Organizations work best when employees are deeply committed to their success. This is less about profitability than it is about what the organization exists to accomplish Dear Bob …Recently you wrote, “Everyone involved in a project, and especially the person running a project, has to personally care about and take responsibility for its eventual success.” (“Red rover, red rover, let NASA come over!” Keep the Joint Running, 2/8/2010.)[ Want to cash in on your IT experiences? InfoWorld is looking for stories of an amazing or amusing IT adventure, lesson learned, or war tale from the trenches for our Off the Record blog. Send your story to offtherecord@infoworld.com. If we publish it, we’ll keep you anonymous and send you a $50 American Express gift cheque. ] My question: how to instill that sense of commitment when even the CEO doesn’t seem to have it.– InstillerDear Instiller … Makes it harder, doesn’t it?Far too many CEOs went to the All-That-Matters-Is-The-Bottom-Line Academy. They never figured out that the bottom line is a rear-view mirror, and it never occurs to them that the best way to achieve bottom-line results is to focus on what the business exists to do, not on the numbers.The word for this is “mission,” which regrettably has become discredited by the creation of approximately 1,863,252 worthless mission statements over the past few decades. Another way of looking at it is understanding the business model — the buttons and levers the organization can push and pull that turn its actions into decisions by customers to buy its products at a high enough price to turn a profit.Your challenge is how to provide leadership, focusing everyone on the mission or business model, when the CEO has no interest in either. Interestingly enough, one of the comments posted this week is germane to your question. Turns out most of the high-level NASA administrators aren’t all that passionate about space flight (according to the person who posted the comment at least). That doesn’t matter to the people involved in mission work — the nature of the work is what gets them wound up.So I’d say the answer is to make sure the work is defined in ways that makes committing to it natural — a way to satisfy the desire to achieve. And while not everyone is wired to value the desire to achieve, it is a trait that can be cultivated in most employees.The first step in doing so: Put them in positions where they can experience success. For a lot of people this is addictive, which means once they’ve experienced success they’ll want to experience more of it.– Bob This story, “How to get your staff to care when the execs clearly don’t,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Technology Industry