Personal Brands: It Don’t Mean a Thing
Great parties, like great sex, depend on variety. Different styles, attitudes, even intentions: spice it up – give it that zing. Really great parties, like great sustainable romance, need surprise, along with the two other key elements of happiness: pleasure and meaning.
So if your life or your job is no party: you know what …
Personal Brands: Ugly Entrepreneurs
Making sausage next to a stockyard is prettier than entrepreneurs behave. Often chaotic, angry, distracted by shiny objects, chasing money, yelling at employees – let’s visit with the tribe of ugly entrepreneurs.
Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Huntington were all really ugly people. Maybe not in the face but definitely in the way they behaved toward …
Personal Brands: SEO Yourself
What ARE the right key words – especially, OMG if you are actually talking to someone face-to-face – or at least cell-to-cell? What are you saying – and how clearly are you communicating it online and offline? You get so much good stuff about your online behavior, I want to touch on the you that …
Personal Brands: Let Me Entertain You
We’re having a BBQ with about 50 people up at my house in a few weeks. It’ll be in August, which weirdly enough, is when about a full third of my family and friends are born. So it’s always a big party, featuring crowd faves like ribs, beer, and cake. What could be bad?
Nothing, …
Personal Brands: Hiding From a Billboard
We know you, not because we really know you. We know you because we cruise by you. On our way to updating our status on Facebook, we check out yours. We whiz past the big, hoary posts from people who don’t understand that FB isn’t a blog, to check out your new pics or a …
Personal Brands: Do Ask. Don’t Tell.
“When is it appropriate for me to criticize my co-worker?” I got the question from a young manager in my course: the Perfect Presentation, on campus at UCLA last week.
I felt flooded by the power to disabuse an entire group of people about an entirely inappropriate – yet pervasive – kind of communication: delivering …
Personal Brands: Hate and Disorder
How are you doing amidst the piles you’ve created? You know, the piles of old bills, dirty clothes, and detritus of your hobbies (like your carnival stuffed animal collection or unusable swag from less than stellar events)?
Maybe it’s not your clutter. Maybe it’s your roommate’s mess, or your office mate’s. Maybe you inherited it …
Personal Brands: The Audition
From the time you leave your home, consider that you are being auditioned for the job you are seeking. Your personal brand starts to get its early morning workout when you cross the threshold of your door.
How coherent is your personal brand promise, given what you actually deliver?
The person you brushed by without …
Personal Brands: Craziest Advice Ever
Why do job coaches tell you to EVADE a straightforward answer when a recruiter asks you this simple question?
“What do you expect to earn in terms of salary and related compensation, given the role and responsibilities associated with this position in our company?”
Job coaches earn money for coaching you to get a job,…Personal Brands: Answer This
I imagine there’s some lunatic that we’re calling a “thought-leader,” who is passing out some horrific job-interview ending advice, including:
“Never answer a question about compensation.”
I did not hire five people in the last week because they would not answer this question:
“What are your expectations for salary, bonuses, and other compensation as an …