Raising a child is not an act of building or assembly, but of cultivation. The child develops out of the generative forces given to him as his nature at birth. Some new qualities can be implanted, but these new qualities grow out of his nature. To think of the qualities as annexations is a deep mischaracterization of character-building which makes success a matter of pure luck. The parents literally does not know what they are doing.

Parents cannot make their children into whatever they’d like. A child begins life with a nature — a  temperament, talents, strengths and weaknesses. This nature can be cultivated into an adult personality that does full justice to the child’s nature, aligns all his natural forces, and provides the child with authentic self-awareness — or the nature can be selectively ignored, wasted, suppressed or perverted to suit the parent’s prejudices and aims, with results that range from mediocrity to dysfunction.

The same can be said for a company. A company can be cultivated through good management and groomed to convey a brand to the outside world and to itself. Or leaders can fantasize out and decree a “brand” for the company that suits their own taste or the whatever they think their customers will like. The brand might “take”, but if the organizational culture — however embryonic it is — is ignored, the brand might flounder or even undermine the company’s development. Or worse, deprived of the inspiring resistance of nature, the leadership might concoct the normal hackneyed list of desirable traits (you know, integrity, openness, innovation, customer-centricity, blah, blah, blah) and create another generic corporate non-entity.

People who start from the outside and try to bring themselves into conformity to the world’s expectations tend to be somewhat bland, ineffectual and dully conflicted. The same is true for companys.