Why Jeffrey Katzenberg Thinks You Should Stop Following Your Passion

Warren Buffet gets asked by a lot of folks like you and me what is his key to success. Almost always he says you have to do what you love. He knew from an early age that he loved money - and he loved making it. And from there grew a billionaire.

Not everyone agrees. And this week, at a very different type of meeting, the Milken Global Conference in Los Angeles, Jeffrey Katzenberg told an audience of hundreds to stop following their passion.

Business leaders "talk to kids today about follow your dreams, but I'm not actually sure that's such a great idea," he said. "How about follow your skill?...I believe every human being does something great. Follow that thing you're actually really good at and that may become your passion."

The audience was silent as was I, who was sitting across from Katzenberg on the panel as the moderator. Alongside him were Greg Maffei, CEO of Liberty Media, Barry Sternlicht, CEO of Starwood Capital and Tom Wyatt, CEO of Knowledge Universe. (You can watch the entire panel session here.)

I countered back to Katzenberg: What if your skill is accounting? I mean, can you really grow to love accounting?

"Jeffrey," I said. "You love what you do!"

"That's my point!" he exclaimed, and then went on to recount his first days at the Walt Disney Company when Michael Eisner told him to fix the animated movie business. It wasn't anything he was interested in, but because he was assigned to turn it around, he did and from there, became one of the pioneers in producing blockbuster animated films. Follow what you're good at, he said, and it will become your passion.

I'm not sure I was completely convinced but that exchange wasn't the only time the room fell silent from an off-the-wall comment from the CEO panel. Our task was to highlight what corporate leaders can do to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit, whether you run a fairly smaller company like DreamWorks Animation or a giant global chain like Starwood Hotels & Resorts, which Barry Sternlicht created.

"One of the things I try to do is hire people not from the industry," Sternlicht said. "I hire unusual personalities into the team because we don't want `group think.' I can be known to have my own strong opinions so I don't want people to agree with me all the time. I want to know what's wrong with the thesis all the time, and be challenged like that."

As an example, Sternlicht mentioned the demise of Kodak.

"You think about Kodak, where did Kodak go? They ignored the digital camera. I mean, really? Was there nobody at Kodak who said to somebody at Kodak maybe we should look at this digital thing?"

When challenged on how he encouraged employees to approach him with zany ideas, he mentioned the curved shower rod that's now in most of his hotels. One of his staff in Canada pitched the idea after noticing how cramped the showers felt.

"What was your reaction when you first heard it?" I asked.

"Thirteen dollars and brilliant," he said. "If I was smart I would have sold all my hotels and just bought shower rods. There's about a billion of them now."

Greg Maffei said at times you have to promote the person you don't like because he or she is the one who challenges you.

"I'd been there at Liberty about six months when I promoted our general counsel to EVP and our general counsel was far and away...the most cantankerous guy on my staff," Maffei said. "But he was always challenging and (had) good ideas…I promoted him and one of the other guys came up and said,` Wow, if being a real jerk was the way to get promoted, I would have done that too.' The point is you have to embrace people who are willing to challenge you."

There were several entrepreneurs in the audience and many of them approached me after the panel in agreement that for the most part, conventional wisdom is the way great businesses - and business leaders - whither away. Sam Zell, who was also at Milken but on a different panel, once said to me: "Conventional wisdom is the greatest horror of all time."

The biggest hurdle is being the one who defies the conventional wisdom. What does it take to go left when everyone goes right? As the panel put it, if you do everything everyone else does, you'll get the exact same return as everyone else. The outlier may experience the fall, but reap the biggest reward.

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Betty Liu is Editor-at-Large/Anchor of Bloomberg Television and author of Work Smarts: What CEOs Say You Need to Know to Get Ahead. You can buy it at Amazon.com or a signed copy at www.betty-liu.com!