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In the opening pages of the publication Authentic, speaker Jodi-Ann Burey poses a challenge: commonplace advice to “come as you are” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not harmless encouragements for personal expression – they’re traps. This initial publication – a combination of recollections, investigation, cultural critique and discussions – aims to reveal how organizations take over individual identity, moving the weight of corporate reform on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.

Personal Journey and Wider Environment

The impetus for the book originates in part in Burey’s personal work history: different positions across business retail, startups and in international development, interpreted via her perspective as a woman of color with a disability. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a back-and-forth between asserting oneself and aiming for security – is the core of the book.

It lands at a period of general weariness with organizational empty phrases across America and other regions, as opposition to DEI initiatives increase, and various institutions are cutting back the very structures that once promised transformation and improvement. Burey enters that landscape to contend that retreating from the language of authenticity – specifically, the business jargon that minimizes personal identity as a collection of surface traits, peculiarities and pastimes, keeping workers concerned with managing how they are perceived rather than how they are treated – is not a solution; rather, we should reinterpret it on our personal terms.

Underrepresented Employees and the Act of Persona

Through vivid anecdotes and interviews, Burey illustrates how underrepresented staff – employees from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ individuals, women workers, people with disabilities – learn early on to calibrate which self will “pass”. A weakness becomes a liability and people compensate excessively by striving to seem agreeable. The practice of “presenting your true self” becomes a reflective surface on which various types of expectations are placed: affective duties, disclosure and ongoing display of thankfulness. In Burey’s words, workers are told to share our identities – but without the safeguards or the trust to withstand what comes out.

‘In Burey’s words, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but absent the protections or the trust to survive what emerges.’

Case Study: Jason’s Experience

She illustrates this situation through the story of an employee, a employee with hearing loss who took it upon himself to educate his co-workers about deaf culture and communication norms. His eagerness to discuss his background – a behavior of openness the workplace often commends as “genuineness” – temporarily made everyday communications smoother. But as Burey shows, that improvement was unstable. When employee changes erased the informal knowledge he had established, the culture of access disappeared. “All the information went away with the staff,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the weariness of having to start over, of being made responsible for an company’s developmental journey. In Burey’s view, this is what it means to be requested to expose oneself lacking safeguards: to risk vulnerability in a structure that celebrates your transparency but refuses to institutionalize it into regulation. Genuineness becomes a snare when institutions count on individual self-disclosure rather than institutional answerability.

Author’s Approach and Concept of Dissent

Her literary style is at once clear and expressive. She marries scholarly depth with a tone of kinship: a call for readers to engage, to interrogate, to dissent. For Burey, professional resistance is not loud rebellion but principled refusal – the effort of resisting conformity in workplaces that require gratitude for basic acceptance. To oppose, in her framing, is to challenge the accounts companies narrate about equity and belonging, and to reject participation in customs that sustain injustice. It could involve calling out discrimination in a meeting, opting out of voluntary “diversity” labor, or defining borders around how much of one’s identity is offered to the company. Resistance, she suggests, is an affirmation of individual worth in environments that often encourage conformity. It represents a practice of integrity rather than defiance, a way of insisting that a person’s dignity is not conditional on organizational acceptance.

Redefining Genuineness

She also refuses brittle binaries. Authentic avoids just eliminate “sincerity” wholesale: rather, she urges its redefinition. For Burey, sincerity is far from the unrestricted expression of individuality that corporate culture often celebrates, but a more intentional correspondence between individual principles and individual deeds – an integrity that resists alteration by organizational requirements. Rather than treating authenticity as a requirement to overshare or adjust to cleansed standards of openness, Burey urges readers to keep the aspects of it grounded in sincerity, personal insight and principled vision. According to Burey, the goal is not to abandon authenticity but to shift it – to remove it from the corporate display practices and toward relationships and offices where reliance, equity and responsibility make {