Passion is vital and Summers has it in bags

Two of the most enduring 1970s rhythm and blues tunes testify that the passion you put into your efforts can make all the difference. The two songs are Midnight Train to Georgia by Gladys Knight and the Pipps, and the late Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get it on.

Both singers drew from the depths of their souls and personal experiences when recording the tunes. The passion they put in lives on in the recordings. Though she has long parted from the Pipps, Knight still performs the song as part of her regular repertoire.

Passion and its associates transcend the performing arts. They are one of the key building blocks of all of life’s other endeavours. It’s passion that explains the endurance of Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, two scientists who were this week rewarded with a Nobel prize for their work on the RNA messenger.

As the Wall Street Journal reported this week, they were first pushed “to the fringes of the scientific establishment” before their discovery saved millions of lives during the Covid-19 pandemic.

It was no surprise then when Sean Summers, the man who is riding back from the sunset to rescue Pick n Pay, referred to passion this week.

“The hallmark of great retail is people. We need people who are passionate about the business, the products that they sell and the customers. That’s what drives a successful retail business. We need to put the passion back into Pick n Pay,” Summers told Business Day in response to a question on how he planned to differentiate the troubled retail chain from the rest of the retail pack.

Summers’s mission is easier described than achieved in businesses that employ large numbers of people from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. Pick n Pay employed 90,000 people at the end of February 2023 (including those working for its franchised stores). Each employee will respond differently to attempts by Summers to inject passion back into the business.

The other complicating factor is that sources of passion vary from person to person. Also, one’s passion in a business or any organisation may be cancelled out by other factors, including bad people management practices.

But there is no doubt that passion — a strong emotion or intense enthusiasm for something — can make a big difference. Knight and Gaye drew from strong emotions in recording their songs. Knight took a song written by Jimmy Weatherly, which was also recorded by Cissy Houston, and gave it her own imprint: “something moody, with a little ride to it”. She modified some of the lyrics too.

What sealed it was that the lyrics matched her personal circumstances — a failing marriage — when the recording was made. She told Marc Myers, author of Anatomy of a Song, that she was married to a saxophonist who was unhappy “that we didn’t have a more traditional marriage because I was often on the road or recording”.

“Ultimately it all proved too much for him, like the song said, and we divorced later, in ‘73. I was going through the exact thing that I was singing about when recording — which is probably why it sounds so personal.”

Let’s Get it on was also personal for Marvin Gaye, who took a tune Ed Townsend composed as a call to move on — “getting on ”— after rehab. Gaye took it in a different direction, one reinforced by his own failing marriage and his love for a 16year-old girl who was a guest in the studio during the recording.

“She was the figure in my fantasy come to life,” Marvin later told his biographer David Ritz, “the one I watched dancing round and round in my imagination, whirling from man to man.

“I’d never encountered a more beautiful creature in my life. I had to have her.”

The girl was Janis Hunter, whom Gaye married a couple of years after the recording, after he divorced his first wife. Ritz quotes Curtis Shaw (Marvin’s lawyer) as saying: “Marvin has been accused of giving only 80% of his effort when he sings. His talent allows him to get away with that.

“Marvin wasn’t a singer who liked to exert himself. But that night, with Jan listening, he gave 100%. Listen to it and you’ll hear what I’m talking about.”

So passion is key to all endeavours. But I’m sure Summers knows from his previous tour of duty at Pick n Pay that transferring his passion for the business into passion for the 90,000 staff is difficult.