Does Your Company Have a Soul?
Or Will the Future Eat You Up?

On Sunday I watched The Devil Wears Prada 2. There is a sequence where the entrepreneur Benji Barnes says:

“The future just comes rushing at us like the lava of Pompeii. Our job is just to let it take what it wants to take.”

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And it got me thinking.

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In my framework TheSpacesBetween™, I recommend that leaders “release the old” in the face of change. But what exactly should we release to make space for the new? And what should we hold on to, so we do not lose ourselves in the process?

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I have been sitting with this question.

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Seth Godin once said something along these lines: if Nike built hotels, you would know exactly what it felt like. But if a hotel chain (which shall remain unnamed here) made sneakers, you would have no idea what to expect.

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Think about that for a moment. One of those sentences describes a company with a soul. The other describes a company without one.

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And then I saw a headline last week: a sneaker company pivoting to become an AI company. The core mission was to create footwear using natural, sustainable materials while maintaining a low-carbon footprint. Now chasing the technology wave. You can feel the soul leaving the room.

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I use the word soul deliberately. I know it is borrowed from theology. I know it has no clean corporate definition. But that is precisely why it works. We all know what it means. We feel its presence. We feel its absence even more acutely.

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A company soul is not a mere mission statement. It is not just a brand guideline document. It is the thing that would still be recognisable if you stripped away the logo, the offices, the product line. It usually traces back to the founder. The spirit infused at the beginning. The reason the thing was built in the first place. Before the investors, before the scale, before the pressure to become something the market wants rather than something the founder believed in.

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Here is what I have come to believe.

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In a world of permanent change, where the playbook expires, where markets shift without warning, where the future arrives like lava, the soul is the only stable thing. Not the strategy. Not the product. Not the org chart. The soul.

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The companies that navigate transformation successfully are not the ones that release everything to the future. They are the ones that know precisely what they will never release. That clarity, knowing the irreducible core, is what allows them to change everything else without losing themselves.

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Crisis does not threaten a company with a soul. Crisis clarifies it. Every disruption, every pivot, every external shock becomes an opportunity to ask: does this decision reflect who we are? Does it honour the thing we were built for?

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That question is a compass.