As I am further led down the path that is Authenticity, I am led to understand a number of things I knew but could not delineate properly.
The first of those comes from Hamlet, as Polonius says to his son Laertes:
This above all-to thine own self be true
And as it must follow, as the night, the day
Thou canst not then false to any man.
As it relates to authenticity both for individuals and companies, two directions thus apply:
Be true to yourself;
Be what you say to others;
and the corollaries to business which the authors call the Polonius Test:
1) Is the offering true to itself?
2) Is the offering what it says it is?
The authors then take us through a matrix of possibilities which are
1) Real/real
2) Real/fake
3) Fake/real
4) Fake/fake
In other words depending where your offerings fall, it’s OK for an offering to be fake as long as it is true to itself. Where companies get into trouble is where they project an image of themself which isn’t true, or because the core product is not able to ‘sustain’ that image of themselves.
The other interesting point is that it is the consumer of the product who decides which category you fit into, and how ‘authentically’ you fit into that category….
The chapter then describes how to go about assessing where you are and what to do about it if you ascribe to a different category(i.e. that you are perceived as fake and you’d rather be seen as real). To change from one to another takes a long time unless you are a new company….
Which means if authenticity is important to you, it’s a long term path, not a get rich quick scheme….do you have the persistence to stay the course or is it not worth the effort.
For me, I see it as keeping things as simple as possible.