Origins: The Birth of Essence

“There is a spark inside each of us. Call it greatness. Call it purpose. Call it essence. But too often, it gets buried—under expectation, fear, failure, or noise.” — Cormirus

From Personal Purpose to Organisational DNA

By now, you’ve explored your personal purpose through pattern recognition. You’ve examined what you’re consistently drawn to, what you do regularly, who you serve instinctively, when you feel most aligned, and how you naturally contribute. This personal purpose provides a foundation—but how does it grow into something larger, something that defines an entire organisation?

This is the critical alchemy at the heart of distinctive businesses: the transformation of individual purpose into organisational essence.

On a typical Tuesday in 2008, Kevin Systrom, then working at Nextstop, a travel recommendation startup, wandered the beaches of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula during a vacation. An amateur photographer with a persistent interest in image sharing, he snapped photos throughout the day. That evening, his girlfriend (now wife) Nicole observed that their photos might look better with filters like those on some professional cameras.

This casual observation collided with Systrom’s longstanding pattern of interest in photography and social sharing—and a spark ignited. Within weeks, he began building a photo app with simple filters that would eventually become Instagram.

What’s notable isn’t just the specifics of Instagram’s origin, but how Systrom’s personal patterns—his fascination with photography, social connection, and simplified technology—became woven into the very fabric of the company, creating an organisational essence that guided thousands of decisions over subsequent years.

This transformation from individual purpose to organisational essence is what we explore in this chapter.

Essence: Beyond Mission and Vision

Before diving deeper, let’s clarify what we mean by organisational essence. It’s more fundamental than mission statements, vision declarations, or value propositions—all of which are external expressions of something deeper.

Essence is the irreducible core of an organisation—its fundamental “why + how” that drives everything else. It’s not merely what’s claimed on websites or lobby walls, but the emotional and philosophical centre that guides decisions when no one is watching. It’s the distinctive spirit that competitors cannot replicate, regardless of how carefully they study your business model.

As we express it at Cormirus: “When people remember who they are, they build things that change the world.” Organisational essence begins with this remembering—uncovering rather than inventing what makes your approach intrinsically different.

The Six Origin Points of Organisational Essence

When examining how essence forms in distinctive organisations, six primary origin sources emerge. These aren’t mutually exclusive; often, the most powerful essences combine multiple elements:

1. The Spark: Moments of Inspiration and Possibility

Organisational essence often begins with a spark—a moment when possibility crystallises from vague interest into focused potential. These sparks ignite when personal pattern meets external opportunity.

Consider the origin of Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales had long been fascinated by encyclopedias—he’d even attempted creating a traditional online encyclopedia called Nupedia, with formal editorial processes. But the spark that ultimately created Wikipedia’s essence came when he encountered the wiki technology developed by Ward Cunningham.

This technology aligned perfectly with Wales’s underlying pattern of interest in collaborative knowledge sharing. The collision of his personal purpose with this enabling technology created the spark from which Wikipedia’s essence emerged—an approach to knowledge fundamentally different from traditional encyclopedias.

“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing,” Wales explained. The spark wasn’t just about a website; it was about a radically different approach to creating and sharing knowledge.

A similar spark ignited Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), though in a completely different field. In 1975, George Lucas found himself facing a profound creative challenge: the visual effects he envisioned for Star Wars simply didn’t exist within the capabilities of Hollywood’s existing studios. Rather than compromise his creative vision, Lucas made a decision that would reshape not just his film, but the entire visual effects industry.

He assembled a small, unconventional team of artists, engineers, model makers, and camera operators in a cramped warehouse in Van Nuys, California. This eclectic group—drawn from fields as diverse as experimental animation, engineering, and architecture—was united by a common willingness to challenge established filmmaking techniques.

“I want to create things that haven’t been seen before,” Lucas told his nascent team. This wasn’t just ambition; it was the articulation of a spark that would define ILM’s essence.

What made ILM’s essence distinctive wasn’t just technical innovation, but the cultural spirit that drove it. The team developed an approach characterised by creative rebellion, relentless experimentation, and a willingness to dismantle and reinvent filmmaking tools. When existing cameras couldn’t capture their motion-control shots, they built new ones. When traditional optical printing techniques proved limiting, they pioneered digital compositing.

“The only rule we had was that there were no rules,” recalled John Dykstra, ILM’s first visual effects supervisor. This wasn’t chaos but liberation—a fundamental belief that technical limitations existed to be overcome, not accepted.

This spark—the collision of Lucas’s imaginative vision with technical constraints that demanded reinvention—created an organisational essence that transcended the production of Star Wars. It established a culture where creative problem-solving became the defining characteristic, where traditional boundaries between art and technology dissolved.

Decades later, this essence remains evident in ILM’s approach across hundreds of films and evolving technologies. From the first computer-generated character in Young Sherlock Holmes to the revolutionary digital creatures in Jurassic Park to the virtual production techniques of The Mandalorian, ILM’s technical innovations have consistently emerged from the same essence that sparked its creation: the belief that visual storytelling should never be constrained by existing tools.

“If it hasn’t been done before, that’s exactly why we should do it,” became an unofficial mantra, reflecting how deeply the original spark had become embedded in organisational culture.

The ILM example illustrates how a company’s essence often emerges not through strategic planning, but through the collision of a founder’s vision with a specific challenge—creating an approach to work that becomes the organisation’s distinctive signature. The initial spark creates not just a company but a philosophy that guides thousands of subsequent decisions and innovations.

2. The Chip on the Shoulder: Frustrations and Challenges That Demand Response

Many distinctive organisations emerge from a chip on the founder’s shoulder—which can take two powerful forms:

Product Frustrations: When existing solutions fail to solve problems adequately, creating irritation that drives innovation.

When James Dyson became frustrated with his vacuum cleaner’s diminishing suction, this irritation wasn’t just a consumer complaint—it was the beginning of an essence that would define his company. Dyson’s frustration with existing approaches—bags that clogged, designs that prioritised cost over function, engineering shortcuts—became the chip on his shoulder that drove 5,127 prototypes before success.

“There are always dozens of reasons why something can’t be done,” Dyson has said. “But if you fight through them, you’ll find a way.” This chip on his shoulder became central to Dyson’s organisational essence—an obsession with solving fundamental engineering problems regardless of conventional approaches.

Proving Doubters Wrong: When founders face dismissal, underestimation, or outright rejection, creating determination to prove critics wrong.

When Richard Branson launched Virgin Atlantic with a single aircraft in 1984, established airlines dismissed him as an upstart with no chance of success. “You’ll never be able to compete with British Airways,” he was told repeatedly. This underestimation became the chip on Branson’s shoulder that drove Virgin’s distinctive “challenger” essence.

“Every time I was told I couldn’t do something, it just made me more determined to prove people wrong,” Branson has explained. This “I’ll show you” motivation shaped Virgin’s organisational essence—a willingness to challenge established players and conventional wisdom that has defined the brand across dozens of industries.

Both types of chips create powerful emotional energy that drives the development of organisational essence, though they channel this energy in different directions—one toward solving neglected problems, the other toward disproving limiting assumptions.

3. The Belief: Fundamental Perspectives That Shape Approach

At the heart of many distinctive organisations lies a belief—a fundamental perspective about how things should be that differs from conventional wisdom.

When Elon Musk founded SpaceX, he held a belief that contradicted aerospace industry consensus: that space travel could and should be dramatically less expensive. This wasn’t just a business strategy but a core belief that traditional approaches were fundamentally flawed.

“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favour,” Musk has noted. This belief—that radical cost reduction in space travel was both necessary and possible—became central to SpaceX’s essence, informing everything from engineering practices to organisational structure to launch procedures.

The company’s essence wasn’t just about building rockets; it was about a fundamentally different belief in how space exploration should work.

4. The Need: Gaps Personally Experienced and Deeply Understood

Some of the most resilient organisational essences emerge from personally experienced needs—problems the founder has lived with and intimately understands.

When Sara Blakely founded Spanx, her innovation wasn’t based on theoretical market research but on her direct experience. While preparing for a party, she cut the feet off a pair of control-top tights to wear under white trousers, creating a solution to a problem she had personally experienced: the need for seamless undergarments that actually worked as intended.

This personally experienced need—comfortable, practical shapewear—became the essence that distinguished Spanx from countless other apparel companies. It wasn’t just about selling products but solving problems Blakely had personally experienced and deeply understood.

5. The Ideal: Visions of What Could Exist But Doesn’t Yet

Many essence-driven organisations begin with an ideal—a vision of what could exist but doesn’t yet. This isn’t just a product concept but a higher aspiration that pulls the founder forward.

When JB Straubel co-founded Redwood Materials after his time at Tesla, he was driven by an ideal of a circular battery economy where materials from used batteries would be fully recycled into new ones. This wasn’t merely a business opportunity but an ideal of how battery production could function in an environmentally sustainable future.

“The missing piece in the whole sustainability puzzle is: what happens to all these materials at end of life?” Straubel has explained. This ideal—a closed-loop system for battery materials—became the essence of Redwood Materials, shaping everything from technology development to facility design to partnership strategies.

6. The Core Conviction: Non-Negotiable Truths That Drive Decisions

Perhaps the most powerful essence source is conviction—a deeply held truth that founders feel compelled to express through their organisation. This isn’t a preference but a non-negotiable principle.

When Daniel Lubetzky founded Kind Snacks, he held a core conviction that kindness and economic success aren’t opposing forces but can be integrated. This conviction stemmed from his father’s Holocaust experience and Lubetzky’s subsequent work on Middle Eastern peace initiatives.

“I think of business as a vehicle to have an impact on society,” Lubetzky has said. This conviction—that business can embody kindness while achieving commercial success—became central to Kind’s essence, informing everything from ingredient sourcing to marketing approaches to corporate philanthropy.

How the Founder’s Journey Shapes Organisational Essence

While these six origin points help us understand where essence begins, it’s the founder’s entire journey that forges essence into something distinctive and powerful.

Consider how Lynsi Snyder’s journey shaped the essence of In-N-Out Burger. As the granddaughter of founders Harry and Esther Snyder, Lynsi experienced a series of family tragedies—her father’s death at 17, family conflicts over the business, multiple challenging marriages—all while carrying the responsibility of her family’s legacy business.

These experiences didn’t just influence In-N-Out’s succession plan; they shaped its entire approach to business. The company’s essence of stability, simplicity, and family orientation—reflected in its limited menu, employee-first culture, and resistance to going public or franchising—bears the imprint of Snyder’s personal journey through turbulence to stability.

“Maintaining our family business and family heritage is very important to me,” Snyder has explained. This isn’t a strategic positioning but a direct expression of her life experiences.

Similarly, Hamdi Ulukaya’s journey as a Turkish immigrant to America profoundly shaped Chobani’s essence. His experience of longing for the foods of his homeland, combined with his background in a family of dairy farmers, created a distinctive lens through which he viewed the opportunity to purchase a closed yoghurt factory in upstate New York.

Chobani’s essence—its emphasis on quality ingredients, cultural authenticity, and immigrant opportunity—directly reflects Ulukaya’s personal journey from Turkey to America and from struggling entrepreneur to industry disruptor.

“I came to America with $3,000 in my pocket and the hope that anyone can come here and build a life,” Ulukaya has shared. This journey-driven perspective became inseparable from Chobani’s organisational essence.

The Emotional Foundations of Organisational Essence

Beyond the origin points and founder’s journey, three emotional elements combine to create resilient, distinctive organisational essence: heart, wonder, and curiosity.

Heart: The Courage to Lead from Conviction

Heart represents courage and conviction—the emotional centering that allows us to recognise what truly matters beyond rational analysis. It’s about creating an organisation that reflects who you truly are, not what the market expects.

When Brunello Cucinelli founded his eponymous luxury company, heart guided his unconventional approach to business—paying workers substantially above market rates, renovating a medieval village as his company headquarters, and refusing to participate in deep discounting. These weren’t strategic calculations but heart-driven expressions of his philosophy of “humanistic capitalism.”

“Profit is necessary and also beautiful, but if it’s not achieved with respect for people, it loses its true value,” Cucinelli has explained. This heart-level conviction created an organisational essence fundamentally different from typical luxury fashion brands.

Wonder: Seeing Possibilities Others Miss

Wonder represents the capacity to maintain openness to possibility—to see potential where others see limitations. It’s not naivety but the ability to question “What if?” without immediate constraints.

When Reshma Saujani founded Girls Who Code, wonder allowed her to see beyond conventional approaches to the gender gap in technology. Rather than accepting the standard narrative that girls simply weren’t interested in coding, she wondered: What if the problem isn’t girls’ interest but how we introduce them to technology?

“I think what’s happening in tech is a revolution. And I worry that if half the population isn’t part of that revolution, we’re leaving opportunity on the table,” Saujani has noted. This sense of wonder about what might be possible became central to Girls Who Code’s essence—its distinctive approach to combining coding education with community building and female role models.

Curiosity: Questioning Without Judgement

Curiosity drives persistent questioning of assumptions others take for granted. It’s the refusal to accept “that’s just how things are done” without exploration and challenge.

When Patrick Brown founded Impossible Foods, curiosity led him to question assumptions about meat production that most accepted as inevitable. As a biochemistry professor, he didn’t dismiss the environmental impact of animal agriculture as an unfortunate necessity but asked: What if we could recreate the molecular experience of meat without animals?

“I’ve always been driven by curiosity and wanting to understand how things work,” Brown has explained. This curiosity-driven approach became central to Impossible Foods’ essence—its scientific methodology to recreating meat experiences rather than simply creating another vegetarian alternative.

From Individual Spark to Organisational Fire: The Essence Transfer

The most critical challenge in essence development is the transition from founder conviction to organisational culture—how personal values become institutional DNA.

This transfer isn’t automatic; it requires deliberate attention. The most successful essence-driven companies employ four key mechanisms:

1. Stories as Essence Carriers

Stories transmit essence far more effectively than policy manuals. At Southwest Airlines, former CEO Herb Kelleher’s story of drawing the initial route map on a napkin isn’t just company folklore—it’s an essence carrier that communicates the company’s scrappy, unpretentious approach.

“We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things,” Kelleher was famous for saying. This and countless other stories became part of Southwest’s essence transmission system, helping new employees understand the company’s distinctive spirit without formal indoctrination.

2. Decisions as Essence Demonstrations

Nothing communicates essence more clearly than decisions—especially difficult ones that require trade-offs. When outdoor apparel company Patagonia sued the Trump administration over reducing national monuments, it wasn’t just political activism but an essence demonstration that showed the company’s environmental commitments transcended business convenience.

These essence-reinforcing decisions become reference points for future choices. “Remember when we chose environmental advocacy over appeasing political powers? That’s who we are.” These precedents create clarity about what the organisation truly values.

3. Rituals as Essence Reinforcement

Regular practices and rituals embed essence into daily operations. At animation studio Pixar, the “Braintrust” meetings provide creators with candid feedback without hierarchical pressure. This isn’t just a process improvement but a ritual that reinforces Pixar’s essence of prioritising story quality over politics or egos.

“The Braintrust evolved from Walt Disney’s story meetings during the early days of feature animation. But unlike their predecessors, our Braintrust has no authority,” former Pixar president Ed Catmull has explained. This ritual makes abstract values tangible through specific, repeatable practices.

4. Hiring as Essence Protection

Perhaps the most important mechanism for essence preservation is hiring—specifically, selecting people who resonate with the organisation’s core spirit. Online retailer Zappos famously offers new employees $2,000 to quit after their initial training period, ensuring only those truly aligned with the company’s service-focused essence remain.

Culture fit doesn’t mean homogeneity; it means alignment with fundamental values while bringing diverse perspectives and skills. The question isn’t “Are they like us?” but “Do they care about what we care about?“

5. Essence Custodians: Preserving Founder Values Through Succession

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of essence transfer occurs when founders depart. The transition from founder-driven to institutionalised essence often determines whether a company’s distinctive spirit survives or fades into generic corporate culture.

Few organisations have navigated this transition more successfully than Walmart, where Don Soderquist became known as the “Keeper of the Culture” after founder Sam Walton’s passing in 1992. As Vice Chairman and later Senior Vice Chairman, Soderquist’s primary focus wasn’t financial performance but essence preservation during Walmart’s massive global expansion.

“Sam was the entrepreneur who founded the company, but Don was the one who institutionalised the values,” noted David Glass, former Walmart CEO. This wasn’t merely philosophical work—Soderquist created practical mechanisms for essence continuity.

He maintained and strengthened Walmart’s signature Saturday Morning Meeting, a ritual Walton had established where leaders would share successes, address challenges, and reinforce core values. What could have become an empty tradition instead became a powerful essence transfer mechanism under Soderquist’s guidance.

“Don understood that culture isn’t maintained through policy manuals but through consistent demonstration,” explained a long-time Walmart executive. “He would travel to stores, distribution centres, and offices worldwide not to inspect operations but to connect people with the company’s fundamental spirit.”

Soderquist focused especially on operationalising Walton’s servant leadership principles, ensuring that “respect for the individual” and “striving for excellence” weren’t just wall slogans but decision drivers. He frequently reminded leaders that their primary responsibility wasn’t hitting quarterly targets but preserving the essence that made Walmart distinctive.

“The numbers are important,” Soderquist would say, “but they’re the result of living our values, not separate from them.”

What makes the Walmart example particularly instructive is how Soderquist maintained essence through massive scale change—growing from 1,928 stores at Walton’s death to over 3,400 stores just a decade later. This demonstrates that essence preservation isn’t just possible in small, founder-led companies but can be achieved even during dramatic expansion when the right custodian takes responsibility.

The Soderquist example illustrates a critical principle: essence doesn’t automatically transfer when founders depart. It requires deliberate custodianship—individuals who deeply understand the organisation’s irreducible core and take primary responsibility for its preservation and transmission.

In Chapter 7, we’ll explore the custodian role more deeply, examining the four custodian archetypes and how they sustain essence across leadership transitions. For now, it’s sufficient to recognise that essence transfer isn’t complete until it can survive its originator’s departure—making succession planning about spiritual as well as operational continuity.

The Essence Origin Framework

To identify and articulate your organisation’s authentic essence, use this systematic framework to explore the six origin points and how they’ve shaped your distinctive approach:

1. The Spark Exploration

Guiding Questions:

• When did the first seed of your business idea form?
• What feelings accompanied that moment?
• What possibility did you glimpse that others had missed?
• Why has this idea persisted when others faded?
• What about this spark resonates at a personal level?

Example - Duolingo: Luis von Ahn, a computer science professor and creator of CAPTCHA, had a spark moment when thinking about how to translate the web’s content while simultaneously helping people learn languages. His realisation that learning tasks could be designed to simultaneously translate text created the origin spark for Duolingo. This wasn’t just about language learning apps; it was about a fundamentally different approach that converted learning time into productive translation work.

2. The Frustration Inventory

Guiding Questions:

• What specific problems or limitations frustrated you enough to act?
• How clearly could you see a better alternative?
• What emotions did these frustrations evoke?
• Why did you see these problems when others accepted them?
• How strongly did you feel these issues needed addressing?

Example - Transferwise (now Wise): Taavet Hinrikus and Kristo Käärmann were frustrated by the hidden fees and poor exchange rates they encountered when transferring money between the UK and Estonia. Their frustration with traditional banks’ obscure pricing and inefficient processes became the chip on their shoulder that drove Transferwise’s development. This wasn’t just about creating another financial service; it was about a fundamentally transparent approach to international money movement.

3. The Belief Articulation

Guiding Questions:

• What fundamental beliefs shape your approach to business?
• Where did these beliefs come from in your life experience?
• Which of your beliefs run counter to industry norms?
• Which beliefs are rational and which are heart-based?
• How do your actions demonstrate these beliefs?

Example - Vanguard: John Bogle founded Vanguard based on the belief that investment companies should be structured to benefit investors, not managers. This belief—that the traditional investment management model was fundamentally misaligned with customer interests—shaped Vanguard’s unique mutual ownership structure where fund shareholders effectively own the management company. This wasn’t a marketing position but a core belief about proper alignment in financial services.

4. The Need Assessment

Guiding Questions: