October 2008

Faking an Identity: How Inauthentic Organizations Dress Up

October 31, 2008

Tweet Special Halloween Edition In the spirit of Halloween, a time of costumes, treats and tricks, I’m inspired to start a list of ways that organizations dress themselves up so that they appear to be what they are not. Some of these terms and concepts are familiar. Some terms I’ve invented (4, 5, 6) and […]

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Can Organizations Regain Authenticity by Bringing Back Their Original Visionaries?: Where to, Starbucks?

October 30, 2008

Tweet Too many organizations feel inauthentic. Some organizations never had authenticity, and they feel empty. Other organizations had authenticity once but have since lost it. These organizations feel hollow. In an effort to address its own hollowness, Starbucks has over the last year brought back not one but two of its original visionaries, Howard Schultz […]

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McCain Campaign Exploits the Race of Their Hired Help

October 28, 2008

Tweet The McCain Campaign has hired Obama supporters to work as as "paid volunteers ."  As reported by Tom Baldwin in the UK Times, and picked up by The Huffington Post and the Daily Kos, the McCain Campaign is paying temp workers $10 an hour to go door to door handing out absentee ballot requests. […]

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Organizational Identity, Employee Branding and Political Contributions: Should you care if The Body Shop leans Republican?

October 27, 2008

Tweet The Body Shop is Republican? Anita Roddick must be rolling over in her grave. Released last week were the results of a study that shows how organizations have supported the Republican and Democratic parties. The data include direct corporate support (through Political Action Committees) and/or the support of these organizations’ employees (through individual donations). […]

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The Lyin’, the Which? , and The Wardrobe: Palin’s new clothes cost her more than $150,000

October 23, 2008

Tweet Sarah , Sarah , Sarah . Just when I’m ready to move on to other topics, you serve up yet another opportunity to understand organizations and authenticity. This time, the lessons are all about image, and the relationship between how we present ourselves and who we really are. If Palin’s wardrobe upgrade had been […]

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6 Reasons Why Taking Responsibility is Good for Your Organization

October 22, 2008

Tweet In my previous post, Can Taking Responsibility for the Financial Crisis Be Good For You ?,  I argue that taking responsibility is the one thing that you and your organization can do , right now, to improve your organization’s financial future. When an organization takes responsibility, it shifts how it sees itself. It moves […]

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Can Taking Responsibility for the Financial Crisis Be Good For You?

October 17, 2008

Tweet In a word, yes. You’d never know it from the conversation we’ve been having about our current financial crisis, but it’s true: Taking responsibility for your organization’s part in the financial crisis can actually be good for you. We’ve seen a variety of explanations for what’s been happening, some finger-pointing over who’s to blame, […]

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Mix Fake and Real, the Palin Way

October 8, 2008

Tweet People are hungry for authentic leaders and authentic organizations .  Assessing an organization’s authenticity or a candidate’s authenticity is one way that we gauge where to place our trust. To entice people to trust us, we need to make them think the organization is authentic. Sometimes, we may even want to create "Fake Authenticity" […]

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4 Ways Palin Creates a Fake “Reality”

October 3, 2008

Tweet In my earlier post, Use Real Authenticity to Establish Fake Authenticity: Sarah Palin shows organizations how , I argue that Palin is a useful role model for organizations in the way that she has gone about creating "Fake Authenticity." Establishing Fake Authenticity has two steps, and in this post I’ll discuss Step 1: Creating […]

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Use Real Authenticity to Establish Fake Authenticity: Sarah Palin shows organizations how

October 2, 2008

Tweet Almost anywhere we look at this election season there’s something to learn about authenticity.  This is especially true when we’re able to draw analogies between individuals and organizations. Watching the ways that individuals work to present themselves as authentic , we can learn tactics that organizations can use. Sarah Palin has been very effective […]

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