I began this series of posts on authenticity by quoting Yvon Chouinard. So it seems only fitting that I complete the circle and end with his company, Patagonia. It’s certainly among the most authentic of any organization that seeks to operate sustainably and contribute to society. What’s my evidence? Consider the following.

As I wrote in an earlier post, when a company lets in the sunlight—revealing its good and especially its bad impacts on society and the environment—it takes a critical step towards authenticity. Patagonia has launched one of the more audacious attempts to make itself transparent.

Take, for example, its “Footprint Chronicles” Web site. It’s built around a map of the world that offers an unflinching look at the good and the bad of manufacturing and transporting Patagonia’s wares. Click on the “Wool 2 Crew” shirt, for example, and you learn that the wool travels more than 16,000 miles from ranch to store. Patagonia’s cold-eyed verdict on its own performance: “This is not sustainable.”

*Patagonia’s authenticity also comes through in its hiring. The most important decision that any company can make is whom it lets in the door, and if you visit Patagonia’s headquarters in Ventura, California, you’ll find far more river rats and rock climbers than MBAs. If Patagonia were to reverse that ratio it would quickly become a poser. “We can hardly continue to make the best outdoor clothing if we become primarily an ‘indoor’ culture,” writes Chouinard in his book, Let My People Go Surfing . “So we seek out ‘dritbags’ who feel more at home in a base camp than they do in the office.”

*There’s another mark of authenticity: the story that Patagonia tells through its actions echoes the story it tells through its words. Chouinard considers Patagonia’s real bottom line to be the “amount of good” the business accomplishes over the course of a year, which sounds like a shiny piece of marketing copy. Apparently, it’s a bedrock value.

Many years ago, Chouinard phased out his piton business when he realized the iron spikes severely disfigured the rocks he so loved. When a startup kills off the mainstay of its business because it degrades the environment, we can probably conclude that the outfit means it when it says it seeks to do good.

Put aside the transparency, the hiring, and the values, and I’m still persuaded that Patagonia is basically the real deal, if only because Chouinard is so dismissive of all this hustle to be authentic. He argues that the fashion industry—and, I’d add, the advertising industry—has so exalted authenticity, it’s now just another one of those “meaningless words.” To my ear at least, that sounds pretty damn real.

I’ve had this soapbox for long enough. Now it’s your turn. What are your thoughts and suggestions for good companies that are trying to “make it real”? We’d love to hear from you.

Recently, I came across a book that advises marketers to push past their demographic research and trends analyses, and start focusing on how best to create solutions to customers’ real-world problems. Relevance: Making Stuff That Matters , by marketing consultant Tim Manners, spotlights an idea that I’ve been talking about for the past year:  the need to shift from making stuff that is “less bad” to creating products and services that seek to be “all good.”

This is especially critical for any company that strives to be sustainable. An authentically sustainable company does more than merely conserve and maintain; it enriches and embellishes. It embraces a whole new mindset that moves from thinking incrementally about doing less harm to thinking expansively about leaving things better than we found them. It’s an incredibly difficult challenge—one that my Seventh Generation colleagues and I are just beginning to reckon with—but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

So last year, when I spoke at a national conference of grocery retailers, I challenged Kroger, Target, Wal-Mart, Publics, and other retailing heavyweights to consider the impact of selling billions of dollars of less-than-healthy products with less-than-apparent relevance for consumers. Products that take precious natural resources and either flush them down the drain or (after a brief life span) dump them in the trash. I encouraged them to think about how they could help create a world that’s rich in values, rather than a world that’s awash in useless artifacts. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be invited back!

Relevance strikes a similar theme. According to a recent review in the Financial Times, the book argues, ”many brand managers have made careers out of trying to make their brands ‘aspirational’…But, the author thunders, marketers are confusing happiness with materialism. ‘The entire advertising industry is built on the premise that we can buy our way into being smarter, sexier, cooler or more popular. Deep down we all know this is one big lie.’”

That’s just the type of thinking we need. If there’s a silver lining to this awful recession, it just might be that we learn how to consume smarter, and be the happier for it.

Any company that truly aspires to be authentic must dare to wear the see-through. It must have the courage to publicly bare, for all to see, its good, bad, and ugly impacts on society and the environment. Only then can an enterprise make a convincing case that it’s authentic—that its actions live up to its words. This is especially true of a company that seeks to do good. Stakeholders expect—and the Web’s accelerating influence demands—that values-driven companies reveal their shortcomings and engage the outside world on how best to fix them.

Seventh Generation has taken on the see-through imperative by leveraging our blog, Web site, and corporate responsibility reports to reveal our successes and more importantly, our setbacks. Here are three critical lessons that we’ve learned—sometimes the hard way—in our effort to become authentically transparent.

As companies become less opaque, demands increase for greater transparency. Thanks to the democratizing effect of the Web—as well as outside pressure from activist groups, NGOs, and citizen stakeholders—the traditional corporate-communications model has been flipped. A company’s communications no longer flows exclusively from the top-down, with only executives in the C-suite permitted to make “official” pronouncements. The public airing of company business also flows from the bottom-up—and out—as front-line employees blog on nearly everything that the company is up to—wrong as well as right.

With more and more employees, CEOs, activist groups, and citizen stakeholders taking to blogging, the pressure to air company business grows stronger every day. Up until several years ago, no U.S. company would dream of listing its subcontracting factories on its Web site. But when Nike and the Gap broke that taboo, it became an issue that every company with a global supply chain needed to deal with. Once you let in a little sunshine, it tends to spread.

*By exposing problems, transparency begins to solve them. When a company begins to make itself transparent, it essentially conducts an unblinking audit of all its activities. The process is analogous to the lifecycle analysis of a product. Just as a product-development team puts a spotlight on all the impacts of a new offering, from cradle to grave, the company casts a bright light on itself, by measuring the systemic effects of operations.

That’s what led Timberland to affix Green Index tags to some of its footwear, outlining the shoes’ climate impact, harmful chemicals, and non-renewable materials. This transparency-fueled design innovation has helped the company understand that most of its carbon footprint comes from extracting and processing raw materials, before it even makes the shoes. By producing a 3-D picture of its carbon output, Timberland has taken the first step toward mitigating the problem.

*Transparency builds trust. No company lives entirely in a glass house, meeting the transparency challenge at every level of the organization. Some secrets—Coke’s formula, Apple’s design process—will most likely always remain unrevealed.

And yet, the accelerating power of viral media has upended the carefully scripted communications still venerated by many in the business establishment. To confront the relentless, Internet-powered scrutiny by outsiders (and blabbing insiders) of their business activities, companies will have to strip away the layers of secrecy surrounding their impacts on society and the environment. That’s a good thing, because fewer secrets generate greater trust. And in our bottom-up media culture, trust accrues to the most transparent.

In many ways, authenticity is a synonym for integrity. A company that aspires to be authentically good says what it’s going to do and then does it. And when it stumbles along the way (stumbling is inevitable, as I well know), it doesn’t try to greenwash or explain away its mistakes—it exposes its setbacks and works urgently to fix them. It sounds so simple, and yet it’s surprising how often companies get it so wrong. Take PepsiCo.

Early last year, Fortune reporter Betsy Morris sang the praises of Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo’s CEO. Morris described PepsiCo’s new motto under Nooyi, “Performance with Purpose,” which strives to balance “the profit motive with making healthier snacks, striving for a net-zero impact on the environment, and taking care of your workforce.”

Sure, it’s fashionable for folks in the C-suite to proclaim their commitment to corporate responsibility. Nooyi told Fortune that she meant what she said: “If all you want is to screw this company down tight and get double-digit earnings growth and nothing else, then I’m the wrong person. If companies don’t do [responsible] things, who is going to? Why not start making change now?”

Nooyi made changes, but not the kind she hoped for. When the financial crisis hit, PepsiCo’s response was sadly predictable. It slashed 3,300 jobs in a $1.2 billion cost-cutting drive. (Contrast this with FedEx’s actions, which I described in yesterday’s post.) Some will argue that from a fiscal standpoint, PepsiCo acted responsibly. But it certainly didn’t act authentically.

In an interview with Jonathan Birchall of the Financial Times, Nooyi said that PepsiCo was “facing challenges that are really out of our control, and affect others as well.” That’s typical CEO-speak for explaining layoffs—and a pretty clear example of PR puffery. (An authentic—or at least honest—response would be, Management messed up and our employees are paying the price.) But then Nooyi added the following: “Is it prudent to do something radical to deliver [earnings forecast] numbers? And the answer is no. You never run a company where you burn the furniture for the short term.”

Perhaps pink-slipping 3,300 people really isn’t a “radical” attempt to deliver earnings results (though it’s certainly radical for the people who were fired). But mass layoffs are clearly inconsistent with one of PepsiCo’s core values—“treating people with dignity.”

Of course, it’s unfair to single out PepsiCo, which has a stellar record of promoting women into its management ranks and of building a diverse workplace. It’s hardly the only multi-national that’s firing thousands of workers during these tough times. But when Nooyi claims that part of PepsiCo’s newfound mission is “taking care of your workforce” and then summarily cuts more than 3,000 people loose, her lofty talk about performing with purpose rings a little hollow.

Has authenticity become just another artifact of our shiny, pre-fab world, where nearly everything we encounter is created for consumption? Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard certainly thinks so. In his compelling book, Let My People Go Surfing , Chouinard recalls seeing someone wearing a sweatshirt with the word “authentic” emblazoned across the chest. “The fashion industry is so caught up with this idea of the ‘authentic,’” writes Chouinard, with characteristic brio, “that it has become another of those meaningless words.”

At a time when spin doctors are coaching brands on how to “make it real,” it sometimes seems like authenticity is at risk of becoming as fabricated as a fast-food chain. And yet, authenticity remains a core benchmark against which any company that seeks to “do good” must be judged. Authenticity comes to a company that is what it says it is. Only when a company’s actions align with its words does its story begin to ring true. So this week, I thought I’d blog on what it takes, as Smokey Robinson memorably put it, to be “really, really real.”

As Chouinard implies, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to parse what’s genuinely authentic from what’s authentically fake. Take, for example, the two faces of FedEx.

I once held FedEx in high regard, until I read Steven Greenhouse’s book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker . Greenhouse offers up some convincing allegations that FedEx abused and cheated its independent contractors so it could save nearly $400 million a year. Clearly, FedEx’s “good company” patina is a fake. Or is it?

Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that FedEx is taking an enlightened approach to the financial meltdown. Instead of firing employees, the carrier is preserving jobs by trimming paychecks. Senior exec’s salaries are getting as much as a 10% haircut; hourly workers aren’t affected. Compared to the slash-and-burn policies that have left millions of workers unemployed as hundreds of big companies announce super-sized layoffs, FedEx’s response is smart and responsible.

The same company that reportedly abused its independent contractors offers an enlightened way to limit the pain to its full-time employees. This poses a vexing question: How do we know if a big company like FedEx is truly good, a poser, or a mix of both?

At least in FedEx’s case, it seems that both faces—the good and the bad—amount to a portrait that’s really, really real.