After decades of increasing over consumption, staging and simulation, we are on the threshold of meaning society. The new sensibility for authenticity is growing in an ailing hyper-real world. The culture of authenticity places new demands on companies, who have received a new management responsibility – the organization’s authentic identity.

In the future, the success of the company depends on the manager’s ability to define the organization’s authentic strengths and to offer present and transforming relationships.

All companies have an inherent potential, which is waiting to be discovered and released. Even those unfamiliar, the most boring and the organizations, who now find themselves in crisis, began with an idea or a task to be solved. This applies to associations, the private or public company, charities, a city and even the entire nation of Denmark.

They all contain a special meaning and a passion that sometimes is lost and must be rediscovered, defined and reconstructed. In times of crisis focus is put on the immediately visible and tangible symptoms such as finance and operations. But when the organization is troubled, the biggest problem is in fact that management and the entire organization fails to define what idea or problem, the skills and energy  of the organization must be focused on. Companies lose themselves – and only then their finances.

The authentic narrative requires inherent strengths

“You have to have a story,” says René Redzepi, one of the world’s finest chefs, who founded the restaurant Noma together with food entrepreneur Claus Meyer. “We also see this in Copenhagen today, where there is strong competition. Those who survive have a strong history and a strong profile. Combined with a world-class kitchen and excellent service, of course. But you need to have a strong identity – more than just being a French kitchen. Otherwise it’s just another good restaurant.” When René Redzepi talks about “a history”, it is not in the superficial sense that you must stage your services in order to market them. He speaks of the entire set of inherent strengths and capabilities that the company is composed of and which are connected in a system that can be described through a narrative.