The Authentic Enterprise revisited: a relevant guide – or a missed opportunity?

Citation

Debreceny, P. (2010), "The Authentic Enterprise revisited: a relevant guide – or a missed opportunity?", Journal of Communication Management, Vol. 14 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/jcom.2010.30714caa.002

The Authentic Enterprise revisited: a relevant guide – or a missed opportunity?

Article Type: Viewpoint From: Journal of Communication Management, Volume 14, Issue 3

Whatever else one might argue about “authentic,” it is a term that has definitely become a buzzword in recent times. The slow food movement tells us that it is one of the ways to tell good food from bad. It is a term that describes buildings, sports team merchandise, toys, gardens and untold manner of products, experiences and feelings. Not to mention presidential campaigns – a Google news search in the middle of the 2008 US campaign year shows the term as having been used over 11,000 times in just one month.

Of all uses, this ubiquitous term is a word that is particularly relevant to today’s public relations profession – a profession that is experiencing a revolution in its form and function from disruptive forces that cloud the future path, by the unprecedented tools now in the hands of consumers and citizens around the world through the power of new technologies, and ever more powerful, low cost and easy-to-use technologies at that. No one knows what the ultimate state of the profession might be once the revolution has run its course. We do know that in times of change there is an opportunity to revisit what we do and why, to evolve and adapt to these changing circumstances.

In late 2007, after a 15-month survey of today’s communications field, the Arthur W. Page Society[1] issued a report dealing with the “the evolving role” of chief communication officers in the light of this rapidly changing business climate. The Authentic Enterprise (Arthur W. Page Society, 2007)[2] highlights the impact of “the emergence of a new digital information commons; the reality of a global economy; and the appearance and empowerment of myriad new stakeholders. Together these forces have created a global playing field of unprecedented transparency and radically democratised access to information production and dissemination” (Arthur W. Page Society, 2007, p. 6).

The paper suggests that corporations can no longer manage how they wish to be perceived. Despite Jim Grunig’s pleas for symmetrical two-way communications, we practitioners used to love to think we were in control of messaging. With the ubiquity of today’s technologies control of messaging, and reputation, to the extent that it ever really existed, has disappeared. Corporations are dispersed around the world, and operating on a 24-hour basis. Decisions taken and behaviors followed in one part of the world affect the perception of the organisation everywhere else. Information is shared, and judgments drawn, in an instant.

Equally, old patterns of employment have significantly changed. Now the individual acting on behalf of the organisation may well be working for some other company rather than an employee, yet still carry the imprimatur of the organisation without any of the traditional employer-employee understandings or rules. The actions and behaviours of the quasi-employee impact public perception and consumer attitudes just as much as the actions and behaviours of a regular employee.

Moreover, the organisations we work for or consult to are dealing with a broader range of empowered stakeholders than they have ever had to face before. Pressure groups opposed to the organisation have access to the same technology tools – and are skilled at using them. Everything becomes public – whether the company, government department, or not-for-profit organisation wants it to or not.

The appropriate response to such far reaching changes in the business, social and communications environment is – the paper concludes – for organisations to become “authentic”:

In such an environment, the corporation that wants to … achieve long-term success must, more than ever before, be grounded in a sure sense of what defines it – why it exists, what it stands for, what differentiates it in a marketplace of customers, investors and workers. These definitions, call them values, principles, beliefs, mission, purpose or value proposition – must dictate consistent behaviour and actions. In a word, authenticity will be the coin of the realm for successful corporations and for those who lead them … [the corporation’s] actions and reputation, which used to be safeguarded by a cadre of professionalised functions, are now the responsibility of everyone in the enterprise (Arthur W. Page Society, 2007).

The paper challenges chief communications officers to take accountability for driving this process, in effect becoming the values custodian in the organisation and ensuring a consistent set of behaviours across the organisation. Successful organisations will do the right thing, because they understand that they live in an interdependent world. These organisations will engage in a dialogue with all stakeholders – they will be as open and transparent as possible, and they will empower their employees and associates to speak on their behalf in their local networks and communities.

These organisations behave this way because it is who they are, and because it is the right thing to do – not because of the fear of being found out if they do the wrong thing, although that by itself should be incentive enough. If authenticity is about being “real” and “genuine” as the authors aver, rather than “pretend” or “counterfeit” (Oxford University Press, n.d.), then we are dealing not with a marketing veneer but the substance of organisations. We judge them by whether their actions match their words. And we know more about those actions and behaviours than ever before, so we can easily identify those organisations that try to appropriate an authenticity not grounded in their reality.

The reaction to the white paper has been largely positive. It has sparked debate and discussion across the profession in the USA and elsewhere. For many practitioners, it has provided a useful guidepost to the approach to take to respond to the changing dynamics of the communications environment. The faster that change, the more relevant the advice seems. For example, the arrival of micro blogging sites like Twitter and the growth of social networking practices since the paper’s publication serve to reemphasise the importance of organisations behaving in a way that is true to who they are. For practitioners the call for authenticity is an increasingly valuable guide for navigating the change we and our organisations face every day.

It is ironic that one can argue that by its very nature what we as public relations practitioners do detracts from authenticity – we take the real nature of the organisation and mould it in the way we want it to be seen, develop key messages that act as a filter between the recipient and the organisation, and then make sure everybody repeats those messages like a mantra. The profession must become more authentic if it is to accept the challenge in the Page white paper. Our task as practitioners must be to encourage the organisations we serve to embrace authenticity and then allow the authenticity to come through as directly as possible. As individual practitioners we need to be rigorous in our personal authenticity. If we fail in this, we will truly have missed a golden opportunity.

The Arthur W. Page Society is an organisation whose mission is to strengthen the management policy role of the corporate public relations officer by providing a continuous learning forum and emphasising the highest professional standards. Its 350 members are drawn from the ranks of the Chief Communication Officers of Fortune 500 companies in the USA and Europe, the heads of the major international public relations agencies, and the leading academics in the public relations field. The organisation, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2008, is named after Arthur W. Page, the first public relations practitioner to hold a senior officer title in a major US public corporation. Page served as vice president of public relations and member of the Board of Directors for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company from 1927 to 1946. He is regarded as being the pioneer in the field of corporate public relations.

Electronic copies of the report and its sister publication on trust The Dynamics of Public Trust in Business (Arthur W. Page Society, 2009) can be downloaded from the Society’s web site: www.awpagesociety.com/

Peter DebrecenyGagen MacDonald, Chicago, Illinois, USA