From Grumpy's Garage

 I've started reading Naomi Klein's book,  No Is Not Enough . After an introductory chapter in which she gives an overview of how Trump is (in 2017) shocking the political landscape in the U.S. (and, she forecasts, will continue to do so), she points out that Donald J. Trump is a well-crafted "Superbrand," a type of phenomenon that emerged from the rise of business mega-branding in the 1980s. To understand Trump and his strategies, Klein says that one must understand how Trump leverages the psychology of modern commercial branding to influence large populations. Mega-branding gets people to attach their sense of personal identity to the brand. The human psyche has a fundamental need to connect with others, to belong to tribes. Corporate brands seek to create a tribe for their followers to join. It's brand loyalty on steroids. That is the premise of Chapter 1, How Trump Won by Becoming the Ultimate Brand. She starts with the history of how, in the 1980s, corporatio...

 I woke up yesterday with my mind ablaze with ideas on how to brand myself, how to present myself to the world as a team development consultant and leadership coach. I value agency and autonomy above most other aspects of work. When I was fresh out of college, I got a job as an engineer at Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo. It soon felt like I had entered the workforce as a drone in a massive machine, a mere cog. My security clearance was taking forever to process. I was given trivial work to do, tasks that seemed unimportant. It didn't take long for me to wish I could have more control of the work I did and how I did it. I wanted to exercise agency in my work. Well, an opportunity arose for me to go back to school and get an MBA. That's it! I'd become a decision maker, a manager, a boss of others! I'd be the one designing the work, the tasks that needed to be performed, and assigning those tasks to others. So I quit. I enrolled in the the MBA program at CSU Fresno....

I ran across a cool book at the Lynnwood library this week: The Message of You , by Judy Carter. It fits rather well into my growing YOU library, right next to: Business Model You, by Timothy Clark and Alexander Osterwalder The Startup of You, by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, and The Economy of You, by Kimberly Palmer. The Message of You is aimed at people who aspire to become professional speakers, but the message of this book is so much more than that. Carter's premise is that everyone has a compelling story to tell, something meaningful and inspiring, and that that could form the cornerstone of the reader's new career as a paid professional speaker. But your story can go farther. Much farther. Every blogger has a story to tell. Every writer. Well, everybody. So tell your story. In this Internet Age, people seem to thrive on anonymity, on hiding in the corners of cyberspace, staying unidentified and unknown. But we are seeing a revolution in cyberspace. The Internet ...

I'm looking forward to Monday morning. I know that many people don't. They drag themselves out of bed, get a cup of coffee, put on their longest face, and groan at anyone who says, "Good morning!" when they get to work. But I really am looking forward to getting to work on Monday. In fact, I think I'll get their a couple of hours early. I'll be teaching ("facilitating" in Google lingo) a two-hour workshop on "personal branding", based on the notion that everyone sends a message about their work ethic and their value to the workplace. Tom  Peters pioneered the idea in a story for Fast Company, The Brand Called You , back in 1997. More  recently, Dan Schwabel (and others) have taken up the message in stories like Personal Branding 101: How to Discover and Create Your Brand , published at Mashable.com in 2009. Yesterday, I was reviewing the slides and facilitator notes to refresh my memory for the class. Someone, probably the program manager w...