Personal branding is a familiar topic, now that the world has been graced with the Beckham brand, the Brangelina brand, the Alan Sugar brand. It’s very easy to think that there’s no place for it in the real business world and yet each of these brands is incredibly successful, so isn’t it worth looking at whether personal branding could help you differentiate yourself, especially in this tough market?

Last month I was preparing a talk to a corporate women’s network and comparing notes with the other speaker for the evening. My topic was “Personal Branding” and hers “Public Relations” and we found a fascinating set of parallels between our two worlds. Where I’m concerned to ensure my coaching clients establish their reputation as leaders, her job is to help companies establish their corporate reputation. We set ourselves the challenge of answering the question “Why bother?” anticipating that both topics would meet with a certain degree of scepticism: aren’t reputations built on what you deliver, so don’t they take care of themselves?
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When the going gets tough, the tough get going.
What does that mean? When the going gets tough, the tough scarper or does it mean the tough get into action? I like to think it means the latter. As we struggle with the vicissitudes of the current economic climate it’s good to learn lessons from how a great leader reacted in very different stressful circumstances.
I’m inspired by the great explorer Shackleton. In 1914, Shackleton led an Antarctic expedition which found disaster and Shackleton’s leadership meant that all his team lived to tell the tale.
And it’s quite a tale. The ship got stuck in the ice. For ten months. Then the ship was crushed by the ice. The men had to camp on the ice for four months in the darkness of the Antarctic winter. When summer arrived, they launched their three lifeboats. Four months later they landed on a very inhospitable Elephant Island. Shackleton took five men and sailed eight hundred miles over heaving seas in a lifeboat and had to cross a frozen mountain range on South Georgia before they could summon help. Oh, and then Shackleton immediately set about organising the mission to rescue the men he’d left on Elephant Island!
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Chris Hoy, unofficial captain of Team GB, won the Sports Personality of the Year this week. Didn’t it bring back all the excitement of the Summer? Fourth in the medal table behind the giants China, the US and Russia: I was so proud to be British!

Now I love cycling, though you would never catch me riding in one of those velodromes: it looks far too dangerous! And I’m passionate about teams and what they can achieve that individuals can’t achieve on their own. The concept of a British team for the Olympics is a strange one though, isn’t it? In most of the events isn’t each individual athlete competing for individual glory, trying to beat their personal best? And yet, and yet…it seems team may have been a factor that really made a difference in Beijing in 2008. What could have made Team GB so powerful? (more…)