Your Business and its Soul

In a world that is so full of empty promise it’s no wonder that people have begun turning away from the logical towards the emotional.

Emotion doesn’t deal in numbers or facts; it’s deeper, longer lasting and most importantly it isn’t logical.

There are a number of factors that enable a business to relate to it’s internal and external world on an emotional level. The one I’d like to discuss today is soul. More specifically the issues that act as a soul-growth-barrier to businesses.

A business soul is something of a strange concept; especially considering that, for many, a business isn’t human and therefore can’t or shouldn’t have a soul. I don’t believe that to be true. My thinking is that a business is a person, or a collection of people, working together. Doing stuff, making stuff, selling stuff to other people. So, in reality, a business is more human than most of us realise or care to admit.

If this is true, which I believe it is, why is it not easier to grow ’soul’? [We all supposedly have one so why can't we grow them?]

We face 3 predominant issues:

1. We expect it to be like lawn, instant.
2. We have no idea what goes into growing a soul. Most of us don’t have a recipe to follow. We have no clue as what we need in cups and what we need in pinches.
3. Each business is individual in its soul recipe needs. While there is definitely an across-the-board base there is not a universal recipe.

What we really need is patience, a desire to experiment and tweak our recipe and a true understanding that our business’s soul doesn’t come in a just-add-water package.