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Within the beginning sections of the publication Authentic, writer the author raises a critical point: typical injunctions to “be yourself” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not benevolent calls for personal expression – they’re traps. Her first book – a mix of personal stories, investigation, societal analysis and conversations – attempts to expose how companies take over individual identity, transferring the responsibility of organizational transformation on to individual workers who are often marginalized.

Personal Journey and Wider Environment

The driving force for the work originates in part in Burey’s own career trajectory: multiple jobs across retail corporations, startups and in global development, filtered through her experience as a Black disabled woman. The conflicting stance that Burey faces – a push and pull between asserting oneself and looking for safety – is the driving force of Authentic.

It arrives at a period of widespread exhaustion with organizational empty phrases across America and other regions, as resistance to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs increase, and various institutions are reducing the very systems that once promised transformation and improvement. The author steps into that arena to argue that withdrawing from corporate authenticity talk – namely, the business jargon that reduces individuality as a set of aesthetics, peculiarities and pastimes, forcing workers concerned with controlling how they are viewed rather than how they are treated – is not an effective response; instead, we need to reframe it on our own terms.

Minority Staff and the Act of Persona

Through detailed stories and interviews, Burey illustrates how marginalized workers – people of color, LGBTQ+ people, female employees, people with disabilities – quickly realize to modulate which identity will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a disadvantage and people compensate excessively by attempting to look palatable. The effort of “presenting your true self” becomes a display surface on which numerous kinds of assumptions are projected: emotional work, sharing personal information and constant performance of appreciation. As the author states, workers are told to expose ourselves – but without the protections or the trust to endure what emerges.

According to the author, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but lacking the safeguards or the trust to survive what comes out.’

Real-Life Example: The Story of Jason

Burey demonstrates this dynamic through the story of a worker, a employee with hearing loss who took it upon himself to educate his colleagues about deaf culture and interaction standards. His willingness to talk about his life – a gesture of candor the office often applauds as “sincerity” – for a short time made routine exchanges smoother. But as Burey shows, that improvement was fragile. When employee changes erased the informal knowledge he had established, the environment of accessibility disappeared. “Everything he taught left with them,” he states tiredly. What stayed was the weariness of having to start over, of being made responsible for an company’s developmental journey. According to Burey, this illustrates to be requested to expose oneself lacking safeguards: to face exposure in a framework that praises your transparency but fails to institutionalize it into regulation. Authenticity becomes a snare when companies count on employee revelation rather than organizational responsibility.

Author’s Approach and Idea of Resistance

Her literary style is at once understandable and lyrical. She marries intellectual rigor with a style of connection: a call for readers to lean in, to challenge, to dissent. For Burey, dissent at work is not noisy protest but moral resistance – the effort of rejecting sameness in settings that require thankfulness for basic acceptance. To resist, in her framing, is to challenge the narratives organizations tell about equity and acceptance, and to decline participation in rituals that sustain inequity. It might look like naming bias in a discussion, withdrawing of uncompensated “equity” effort, or defining borders around how much of one’s personal life is provided to the organization. Dissent, the author proposes, is an assertion of personal dignity in spaces that frequently encourage conformity. It is a practice of principle rather than rebellion, a way of asserting that an individual’s worth is not conditional on institutional approval.

Redefining Genuineness

The author also avoids rigid dichotomies. The book does not merely toss out “genuineness” entirely: on the contrary, she advocates for its reclamation. In Burey’s view, genuineness is far from the raw display of character that corporate culture typically applauds, but a more deliberate alignment between personal beliefs and one’s actions – a honesty that rejects manipulation by organizational requirements. Rather than viewing genuineness as a mandate to reveal too much or adjust to sanitized ideals of transparency, Burey urges readers to keep the parts of it based on sincerity, self-awareness and moral understanding. From her perspective, the aim is not to abandon sincerity but to shift it – to transfer it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and to interactions and offices where trust, fairness and responsibility make {