Soul is not a slide

It was one of those autumn wonderful sunny and gorgous afternoons when San Francisco shows what it can do. Fleet Week, the Blue Angels roaring over the bay, music festival in the golden gate park.

Tech Week was already in its fifth day. A Saturday, sunshine, a hundred better ways to spend the day.

I thought: nobody will show up today.

At three o'clock I went to the first event. A plain room, no food. And still packed. Founders, investors, researchers, all hungry, all curious. In the evening, a robot event, nothing spectacular. The line stretched almost a kilometer down Mission Street. I was already inside, stepped out for a moment, and couldn't get back in.

Try that in Vienna, Zurich or Paris. Saturday, 5 p.m., beautiful weather. You'll have two people in the room.

Ever since, one question has stayed with me: What makes a good company? I keep coming back to a word hardly anyone in business dares to use, because it sounds esoteric;

Soul.

By soul I mean the core of a company. Everyone knows the feeling: when you unpack an Apple computer and sense that reduction to the essential, you know this product has a soul.

As managing director of the Federation of Austrian Industries in Carinthia, I saw 150 to 200 companies from the inside. Whether one has a soul, you feel within the first few minutes. With your whole body, the way you walk into a place and instantly know whether it feels right. The way a musician moves you, or a painting.

In many companies it was quiet. Correct, functioning, but quiet. Little contact, rarely eye contact, often a quiet fear.

And then there were the others. Rare, truly rare. But they were almost always the most successful.

They were the ones without glossy slides about values. No poster saying "The customer is at the center." It showed in how people treated each other. If you wrote an email, you got an answer. If you spoke, someone listened. And whoever stood across from you looked you in the eye, and those eyes were shining.

I find that glow hard to put into words. And that's exactly the point.

Where analysis and reason end, soul begins.

That's why no consultant's slide can capture it. No KPI, no mission statement.

Mostly they were founders, or people deeply convinced of what they were doing. People who look forward to Monday on a Sunday. Work wasn't a means to an end, a way to afford a week at a beach bar. They wanted to put something into the world. It's a different bioenergetic state of being.

In Silicon Valley I encounter it on every corner. The Valley is no paradise; it has its hype, its harshness and its bluffers. But that hunger to build something, you feel it everywhere.

Why is this kind of soul so rare? I didn't find the answer in business, but in the music I've been listening to. Ray Charles, B.B. King, soul and blues. This music was born from pain. B.B. King worked the cotton fields as a child. Ray Charles went blind as a child.

It's similar with the people I know who work from the heart. Josef Zotter, the Austrian chocolatier, went bankrupt with his pastry shops, and many laughed at him. Today his chocolate is known far beyond Austria. Not everyone who suffers finds a soul. But those who have one have almost always overcome something.

And the companies that have done well for generations? Success makes you comfortable, and once you're full, you lose your hunger. Still, it doesn't take a crisis. The owners who stayed successful without one live what Steve Jobs told Stanford's graduates: Stay hungry, stay foolish. They stay curious, and they have the humility to admit a mistake: That wasn't it after all. I'll start again.

Why does this matter now? For centuries we have defined ourselves through knowledge. Our self-worth and our careers depended on it. Now intelligence is becoming a commodity. Freely available, almost free, in abundance. AI does the rest, and AI is interchangeable.

A soul is not.

When an owner sits across from me and says, "Werner, our company lacks this soul," I tell him: Sit down with your people and peel everything away, layer by layer, like an onion. All the should-haves, could-haves and would-haves. The pseudo-meetings. The self-important working groups.

Then ask yourself: If you had only 48 hours left to live, what would remain? What value do you create? And what does it have to do with you?

If you can answer that, you have found the source.

If not, you'd better do something else.

It won't be AI that costs us our heads. It will be companies without a soul.

Werner

Autor: Werner Sattlegger, Foudner Art of Life

Autor: Werner Sattlegger
Founder & CEO Art of Life

Experte für digitale Entwicklungsprozesse, wo er europäische mittelständische Familien- und Industrie-unternehmen von der Komfort- in die Lernzone bringt. Leidenschaftlich gerne verbindet er Menschen und Unternehmen, liebt die Unsicherheit und das Unbekannte, vor allem bewegt ihn die Lust am Gestalten und an Entwicklung.