Welcoming complexity, embracing paradox
My friend Roberto Otamendi helps CEOs to get out of fire-fighting mode. They sit down with him regularly to think about strategy.
The personal brand in turbulent times
The world has become so complex that we have largely lost the capacity to order it, and with it the confidence to set strategies and plans fixed to a timeframe, however brief. Is this the death of strategy?
How your public actually reads you
The image your public holds of you forms quickly, from signals processed mostly below the level of conscious attention, and it is hard to change once it has taken shape. Every signal you emit, like…
Accumulating a reputational capital
The perception your public holds of you forms from signals it reads and organises through mental shortcuts. People do not spend time and energy analysing all we do and say and then making a reasoned…
How you write the story your public tells about you
While we rightly spend a lot of energy telling the story of our personal brand, the story that really counts is that which the public makes in their mind about us.
A template for authority building
Our public forms a picture of us from the signals they observe over time, through two mechanisms that operate mostly below the level of conscious attention. The first is heuristics: the mental shortcuts through which…
Why you must choose
Five years ago, if your personal brand did not show a sensibility for sustainability and inclusion you would have a problem. Is that still true? Five years ago, visibility tactics on LinkedIn gave you reasonably…
The infrastructure of choosing
You know the feeling. A new opportunity appears, then another, each one reasonable, each one slightly different from the last. You say yes to a project that sits at the edge of what you do…
Choosing your profile
In every relationship, we show a part of ourselves that is a curated selection of our identity. We act and talk with friends in a way that is different from the way we do in…
How to choose and win
Promotion is a system. It brings together everything we do to attract the attention of the people who matter to us, to reach them proactively, to make others speak about us in the terms we…
What is authority and why you need it for your personal brand
In May 1885, Geronimo led a group of 35 men, 8 boys and 101 women off the San Carlos reservation in Arizona and back into the mountains. He held no formal title in his tribe.…
How to build and sustain authority as a personal brand
In September 2025, Luca de Meo left Renault to become CEO of Kering, the Paris-based group that owns Gucci, Saint Laurent and Balenciaga. The appointment raised eyebrows in the luxury world. De Meo had spent…
How narrative builds authority
Authority is not something that we gain through the rational scrutiny of our public. People do not grant authority after carefully evaluating credentials or listing our achievements in a careful analysis. Authority is a feeling…
How to make authority visible and lift up your personal brand
Why are some people considered references in their field while others, equally capable and knowledgeable, remain invisible to the public that would benefit from their work? The answer often has nothing to do with their…
From competition to transformation
Let's face it: competition is hard and most of us operate in highly competitive environments.
Changing the game
When Ferran Adrià was building his reputation as a chef in the 1990s, the culinary world had a clear hierarchy. French cuisine owned the territory of sophistication and technique. Italian cuisine owned authenticity and tradition.…
What if: a new narrative for transformative personal brands
There is a level of value that goes beyond solving problems. When you ask what your clients can become as a result of working with you, rather than what problems you can resolve for them…
Promoting your personal brand from a place of possibility
Most promotional strategies are built around proof. You show your credentials, demonstrate your results, explain your methodology and hope that the accumulation of evidence convinces the right people to hire you. This works reasonably well…
Thriving in times of change: what we can learn from biology
When I was given responsibility for the marketing team that would develop what became the Nissan Qashqai, I brought with me a reputation built over years in communications and media relations. But I was conscious…
Personal branding when everything changes
In 1999, Carlos Ghosn arrived at Nissan with a mandate to save a company that was, by any honest measure, close to collapse. The Nissan Revival Plan he introduced was a structural reorganisation of how…