Authentic Miscellany

The blogthread (hmm, does the fact that it’s multi-site meant that it’s a blogyarn, not a blogthread?) about authenticity, marketing and the world has some excellent comments and additions.

Bill Seitz writes:

… in addition to authenticity and voice, perhaps the term Congruence has some play here. I’ve run across it mainly in a management context, but it’s a bigger/meatier/softer idea.

On Bill’s site congruence is defined as “Having action be congruent with thought. Doing what you know you should do.”

Oy, Bill, don’t go deepening this discussion on us! Authenticity has usually been taken to be within the realm of self-understanding, not action. But, of course, not only could you re-construe the entire discussion along the lines of the congruence of thought and action, but you would immediately plunge into a literally theological debate. E.g., faith versus works, to put it Christianly. For Jews, the faith/works model doesn’t work all that well. And now we’re off to the races…

Maybe congruence is all that we can or should demand of a business. I still believe that “authenticity” just doesn’t apply to organizations, but if we take corporate “thought” to mean not only the codified “vision” and “mission” but its external marketing, then, yes, if Monsanto is preaching “building a better world for all of us,” then I damn well want their actions to be congruent with that. In fact, I care much more about congruence than authenticity in this case.(By the way, I made up Monsanto’s motto.)

Andrew Ross writes:

I have been reading your recent thread about authenticity with great interest, as my own research [He’s at Oxford – dw] deals quite a bit with learners creating a sense of community (and with that, a sense of belonging) on the Internet.

I’ve come to believe that authenticity is where you find it — some people arrive at the person/ether interface with a well-established sense of self that carries through in toto into the Internet, and some others use the opportunity to lose the body as a change to renegotiate their selves. What results is a system that allows people either to import or to synthesize identity. It seems strange (and probably misleading) to discuss whether or not a projection of self is ‘true’ or ‘authentic’, mostly because doing so assumes a binary true/false duality of self. Perhaps we should speak in terms of two relative loci of being (‘In situation X, I am more/less like I am in Y’) rather than one fixed and one fluid locus, as we tend to do (‘In situation C, I am more/less like myself’). Authenticity therefore would be more a description of how acting/speech in a particular context is like that in contexts that a person believes are important to defining who s/he is.

I like the way this helps get us out of the trap of thinking (to put it in a purposefully loaded way) that not only do we have a single “inner self” but that that self is who we really are. It also provides a model that removes some of the traditional moral weight of authenticity — “Thou Shalt Be Authentic” — so that it’s more descriptive than prescriptive. This lets authenticity apply better to the Web where having a variety of selves and personae may be a sign of creativity, flexibility or playfulness rather than an indication that your moral core is flabby.

I think that Andrew’s view of authenticity makes it pretty irrelevant to corporations, which is fine with me. Or am I just thinking about this wrong?

Jonathan Peterson writes:

David Rogers‘ observations are pretty interesting, as is your response. It seems that the voice of the ideal cluetrained corporation is a gestaltic chorus, guided by a clear understanding of core corporate values and ideals. To become clue’d, a company has to have fundamental values that are clearly understood and shared by all employees (and partners/customers for that matter).

The problem is that all the vision statements in the world won’t actually tell you who a company IS, for that you must be there for a period of time. And the majority of companies are very different from who they say they are.

I worked with Earthlink in the very early web days, packaging an Earthlink sign up kit in our CD-ROM titles from CNN in ’95), and have been a customer since then. Perhaps apocryphal, but earthlink’s founders claim to have created this statement BEFORE deciding what their business was going to be: http://www.earthlink.net/about/ourvalues/cvb/

Interestingly http://www.earthlinksucks.net/ is a good example of how the internet can enable the voice of a single person. How these things inter-relate may be an interesting real-world lesson in corporate core values, voice and what happens when a company forgets where it came from through mergers, loss of founders, etc.

So, this would ground a company’s idea of itself in its actual history. I like that a lot. And it has an odd impact on the implications of Andrew’s and Bill’s ideas, for we don’t necessarily want congruence between a company’s history and its actions but this longer view of corporate identity maybe gives a way to identify an authentic (!) inner core of a company. (In The Cluetrain Manifesto, Doc and I wrote that positioning isn’t a matter of taking a blank piece of paper and jotting down some ideas. In fact, the market positions companies. And it can take generations before, say, Volkswagen is no longer “branded” as a Nazi car.)

Good heavens, is AKMA a masterful writer and the rare person who raises up all who meet him. His latest is brilliant along several axes. Unfortunately, I deleted the blog of mine to which he refers because I thought it was, well, crap. Had I known that it figures in AKMA’s latest authentico-blog, I might have left it up just so his links wouldn’t be dead. (I also was affected by the “hot ‘n heavy theological mash note” AKMA’s wife sent him yesterday.)

Dave Rogers, part of the original blogthread on this topic, has a terrific piece on whether Love is really the killer app. It’s very much on the same theme as the blogthread since it asks if businesses are capable of love. He also has blogged praise for Santa Cruz Bicycles as a company that perhaps deserves to be described as authentic. (I ran an interview with them in my ‘zine because I was similarly impressed with them.)

Jason Thompson is off to a great start with his new blog, including an entry about voice and marketing.

And, Jacob Shwirtz has entered the fray with a piece on trust. (“Fray” is the wrong word for this virulently civil discussion.) He includes a long quote from an entertaining rant from Dennis Miller.

Categories: Uncategorized dw