Energy is currency in anyone’s language. And no I don’t mean Middle East oil reserves or the latest Aussie wind farm (aka parliament house). I’m talking about personal energy – the kind that keeps your body perky, the under-eye baggage at bay, and your friends jealous.
Keeping on top of everything we need to, want to or must do can take it out of you. Now apparently banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an hour, but it’s not the ideal way to stay fit, focused and fabulous.
If I had a dollar for every time I heard that, I’d be on a yacht in the Bahamas instead of sitting writing this blog.
It’s pretty simple really. A personal brand is all about what you bring to the world. It defines who you are and how other people perceive you.
According to the experts we form an opinion of someone within the first 5 minutes of meeting them. In today’s instant connection world you can probably shorten that to 140 tweet characters, or the time it takes you read a Facebook status update.
Every day in every way, people are forming opinions about what we say and do and think, and judging us on how we look, how we present ourselves, how we work and how we relate.
So whether you’re into this personal brand thing or not, you’ve got one. And just like any brand – celebrity, business, product or YOU – it needs to be authentic, sustainable and engaging if you want it to produce results.
And personal brands have the power to produce some amazing results, let me tell you. Whether it’s getting a better job, winning a business pitch, or enjoying a more fulfilling relationship with your kids or significant other, your personal brand has a significant part to play.
But just like any successful brand, brand YOU needs to be well managed or it can lose traction and credibility in the marketplace.
If you think working on your personal branding sounds too much like hard work, and prefer to adopt the “take me as I am and like it or lump it” philosophy, that’s your choice. It also makes you the complaints department if you aren’t where you want to be in your life, and could warrant a bit of navel-gazing and a good hard look in the mirror.
Personal branding is an investment in yourself and the people you care about most. Think of it as raising your interest rate and increasing your value in the marketplace.
Alright I admit it, I confess. I’m a self-proclaimed enemy of the ordinary. What else would you expect from a business creativity and innovation evangelist?
In an era where competition is fierce, the marketplace is cluttered, economic instability is squeezing budgets and technology is leaving many in its wake, taking a creative approach to running your business (bricks or clicks) has never been more essential.
Business creativity is about so much more than having a clever name, cutesy logo or a website with all the bells and whistles. Think beyond branding or marketing. Business creativity is something that can be applied in just about any area of your business. From how you answer the phone to how you service your customers, how you manage your people to how you engage with suppliers, or how you cultivate referrals to how you develop new products.
Creativity in business is about better ideas and doing things differently, sure. But it’s also about problem solving, vision, innovation, unlocking potential, achieving efficiencies, manifesting ideas into reality, implementation, creating value, building stability and growing profits. I could go on, but you should be getting the picture by now.
Don’t cling to the tired old excuses that your business is too small, too new, too time poor, no budget or you’re not creative.
You don’t have to be a ‘creative type’ to be creative in your business, and money doesn’t drive creativity. There are countless low-cost, no-cost approaches that can be taken to improve business in any environment.
The switched on business operators are the ones taking steps to find out what business creativity is and how it can benefit their business, then working out how to put it into practice and get the most out of it.
Today’s most successful companies are the ones who make business creativity a big part of their culture and are turning fresh ideas and smarter ways of operating into dollars as a result.
Well, well – Entrepreneur Magazine tells us 2010 will be the Year of the Entrepreneur. No surprises there, of course they’re going to tell their target market what it wants to hear. But healthy cynicism aside, they could have something.
During the EGC we looked on as some of the world’s biggest companies became the biggest casualties. Just goes to prove size isn’t everything. So if this is the Year of the Entrepreneur, I say “bring it on”. After all, entrepreneurs start small and as Seth Godin says … small is the new big.
Big used to be beautiful and getting big as fast as you could was everybody’s aim. We equated size with stability, growth, jobs, economies of scale, R&D.
Today small is the new big because small means you and your staff are at the coalface, so you’re more in touch with your market. (continue reading…)