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… Read More »100 Toonies Worth
So another celebrity, this time Ashton Kutcher, has proven to us all what we already know – that we are no different from each other when it comes to making mistakes. Last week on seeing the headline about Penn State firing their football coach he immediately put his stream of consciousness on Twitter and told his 8 million followers what he thought. This was his original tweet; @aplusk: How do… Read More »Engage Brain Before Tweeting – 5 Personal Brand Lessons from Ashton Kutcher
Paul Allen – Idea Man – a memoir by the co-founder of Microsoft. © 2011 MIE Services LLC – 358 pages hardback $- US 27.95 / Cdn $35 PERSONAL BRAND LEADERSHIP POINTERS From this book you will learn: The importance of having several avenues of interest to round out your brand. How you can enjoy your passions AND make it part of who you are. Remain true to your core… Read More »Personal Brand Leadership Book Review – Paul Allen – Idea Man
It was sad to see the news earlier this week of the passing of Jimmy Savile, two days short of his 85th birthday, a truly authentic if slightly eccentric personal brand. Many years ago my aunt experienced a stroke and was in Stoke Mandeville Hospital in the UK, world renowned for it's work in spinal injuries, but also a hospital supported and visited on a regular basis by Jimmy Savile.… Read More »The 7 Signature Signs of Jimmy Savile – An Original Personal Brand
Sometimes one of the hardest parts of the work in defining your personal brand is identifying your purpose. Mother Theresa was a great example of someone with a purpose- to help the poor in Calcutta. Another is Guy Laliberte, the founder of Cirque du Soleil, with his dream of providing water to the third world with his One Drop- see the video at the Globe and Mail. But we may… Read More »Have you found your purpose?
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. … Read More »The Brand That Was Steve Jobs
Last week John Baird, Foreign Secretary and one of the Canadian governments leading figures, caused a bit of storm with a recent business card re-design. He seems even to have strayed from the 'brand standards' that are recommended and his Chief of Staff even had to sign a disclaimer to formally acknowledge that his office was advised against the changes. There is always the challenge of wanting to have a… Read More »What does your business card communicate about your brand?
The provincial election in Ontario is a little over a week away and depending on which poll you believe anyone of the three main parties could end up winning. But if it came down to backyard barbecue invitations instead of votes NDP leader Andrea Horwath would be the winner with 37% of respondents to an IPSOS Reid poll saying they would prefer to have her than 32% for PC leader… Read More »And the new Premier of Ontario is……….likeable?
The appointment of Meg Whitman as CEO of Hewlett Packard this week brought immediate doom and gloom predictions from analysts and market experts – unfortunately this comes as no great surprise. Regular surveys including yearly studies by Catalyst find the following: Companies with the greatest number of women on their boards performed significantly better financially than companies with fewer female board members. Women in high-ranking corporate positions offer their companies… Read More »Are markets too quick to judge female CEO’s?
These are not always the words you would expect to hear from a leading CEO when admitting that a move they made in the market was the wrong one, or at the very least one that should have had a more considered approach. They are certainly not the words that Jim Balsilee the Co-CEO of Research in Motion, makers of the Blackberry, has uttered (well at least not publicly). The… Read More »“I messed up. I owe everyone an explanation.”