Marketers on a mission

I just caught a glance at Seth Godin's blog post in which he describes the three big barriers that companies believe are hindering their growth. 

I found the second one intriguing, in which companies and their marketers engage in a lack of authenticity as they tell their companies' stories.  Godin suggests that company leaders who, for example, constantly seek the ROI of various marketing initiatives, are in fact dulled by the humdrum pace of achievement, and have actually lost the original the mission of what they were trying to achieve in the first place. 

This remark is reminiscent of some of the themes in the new book "Must-win Battles," which I featured in a recent post.  I've heard it from some of my CMO clients, too, that it seems easier to galvanize the troops to make a big marketing push for something in which they fervently believe, and harder to keep the "professional passion" going when the goal doesn't capture people's hearts, or when the original mission has already been accomplished.   

It's a valid question: can we as professional marketers continually fan the missionary zeal for our fee-earners to achieve new growth goals?   Is it a professional service marketer's job to help a firm's practitioners (those doer-sellers) to find a level of "authenticity" -- some larger mission In which they can truly believe?