Authenticity has become a must-have quality in the business world, up there with diversity and sustainability. Advertisers feature “real people” rather than models. Gourmands forsake Taco Bell for taco trucks. Ambitious corporate types attend courses on how to be an authentic leader. As for us worker bees, we are constantly being urged to bring our authentic selves to work, as if work is a primal-scream therapy session rather than an exchange of cash for labor.
In her thought-provoking and beautifully written new book “Authenticity: Reclaiming Reality in a Counterfeit Culture” Alice Sherwood, a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Policy Institute at King’s College London, argues that authenticity is so fashionable precisely because its opposite, inauthenticity, is so ubiquitous. We live in a world of fakes and frauds, knock-offs and con tricks. About 10% of us have handled counterfeit goods — there are more counterfeits on the market than the genuine article — and about the same proportion of us fall victim to a fraud, scam or con every year.
The problem with authenticity starts with the word’s multiple meanings. The most obvious meaning of “authentic” is “genuine”: An authentic Michelangelo is one that was painted by the master rather than a forger or even a pupil. A second meaning is “natural”: An authentic fruit juice is made with the juice of fruits rather than sugar and water. “Genuine” and “natural” also feed into something fuzzier: Discerning holiday makers want to experience the authentic Mexico rather than the one that is packaged for the mass tourist market. Here authentic can mean anything from hidden to old and unspoiled.
The word has a whole new set of meanings when it is applied to people. Authentic is commonly used to distinguish between true leaders and artificial ones. Thus in the race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, John McCain marketed himself as an authentic leader — the free-wheeling pilot of the Straight Talk Express — as a contrast to dynastic politician George W. Bush.
Today the word is acquiring a new meaning: marching to the tune of your own inner drum rather than adopting a made-to-please public persona. This idea has its intellectual origins in the Romantic idea that society acts a constraint on the heroic individual and the post-structuralist theory that biological and other realities are socially constructed. But by some weird alchemy it has become all-pervasive in HR departments.
You can just about argue that “authentic” products and “authentic” leadership have something in common. In today’s intangible economy, companies are increasingly selling brands rather than commodities — that is, bundles of emotions rather than solutions to practical problems. The most successful brands try to bond with the consumer’s hidden self: Buy me and you will become the real you. So it makes sense to apply the same logic to the employment contract: Work for us and we will help you to be all that you want to be. Still, we are a long way from the idea that “authentic” means a genuine Michelangelo rather than a forgery.
The word becomes even slipperier when you try to apply it to the real world of business. Let’s start with products and experiences since they are the simplest. On the face of it, the case for authenticity is simple: People are willing to pay a premium for authentic goods or services because they think that they are superior. People buy real Gucci bags rather than fake ones because the real Gucci bags will last whereas the fake ones will fall apart. They visit the “real” Mexico rather than tourist haunts because they know that there is more to Mexican culture than cheap beer and nice beaches.
Yet aren’t brands in themselves a lie — or at least a fantasy? Brand managers spend heavily to convince us that if we wear their clothes or sport their bags we will live a more exciting and fulfilling life.
And aren’t the boundaries “authentic” and “inauthentic” changeable? Holiday-makers have to venture ever further into the back-and-beyond of Mexico in order to escape from other tourists who are also seeking the authentic Mexico.
Sherwood has a lot of fun with Andy Warhol. Warhol spent his career mocking the notion of authenticity that lies at the heart of the art market. He happily confessed that his assistant, Gerard Malanga, “did a lot of my paintings” and routinely ran off lots of copies of “his” pictures on the grounds that “repetition is reputation.” He didn’t even bother to sign the works that he didn’t produce, getting a rubber stamp made of his signature so that flunkies could sign them for him. At one point, he took out an advertisement offering to sign anything, including food, whips and money — for a fee. But now that Warhol has become the very thing that he mocked — a major artist whose paintings are worth millions — his skepticism is coming back to bite him, or at least his legatees. In 1995, the Andy Warhol Foundation established an Authentication Board to call out any fakes.
Sherwood introduces us to the phenomenon of “authenticity decay” to go along with “truth decay,” the blurring of the line between fact and opinion that characterizes so much political discourse. Snapple broke into the over-crowded drinks market because it used natural ingredients — the juice of real fruits — rather than sweetener and bubbles. But it was eventually bought by a giant beverage company, Keurig Dr Pepper, which set about fitting it into its corporate culture: By 2011, Snapple Apple, which has the phrase “all natural Snapple” on the bottle, contained no apple whatsoever.
In TV and film, the J.R.R. Tolkien characters that stalk Middle Earth have become ever-more divorced from the world created by the reclusive scholar, degenerating, at their worst, into action-movie clichés. My younger daughter, a lover of the Harry Potter books and films, refuses to watch “Fantastic Beasts,” the latest series in the Potterverse, on the grounds that it “isn’t real.” Authors can only go so far on the road from creator to brand endorser before they lose their audience.
The concept of authenticity is even more slippery when it comes to people rather than products and services. Are authentic politicians really authentic? Or are they just trying on different masks from their colleagues? The John McCain of the 2008 campaign was a different man from the McCain of 2000. And is authenticity really a desirable quality? Many British voters warmed to Boris Johnson because they treated his cavalier habits, from lying habitually to betraying his wives, as proof that he was the opposite of a conventional blow-dried politician. They are now treating the very same habits as proof that he is a cad, albeit an authentic cad.
The concept is at its slipperiest when it comes to the ubiquitous idea that we should bring our authentic selves to work. Does anyone really have one single authentic self? Most people have lots of different selves, depending on what we are doing; some even hope to evolve as they gain experience. And is it really wise to expose our inner selves in the workplace? Herminia Ibarra, of London Business School, points out that leaders can lose credibility if they expose too much of what they think and feel, particularly if they are untried.
The bring-yourself-to-work movement rests on a misunderstanding of the nature of work. Work is a structured activity, replete with hierarchies and conventions, in which we adopt professional roles in order to achieve collective ends. It also rests on a failure to appreciate the desirability of drawing a line between public and private, particularly in a world in which the public realm is so polarized. Do we really want gun-rights advocates littering their workspaces with pictures of semi-automatic guns because their inner hunter urges them to do so?
The ultimate paradox about authenticity is that the more we crave it, the more we are likely to be deceived: Authentic leaders turn out to be bounders and authentic experiences turn out to be mirages. There is no doubt that we all need to reclaim reality from a counterfeit culture, as Sherwood puts it in her subtitle; but, alas, thanks to the assiduous work of marketers, management gurus and other jargon mongers, authenticity is now just another counterfeit idea in a world overflowing with them.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at the Economist, he is author, most recently, of “The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.”
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
