Personal Brand

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently after reading a blog by Mark Suster where he argues that if you don’t define your personal brand, someone else will. He’s absolutely right, it happens all the time and doing an MBA changes the way that you and other people perceive your brand. After reading the article I tried to remember back to the last time I actually stated my brand and for me, pretty much the only time I do it regularly and explicitly is when someone asks “So what do you do?”

When you answer this question, the person you are talking to puts you in a mental box: “that guy’s an engineer” or “she’s in finance”. That then gets packaged up with whatever preconceptions that person has about the box they’ve put you in “that guy’s an engineer; he must be socially incompetent” or “she’s in finance; she must be totally focused on money”. I might be focusing on the negative here, it could quite easily be “that guy’s an engineer; my dad was an engineer and he was awesome” but the outcome is the same. You, as the speaker, have almost no control over the impression you will leave.

This freaks me out a little and it stops me from actually telling people what I am. I want to say “I’m an entrepreneur who started an engineering company with a couple of buddies which went OK, then started a couple more businesses that didn’t go so well. I didn’t do much engineering (because the other guys are better at it than I am) so I filled in the gaps to let them do their jobs better (sales, marketing, accounting etc.) and our businesses didn’t fail because the engineering was wrong, they failed because of everything else so I went to school to learn some skills so I won’t screw up as badly next time and now I’m a student.”

But I don’t. Not just because it’s a bit of a mouthful but also because it’s not going to create the kind of first impression that I want. So how do you get around that?

It comes down to the message you want to communicate. The easiest way to stop being put in a box is to give people an answer they don’t have a box for (some people who have written on this topic before me have suggested things like: “I’m a pirate” or “I run around in circles waving my arms a lot” which gets a giggle but really doesn’t solve the problem). Some people deflect the conversation by stating who they work for rather than what they do (I work for Nike) to create a good impression but that doesn’t tell me who you are unless you’re the personal embodiment of Nike, and a certainly hope you’re not!

And back we come to personal branding: How do you want the world to perceive you? When I read through what I’d like to say but don’t there are three themes that I’m trying to get across.

1. How do I add value? I make other people better. This can be as simple as getting the little stuff done so that they can concentrate on their job and as complex as diagnosing when someone doesn’t have the skills that are needed for the task and can’t ask for help so you have to intervene so that the job gets done but the person doesn’t feel bad about the way that it went.
2. I am disruptive. Anyone who’s sat in a class with me knows I can’t keep my mouth shut, I believe that education is participatory experience, if you don’t challenge what’s being proposed then you’re going to fall for any old crap that someone pushes at you. This extends to my professional life as well, I love technology for it’s ability to completely change the landscape of an industry. It’s one of the big drivers behind my push into 3D printing. Change is amazing!
3. I like to learn. I’ve always been surrounded by people who value education (my parents, my brother, several cousins and many of my friends are teachers or in academia). This has led me to sign up for MOOC’s, use codecademy and spend at least an hour a day to reading blogs and education sites (I’d recommend the conversation, macrobusiness, hack-a-day and seth godin’s blog as a great range of interesting reads that you can digest quickly on a mobile device in between whatever you are doing). I’m interested in stuff.

Distilling this down, I can turn it into three key messages:

• I make others better
• I am disruptive
• I want to learn

How this ties back to the MBA is that I feel a bit like that about being a student. If I say I’m a student to someone, they look at me and think; here’s guy in his 30’s who’s still at school, mustn’t know what he wants to do. Some people might argue that if I gave some more information, “I’m doing an MBA at Melbourne Business School”, I might get a different reaction but I still have no control. Maybe the person I’m speaking to thinks an MBA is a waste of time, maybe they don’t like formal education. Ultimately it doesn’t matter whether I’m a student or not, that’s not who I am. What I really want to communicate is those core concepts: Disrupting and making others better and learning. So now my response is clear, when I get a question like ‘what do you do’ I can answer it in terms of what I really want to communicate:

               “I’ve gone back to school to study so I can help the people I work with do their jobs better because we are going to change the world”

Plenty for the listener to respond to, creates a huge level of engagement, hard to put in a box and, creates a positive, memorable first impression. That’s what I wanted to say.