or singing, which has brought him an international fan base as lead singer of his band, Thirty Seconds to Mars, despite the early bashings of critics. Leto wants to talk about Leto Inc. The enterprise starts with the band, a demanding venture: It performed in Hungary two days earlier, with several other European countries ahead, then on to the U.S., Canada, most of South America, and South Africa before the tour ends. "It could last a year," Leto says, and that wouldn't be its longest road trip ever. The group is recognized in the Guinness World Records for a marathon 309-show tour that started in 2009 and ended in 2011.

This isn't enough to satiate Leto. What he really wants to do is reengineer the business of being a performer. He uses social media to connect with some 2 million Twitter followers who buy Thirty Seconds to Mars products and attend special-access events. He has directed an award-winning documentary about his battles with a former music label. More impressively, he's got a team of coders working for him in Silicon Valley on Vyrt, a real-time streaming video platform that combines merchandise sales, fan management and social engagement, and he's an active investor in startups includingNest, Blue Bottle Coffee, and mobile-payments platform Stripe.

So is he a musician, an actor, a director, or an entrepreneur? "I'm a multi-hyphenate whatever," Leto says. "I'm a creative and an artist. I make and share things with the world that hopefully add to the quality of people's lives." His entrepreneurship "comes from the same place. I don't compartmentalize," he says. "My work is never a job. My work is my life. If you work your fucking ass off, you can get a lot done."

Not many of us will ever find ourselves shirtless before thousands of Romanians screaming our name, as Leto does later that evening. But his attitude is one that we can embrace. Leto channels his creative passion into business, and more and more evidence suggests that this is the key to creating a meaningful career.

In this age of flux, people's sense of connection with their workplace has been declining. Last year, Gallup came out with a detailed study of workers across U.S. businesses. In all industries and all age groups, engagement was pitifully low. "The vast majority of U.S. workers (70%) are not reaching their full potential," the report concluded. Yet in those pockets where passion for the job flourished, productivity, levels of customer service, and profitability were all higher than average. "Companies with engaged workforces have higher earnings per share," the report stated. Perhaps most important (and surprising) of all: "Engagement has a greater impact on performance than corporate policies and perks."

"There has always been a psychological contract between workers and corporations, often unconscious," says motivation expert Marcelo Cardoso of Brazilian health care company Grupo Fleury, who has studied employee engagement across cultures. He notes that the demise of loyalty-based contracts (job security in exchange for commitment to the organization) has resulted in a more transactional relationship between worker and company: bonuses, stock options, and other compensation bind the two together. "But as the level of complexity [in business] is increasing, these types of contracts are no longer satisfying and effective for individuals," Cardoso says.

A more effective contract, he says, meshes an individual's sense of purpose with that of the company. The Gallup report notes that millennials, gen-Xers, and baby boomers consider "mission and purpose" a valuable motivator. Other studies reinforce this idea that unlocking "psychic energy," as Cardoso describes it, is less tightly tied to financial compensation, as economists had assumed. As Daniel Pink eloquently explained in the book Drive, higher pay leads to better performance only for routine, repeatable tasks; for higher cognitive efforts and creative tasks, maximizing rewards actually hurts performance.

Jennifer Aaker at Stanford University has taken this idea even further. She challenges the very notion that a pursuit of happiness is what drives us most. Her work suggests that people's satisfaction with life is higher, and of greater duration, when meaning--rather than happiness--is their primary motivation. For other professors, such as Wharton's Adam Grant, this is the difference between a life focused on "giving" rather than "taking," a difference that they believe increases productivity as well as satisfaction.

We should, of course, stop for a moment to acknowledge that choosing a career built around meaning is not a choice available to billions of people who are desperately struggling just to make enough money to find shelter and put food on the table. That is often the only "mission" that matters. But for those who have been fortunate enough to look beyond their basic needs, the motivation to do more, create more, and, yes, give more to the world--whether that is burritos or iPhones--arises directly from the personal meaning we derive from those activities. That is the way humans operate. We are not drones whose only goal is to make more money. Keeping passion out of the workplace makes no sense at all.

BY ROBERT SAFIAN