In the pursuit of complete visibility leaders have managed to go blind. What was promised to produce certainty has somehow produced a generation of risk averse executives.

But complete transparency into every single buyer journey cannot tell a company how it should view the world, what tradeoffs it should make, or what aspects of itself it must never betray if it wishes to remain whole.

And even if the future could be guaranteed, that would not provide the psychological safety required for the courage to act to become available.

Those things require an identity, not another dashboard or model update.

Yet identity is routinely treated as a matter of brand, and brand as a marketing function — as if the question of who a company is somehow separate from how it conducts business.

Brand is the outward expression of who you are as a company. It is both the shadow your identity casts on the market and every private and public-facing choice you make as a company.

Brand exists at every layer and in every aspect of an organization: from its color palette, to how deep in the Settings panel that you place the unsubscribe button (and how difficult you make it to do so), to how quickly you respond to customer support requests, to what product you refuse to offer no matter how many customers ask for it.

Which is why brand is an identity function, not a marketing one.

Identity is the internal psychology of a company that drives its behavior and the lens through which it processes reality. Identity determines a company's ability to withstand internal and external pressures, its risk tolerance, and its generative capacity.

This structural integrity of selfhood separates the companies that endure from those that eventually collapse under the weight of their own success.

Business is the arena where a company’s identity is commercially tested over time.

When brand is treated as a marketing function, the CEO makes decisions that change who the company is without recognizing them as such.

Raising another round, going up market, changing a pricing model, adding a feature — these things fundamentally alter a company, just like major decisions and actions taken fundamentally alter who a person is. Identity drives behavior, but behavior enforces identity.

Marketing is then expected to answer questions the CEO has left unresolved —who the company is plus the boundaries and significance of its existence — as well as tasked with expressing the company’s inner world when the business has done little to develop one and their own understanding of brand leaves them unable to effectively convey it even if it had.

Approaching business and brand as separate matters doesn’t remove this gravity or complexity, it simply ensures that it never gets addressed.

At the same time, the current landscape of business writing and media reflects its own version of this proverbial separation of church and state by completely ignoring the invisible human and energetic forces that not only influence what happens, but are actually in the driver’s seat.

Funding rounds and cap tables are dissected and the minimization of dilution gets explained, but the psychospiritual ramifications of being handed a large sum of money you have not yet earned have yet to be analyzed through a Kabbalistic lens.

Branding literature draws on Jungian archetypes to give brands a personality taxonomy and organizational psychologists have applied Jungian principles to company identity, but no broader business literature addresses how a startup must individuate to transcend the parent-child dynamic of VC funding — or how companies without a core self depend on paid ad clicks as proof of their existence.

The exoteric use of the word alchemy makes for a great title of an advertising bestseller, but entrepreneurship as an esoteric alchemical process requiring the death of a former self remains undiscussed.

Frameworks are offered for developing taste and deploying storytelling, but nobody has articulated how the tech industry’s obsession with these things stems from a combination of its refusal to engage with uncertainty combined and complete disinterest in the human experience.

The only human element appears separately as curated vulnerability via founder confession podcast episodes or building in public.

There is a third lane for the sober, in-depth study of the human dynamics beneath business that does their intricacies and nuances justice, using language that is neither clinical nor mystical, while demonstrating their tangible effects on and direct connection to strategic and commercial decisions and outcomes.

The essays that follow examine the intangible forces and the structural underpinnings of business and brand through depth psychology, myth, and power dynamics.

Depth psychology to uncover what the stated explanations leave out: leaders’ internal conflicts, their compensations, desires, needs, and what they try to avoid.

Power dynamics to explain how internal conflicts eventually manifest into external problems, whose desire (or avoidance) becomes an organizational priority, how does a company create desire for its products, the irrelevance of leverage if you can’t afford to walk away, and whose version of reality gets the final say — and why?

And myth because they were never just stories. Myths endure because they trace archetypal journeys that serve as maps to the human psyche.

The goal of this publication is to give language to what leaders can feel but not name, and to bring discussions of strategy and growth back into contact with the human realities that actually dictate how leaders and companies operate.

An intellectual refuge for those that do not confuse academic speak with academic rigor, it is written for those who understand that the most impactful business decisions are made before the data exists, that some truths deserve more than a scroll's worth of attention, and that the world doesn’t belong to those who can measure the best — but to those who understand that which can never be measured at all.

Welcome to Deviation Standard.