

Define Your Personal Brand, Lest Others Do It For You - MediaSquirrel
http://www.metamorphblog.com/2010/06/personal-branding.html

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plinkplonk
So, while I was at Intuit there was this manager dude who was very focused on
climbing the ladder and was pretty sharp at office politics but didn't have
any other skills.

He wanted to make his mark, and was facing pushback from his engineers for his
wacky plans, and so he thought up a scheme whereby each of his subordinates
would define their "personal" brand, write it down on a piece of paper, along
with a graphic "embodying the brand" and stick it on the sides of their
cubicles. [1]

He exerted relentless pressure on the people reporting to him ( He tried to
get me to go along but I was thankfully a peer [2] and not really subject to
his fancies) till they all had these ridiculous "brand statements" stuck to
the sides of their cubicles. The best engineer in the group (he left the
company soon after this) had a big picture of Two Face with "Either you die a
hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain" written
underneath. The manager didn't understand what that meant,(but was suitably
impressed by the picture) and he showed off his "initiative" when some VP
chaps came around [3] and in due time was promoted to "Director" for his "team
building" skills.

The engineers all fall around laughing if you mention "personal brand" to
them, but hey they are still doing the same job wrestling with ancient horror
codebases [4] and the manager fellow is now earning twice what he was for half
the work so who is cleverer? :)

Nothing to do with the content of the posting really. Just something that came
to mind when I read "Personal Brand".

[1] All kinds of management fads swept Intuit periodically. This kind of stuff
was very normal there. A lot of nice people but very very "corporate".

[2] I was supposed to do technical "architecture" work , but had a "manager"
in my title and was sufficiently high in the hierarchy (and boy does Intuit
believe in hierarchy!) that I was this guy's peer. The cost of being so "high"
was death by meeting. When I found myself in a "meeting about a(forthcoming)
meeting" I knew it was time to quit.

[3] One VP was a sharp fellow and he had a bemused expression on his face
after seeing the Two Face "brand" but he didn't say anything.

[4] Example 1: The code for QuickBooksOnline is _the_ most terrible code I
have seen in my life. I had no idea you could write Java like that. I still
have nightmares about it and it wasn't even something I was working on.

Example 2: There was this "engineer" who built a flash application to view a
database table (not a database, a _table_ ). The app wasn't "advanced" enough
to order the entries by primary key (or by anything else) so the team (of
which this fellow was the "lead engineer") would bring up the flash app and
scroll desperately to find the right row for debugging etc. No one ever used a
"Select * from ..".

The creator of this abomination was given a spot award by his manager for
"building useful tools to support the company technical strategy" (which at
that point of time boiled down to something like "flash frontends and cloud
backends").

~~~
MediaSquirrel
that sounds awful. i love being an entrepreneur.

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joshkaufman
"Personal Branding" is one of my least favorite buzzwords. (Right up there
with "synergy.")

If you replace every instance with "Reputation," you get the very same advice
plus some.

~~~
MediaSquirrel
Ha! Fair enough.

~~~
SkyMarshal
True, but very good writeup nonetheless.

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tjmaxal
So the moral of the story here is it's your fault if someone else mis
characterizes you?

~~~
MediaSquirrel
Pretty much.

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steveklabnik
This was way better than I expected.

A few months ago, I decided to start using my real name for all of my
accounts. It was for a few different reasons, but one major reason was
personal branding. In a world where everything starts to become more and more
public, I think it's much easier to do what this article suggests, and
proactively shape your public persona, rather than let it be created when
Facebook changes privacy settings.

~~~
iamdave
Yeah, except when you have a painfully generic name, of which a Google search
for brings up a wikipedia result for dead sculptors and dead links for defense
attorneys.

~~~
abstractbill
I changed my name to one that had almost no Google results at the time. You
could too.

~~~
cema
Not to AbstractBill, I presume?

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mkramlich
That's his personal brand: abstraction.

~~~
cema
And billing, I guess. Ok.

