In search of the company’s strengths

The authentic company is about how some managers are able to create exceptional results by exploring the visible and invisible strengths in the organization and use these to create an authentic identity. Authentic companies are attractive, perform better than their competitors, have a clear purpose, high cohesion and low transaction costs.

Set the market agenda

Authentic identity is a new strategic leadership responsibility. In the future, managers at all levels must to be able to identify, analyze and manage the company’s authenticity if they want to move the company from crisis to success or influence the market. Instead of mimicking the outside world, companies must look inward and believe in the organization’s internal strengths as the basis for future development.

Learn from Noma, LEGO and Ducati

In The authentic company, Nikolaj Stagis has interviewed and challenged executives and owners. One example is René Redzepi from Noma, who talks about the quest for the Nordic food and the journey from being an outsider to becoming the world’s best chef. We experience Alberto Alessi in his design museum, which is reserved for staff development meetings, and  we discover how Jørgen Vig Knudstorp from LEGO and Jan Ryde from Hästens have created internal motivation and redeemed the company’s potential by rediscovering and reconstructing the company’s authentic identity.
The book is for leaders in all types of organizations, large and small, public and private, who wish to understand the company’s authentic identity in order to find the organization’s inner potentials for strategic development, organizational change, marketing and communication.

Sensemaking and radical changes

The book explains how the company’s authentic identity can be developed through a process, which alternately provides construction of opinions and radical actions. In order to rediscover the company’s identity there must on the one hand be “sense-making processes” involving employees, fans and leaders, and on the other hand, management must from time to time make radical choices to create empowerment and change the company.