For the past three years I've been working on 'Den autentiske virksomhed' (or, The Authentic Company, as it may be in English). Now I'm finally coming to an end. There is a full 360-page manuscript which I'm now editing to about 300 pages. I'm planning to deliver the final document to the publishing house Gyldendal Business sometime in May and hopefully see a real book looking a bit like the picture above during the summer. Besides my theory on business strategy development based on the authentic strengths of the organization, there is a string of case studies in the book. Some of them are Noma, LEGO, Ducati, Alessi, Hästens, Novozymes, BMW and Absolut. I've been really lucky to visit them and talk to their CEOs, owners and leaders.

During the fall I'll tour Denmark to talk about The Authentic Company and discuss how companies of all sorts can explore and develop their strengths from within. Some of the talks are already being arranged as I receive calls almost every week from people who want to discuss authenticity and what it means. Here are some of the talks that I'm doing soon:

14. April 2011, Hewlett-Packard Denmark (workshop)
3. May 2011, Vanebryderdagen 2011, 'Bremen' in Copenhagen (conference)
5. May 2011, Dansk Industri (talk)
11. May 2011, Dansk Kommunikationsforening (Day seminar)
13. May 2011, Medieforbundet i DR (workshop)
23. May 2011, Danske Fysioterapeuter (talk)
23. August 2011, FTF (workshop)
10. October 2011, Master of Management Development, CBS (education)
1. November 2011, Efterskoleforeningens lederkonference (talk)

During May we'll put more video clips from some of my talks on the website and once we get closer to the release date of the Danish book we'll start publishing parts of the content here on the blog, on Facebook and elsewhere. We'll make sure you get notice!

If you want to know more or want to book me for a talk, take a look at stagis.dk (Danish) or stagis.com (English). Lots of students want to know more - don't hesitate to write!

A few weeks ago I spent two days with an inspiring group of people discussing thoughts on branding, identitity, the use of social media in the Middle East, city planning and branding challenges in China. I was invited by Nicholas Ind to meet the group in Paris and give a brief talk on organizational authenticity. I really enjoyed the diverse group consisting of branding experts from the US, Europe (UK, Sweden, Holland, France and Spain), Russia and UAE. Everyone joined in a series of small lectures and discussions with a plethora of views and opinions. How do you meet the challenges of working with the Chinese? What role did Facebook and social media play in the revolution for democracy in the Middle East? How will new typologies for fast and efficient architecture that meet the new demand for housing in Dubai and Africa develop?



I was later invited to join The Medinge Group as a permanent member, which I was pleased to accept. I'm already looking forward to our next convention in August.

The Medinge Group has such distinguished members as consultant and writer Nicholas Ind, who wrote numerous books on branding, the latest of which is called Meaning at Work (check out earlier post), consultant and cofounder Ian Ryder of BCS, CEO Stanley Moss who has been a succesful designer and brand consultant for decades and now travels the World, dean Pierre d'Huy of La Sorbonne/CELSA and Management Institute Paris, consultant Simon Paterson, Ava Maria Hakim, executive at IBM and CEO Erika Uffindell of UffindellWest. The group was founded in Sweden by Thomas Gad, brand consultant and author of 4D Branding which has been published in 12 languages. During the past decade the members have met biannually in Paris, France, and Medinge in Sweden to share and develop thoughts on branding.

The philosophy of The Medinge Group is: "We believe that change can happen at a business and societal level simply by pursuing the principles of compassionate branding. Each of our members has particular expertise which enables them to make a unique contribution to the Group and to clients throughout the world." Every year the group awards brands for their humanistic, compassionate, sustainable and socially responsible behaviour. This year the Brands with a Conscience award was given to Aquamarine Power (UK), BBC World News - Newsweek for World Challenge (UK), Caja Navarra (ES) and Masdar City (UAE).

Besides being a think-tank, The Medinge Group is complemented by for-profit activities called the Medinge Consulting Group, which puts together brand development teams to help international clients.

Update: A few more images on our moblog.

I was fortunate enough to participate at "Kom-dag", the annual event created by the Danish Communication Association. The theme this year was Authenticity and Credibility. Apart from a 30-minute talk in the morning, I gave a brief interview that you can watch on YouTube and an article about the talk has been published.

In janurary we will launch a video with clips from the talk.

Radioavisen (the danish national newscast) woke me up this morning to talk about Specialekontoret. The idea is to create the best physical and mental environment for students. I just grabbed it with my Mac. You can hear it here:

Specialekontoret DR P1
or find it on DR Radioavisen - it was on at 8.00 this morning.

If you're working in a business consider if you could support the project. It's a great way of getting involved in the development of Denmark as an innovative nation, it's a great way of getting young managers training in coaching, it's a great way of getting the next generation of talents into business. There's lots more to know about the project. Read about it on www.specialekontoret.dk.

Last week I was lecturing on how organizations can map their authenticity. The lecture was part of Roy Langers course at RUC where I've been so fortunate to participate twice this winter. We recorded the last lecture and you can hear it here as a podcast. It's rather long (maybe too long for anyone to download and hear?), just about one and a half hour. The first hour is about authenticity in companies and my talk is based on my master-thesis which I am writing into a book this year. If all goes as planned it will be published in the first quarter of 2008. The last half hour of the talk is about blogging in organizations and how that can be connected to authenticity.

The lecture was a great experience because the students seemed to be really thrilled and everyone participated in trying to describe different organizations and authenticity-profiles as I tried to draw them out on the blackboard.

Hear The Talk: STAGISTALKS authenticity lecture [1:29:25 min, 37,8 mb]

Friday I spoke with Jonas Kjær, who is writing his master-thesis on the effect of corporate blogging. He is researching to what extend the relations created through corporate blogging are connected to the company or to the individual writing the blog-posts. So he's interviewing me and discussing stagisblog.com as well as the corporate blogging-issue in more general terms.

Our talk was more than an hour - here's the first 22 minutes. I'll go over the remains and upload them during the week. And by the way: This one is in danish!

Hear The Talk: STAGISTALKS Jonas og Nikolaj [22:27 min, 15,8 mb]

Now you can get the podcasts from STAGIS to download automatically to your iTunes and iPod (or any other device you may use to organize and carry audio and video with you...). In iTunes you can simply choose "subscribe to Podcast..." and insert this link:

feed://feeds.feedburner.com/stagistalks

Or you can push the "Subscribe to my Podcast" on the right and subscribe to the RSS-feed (Really Simple Syndication). Learn more about RSS on Wikipedia.

And when you've heard one of them, let us know what you think? Are they too short or too long or just plain boring? Another one is coming up soon - I think some insider-stagistalk is on it's way.

Yesterday I spoke with Jacob Benbunan, CEO of Saffron Consultants, who works with corporate branding and country branding (Chairman at Saffron is brand-guru Wally Olins whom I met earlier). One of the countries that Saffron is working with is Poland. I asked Jacob if an organization can have any single identity when there are 40 million members of the organization. And what the difficulties are when the client is only sure to be in charge for four years?

Hear The Talk: STAGISTALKS Jacob Benbunan [15:50 min, 10,9 mb]

The first podcast on stagisblog is a talk on authenticity with Professor Mary Jo Hatch from McIntire School of Commerce at University of Virginia. Mary Jo is known for a number of academic papers, articles and books on organization theory, leadership, identity, image and organizational symbolism.

You can find two of the companies that Mary Jo mentions here: The Body Shop and Interface Flooring Systems.

See a list of books by Mary Jo.

Hear the talk: STAGISTALKS Mary Jo Hatch [11:46 min, 8,1 mb]