So I was catching up on some blog reading this morning when I came across this post from Doc Searls.  I read his blog regularly for the keen observations of developments up and down the Tubes -- and you should, too, BTW.

And to my horror – and one week into Lent no less – I read that he believes Verizon HAS NO SOUL!

The post was a comment on Starbucks losing its soul, or in the words of CEO Howard Shultz, how the chain needs to “get back to its core.”

Doc says Starbucks has the soul of a coffee shop (really, Doc? I was thinking haberdashery), Wal-Mart is a five-and-dime, and Nordstrom the soul of a shoe store.

He goes on to state that some companies have no soul, and singles us out! 

He asks us not to take it personally but that he finds it hard to find soul in a company built from several legacy businesses, to rephrase his description.

We may not speak Fritalian but this company has soul… and then some. 

It was the soul of this company that responded to the 9/11 attacks.  We helped get the New York Stock Exchange and world financial markets on their feet by replacing a grid the size of Cincinnati in five days, and then bringing thousands of Verizon workers into lower Manhattan to get businesses humming and residences communicating again in the ensuing weeks.  We achieved a telecommunications rebuild unlike anything ever seen before, and under horrendous circumstances. You can't do that without soul.

It is the DNA of this company that ensures your dial-tone is there 99.99% of the time, come ice storm, hurricane, or flood.

The life-blood of this company? Our 250,000 employees – 100,000 of whom are union members – who are injecting into the US economy $17+ billion this year alone – more thant the big three automakers combined.

It is the vision of this company to do for the Internet what the internal combustion engine did for transportation – by bringing future-proof fiber optics right into millions of American homes.

So we may not sell fancy sounding coffee-flavored milk or our own dog food named for old friends, what we do is something more important, connect people.

And it takes soul, and a lot more, to make that.

UPDATE:  In case you missed it. Doc Searls responded to this post here, as did a number of his readers under the blog's discussions last week.