Volume 17, Number 4 Article by Pradeep Banerjee December, 2005
Career Warfare – 10 Rules for Building a Successful Personal Brand and Fighting to Keep It : By David F D‘Allessandro with Michele Owens, Tata McGraw-Hill, 2004, pp. 216, Price: Rs. 195:
Managing one’s career is a serious affair to most, and a war to many. Success in this war comes not by walking on a road that is built of hope, but by constructing the self as brand. Author D‘Allessandro is quite clear that ‘It’s the brand you make for yourself that determines whether you become mayor of the vertical village – or the village idiot’. The vertical village, of course, is a metaphor for the corporate body. The book is a quick roll-through of what it takes to get to the top slot. The reading bit is easy for the text is zippy and engaging, but it takes hard work when it comes to putting the learning into practice.
This is a self help-book that talks about what you do to build a career for yourself when you join an organisation. The top job being a prized one, with many aspirants, the brand building exercise is necessary for positioning oneself in a slippery world of closing doors and impenetrable glass ceilings. Help is offered here in the form of rules based on the author’s experiential learning, the product of 30 years of business experience. The greatest battles in a career, the author believes, are ‘the battles you have with yourself as you struggle to give the world reasons only to judge you positively’. The avowed purpose of this book is ‘to help ambitious people win those battles and build the kind of name for themselves that will allow them to rise to the level of their ambitions’.
Why do you require a personal brand? It is to set you apart from your peers who are all hardworking and have abilities similar to yours. D’Allessandro also believes that organisational rationality is an oxymoron. Corporate structures, more often than not, are peopled with those who are ‘full of eccentricity, rashness, and pettiness’ and go about their brief of evaluation ‘driven by gossip, intrigue, and anecdote’. It is a part of everyday life in the corporate world. The interactions between people both within and beyond the boundaries of the firm, who perform a myriad of functions, leads to disparate opinions about an individual, crystallising into a kind of consensus about him or her. That consensus goes by many names – reputation, public image, legend or character. The author likes to think of it as a ‘personal brand’. But no matter what you call it, that collective opinion, more than anything else, will determine whether you conquer the vertical village or are defeated by it. However, it is important to realise that you do not occupy a large proportion of the mental space and time of your senior who wields so much power over your move upwards. What probably happens when your name is referred to him is akin to what happens in a Rorschach test and this is where the consensus arrived at earlier helps. In terms of effectiveness, the immediate responses (‘genius’, ‘sloppy’, etc.) are more effective than miles of appraisal sheets.
Having established what the personal brand is all about, the author moves on to the rules for building one. These rules help one to construct a reference grid. The first, appropriately is, ‘Try to look beyond your navel’ if you want to go places, while the second focuses on the person who can make all the difference to your career – your boss, who is the co-author of your brand. Since ‘all relationships with bosses are a Faustian bargain’, it is intelligent to start by finding out the type of person the boss is. The ‘Wimp’ is incapable of helping you build your brand and so would be the ‘Wastrel’, the ‘Pariah’, and the ‘Know-it-all’. And if you are lucky, you could get the ‘Mentor’, but if not, be patient because the tables may turn. Meanwhile, you need to ‘Learn which one is the pickle fork’. In other words, learn the correct etiquette and concern for people that you work with. The author points out that those who have successfully built good personal brands tend to be impatient for results, but very patient in the way they handle the people and situations around them. Caution is an important requirement, too: there are some situations, such as family businesses and entrepreneurial ventures, where a brand is unlikely to grow into the top slot. The best option is to learn what you can and move on.
‘It’s Always Show Time’ is another important rule. That is, one needs to keep at personal brand building on a continual basis, because a large number of small credits will add more momentum to your upward movement than a few major events in your performance. Mega performances at short intervals don’t happen in real life; they are the stuff of movies. Nor do opportunities to face the enemy for an open gun draw, so it is important to make the right enemies. Disloyal types and bullies need to be handled with toughness: ‘A reputation as an absolute pacifist is useful if you are a candidate for sainthood, but it is a disaster if you are a candidate for higher office in an organisation.’
The last three rules show the way to sustain the brand you have created. With brand acceptance comes success and self confidence in one’s exceptional ability. So the author issues a timely warning – ‘Try not to be swallowed by the bubble’. Retaining some measure of scepticism about yourself helps keep you on the ground and walking with the people who have not made it into the Hall of Fame and yet are an important part of your life and your success. These people could be working with your organisation or with other units including the press. Remember that ‘The higher you fly, the more you will be shot at’, for the simple reason that ‘the higher you fly, the more interesting it is to shoot at you’. Rule ten is straight out of the movies. In On the Waterfront, cult figure Marlon Brando, a ‘washed-up’ boxer, ruefully tells his brother that he ‘coulda been a contender’. D`Allessandro tells the reader, ‘Everybody coulda been a contender; make sure you stay one’!
This book is written with the firm conviction that careers can be built, as much as a car can be sold. It just requires discipline. Once you build the brand, promoting it is easy.
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