Could I have Madeoff by Faking Authenticity?

In a year where banks showed that what once looked like solid profits was in many cases a mirage, could I have madeoff by faking authenticity.

OK these two words side by side sound like strange bedfellows.

I got started on the topic after reading the Outside Edge column If you can fake it, you will make it by Jonathan Guthrie (FT, December 28).

He notes:

 "At one executive leadership seminar I attended recently, the trainer explained that authenticity was the main attribute delegates needed to radiate, including “different types of authenticity for different audiences”. This means being a technocrat in the boardroom, a pragmatist among middle managers and an Average Joe on the shop floor."

This led me in turn to Fake Authenticity: An Introduction by Joshua Glenn for Real? Fake 'Hermenaut' magazine.

You have to give him kudos for managing to quote Jean-Paul Sartre and an SUV ad in the same paragraph.

He who might not be Joshua Glenn also wonders:

"Will there never be an end to the spectacle of (white, middle-class) people draping themselves in exotic fabrics, bribing sherpas to haul them up mountains, spending $15 for turkey-burgers in urban hunting lodges, ooh-ing and ahh-ing over macaroni paintings by schizophrenics, throwing out perfectly good old kitchen tables for new tables into which fist-sized holes have been carefully drilled."

Can the next big career coach-reinvention guru become successful by promising that nothing she/he says is true?

Irony, existentialism and city slickers on the menu for Monday Work Etiquette # 70

Previously: Forced to Take a Holiday Break (as in Silicon Valley) How do you take it?

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