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 "It's this
simple: You are a brand. You are in charge of your brand. There is no single
path to success. And there is no one right way to create the brand called You.
Except this: Start today. Or else." - Tom Peters
So maybe I'm
a slow-learner, or maybe I just don't scare easily. After all, it's been 14
years since Tom Peters wrote "The Brand Called You" for Fast Company and warned
us all to act quickly. But I wasn't too concerned about my "personal brand"
when I created the user name "Moose" six years ago. Back then, I was more
concerned about protecting my privacy. Since then, a lot has changed - including me.
Sure, I'm
still concerned about Internet cranks, but my days as a site-moderator are mostly
in the rearview mirror. Revoking privileges or refereeing disputes about good-answers
is a job for new management, and has been for quite some time. For now at
least, I just blog about topics that interest me. And if you message me, I'll
probably message you back.
So what's
all this business about "personal branding", and what does it have to with CR4?
Let me answer the second question first - not much. After all, I could have blogged
under the user name Moose until the proverbial cows came home. But I also began
to realize, even before I read Tom Peters' article, that we all have a "brand"
whether we like it or not. In years past, I think they called it a "reputation"
- but that was before social media and Internet job searches.
Those were
the days, too, when you could expect to work at the same company for 40 years,
eat red meat every day, suffer multiple heart attacks, get the company's healthcare
plan to pay for it all, and collect a pension. Those days are gone - and they
were history for most us before 1997, the year of Tom Peters' article. The
Great Recession of 2008 would have seemed impossible back in those heady days
of Internet IPOs, too. Today, occupational security is even more of an illusion.
Yet the news
isn't all grim. Consider (as I did) what Tom Peters' wrote about managing your
own career path: "Along the way, if you're really smart, you figure out
what it takes to create a distinctive role for yourself - you create a message
and a strategy to promote the brand called You." So did you notice who gets do
the figuring there? It's not your boss. It's not management. It's not even the
HR department. It's YOU.
This doesn't mean that you start doing things for yourself
that run counter to your company's best interests. Quite the contrary! "Just
win/win, baby", as Al Davis might say if he wasn't already the CEO of his own powerful personal brand. For his part, Tom Peters advises readers to do things that are both
good for the company and good for themselves. Seen another way (and as folks used to
say before people tweeted what they ate for breakfast), "you need to make a
name for yourself".
My CR4 user name was Moose, but Moose is now no
more on CR4. I'll keep my robotic moose avatar (at least for the time being), and I'm certainly
not going anywhere. But my name - and my
brand - is Steve Melito. The paradox of our ever-changing world is that they need to be one and the same.
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Re: What Happened to Moose?
Users who posted comments:
Del the cat (1); Jaxy (1); Just an Engineer (1); kramarat (3); Milo (3); Steve Melito (3); Tornado (1)