She Inc. – A woman's guide to maximising her career potential.
© 2008 Kelly Keehn 282 pages. Paperback.
5R Score: 15/30
Main Focus – Career success for women.
Five Key Take Aways
- Financial stability and success are key.
- Goals are important part of personal branding
- Routines and positive thinking are must's
- Work life balance is possible
- Women can be equally if not more successful in their careers.
On a scale of 1-7
Relevance – is it right for personal branding? - 4
Resonance does it make sense to the reader? - 4
Relation is there a connection for everyone? - 2
Remakability – does it stand out, will it get noticed? - 3
Real – does the personal brand come through? – 2
Would you pick it up?
Unfortunately I was more diappointed by this book than engrossed and ended up skim reading from the middle and actually left out the last two and half chapters. Kelly comes from a banking and financial services background and although the book starts off in the personal branding area the last third is all about finances.
Financial stability and success are important, of course, but I just found it more of a disconnect – it's as if the book could have been two. The layout is very tight without much white space which starts to make for a difficult read. Kelly had a lot to share and made the mistake of trying to include it all in one book, but keep it to less than 300 pages, for me it did not work.
This book is a mixture of personal brand with Jack Canfield, Napoleon Hill and the Wealthy Barber thrown in for good measure. Personal branding is not Kelly's expertise and whilst she may have built a strong personal brand in the financial arena and shared some of her own experiences there was little else to make the content engaging or pick up on some key lessons.
Relevance
What I liked about the content was that much of the core foundation of good personal brands are included in here, goals, lifestyle, finance etc – this could be a good early read on the subject but not for any depth in personal branding. Many other books out there on personal branding that have same or better content and more examples. for women looking for real detail there are other personal branding books I would recommend.
Resonance
What Kelly says makes sense, her messages are very similar to many of the personal development experts like Canfield. Again good for a toe in the water visit of these topics.
Relation
Despite the title men can find this content useful too if there are looking for surface touches in a whole bunch of areas. Little mention of social media and on line brand so not of use for the under 30's in this piece.
Remarkability
A solid introductory book on the subject of personal development and personal branding, nothing more than that.
Real
I do not know that I feel the real personal brand of Kelly coming through. In fact in her book there is almost the advice that you keep personal and business separate in your brand and this comes through in her own examples. The Sidebars she puts in are useful insights in to her brand at work, but I do not get a good sense of her overall personal brand. Kelly is motivating and insightful when it comes to the subjects she wants to share but also private.