OUR STORY

President Tony Tiernan describes why he founded Authentic Identity

“It started, as things often do, because I was really ticked off.  

My international career had spanned sales, journalism, marketing communications and management consulting. Over the years, that combination had given me the opportunity to meet an awful lot of senior executives, middle managers and workers across a wide range of industries and organizations.

Three frustrations recurred frequently in those conversations over the years:

• The absence of meaning in much of the work that our sophisticated information economy had produced (and the consequent absence of satisfaction and engagement)
• The equation of marketing and brand with manipulation and image (and the consequent growing ineffectiveness of both)
• The pervasive unwillingness (or inability) of business leaders to address their own and their people’s humanity (and the consequent lack of passion, creativity and real differentiation in many of the businesses I knew)

More recently, I had been wrestling with the question “what is a brand, when applied to a professional services firm?” and running into a slew of obstacles:

•  “The brand is the individual partner, not the firm”
•  “Brand is trivial – it’s just logo and color palette and tag-lines”
•  “It means we’ll all have to parrot a script and march in lockstep – and our people will never do that”

I began to see a connection between these seemingly disparate frustrations. More importantly, I began to see an answer. The successful leaders and organizations I had encountered over the course of my career had two common characteristics: a strong, clear sense of self – they knew exactly who they were – and an ability to make their work meaningful.

So in 2002 I set out to do something about it. I founded Authentic Identity Inc to help leaders and their organizations attract and keep the right followers, customers and staff, by developing and managing identity and meaning.

At first we focused on professional services firms. They are a difficult group to differentiate: business models, practices, frameworks and deliverables are all very similar. They sell something intangible – advice.  And their brand is conveyed by people – highly educated, independent-minded people who don’t much like being managed.  So starting with image isn’t going to get you very far. To build the organizational brand, you have got to uncover the meaning in the work, and make it operational. That’s our kind of territory.

Professional services firms still make up a big chunk of our client base. But we’ve found that our approach resonates with an ever-widening range of businesses. 

Because our work helps key individuals find the connection between their personal stories and the organizational narrative, and because we insist that your authentic identity is not just a form of words but a code that you live by, we find ourselves increasingly working with leaders who want to build organizations that endure and create lasting value. “

Are you ready to harness the power of your uniqueness ? Click here to learn more.