Yesterday, Steve Roesler asked Will You Survive Your Branding? I’ve actually been struggling with this concept of personal branding and even though I’ve presented on the subject a few times, I’m still a bit of a skeptic. There has been something nagging at me, a voice inside that has grown steadily louder that something about personal branding doesn’t jive with me. But something about Steve’s post provided a pedestal for my inner voice. Here’s the full comment I left:

Lately, I’ve been thinking how great individuals of the past would have “branded” themselves. Think Ben Franklin could have put together an effective elevator speech lasting under 30 seconds? How about Tom Jefferson or Marie Curie? And for that matter…would they even have entertained the notion of engaging in personal branding?

It’s with this in mind that I continue to feel a bit sad about where we are right now. We’re expected to distill our essence down to something that can be drunk from a thimble. For those of us who curiously explore many things and have a bit of a renaissance soul, the exercise of personal branding is one that feels awkward and confusing.

The question that we face is: how to blaze a different path in today’s world? It’s not easy to swim against the current which preaches the necessity of the singular expertise, the narrowness of personal expression. Ahh, but maybe this is just the time to reinvent the renaissance thinker, doer, explorer, creator. Every challenge is an opening for opportunity.

Are you a fellow renaissance soul who openly rebels against the constrictions of today’s personal branding movement? Speak out and make your voice heard. We can be more than one thing. We can reclaim the idea of passionate eclecticism that guided the great minds of the past. What do you think?

Earlier this week, Michael Arrington at TechCrunch managed to get his mitts on some rather juicy inside information from Google. Turns out that the tech darling isn’t the career paradise that it’s been made out to be. For all the gushing that us outsiders did over their innovative benefits and employment practices, perhaps it was all just hyperbole. From the post:

One message stands out though in most of the posts – employees thought they were entering the promised land when they joined Google, and most of them were disappointed. Some of them wondered if it meant they were somehow lacking. One person sums it all up nicely:

“Those of us who failed to thrive at Google are faced with some pretty serious questions about ourselves. Just seeing that other people ran into the same issues is a huge relief. Google is supposed to be some kind of Nirvana, so if you can’t be happy there how will you ever be happy? It’s supposed to be the ultimate font of technical resources, so if you can’t be productive there how will you ever be productive?”

There are some cautionary lessons to be extracted from this if you’re not only on the hook for your organization’s employer branding but employee engagement.

The reality doesn’t match the expectation. This is a failure of the brand to deliver the expected experience. Consumers rail against companies that deliver poor brand experiences, particularly when the brand has been hyped to the nth degree (e.g., Chevrolet, Sprint, Microsoft Vista). So, why does employer branding get a relatively free pass?

Individuals wanted to work for Google because it was supposed to be different than the norm, had innovative benefits, promoted a fun workplace, etc., etc. Turns out that maybe these were a clever facade masking a workplace and company that were just humdrum. If you want to sell the sizzle, that steak better not come out limp and soggy.

Professional failing is personal failure. It pisses me off when I hear stuff like this. Why? Because there’s a hellacious management problem here that no one is apparently trying to resolve. If a manager is going to wear the big hat and call him- or herself a leader, they better start with making sure that their people are getting what they need to be – and feel – successful. If an employee is struggling with their work, you better believe that’s likely going to get internalized as a “personal” problem. It’s a one-way ticket to not only poor engagement but a morale freefall.

When the going gets tough, uniqueness gets crushed. Yeah, I know…it’s tough out there for business. I get it. Now get over it. Everybody’s impacted so don’t think for a second that you’re special (hell, even Microsoft is laying folks off). So rather than curl up in a ball do something that none of your competition is likely thinking about right now: become even more unique and remarkable. Trust me, your competitor is hoping you’ll lay low like them. Instead, do something that will make their management wet themselves. Actually engage in employer branding. Build a workplace model where the people you have are doing their best not because they’re scared to death they’ll lose their job tomorrow if they don’t, but because they genuinely care about their work and their organization. Go out and look for the talent that’s looking for a place to make a difference (there’s plenty of good folks out there now).

Don’t waste this perfectly good opportunity. Be a leader, show some guts, and build something special when no one else appears to be doing it.

In the Fall 2008 edition of the OD Practitioner [membership required], Peter Block writes a provocative article entitled Nothing is Next where he explores emerging trends in organizations. Block is one of the chief influences (along with Meg Wheatley and Bob Sutton) in my own work and he doesn’t disappoint here. One of the trends he highlights is Fearful Employees.

In a world of increasing consolidation and lessened customer choice, employees have been commoditized. Workers are treated as costs, not assets. The faster we can automate processes, outsource functions and send questions to a website, the happier we are. It is cost effective, but has created widespread insecurity so that people are as afraid of their bosses now as they were forty years ago when I began this work.

I had thought that when team building, larger group methods, decades of employee involvement and the results gained by the quality movement had become mainstream and part of the common knowledge, we would care more for our employees. I would have expected we might have reduced the social distance between levels. We would act as partners in our relationship with the boss. We would feel the place we work is where we belong. I don’t see it, maybe I am missing it, but the alienation and caution people feel about the workplace seems too painfully common.

He surfaces a disappointment that I think is shared by many who care about improving workplace dynamics and employee engagement. And it’s exacerbated now with the economy the way it is. Companies are in full survival mode with their focus squarely on managing through the short-term. Nothing wrong with that in principle; it would be irresponsible to not act on current business conditions. However, when does action merely become reaction? Was all this talk about employee empowerment and engagement just a bunch of crap, conditional on sunny economic conditions? Time to go back to the comfortable business basics of last century?

The real question that organizations of all types need to ask right now is…what is the opportunity in front of you right now to (re)create a business that changes the relationships with employees and customers?

As I progress into my Business Anthropology grad work, you’ll start seeing most of the discoveries, insights, and developed applications here either in the form of blogposts or downloadable resources. Look for a new Portfolio page soon.

Over the summer, I did some introductory research on culture in business. What might come as a bit of a shock to most managers within organizations is that the concept of “culture” that’s been thrown around for the last 30 years isn’t really culture in the purest (or at least anthropological) sense. Below is the introduction to my paper; you can download the full article here [pdf].

Culture in Business: Using a Symbolic Approach to Connect Organizational and Corporate Cultures

Introduction
In trying to understand the modern business organization, few concepts have been applied (and misapplied) by management and organizational theorists as frequently as culture. The genesis of this is likely the publishing of Deal and Kennedy’s Corporate Cultures and Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence, both best-sellers in the early 1980s (Hamada 1998:1; Gamst 1989:15; Jordan 1989:2). Both non-anthropological works had a considerable impact on business thinking and in many ways challenged the idea of what culture is. Since then, the idea that culture exists in organizations has grown in acceptance to the point where most business leaders now take it for granted. And herein lies a significant problem for organizations: over the past thirty years the richness and salience of the culture concept has been diluted and devalued by the prevailing conventional wisdom. It is considered yet another faddish management tool rather than a valuable social process that reveals the holistic nature of human group behavior.

Today, when management talks about culture within their organizations, they often focus on tacit qualities they want to encourage among their employees or they use culture as a branding tool for attracting new employees and retaining current ones. While I don’t want to completely disparage the intent behind these efforts, I do argue that these simplistic and directive efforts ignore the complex symbolic and individualistic meanings that exist within an organization. It’s these symbols that help define the structure of the culture and ultimately guide the behavior of the organization’s employees.

In this paper I explore how culture has come to be defined and applied in the business organization and how this differs from the more traditional concepts of culture as developed by anthropologists. This contrast will be important as I examine organizational culture as viewed from a symbolic analysis. This paper will show how the theories of symbolic anthropology can provide a useful understanding of culture that reveals how organizational actors formulate meaning and reality in their collective work.

Download the full article [pdf]