A Kick In The Career: What Do You Do When You're Branded?

At last I have read a piece about personal brands that does justice to how the cow feels. How long my udders have waited for someone to poke a little juicy fun at all those glossy devotees that were previously so untouchable. India has untouchables that want to be touchable but brand people are untouchable by choice and the only touchable allowed in branding is anything that can be airbrushed. Thankfully most of us regular cows are still considered Holy in the Land of the Tiger so long as we stay well clear of Film City and that cosmetic crowd (I always wondered whether cosmetic was actually shorthand for cosmopolitan and hermitically sealed?). That is why one day I will support the New Age Movement, but only when they ensure that cows comes first. At least I will be safe from Tigers if human beings start thinking that its hip again to walk around in illegal tiger skin, but you never know when that kind of in-thing ends an out thing starts and then the next you know, leather is back in big time – nothing cooler than being appearing little risqué my hopefully ashram inspired brandabees (or is that wannabees I can never tell the difference) but let me tell you bold and loud, none of this branding stuff should come at the cow’s expense. Look at the bright side, thankfully no one in their right mind would show a tiger eating a cow on this thing I think you humans call “Youtube”, (you should see MyTubes but lets not go there) or at least not while I am munching away at this piece of freshly laid Tom Stern grass here or at least until the cow shed gets broadband access so that the farmer serves to remind us that there is an alternative to milk production. (We cows call this kind of Tom Stern writing really “good weed” or at least you humans call it rBGH, well I hope its weed, because it gets me through the milking phase, though sorry to disappoint you folks, I am not going to talk about the massage phase, I am a modest cow). OK I might be stuck to a machine (but aren’t all personal brands stuck in their own with their carefully manicured logos too, and I don’t mean Naomi Klein my friends) and while I probably haven’t taken a long moo walk around a green field in a long time, I just have to think about what those non-Indian cows had to endure back in the days when they used a searing hot iron to leave a mark on our sides, but thankfully Thomas Friedman is hip, the world is flat and one day I will get to go back home. OK I do recognize that I am an honorable exception in the cow universe because my fellow munching brethren are not exactly what you might call that sharp upstairs, but being a cow has its upside, because, the way I see it, its way better to be an authentic cow chewing on cud than to become one more of the branded sheep with all their posing crud. There are of course some days I wish I was never born a cow, how much better life would be if I just gave in to the glitz, the perfect resume, the do no wrong persona, (yep becoming cosmetically untouchable), but then that is what you humans would call a whole load of Bull and I assure you all, being a cow is quite fine by me. Oh, why even keep dreaming of being anything than the silent muncher I have always been (just keep those climate change people away from me when they start asking whether cow farts are bad for the environment). So I do know one thing, all I ever will be is a humble and docile cow going through a lifetime on cheap grass, or at least until I become product and enter your human supermarket of credibility seeking branded life (ah! but the whole point today was getting the chance to milk all this branding stuff out of my own system and not become so branded that I forgot what the whole point of this was about and my dearest humans (and honorable Tom Stern), I will tell ya’ what that was, this was personally very cowthartic)……M.

It sounds to me as if you're reinventing the wheel and essentially stating the obvious: promote yourself. I don't see anything new or revolutionary about what you're saying. That being said, sometimes the obvious needs to be stated, but just not in that many words.

I think your statement gave a new idea: a people-branding site. Who's gonna take this one to the web?

David, I don't personally see Tom saying the obvious here. What's new here personally for me is that there is odd rare glimpse these of days of slightly rolling ones eyes to the manufacture of the obvious. Dannielle Blumenthal wrote a good blog called "Unbranding the productized self: a vote against personal branding", and so did Matt Farina where his blog posed the question "Is Personal Branding Selfish". I guess we have only marginally entered an self-brand age where truth becomes reframing of truths and trust become a euphemism for distrust and the only way to see how much clown make up one needs to profit from this three ring circus is to sit back and enjoy the show, the takeaway from this Tom Stern piece for me is that we may be taking personal branding way too seriously. At the organizational level, Tom Asaker wrote a blog called "The Brand Identity Delusion" but his viewpoints can be electroplated even more potently at the personal level. What's not new is the obvious that branding does work; but while nothing in life is ever "new", what is re-newable is the reality that it isn't about Brand YOU, it is always about THEM Experience. For the past decade I've tried to find a way of escape from the narcissism of our commercial culture, and this idea of "brand narcissism" isn't new either, check out the chapter summary at "Beyond-Brand". When Brand-You first came out, it hit a nerve in me, not because Tom Peter's was wrong but because I looked in the mirror, and it awoke in me the reality of my own reflection. Things are only obvious when we see the other persons face, what isn't obvious about our creating our own "Brand You", is the product we may have constructed and ultimately end up living behind, that choice isn't IMHO a Tom Peter's thing-to-do, but a far more radical brand invented by Socrates which he stated as "Know Thyself"......M.

David, just one more thing, so I can get this out of my system once and for all; to win the Presidency of the United States back when the Founding Fathers were around, required them to fight against grievances by airing grievances. This system of yesterday’s grievance today represents the complete opposite of mass democracy because the system of mass production we exist in today treats grievance as an impurity that will stain “our personal brand”. Today dealing with grievance is now mass produced in a form neatly grouped and batched in a segment called “activism”, and we are still living in this batch produced manner in a world where I can see that technological advances are now light years ahead of mass social and mental capabilities. We can’t keep up with technological breakthrough because both irrational fear of the future and pluralistic ignorance is a byproduct of the linear machinery we consider “normal” today (it is irrational because living segmented, siloed and divided existence isn’t a natural way for humans to live). Today to win the Presidency one has to stay on message and fight for limited attention spans because it fits the way we have generally learned to habituate and consume, and that is regardless of the intelligence of the eventual incumbent. Today the opposite of Brand You is either personal career suicide or image-free entrepreneurialism (creating personal enterprise value that is not dependent on the visible machinery of public image); the opposite of this form of public relations is living outside of the highly embedded image manufacturing machinery, and this is still the providence of elites and those who are financially untouchable or at least live way above the common fray. The reality of that image machine is that it is ideally built for the mass production of what we describe as people, from birth in mass production hospitals, to education in mass production schools, through mass production careers and finally and unceremoniously mass production funerals – complete with a warehouse like machines that processes human bodies that efficiently process those who have reached the end of the social conveyor. We know that because it fits with the machinery of birth and death registry, and you don’t need cloud computing to manage an ancient human registry system. If freedom from “Brand You” thinking means career suicide today, then I am willing to let it be so at a personal level, but what is IMHO most sad about Brand You is that it has Founding Fathers who have all but forgotten the joy of airing grievances by constituting a process which treats grievance like a production line (for why would any human being worth his salt want to become a product?) instead of the DNA of freedoms established so long ago. IMHO instead of using a philosophy that was made to measure for handling grievance, we have become the children of a parent that is a linear image making machine, that I think even the Founding Fathers would have fought again to dismantle. The Founding Fathers lived in freedom because they did not live in political correctness. That is a shame because the promise of the technological cloud and advances in collaborative processes and structures should make Brand You a potentially redundant mindset (and when smart population becomes a national strategic imperative, it will be). Just like the programming language COBOL however, Brand You as a programming language will persist because the legacy of industrial age thinking is still inherent and will persist for a long time to come, because very few people are naturally or instinctively capable today of relating to 21st Century realities with the application of genuine 21st Century thinking. Otherwise life today IMHO does require the challenge of adjusting to a new way of thinking, a challenge which a “new crop” of new born digital natives have a better chance of navigating through when their day of freedom to work and express themselves (without the handicap of mechanical image) arrives; a time where today’s technological facility isn’t machinery for cleaning ourselves of our human foibles, so we can present ourselves sterile and germ free, but an extension of what the Founding Fathers once fought for, the accumulation of intelligent solutions that erase prior boundaries, that operates as an immune system of freedom that requires the recognition and resolution of our daily imperfections. And the more I see people trying to focus on what is “new” here, the more I understand that it is that the majority of us are stuck firmly in the past because we won’t make the effort to understand what is going on today at a deeply a personal level (which is the only merit of my own personal reflection here), rather than live in the relative luxury of not having to find out in the modern day convenience that is called mass democracy. To embrace a promising and global future - other than the one mostly conveniently to meeting the needs of those habitual creatures, whose destiny is only fit for digesting from the daily milk of formulated messaging, I think to risk challenging our own selves to think differently is a actually a hard won opportunity rather than a social commonality, (mainly because our economic system isn’t equipped or mature enough to embrace such a challenge and nor does it foster and breed people with raw Founding Father instincts). Anyway, enough said, for anything beyond this, means I do risk branding myself, rather than enjoy a rare luxury these days, to be a free thinker who is rueful about my own constant relationship with image and who wants to learn by accepting one’s own imperfection (I have always maintained that I am not here to tell others how they should live, but simply to ruin in the short-term the richness that is contained in my specific destiny). This means recognizing the emergence that comes from a mindset that treats the act of “not knowing”, as an intelligence and a practical wisdom, while exercising a personally liberating trial and error process of learning from my own mistakes. So at a personal level, I don’t want to profit from stating that and above all, certainly don’t want to brand that as a purpose of my life, but if it is still highly profitable for duplication machines to print money stating the obvious, that “personal branding is important!” then I say finally, let that be, for such a reality is merely a measure of how far we have arrived as a so called intelligent civilization and I must surely now seek out better and smarter things that will engage my time, and I have whipped this particular social horsepower now, far too many times......M.