The following is a transcript of a fascinating discussion between Herschel and Jerome Conlon who has directed brand and marketing planning inside Nike, Starbucks and NBC Entertainment at a VP level. He served as CMO for Internap Network Services, Inc. and has consulted with dozens of companies large and small as President of Brand Frameworks, LLC.
Excerpt:
JC: I saw a quote by Norton Simon, the philanthropist, and he has a museum in Pasadena. In the museum there is a quote, in the Asian section, in one of the exhibits and it says “inner growth, more than competition, is responsible for a man achieving his potential”.
HL: And inner growth is exactly what our purpose is in this world. There is no growth without leaving your comfort zone. And serving a higher purpose – serving God – means leaving your comfort zone. So, is there a corporate prayer? There is no corporate prayer. People pray. Corporations don’t pray. Firehouses don’t pray.
JC: (Why is that?) So, do corporations have a soul?
HL: Corporations have a soul. They need the participants of the corporation to feed its soul. The soul of a corporation is its ability to produce what’s called a corporate generic light that fills the world with a sense of honesty, integrity and probity of action that will garner the best good for all. Not the most – all. If you’re serving all consumers, you are doing good.
Now, the corporation has its own inner dynamic that can be even Kabbalistically described as a person. There is a super-rational component, a super-conscious component, and there is an all-encompassing component. There is an intellectual component, there is an emotional component, but the commandments were given to man. Thou shall not steal, thou shall not murder. Corporations are not tried in heaven, people are tried. The corporate spirit is a non-linear transformation of the human spirit within it. How is that so? Since humans make up a corporation, a legal entity, that provides a legal protective unit, and it also is a conglomeration – we incorporate ourselves into being a bona-fide necessary vehicle for the production of products, ideas and systems.
When the entities of the corporation – i.e., the individual people running the corporation have elected to take upon themselves the good of – getting down to basics – the Seven Noahide Laws, believing in God, not committing blasphemy, not to murder, not to steal, no committing adultery, establishing courts of justice and subscribing to the magistrates and the edicts of the courts, and not tearing a limb from a living creature, that integrity of the individual pervades the corporate structure and the corporate consciousness. Then the corporation as a unit has the ability to create a greater goal because the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.
Download the full transcript here.
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