Authenticity on Stage?
Yesterday, I was watching footage of a Weather Report concert from 1976 at the Montreux Jazz Festival. In the video, you can see the sweat on Wayne Shorter’s brow, the facial expressions of the performers as they execute solos, unisons, and harmonic transitions of immense complexity.
The creative tension is palpable. There was no Photoshop, no Auto-Tune, and no post-production to correct pitch or reconstruct doubtful passages. What you heard was exactly what those musicians were capable of performing at that moment, fueled by their technique, their background, and their genuine capacity for musical dialogue. There were no retakes.
Furthermore, the genre itself—jazz fusion—incorporated structural liberties in terms of improvisation, dynamics, and thematic development that demanded more than just individual virtuosity.
Apparent freedom was sustained by a shared harmonic architecture, but also by permanent active listening among the band members. Talent was individual, yes, but also profoundly collective. There were no “free verses” in the literal sense: every deviation had to be musically justified and fit within a common framework.
This absence of added technological layers had an indisputable advantage: authenticity was, quite simply, an inevitable consequence. There was no possibility of dissociating execution from competence. What sounded defined the musician.
[As we will see, the distance between Montreux and corporate dynamics is smaller than it might seem.]
Authenticity and Corporate Performance
The relevant issue is not about idealizing the past or demonizing technology, but about understanding what happens when tools allow us to add progressive layers to a deliverable.
In today’s professional landscape, technology—and specifically Generative AI—makes it easy to build impeccable speeches, visually brilliant presentations, and strategically structured documents, even when the same level of conceptual mastery does not always exist behind them.
Does the person signing that deliverable truly know what they are talking about?
In music, performance is direct execution. In business, performance takes more diffuse forms:
- Strategic and operational decisions
- Documents
- Internal presentations
- Client meetings
- Written and verbal expression
- Financial models
- Operational plans… and a long etcetera.
The problem is that technology allows us to optimize the surface of all these manifestations without guaranteeing that a solid mental model exists beneath.
“If knowledge is genuine, the ability to model it proves it.”
Modeling implies abstracting, structuring variables, identifying causal relationships, anticipating scenarios, and explaining why a decision makes sense under certain hypotheses.
In other words: modeling allows us to detect patterns in past experiences to design the precise response that each new challenge requires.
This ability cannot be improvised or downloaded. It can be supported by tools, but it cannot be simulated indefinitely without inconsistencies appearing sooner or later.
The False Neutrality of Authenticity
Detractors will always argue that “authenticity is not an objective per se, but an accessory attribute that may or may not be valued depending on the context.” From this perspective, what matters is the final result, regardless of the process or true authorship.
Put another way: if the melody hooks the audience, why does it matter how we got there?
However, this thesis begins to crack when we analyze—for instance—certain situations unfolding around us…
A few weeks ago, there was a temporary outage of ChatGPT services in Spain and, coincidentally or not, the volume of posts on LinkedIn was significantly lower than the usual average for that same day and time slot. It is difficult not to observe at least a correlation.
Relying structurally on AI for publishing changes the rules of the game: authenticity is no longer just a personal choice, but a critical asset to ensure our communication doesn’t grind to a halt when the tool fails. ‘Try to start it, for God’s sake!‘, as Luis Moya would say.
But, just like in that rally, if the engine won’t turn over, all that’s left is what we can do with our own hands (or in this case, our intellect).
Judging by what happened on LinkedIn, it seems there wasn’t much horsepower that day, and the grey matter was left on standby.
Authenticity as Professional Resilience
Authenticity acquires strategic value at the moment it allows activity to be sustained beyond the availability of additional technological layers. It is not about renouncing AI, just as it would make no sense to renounce electric amplification in a contemporary concert. It is about preventing the tool from replacing judgment.
“In today’s organizations, we need professionals capable of applying their own rationale, building models, and solving complex problems without depending exclusively on external services.”
Technology can accelerate execution, improve form, and reduce friction, but the core remains the ability to understand what is happening and why.
Returning to Montreux in 1976, what is striking is not the absence of technology, but the evidence of competence. Wayne Shorter’s sweat is not an aesthetic metaphor; it is the physical manifestation of a technical and creative demand that allowed for no shortcuts.
On a stage or in a company, we perform. We play a role, we make decisions under the gaze of others, and we are evaluated by the coherence between what we say and what we know how to do.
As Rush summarized in their song Limelight: “All the world’s indeed a stage, we are merely players, performers and portrayers.”
In the contemporary organization, authenticity should serve a similar function: it is the verifiable trace that there is something real behind the performance.
