The Authentic Organization

Over the years, I often get asked questions about how to communicate something with a donor. For example: We have all these email addresses, but we haven’t sent anything to them for many months or more. We finally want to start a newsletter, which we had only previously hinted at. What do we say to [...]

A few days ago, I wrote a short piece on the idea of an organizational obituary as a tool for deepening authenticity. With the feedback I’ve received, it’s become clear that there are some ambiguities in the practice that prevent it from being as useful as we might like. These ambiguities are identical to those [...]

In the book Original Blessing, Meister Eckhard (via Matthew Fox) offers us an intriguing four part framework from which to examine the spiritual paths of individuals. I believe this framework has something to offer this conversation about the authentic organization. In brief, the framework suggests that it can be useful to think of our walk [...]

Over at Nonprofit Online News, we recently launched a Civil Society LifeWork Survey. I mention it here because of the way in which it touches on the matter of authenticity. The survey opens with a series of more conventional questions, based on a broader Pew survey conducted in 2006. My main objective with these was [...]

I recently reviewed a book called Storytelling: Branding in Practice at Nonprofit Online News. In the chapter entitled “The Company Core Story” the authors present an exercise called The Obituary Test. It’s very similar to exercises I’ve done with both organizational and individual clients. I paraphrase it as follows: Write down your company’s obituary. How [...]