The Power of Defining What Your Company Isn't

It can be useful to define your company by what it is not. Financial cooperatives, for example, were able to communicate their trustworthiness during the financial crisis with their “we are not a bank” message. During a qualitative, longitudinal study of a German company, author Madeleine Rauch and her colleagues looked at how the founders’ determination not to be a “corporation” helped to define the firm. It allowed employees to hold onto their sense of identity in the course of numerous strategic pivots.