Back in 1999, the Danish advertising bigwig, Jesper Kunde wrote a book called “Corporate Religion.”
His argument was simple. Companies with a genuine personality, a reason for being beyond profit, a strong soul in other words, have a massive competitive advantage over the ones that don’t.
You might be thinking sure, I have that already. A mission statement, a set of core values, a forecast for 2030. But there is an important distinction. A religion is not the same as a mission. A mission is about what you want to accomplish. A religion, even a corporate one, is about what you aspire to to be. What the collective sets out to become.
The anthropologist Joseph Campbell once told a story about an old woman in India who went to visit her guru.
“Master,” she said, “I want to be a good person and do the right thing, but I don’t love God.”
“Oh,” said the guru, “well, tell me, what is the most important thing in your life?”
“My darling nephew,” said the woman.
“OK,” said the guru, “then that means your nephew is your God.”
This is not a theological point as much as it is a human one. We are all wired to push toward something larger than ourselves. All of us.
The British physicist Brian Cox, a committed atheist, frequently asks his audience what it means to live a limited, fragile life in an infinite, eternal universe. Regardless of his answer, the question itself isn’t that out there.
People have been asking that same question for millennia. Even if the universe made us incapable of ever answering the question, it bubbles up whether we invite it or not.
YouTuber Rudyard Lynch puts it plainly: “Religion is the operating system of a civilization.”
Which brings us back to Kunde, and to us.
The world has never felt more unstable. Institutions that once gave people a sense of order are fracturing. People are hungry for something solid to stand on.
The organizations that see this, the ones that build genuine belief systems for their people, actual rituals that people can orient their work around, become something rare and powerful. They don’t just retain people, they create belonging.
If you’re putting Jesper’s firm Kunde & Co’s philosophy on the same tier as a major religion like Christianity or Hinduism, we might say that’s a bit of a stretch.
But you can give your people something worth believing in. Not a slogan or a set of values that feel stale. Something real. Something they can orient their work around, even their lives around. Something that holds when everything outside the building feels like it’s coming apart.
The market for that? It’s infinite. It always has been.
