Blunt – The Conversation Agency

It’s easy to know a soulful company when you walk into one. I’m not talking about post-industrial chic or foosball tables or pets running freely through the office. I’m talking about the collective demeanor of the people you pass in the halls. There’s an easy yet authentic confidence that starts at the top, an unarticulated yet palpable sense of freedom and possibility. You wonder at how they can be so blunt, so revealing in the way they blog and tweet and communicate to the outside world. They don’t keep anything under wraps. Why should they? They have nothing to hide. The sky is literally the limit, and you walk out of their offices dreaming of ways through which you can latch onto a part of their inexorable upward momentum.

Here’s a study in contrasts. We walked out of two corporate boardrooms this week: one that evinced a mood and mindset identical to what I described above. The other company, however, had recently experienced a change of leadership. The CEO, CMO, and CFO were all zapped unexpectedly and replaced with outsiders.

As we sat across from the three new faces, we witnessed confusion, an unhealthy sense of reticence, as nobody felt confident enough to take hold of the conversation and the three new leaders struggled to get on the same page. When I walked out of that boardroom, I felt a sense of sorrow. I knew what had happened, and I knew what was coming. Absent a visionary leadership group, the company was losing its soul.

The downward death spiral of the soulless company is as easy to recognize as the heady ascent of the soulful company. First, you watch as the soulless company loses its voice. With a change of leadership, you typically witness an exodus of the tribal knowledge. As a result, Its style and diction change, and the materials it disseminates begin to feel dogmatic and pushy. The blog posts display a stale, insipid tone. The humor, provocation, and edginess subside; everything is reframed in the corporate idiom. The content is self-referential. Acronyms and cliches replace genuine human conviction. The tweets point only to corporate posts and news releases. Monologue supplants dialogue; the frame of reference becomes hermetic.

Soon after, the conversation fizzles altogether. Authenticity is looked down upon as a practice. The new leadership directs resources towards more putatively important corporate functions like building GANTT charts and other pedantic exercises in corporate minutia that sap enthusiasm and vitiate passion. The buzz literally dies, and there is a dark march towards uniformity and enforced consent.

A word of warning to marketers: when you crush the conversation, you crush the voice and the soul of your company. You might think you are acting for the greater good of your enterprise by shifting the energies of your workers away from creative expression, but in truth you are only effacing the humanity from your company. Believe it or not, your clients will notice this and so will the market, and you will lose business as a result of it. After all, they want to do business with people, not automata.

So, does your company have a soul? Look at your leadership and you’ll know.

Jonathan Levitt