Summer holidays are over, but isn't it great to be back to work, back to the job for which you feel utmost passion and 100% commitment? I mean, why did you even need a holiday? Why leave, even for one week, that job you love so much? Unless, of course, you don't feel passionate about your job, but just pretended to in order to get the job.

"Passion" is the big lie of the job interview. But it's a lie we are all complicit in perpetuating but because it feeds into the corporate mindset. It's not enough to want to do a good job, a great job , even, and make a decent living. You have to love your job, marry it and have it's babies.

So says journalist and author Philip Delves Broughton in What They Teach You At Harvard Business School (Penguin). The word "passion" in the corporate world makes him see red. He recounts a moment during an interview for a corporate job in publishing, after the interviewer said that they are looking for people who are "really smart, passionate and committed."

He writes: "I wanted to grab this monster by the neck and scream into her yellowing eyeballs, 'And what are you going to do with all these smart, passionate, committed people? Plug them into your dull, trivial culture and waste their lives on the hamster wheel of corporate life? '"

Broughton has a big problem, as I do, with the word "passion" , as applied to the workplace. I just think it is overused, but he goes further and speculates that it's a form of "corporate coercion"- that it is not enough to do a job for financial reward, that you have to fake passion even if you find the work meaningless and unsatisfying, because if you admit to being passionate about work, there is no excuse to go home and live some other life, because work is your "passion."

He says everyone uses this word in the corporate world. "Business outsourcing is my passion." You would have to feel a bit sorry for the sad person who says this.

BUT, Broughton's best point about this word is that passion is a fleeting sensation, but that this fleeting sensation is meant to endure in the exciting world of commerce. He asks, what will be after our passion for passion? He jokes, "We bring a panting, sexual intensity to our work., " or " a stalkerish obsession with financial performance."

The bottom line is that if you are that obsessed with work, something else goes out of whack- family life, relationships, fun. One of his fellow students calls the school a "factory for unhappy people" but that seems an overly bleak assessment. Being passionate about your work, for real, is not necessarily a ticket to divorce court, rehab or the psychiatrist.

It's more realistic to say that if you do have to fake passion, better to fake it for lots of money than not very much. But it would be better still if we didn't have to fake it at all.

Have you had to fake passion in your career? Any words in the corporate jargon that really grate? Do you think if you use words like passion enough, you actually start to brainwash yourself?

Kassia Gardner
The Athena Network
www.theathenanetwork.com