Leadership Platform 2.0 – A practical example
This is a short little ditty describing a real-life illustration of a concept I presented in a recent blog. While I was catching up on my unending stack of business magazines I came across an article that illustrated a simple and elegant example of a Leadership Platform 2.0. Fortune recently featured an article on WalMart’s new CEO, Mike Duke.
Leadership Platform 2.0: Fostering Customer-Centric Leadership
“The purpose of business is to create a customer.”
Are Strong Personal Brands Hypomanic?
I recently completed writing the expanded and updated version of Be Your Own Brand (to be released in January 2011). So for the last few months I have spent time reflecting on how my perspective on personal brand has evolved since writing the first copy of the book.
The meaning behind customer engagement
What do customer engagement and employee engagement have in common? And why does it matter? Hint: The relationship between these two things will help senior managers make a cognitive connection between “the soft stuff” or business intangibles, and hard tangible results like revenue and profits.
Personal Brand From a Different Perspective continued
This is a continuation of the previous interview with a Spanish interviewer.
Personal Brand From a Different Perspective
From time to time, foreign journalists ask to interview me about the concept of personal brand described in Be Your Own Brand and more recently on my perspective on internal brand building. For a whole set of reasons I happen to find the interview questions submitted by non-U.S. journalists to be curious and interesting. The perspective behind these types of questions piques my interest and encourages me to answer them with a new eye on clarity. I recently responded to an interesting set of questions submitted by a journalist from Spain and thought you might enjoy learning from both the questions and responses.
Authentic Personal Brand: The Road Less Traveled
The virtues of truth and honesty are at the core of becoming a strong authentic personal brand. When an individual embraces authentic personal brand as an operating principle, the universe of strong, positive relationships is expanded and the possibilities for achievement become so much larger. The potential payoff for embracing the notion of personal brand is based upon whether one views personal brand as an image-polishing strategy or as a framework to get credit for how an individual uses their values and beliefs to make a difference for others. The divergent views of personal brand are closely related to an analogous dichotomy in the way the discipline of business brand has evolved.
Using Your Authentic Personal Brand to Become a More Effective Leader
Strong relationship skills are a common trait of effective leaders. In their relationships with others these leaders are admired because they add something special in the relationship, that is to say they have a distinctive point of view that can make a difference. When the distinctive quality is on display time-after-time, leaders are believed to be authentic in their relationships with others. Authenticity takes a strong sense of self and the courage to consistently apply one’s special qualities. The authentic personal brand framework combines the process of declaring one’s authentic self and the skills to get credit from others for the distinctive difference that defines a value-added relationship.
How Personal is Your Organization’s Brand Strategy?
There are brands that are personal and then there are personal brands. At the core of every brand strategy is an objective to create a personal connection with a brand. Organizations create brand identities that represent and remind customers of that important connection with the company. At the foundation of managing a portfolio of brand identities is determining whether to create that personal connection with product brands or the corporate brand or some combination of both. This dual context to leveraging brand strength misses another very important brand segment – the personal brand of employees, especially key employees. A new, innovative approach to brand identity management can benefit many organizations by helping them leverage all of their relationship assets, i.e., making brand more personal.
Is it a Halo or a Smokescreen?
The Halo Effect, by Phil Rosenzweig, is the business book that has been a long time in coming. I love this book. As far as business books go it is a page-turner. If you don’t own it yet (or haven’t checked it out of your local library), get it and put it on the top of your reading pile. Why all the hubbub? For starters, the author provides pitch-perfect insights about the fallibility of most business books that claim to offer the Holy Grail of what it takes to create a high-performing organization. Secondly, after you read this book you will save yourself a bunch of time by not reading too many new business books and spend more time with your family or on the golf course. Besides all of that, the next time that pedantic MBA-nerd in your office tries to impress you by espousing the latest business-guru theory you will have the three questions to ask that will send him packing to Starbucks to commiserate with his social networking friends on LinkedIn.