Paul Copcutt - Just My Toonies Worth

What's your next job in the tech sector?

In some areas of products and services the technology sector is booming, in others it is going.....going....gone - FAST.

I have attended a couple of local events recently that highlighted a very innovative and growing tech hub in the Hamilton area - there is a new smartphone app from Snap Pay for example that enables anyone to take credit card payments in seconds . One presentation from Pipeline Studios (a highly successful cartoon house) informed us of one of the best kept secrets, that Canada is the largest producer of digital content for TV in the world!

This is all great news. Unfortunately this past week we have also seen the bad news associated with tech companies that were not able to keep up, were too big (or too slow) or just missed the opportunity and catch up was the worst game to play. This past week we saw thousands expected to be let go at RIM and HP announcing 27,000 lay offs.

Three things that you can learn from this for your career, regardless of the industry.

1. Never settle for what you have. You cannot afford to stay where you are in terms of skills and strengths. You have to be continually looking to add to your portfolio of experience and knowledge. What is in demand today is tomorrows forgotten role.
2. Remain flexible and open to new ways of doing things. The next best thing (or person) is just around the corner. They have figured out how to do things faster, smarter etc. They may not always be right, but when they are be ready to make a switch in the way you do things to stay ahead.
3. Cut bait and run. Sometimes you have tried everything you know and more and it is just evident you have either missed the boat or run out of steam. Know when its time to quit. Not from just a quitting point but so that your energy and resources can be directed to another area that makes more sense and is a better use of your time.

Now go make today a brand YOU day.

What is holding you back from your personal brand?

Through my wife's business I have had the opportunity to be connected to Keith Kochner at Mentorfish.com for the last few months and have found his teaching exactly what we need in the 21st century. Lots of great content, he is prolific with new insights and learnings - even for someone like me who tends to explore and read a lot! 

Keith is coming to Toronto next week to hold a live evening event so you can get a full experience of what he has to offer. Cost is just covering running costs of the event, but I know you will get way more value - hope to see you there. 

Personal Brand Book Review - 18 Minutes

18 Minutes – Find Your focus, Master Distraction and Get the Right Things Done

© 2011 by Peter Bregman, 263 pages, Hardback

5R Score: 28/35

The 18 Minutes  

Part One – Pause

Part Two – What is This Year About?

Part Three – What is This Day About?

Part Four – What is This Moment About?

 

On a scale of 1-7   

Relevance - is it right for personal branding? - 6

Resonance does it make sense to the reader? - 6

Relation is there a connection for everyone? - 6  

Remarkability - does it stand out, will it get noticed? - 5

Real - does the personal brand come through? - 5

Would you pick it up? 

For me there is always one book each year that has the most impact on the way that I think, act or say. At the end of last year this was the one. People regularly identify a strength in me, organizing and I have been consistent in a related area to this – making some kind of daily planning system work for me – NOT!   

There are far too many books out there that espouse the very latest ways, ideas and ‘simple’ systems to implement and make your life easier. I have tried many of them and found that most of them require a Phd to understand or operate and ultimately get frustrating and unworkable. 

 
What I like about ’18 Minutes; is that it boils things down to the core basics of what is most important to you and ‘forget’ the rest. 
As you slip out of all the good intentions you had at the start of the year, this book can get you back on track fast. 

Relevance

Perhaps not immediately evident that this is a book about your personal brand. But once you have clearly identified what your personal brand is and who needs to know about it, then you have to get on with living and communicating that brand. The challenge is remaining focused and not getting distracted. This book and its easy to follow 18 Minutes a day looking at the 5 most important areas of focus for the year make staying on brand much more effective. It also means at the end of the year you are going to be much further forward.

Resonance

I found the 18 Minute approach quick to grasp, easy to initially implement and in most cases stick to regularly (a failing in many of the more complicated systems – one I have followed has almost 20 pages to act on - weekly!).

For me though the most compelling part of the whole system is that when I have not followed it for a day or I find my day got away from me, I can check back in and identify right away where I was falling down AND find a quick solution to getting back on track.

Relation

In today’s world of multiple demands on seemingly less and less time we can all relate to the desire to want to not just get back control of our lives and simplify them too. But deep down we also want to know we are making a difference (whatever we define that to be), 18 Minutes gives us the approach to focus just on what is most important.

Remarkability

Because the approach is so simple there is a danger that people do not see this as remarkable. That would be a shame. We do not have to complicate or over think things to have them make us more effective or successful.

Just the simple suggestion of setting a one hour alarm to do focused and concentrated work has made a huge difference to my productivity. This book review and one other article were effectively completed in one of those 60 minute bursts.

Real

The author is constantly using personal and real life work and client examples to get his points across. His blog posts do the same. The book is broken down in to very bite size 2-4 page chapters that get one key point across. This makes for easy reference and pick up again stickiness. But once ingrained it’s certainly one to keep on the bookshelf. 

 

 

Is Your Personal Brand LINtastic?

My trip last weekend to keynote at Ball State University took me in to the heart of basketball country. Everywhere you looked there was connection to the game.

Coupled with this has been the meteoric rise of Jeremy Lin over the past two weeks. A social media personal branding sensation.

It was a case of basketball, basketball, basketball! It truly has been LINsanity (he has just applied to trademark that phrase!).

There are a number of lessons from Jeremy's LINtastic recent success that you can take and apply to your own personal brand.

1. Continue to play to your strengths.

Even though he was not picked up originally by an NBA team, dropped and relegated to minor leagues he still continued to play to his own set of strengths.

Personal Brand Lesson

It is important to understand your weaknesses and how they might impact on your brand. But if you spend all your time on them you draw attention to them and you will never get a weakness to a point of strength. Take the extra time and effort to leverage your strengths.

2. Be ready for the opportunity.

A number of injuries and poor results gave him another chance, just when the team were considering releasing him. His persistence paid off and now he has helped the team to win 8 of the last 10 games.

Personal Brand Lesson

In the new reality that is work today the next opportunity might come when you least expect it. You have to be ready. Once you have been given the chance make the most of it and be sure to give 110%. People will remember you for your hard work and results.

3. Be authentic, remember where you came from.

There have been his detractors, but Lin has remained humble and appreciative of the chance to play. Even crass (or just thoughtless) sports reporting he recognised as a mistake and accepted apologies.

 

Personal Brand Lesson

Your personal brand is who you are. It should not be some false image or manufactured personna. The temptation once you have found more success might be to conveniently forget the past. Remain true to who you are and recognise what got you where you are now.

 

What other lessons can you see and apply to your career and personal brand from the recent LINsanity?

What's Love Gotta Do With It? - Your Personal Brand That Is!

 

Do you love YOU enough?

How often do you take time to reflect on your strengths?

I would quite confidently suggest very little. In my work with leaders and employees in Fortune 500 Companies the most under leveraged part of their personal brands are their core strengths.

Your core strengths are the things that you do so naturally and so well that you perform them almost sub-consciously. When I point out to someone that others have identified a particular strength in them they say

“Oh really, but I do that all the time!” – EXACTLY!

Many people are very poor at spending enough time on their own personal development. It might only be in their annual reviews that they do this. Those experiences are not always very positive ones. 5 minutes spent reviewing what you did well. Then 55 minutes spent on strategies to bring weaknesses up to, at best, an average level of performance.

Some may view this as either a little simplistic or harsh. Truth is that only 42% of  North Americans believe that working mostly on their strengths will mean they are more successful. That drops to an alarming 24% of Japanese and Chinese.

Very often it is difficult for you to articulate your top strengths and how they might be reflected in your career to date. If you can identify those strengths, you are ahead of the game. And you will love yourself more!

You can also take this information and create your examples, or stories, around how you have used that strength in business situations. People love stories. They will be more likely to want to work with you and for you based on these emotional connections.

There are many other assessments and tests that can be taken to understand more about yourself. It is probably best to find one or two that resonate and make sense to you.

Another good personal brand exercise is to conduct a SWOT analysis – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats. In each area ask yourself these questions:

Strengths – what are my strengths, what do I have that is positive, that can help me achieve my goals?

Weaknesses – what are my weaknesses, where am I challenged the most?

Opportunities – if I was able to overcome those weaknesses and utlilise my strengths what will result for me? What is the upside?

Threats – what is the down side if I do not address those challenges?

It’s not just enough to be aware of your strengths. Take the time to discover if you have other hidden talents either through your own analysis or from the feedback of others – ideally both. The foundation of ALL strong brands are built in part on maximising strengths.

 

100 Toonies Worth

With consistency and progression comes change. As you spend more time consistently delivering on what you say your brand is and find your career progressing in the right direction, you are going to reach a point where new challenges and opportunities arise. New skills are developed and new ways to communicate your uniqueness present themselves. 

This week see's the 100th edition of the Tuesday Toonie weekly e-tip, which I feel is quite a milestone. Thank you for reading, commenting and recommending to others for the last 2 years. 

It is also a great time to announce some small changes to the format and delivery of this weekly resource. When we started the Tuesday Toonie the rise of Facebook and Twitter was really starting to gain traction and people subscribing to news and blog feeds was rising. Now this weekly Tuesday Toonie is only being read 10-20% of the time by people via the e-zine delivery method - the rest of the time you are reading it or getting to it via social media or directly at the blog. 

This does not make the content any less valuable but with our inundated in boxes and busy lives it does beg the question about sending it out in full format in an e-zine rather than a quick mailing, linking to the blog for the full content. So going forward the Tuesday Toonie is going to be a 21 second or less read. Enough for you to maybe stop and think for a moment about your career and if you want to understand more then go to the blog to get more on that weeks topic.  

We will be continuing with the monthly Inukshuk e-zine that delves deeper in to the subject of career management and personal leadership branding and provide in there links to all the previous months weekly Tuesday Toonies for anyone you might have missed. We also continue to blog and post other very latest links and resources via social media - especially our Facebook page and my LinkedIn updates, or you may just prefer to be made aware of the Tuesday Toonie via one of these methods - so if you have not done so please connect with us at;

www.facebook.com/personalbrand and http://ca.linkedin.com/in/paulcopcutt 

Thank you again for reading and we look forward to continuing to serve you. 

Personal Brand Book Review - Standout

StandOut – The groundbreaking new strengths assessment.

© 2011 by One Thing Productions Inc, 227 pages, Paperback

5R Score: 25/35

The Three Strengths Principles

1. Your Genius is Precise
2. You Can’t Respect What You Don’t Remember
3. You Must Reach Beyond Your Roles

On a scale of 1-7   

Relevance - is it right for personal branding? - 7

Resonance does it make sense to the reader? - 6

Relation is there a connection for everyone? - 5   

Remarkability - does it stand out, will it get noticed? - 5

Real - does the personal brand come through? - 2

Would you pick it up?

Since getting involved in the whole personal branding area, one of the core pieces of work that I use and refer to on a regular basis has been “Now Discover Your Strengths” by Buckingham and Clifton and other updated versions of the work.  That is until now.

I have always enjoyed the work of Marcus Buckingam and he has been personally branded as the “Leader of the Strengths Revolution”. He is a joy to watch and listen to as a speaker (I would kill for a fraction of his speaker fees!). But what I really like is his continued efforts to make understanding your unique strengths, simple. With this book he has taken it all a stage further.

Now you just need to know your top two strengths, (mine were Equalizer and Influencer) and there are only 9 strengths in total, so it’s also easier to understand others as well.

Relevance

One of the core foundation pieces of personal branding is to understand your strengths. If you cannot immediately identify what those are then you need to invest in a book like ‘StandOut’. Each book comes with a unique code to take an online assessment and Buckingham has obviously spent a lot of time and resources in getting this working optimally set to give best results.

Resonance

Strengths are just one part of your personal branding puzzle, but a key one, so not underestimate the need to do this. The book is mostly made up of chapter explanations of each of the 9 strengths, so on first read you might skip a lot. But if you go further with this, start to know others strengths it’s the type of book that should almost be on your desk versus a bookshelf.

What is really excellent about this book is that it helps you understand how you can maximise your strength in various situations;

-      You are at your most powerful

-      How to describe yourself (in interviews and performance reviews)

-      How to make an immediate impact

-      How to take your performance to the next level

-      What to watch out for.

-      How to win as a leader.

-      How to win as a manager.

-      How to win in sales.

-      How to win in client services.

There is also a team strengths version which is very neat.

Relation

I firmly believe that if you are going to live any type of life you love then understanding and playing to your strengths is key, so this book and its approach and principles applies to anyone at any level.  In fact it is a good leveler – it does not matter where you are, strengths are strengths.

Remarkability

In much of my work with personal brands I would say the most underplayed element of most peoples personal brands are their strengths. It is what you do naturally and so well that it’s almost a sub-conscious action. Many people might look at this work and think it rudimentary, but I will bet most of them are not leveraging their strengths anywhere at the level they could be, so there are many lessons from this.

Real

Marcus Buckingham has one of the most amazing strengths based stories about his personal brand, but apart from a few anecdotal personal pieces you are going to have to go somewhere else to find that one out. As most of the book is specific to understanding the strengths you would hope there were more examples, but it lacks that level and is the most disappointing part of the book.

Having said that this is a must for all my future personal branding work.   

 

 

A Decade (and more) of Personal Brand Book Publishing

My whole interest in the subject of personal branding started with reading Tom Peters book The Brand You 50 in 1999, since then I have avidly collected and read many others – some great, some good and some questionable!

I dipped in to my collection and picked one book printed in each year since Tom Peters book and give a quick viewpoint. No doubt going forward my collection may well include a few Kindle versions, but in the meantime I loved picking these ones up and skimming back through them, some for the umpteenth time.

Branding Yourself – Erik Deckers & Kyle Lacy – 2011 – The latest book with a strong emphasis in the area of building the personal brand by leveraging technology and social media, with a few final chapters on offline activity.

Shift – Peter Arnell – 2010 – An ad man that had to make significant personal shifts to literally survive making this much more of a personal journey focus.

Me 2.0 – Dan Schwabel – 2009 – As the title suggests the emphasis here is communicating the personal brand online and looking  at personal branding very much from the perspective of the younger ‘wired’ generations.

Managing Brand You – Jerry S Wilson & Ira Blumenthal – 2008 – Another Fortune 500 executive is one of the authors, the other a brand consultant so the book transposes many product brand approaches to the personal brand.

Career Distinction – William Arruda & Kirsten Dixson – 2007 – The culmination of the first half a decade of his work with Reach, in collaboration with another early personal brand adopter and coupled with many examples from the Reach community.

Soaring on Your Strengths – Robin Ryan – 2006 – Written from the career coaches perspective this book has some good suggestions and actual examples of its use with career marketing documents.

UR A Brand – Catherine Kaputa – 2005 – Some good tie ins between corporate/product branding and personal brand. Some good exercises to complete and part of the author’s personal brand comes through in the use of Shakespere quotes throughout the book.

Career Warfare – David D’Alessandro – 2004 – there is a very shortlist of books on personal branding written for the corporate market, this is the best there currently is and written by someone who made it all the way to the top of a Fortune 500.

The Brand Called You – Peter Montoya with Tim Vandehey – 2003 – One of the better books on personal branding for service based businesses. Written with the small business owner in mind, comprehensive steps and ideas.

Be Your Own Brand – David McNally & Karl D Speak – 2002 – One of the first books to make the connection between personal brand and employer brand. Some interesting templates to help form the basic foundation of your brand.

Build Your Own Life Brand – Stedman Graham – 2001 – Most famous for being Oprah’s partner, this is a good basic read that connects the dots between personal brand at work and elsewhere, after all it’s not just about work.

Make A Name For Yourself – Robin Fisher Roffer – 2000 - Probably one I would continue to place in my top 10 of personal branding books and one of the few directly aimed at women. A good read with a well thought out process.   

The Brand You 50 – Tom Peters – 1999 - This book still has plenty of relevant ideas and tips, particularly for those caught up in doing too much online. THE book that started it all, following on from his Fast Company magazine article, the inspiration for the forming of Reach!

Looking forward to the next decade of personal brand books and seeing where the whole subject develops. 

 

The Brand That Was Steve Jobs

The passing of Steve Jobs resulted in an outpouring of emotion and praise that I would suggest was almost unprecedented. A Google search shows over 234,000,000 web pages - 70,000,000 more than Obama!

Now part of that visible reaction was due to the fact that we have so much more ability to communicate to many more people - ironically in many cases using the very tools that Jobs helped develop. 

Also that technology and it's speed helped produce fast reactions - with many online eulogies, pieces and collections (see below). 

Also significant media responses such as whole ad-free magazines ( like Business Week, Time ) and newspaper inserts ( San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times) dedicated to him. E-books launched ( by Wired) and sold on Amazon within hours and an upcoming biography rushed forward by 6 months. 

And the inevitable surveys on the future of Apple;

Poll: How will Apple perform without Steve Jobs?

They'll do just fine (52%)

Become stagnant (21%)

Fail (10%)

I'm not sure (18%)

In currently reading Paul Allen, Co-founder of Microsoft's autobiography  it is apparent that Steve Jobs was not always a liked man, or a pleasant leader to work with and for. 

But the ultimate test of a strong brand is defined "by a perception, good or bad, that your customers or prospects have about you".

In Jobs case it would appear that with his own personal leadership brand the many positive attributes, skills and unique abilities far outweighed the negative in the vast majority of eyes. He will certainly be missed by many. 

12 contrasting and insightful perspectives I found on Steve Jobs: 

Steve Jobs commencement address at Stanford University 2005, watched the day after his death by over 8 million people. 

 

Steve Jobs - The Builder- blog post from Jonathan Salem-Baskin who worked on the PR account of Apple in the late 90's.

Steve Jobs - A Tribute - obituary from Steven Levy at Wired.com. also check out his podcast at Harvard Business Review -  The Legacy of Steve Jobs - a perfect CEO

Steve Jobs dead at 56, his life ended prematurely by chemotherapy and radiotherapy for cancer - hard hitting commentary on Steve Jobs health choices and the impact of Apple from Mike Adams, Editor of NaturalNews.com

What I learned from Steve Jobs - reflections from Guy Kawasaki, former Chief Evangelist at Apple

Apple under Jobs was quintessentially corporate - Financial Post Comment from Terence Corcoran, commenting on the irony of Occupy Wall Street protestors using Apple products. 

Social media reaction immediately following his death, captured by the Globe & Mail 

Gallery of Fortune Magazine covers with Steve Jobs on the front 12 of them in total!

The Top Ten Lessons Steve Jobs Taught Us - Forbes magazine  

The Legacy of Steve Jobs - Harvard Business Review

and of course Apples own tribute.

Personal Brand Book Review - The Fearless Fish Out of Water

The Fearless Fish Out of Water – How to succeed when you’re the only one like you.

© 2009 Robin Fisher-Roffer – 213 Pages Hardback

5R Score: 30/35

The 7 Steps

1. Go fishing for the real you
2. Use your differences as a lure
3. Find a few fish like you
4. Swim in the ocean your way
5. Put yourself out on the line
6. Evolve by casting a wide net
7. Reel in your unique power

On a scale of 1-7   

Relevance - is it right for personal branding? - 7

Resonance does it make sense to the reader? - 6

Relation is there a connection for everyone? - 5   

Remarkability - does it stand out, will it get noticed? - 5

Real - does the personal brand come through? - 7

Would you pick it up?

This is one of those books that I found by chance, whilst ‘trawling’ (pardon the pun) the shelves of the local library. It was not a book I was aware of, although the author I knew from her very good first book, “Make a Name for Yourself: Eight Steps Every Woman Needs to Create a Personal Brand Strategy for Success” an early personal branding resource.

This book approaches personal branding from almost the opposite direction. Robin, the author, always felt like the fish out of water, and it is people like this who really were the very early pioneers in what we now call personal branding. They already felt different, embraced it and were able to use that differentiation to their advantage in building successful careers and businesses. What I really liked about this book is there are plenty of examples and also it offers lots of practical actions and exercises at the end of each chapter.

Relevance

The reader has to be prepared to view the whole notion of personal branding from a different perspective. Something I talk about often is that we already have a personal brand, the key is understanding what that brand is and then communicating it. A number of other books try to manufacture from the other end, this one says its already there, now use it.

Resonance

Whilst the book almost avoids the label of personal branding, there are some similarities between this and her first book. However this one carries much more of Robin’s own personal brand and its 7 year evolution between the two publications.

For the more straightforward, perhaps even traditional. personal branding process I would favour her first book. This ‘Fearless Fish’ content I would almost label as an advanced approach. The reason I say that is many times you end up talking in much greater depth and much more personally to clients in personal branding than they had originally expected, because it does touch on a whole life not just career and business. Robin has captured that through her own lessons and others she has interacted with in this book.

Relation

Much of her experience has been in the entertainment field so many of the examples and profiles come from that group, but there are smatterings of others to learn from too.

For the individual looking to get a little deeper understanding of who and what their personal brand is this is a good read.

Remarkability

I really enjoyed the fresher, more authentic approach to the whole personal branding process that this book offers. It is not going to be for everyone but those that do read this book will get a lot of value from it.

One challenge might be where to find it on the bookshelf – at my local library it was under self-help, but not careers. Better to buy your own copy online!

Real

This is a very real personal branding work. Robin does not hide aspects her personal brand at all that others might be reluctant to expose. That makes for the readers greater comfort with their own brand and makes the book a much more engaging and believable piece.