If you are focused on Authority, then nothing that any third party does (such as Google’s failed Authorship experiment) should harm your business.
In other words, as different trends emerge for gaining exposure for your business, if you’re a true Authority in your market, or are actively working to become an Authority, your business/brand cannot be harmed by what Google or anyone else does.
“But Jack, we spent a lot of time and money getting publisher markup installed on all of our sites and learning about Authorship implementation! That’s “harm,” right?”
No, that’s doing business on the web and taking advantage of opportunity, even if it becomes just a temporary opportunity.
The good, bad and ugly of the Rise and Fall of Authorship was thoroughly discussed by some smart people recently on Google Hangouts:
Joshua Berg held a Hangout entitled “The End of Google Authorship! – Now What?!” with +Mark Traphagen +AJ Kohn +David Amerland +Eric Enge and +Ben Fisher. There are several really good points made by the panel about why Google Authorship was axed, which helped me quite a bit, actually, to get over the loss. (Which seems like far less of a “loss” as days pass.)
Bottom line: Authority is all that ever has and ever will matter when it comes to grabbing the attention of your market. Keep going. Double down. Be interesting. Put out quality stuff. Engage and create engagement.