I’ve worked with many companies. The happiest companies were the ones who lived by authentic brands. The most miserable companies were the ones where there was no lived brand — where brand was neglected altogether or served as a facade strictly for customers.

Authentic brand humanizes organizations, ensouls machinery with culture.

Authentic brand points to an ideal beyond the interests of individual employees, but the beyond is not exclusionary. It affirms and reinforces the interests of employees who are aligned to the ideal. It isn’t objective or impersonal: it is superpersonal, which means it exceeds personal interests without excluding them.

Without authentic brand, a company has no being for employees to buy into, to take pride in, or to belong to. There is no ideal to unite in or appeal to, there’s only raw political force of self-interested individuals, animated by fear, avarice, ambition or the pleasure of exercising power.

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Brand serves the same cultural purpose as principles.

Authentic principles animate a person. Inauthentic principles are spin — the principles are added after the fact.

Authentic brand animates a company. Inauthentic brand is spin — the qualities of the brand are added after the fact.

Principles and brand make spiritual beings persistent, steady, appealable, nonarbitrary: worthy of relationship.

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I think brand might be even more important to employees than to customers.

I wonder if great brands might work because of the effect they have on the employees.

Inward happiness is attractive. Fake happiness is fake.

Fake brand is “corporate”. Inward brand is something we invite in.

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What was initially only a mnemonic device to help a customer remember a company or product became a device to help customers associate values, feelings and attributes of a company or product, which then became a manifestation of values, feelings and attributes of a company or product which binds together customers and employees in a mutually affirmative relationship.