Independent professionals and creative artists often fall into a fallacious view that being effective at business means you have to be inauthentic. They interpret "succeeding at business" as something that is limited to Enron-like corporate entities, entities with neither a conscience nor connection to community.<br><br>It seems to me that one way the excesses and evils of business will be counter-balanced in this decade is by independent professionals and artists, who engage in business as a vehicle for showing up, serving, and thriving. By engaging in business and welcoming the inevitable breakdowns as occasions for learning, we shine a light on inadequacies of current practices for the sake of devising better practices. <br><br>What will those better practices be? That will depend on how we answer other fundamental questions of authentic business: For the sake of what am I engaged in this enterprise? How will I measure success? How do my business goals and measures for success stand up in the context of my community? What is my community? How do I define it? How do I validate this definition? <br><br>But it is not enough to ask these questions. We must risk putting our answers into action. This is why I term my coaching for business owners and artists, "Authentic Promotion." In order to be truly authentic, in other words, to authenticate our values and our standards, we must act in the world. We must show up to serve, and we must stop pretending that commerce is something the bad guys do. <br><br>This presents a significant challenge for anyone who has bought into the prevailing split between ethics and commerce. You may need, in the language of recovery programs, to "Fake it ‘til you make it." <br><br>Recovering alcoholics are told this, not to encourage inauthenticity, but build a bridge from the addicted way of being in the world to an addiction-free way of being. Fake it, the program admonishes, so that you can take on the body and the experience of new ways of doing things, ways that are utterly unavailable to you as an addict or substance abuser. In fact, if people in recovery do not fake it, they are doomed to live out their addictive behaviors, because those behaviors are the perfect response to the world that they have constructed in their addictions.<br><br>What does this mean for you when it comes to authentic business practice? It means stepping back from the way you have always done it, detaching from your biases and fears about business (without closing your eyes to the real problems and wrongs), and consciously reconciling the needs of your business with your humanity and with the quality of work you deliver. <br><br>The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology" defines "reconcile as "bring into friendly agreement, make compatible." This is no small task, just as it is no small thing for a recovering alcoholic to learn to experience confidence and connection without the lubricant of booze. Yet we must learn to welcome our business breakdowns as opportunities for this sort of reconciliation if we are to transform business and bring our work lives into alignment with our highest and best selves.<br><br> 2008-10-27T17:18:26Z 2008-10-29T03:52:00Z -15.4348 332 2073 true 2 7670 authenticity-and-success 5 2008-10-29T03:51:56Z 2008-10-29T03:51:56Z

Must we be inauthentic to be successful at business? I don't think so and this is why.

0 2009-02-24T09:46:48Z