Are You Prepared for the Authenticity Imperative?

Jan 31, 2023

From champagne to Swiss Army knives, the original Coke to original blue jeans, authenticity is often key to an organization's brand, mission, and success.

Increasingly, companies are claiming themselves to be purpose-driven. And why not? It seems obvious that all manner of stakeholders—employees, customers, suppliers, and financiers—would prefer doing business with a company that knows what it stands for.

But as we saw in my last column, companies that are serious about corporate purpose confront at least three challenges. These include a tension between choosing a generalist vs. specialist strategy, as well as the problem of impact measurement. Today, however, I want to take up the challenge of authenticity and its corollary: the problem of purpose-washing.

Simply put, when corporations make pronouncements about their purpose, they enter into the record a set of values-based claims about their commitments and ambitions. Doing so sets in motion expectations about how the company will operate both now and into the future.

Importantly, an organization’s purpose statements are performative, which means they are not true or false. In the same way that saying “I pronounce you husband and wife” at a marriage ceremony does not report on a wedding (i.e., it is not constative), but instead brings it about, purpose statements are interventions into reality that seek to bring about the very world they name. In this way, purpose-driven companies expose themselves to expectations and evaluations provoked by their own declarations.

Here, it can be the case that no good deed goes unpunished. For instance, a company can find itself accused not just of falling short of its highest ideals, but of being hypocritical for not doing enough to put its purpose into practice. Concerns of purpose-washing are especially likely when there is misalignment between a company’s walk and talk and a lack of perceived connection between its espoused and actual values practices.

Finally, purpose-driven pronouncements can create new scrutiny of a company’s past accomplishments, too. Achievements that seemed settled once and for all can become unsettled as they are reassessed in light of new evaluative criteria.

In short, purpose-driven corporations confront what I call the authenticity imperative, which I unpack below.

What Does It Mean for a Corporation to Be Authentic?

At first blush, the meaning of authenticity may seem self-evident. To be authentic is to be real or genuine, not fake. Considering that we now live in what some have described as a post-truth society, it hardly seems surprising that a company’s stakeholders would put a premium on such qualities. But if you scratch beneath the surface, you find that scholars have delineated at least three different understandings of authenticity.

Authenticity as Self-Consistency

One common understanding of authenticity resonates with Shakespeare’s well-known mantra: “To thine own self be true.” On this account, an organization is authentic to the extent that its internal values are matched by its external actions. Implicit in this understanding of authenticity is the notion that each company is unique and different. Being authentic means having the courage to follow your own path, even—perhaps especially—when doing so means bucking conventions. Quirkiness can be something of a virtue. One might even understand organizations as “auto-authentic,” which is to say they are the origins of the purposes they name as well as the authors of their realization. Apple’s vaunted “Think Different” campaign comes to mind. So does Patagonia’s admonition to “Buy Less.”

Authenticity as Categorical Conformity

A second understanding of authenticity is actually quite different from the first. Instead of valorizing difference and uniqueness, authenticity depends on an organization’s conformity with the attributes of the category it belongs to or has claimed for itself. There is a shift from comparing internal values and external actions to comparing the focal organization’s qualities to the categorical ideal. Was last night’s wine truly the epitome of a Napa Cab? Is the chana masala at your favorite neighborhood restaurant properly prepared? The answer to these questions cannot be found by looking inside the organization, to its values and ideals, but rather by looking to the institutions in which the organization is embedded. After all, as Mary Douglas taught us, social institutions categorize. By extension, authenticity requires proof of conformity to the accepted canon in a particular domain. It also raises the uncomfortable possibility that what was once authentic can become less so (and vice versa) to the extent that shifts occur in the institutional matrix. As Marcus Aurelius said, “Change is the only constant.” This means that authenticity is an ongoing, negotiated process.

Authenticity as Cultural Provenance

A third approach to authenticity emphasizes an organization’s relational connections. Here, authenticity depends on establishing associations to particular persons, places or times. An organization is authentic to the extent it has bona fide credentials. Documentation, expertise, and cultural capital are critical in this regard. By extension, cultural goods are especially sensitive to such understandings of authenticity. Is that painting really a Rothko? Is that bag really a Balenciaga? These are not questions of self-consistency or even categorical conformity, but of cultural provenance. The “genuine” is always an embodied and inscribed experience and not reducible to its material attributes alone. Although materiality no doubt matters to establishing claims of provenance, perhaps more importantly, organizations require the cultivation of the proper semiotic equipment—that is, the ability to both sense and send an array of specialized signs and symbols. In turn, companies require narrative competencies, the ability to translate their specialized sensory knowledge into the lingua franca of the day.

Corporate Purpose and the Authenticity Imperative

This brings us back to the question of corporate purpose and the authenticity imperative. Despite their clear differences in meaning, each scholarly perspective on authenticity relies on evaluations and verifications of largely intangible qualities. This is one reason for the proliferation of so many certifications as it relates to environmental, social and governance attributes of organizations.

Here is the key implication: a purpose-driven company that expects to be taken seriously should be prepared to demonstrate the authenticity of its commitments—both at a point in time and over time. To the extent that different meanings of authenticity are operant, companies will need to do so across multiple sets of criteria: self-consistency, categorical conformity, and cultural provenance. Critically, each of these “modes” of authenticity demands wildly different organizational capacities.

In the first instance, organizations require the capacity for introspection, originality, and transparency. In the second, they are expected to slavishly adopt the latest best practices, exercise self-restraint despite operating in a competitive market, and show they conform with all the latest societal norms (i.e., DEI, ESG, SDGs, etc). In the third, companies will be judged on the strength of the connections they can forge and sustain, the meanings they are able to imbue to the symbols and signs in circulation (i.e., their semiosis), and the verisimilitude of the stories they tell (i.e., the extent to which their stories ring true).

On their own, each of these competencies is likely to stretch an organization’s capacity; collectively they pose a formidable challenge.

So, are you prepared to lead with authenticity? You’d better be!

Further Reading and Viewing

See “Authenticity,” by David W. Lehman et al (2019), in the Academy of Management Annals (https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/annals.2017.0047).

Watch: In 60 seconds: GW Asst. Professor Vontrese Pamphile Discusses Corporate Authenticity, Vimeo.com

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