All about Authenticity

Resources for Authenticity: Being vs. Understanding

June 30, 2009

Tweet What resources can organizations draw on to create and sustain an authentic sense of “who they are”? My class with the Darden EMBA students on Saturday danced around the questions of “How do organizations ‘source’ their identity? and “How do organizations sustain their authenticity?” Even though we had a chance to discuss many other […]

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Brandividual In Action: Follow @cbarger to watch General Motors transform

June 2, 2009

Tweet Here’s your chance to see someone in the brandividual role taking action, over time, in the face of a big challenge. When I gave my talk about The Rise of Brandividuals at last week’s Corporate Reputation Conference, I used the example (well-known in social media circles) of @scottmonty of Ford Motor Company to illustrate […]

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Leading Authentically with Transparency: An interview/podcast with Paul Levy

April 27, 2009

Tweet Here’s a neat podcast interview with Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, whose leadership approach to the need for dramatic cost-cutting we considered in the post Finding a leadership opportunity in alternatives to layoffs. This podcast interview offers a few additional insights, in part because the interviewer Catherine Bell asks some […]

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Local Heartbreak, bankruptcy style

April 24, 2009

Tweet Sometimes organizations fail, and you just don’t care that much. Other times organizations fail, and you wonder why you care SO much. It’s a failure in the second category that’s making me sad today. With Fountains of Wayne, Route 46 sustains its authenticity as the scenic route from the Hudson to the Delaware. Without […]

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Raw Emotion, UnCooked Truth, and the Space Between “Fake” and “Real”

April 14, 2009

Tweet My colleagues at OrgTheory are celebrating the award of Guggenheim fellowships to some great sociologists, and they mention one of my favorites, Joshua Gamson. I was reminded of how much I enjoyed Gamson’s first book, Freaks Talk Back, because Gamson’s analysis of tabloid talk shows is laced with interesting questions and examples of strategic […]

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Tools for Authentic Organizations: Dotmocracy

March 23, 2009

Tweet The end of “business as usual”   Please, let us be coming to the end of “business as usual”. Conversations about whether MBA programs caused the financial crisis and what the future of capitalism should be suggest that ways of doing business that have long been seen as acceptable and even admirable are now […]

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7 Tips for Rendering Authenticity Through Social Media

March 12, 2009

Tweet As part of a presentation I’m giving on “Rendering Authenticity Through Social Media, ” I’ve been distilling advice for from around the online conversation on how organizations can use social media to present themselves authentically. The audience will be a group of managers (practitioners, not professors) who are not themselves directly responsible for social […]

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