Garbage in the Moat Part 2

I was talking on the phone yesterday to a very smart person whose idea I am going to shamelessly steal here because he didn't want to post it himself. We were discussing credit rating agency, Moody's, and what went wrong. So this guy says to me that people don't understand that Moody's was a religion. It operated from a creed. When the company went public and needed earnings growth, it was selling the soul of the church for money. So far so good, this is not new news, right?

Listen, my friend said, imagine if the Pope called in all the priests and told them, we are going to operate a hedge fund for the Church. You go out to your parishoners and tell them to put as much as possible into the collection plate and the institution will glorify them with a financial reward in addition to sending them to heaven. What happens next? The creed gets thrown out very fast as the institution becomes all about collecting money.

In an earlier post I wrote about the essential nature of the Catholic Church as a business model and its point of vulnerability -- the priests who could throw garbage in the moat.  Some of you also have written to post about how See's Candies built its "moat." 

It's been said that successful entrepreneurial enterprises are knit together by a common passion, even more so than by a brilliant business idea. So a useful exercise is to look at any business with a "moat" and think about what aspect of that moat takes the form of a "creed," and what could cause that creed to be abandoned.