The soul of your company is the mental attitude that drives those who make decisions, the inspiration behind their most successful ideas.
The reason for its existence.
It is the spirit in which things are done, the spirit that has allowed entrepreneurs like Enzo Ferrari and Elon Musk to motivate their collaborators to achieve excellence.
Every company is a living organism, with its own identity, its way of approaching work and relating to society. Nobody can see the soul of their company, but we all perceive its effects more or less distinctly, and this is what makes us unique.
The soul of a company very often coincides with the soul of an entrepreneur or of its founders. Unfortunately this is why it risks getting lost after some generations, when the people who founded the company don’t work there anymore.
How can you hand down the heart, the soul and the conscience of your company from one generation to the next, so it doesn’t get lost over time? How can you show your identity? How can you explain what makes you unique, better than you competitors? How can you let people perceive your knowledge of the market, your stories, your working method?
Writing a book is still the best means of storytelling,
the only way to hand down a mental attitude and a philosophy, in addition to a series of facts.
It is easy to state that you are “a team driven by passion and love for its work” in a payoff line, on social media or in the short “Who we are” section of a website. Everybody can do that – and actually everybody does.
But how much weight can a reader give to a sentence like that? How captivating, and especially how credible is it? Telling the reader what that “passion”, that love mentioned on the institutional pages really means is something else.
Your book pages can reveal the most fascinating aspects of the history of your enterprise, such as why you made a certain decision, how you managed to keep going in spite of hardships, where you found the energy to get over crises, what the real engine of your company is.
Your book has to be the outcome of a process that gives you, the entrepreneur, and your collaborators the opportunity to rediscover and reinterpret your story.
It will be amazing for your future employees to be able to discover one day what outstanding qualities have allowed you to get where you are now, the hardships that made you grow, the winning strategies that have led you to success – in a nutshell, to discover the soul, the heart and the vision of the company they work for.
A book about your company can contribute to creating an identity, around which you can build a pulsating community of passionate collaborators and customers that embody its pride, its strength and its motivation for growth and innovation.
