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Authenticity is the sum total of all the aspects of an individual or organisation's, being in the world - both their inner being and public persona. In business, it is about a brand or organisation's life and its lifetime relationships with its customers; its greatest achievement and its most daunting challenge.
As a society, organisations and individuals, we are at best ambivalent about authenticity. On the one hand, we ostensibly demand the authentic and on the other, we live slavishly devoted to the heedless and mindless pursuit of the shallow and the banal.
Businesses are as inept in their pursuit of authenticity as people are. Each year, businesses spend billions of dollars explaining how their product is genuine, their service personalised, intimate, and engaged, their prices the lowest possible, and about how their companies are devoted to the selfless altruistic principle of the betterment of consumer lives. No wonder we don't trust them!
Businesses can't declare themselves to be authentic; that's the customer's job. Brands can't assert they are authentic; they can only be seen as such. And when marketing and advertising tread too close to reality, they fail to resonate. Of course, that isn't to say that businesses can't act authentically. There are businesses which are heavily engaged in the struggle for human rights, and their values reflected in both its corporate philanthropy and its supply-chain labour policies.
In future, authenticity could be the primary criterion to differentiate products and businesses. Technology has simply moved too fast for it to sustain a product innovation on a proprietary basis for any length of time. The best most businesses can hope to enjoy is a six-month innovation advantage before their competitors introduce a similar, and often improved, lower-cost, version of their product without having to recoup research and development costs.
However, authenticity, by its very nature, can't be copied, and any attempt to do so makes the clone appear all the more phoney.
From an organisational point of view, we can say that whatever it does inherently exists outside the domain of authenticity. Authenticity only comes into play when you stop listening to what an organisation says and begin examining how its people live their stated value/s and what they believe in.
Rhetoric aside, being authentic isn't always a commercially successful formula. Authenticity is expensive. Great artistic masterpieces command higher prices than cheap prints, but if you had a penny for every image of the Mona Lisa ever produced, you could buy the original and the Louvre it is housed in! The search for authenticity, personal or commercial, isn't easy. If it were, we'd live in a much different world. No wonder so many businesses opt for the inauthentic!
But no matter how difficult, being authentic is more than worth the effort, in the long run. As Mark Twain said, 'Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, its time to pause and reflect'.
So what does this mean for HRM? Authenticity is about a life, and, by extension, a life's work. To be authentic, organisations have to be transformed; to face up honestly to the responsibility for what one's organisation adds up to in its entirety, and to seize the possibilities in a global society.
Sanjiv Anand is the managing director and Rajesh Iyer is a Director at Cedar Management Consulting International.
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