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I have recently been visiting Spain and will cover my personal reflections on Spain in a future blog. Whilst in Spain, I soon got into the habit of having dinner at 1030 PM and taking a siesta when the opportunity presented. After a siesta one day, I borrowed a laptop and for some reason googled my own name “alf oldman” and as always was amazed by the thousands of hits. I soon became captivated by this kaleidoscope of twenty years of data about myself, all in the public domain. I remembered that twenty years early, I had consciously set out to build a personal brand called “alf oldman“. In a future blog I shall share my story, including:
- Reaching and retaining number one status on Google
- Becoming number one specialist on LinkedIn
- Ranking number one on Twitter in a specialist area
This week a number of news stories made me reflect quite deeply on the current state of affairs in the World. I started to question whether there was a case for more personal branding to counter ever-increasing cancer of personal commodification that seemed to be enveloping society.
Firstly let me summarize the news stories that set the backdrop for my melancholy:
- Preparing for the Worst: The High Price of Abandoning the Euro (Der Spiegel)
- Habermas, the Last European: A Philosopher’s Mission to Save the EU (Der Spiegel)
- The truth behind the new jobless generation (The Telegraph)
- It’s the Economy: The Dwindling Power of a College Degree (The New York Times)
- The UK now faces a ‘lost decade’ (Financial Times)
- Pensions for private sector fall by a fifth (The Telegraph)
- UK women top of obesity league, and men are second – EU survey (The Guardian)
Regular readers of this blog will know that I have recently written about:
- Youth Unemployment, The Lost Generation and Reversing the Emerging Trends
- Drawing the Line Closure and Starting Again!
- Interim Management: Ten Emerging Trends and Outlook for the Future
- Twelve Open Questions for UK Government on its Strategic Vision for Shared Services
Given so much bad news, despair, gloom and promise of further austerity, it is hard to believe that policy makers and their leaders will have the statesmanship to provide effective leadership out of the crisis. Sadly, democracies are being subordinated and bureaucrats are now running countries, all at the behest of a powerful elite, who wish to stamp their own branding with increasing forcefulness and to marginalise those that stand in their way.
Against this background, individuals face agonizing challenges, uncertainties and increasing risk. This includes youth unemployment and older workers displaced by technology or offshoring. Public sector workers are being targetted and family owned businesses are being told that they do not know how to run their businesses in the national interest. Social mobility and a post-war belief in education is being challenged like never before. Minorities with privileged education and their privileged networks will perhaps be spared some of the worst of the pain.
The Public Sector and large corporates are increasingly treating individuals as commodities. Individuals face an agonizing choice between being “a commodity” or an “individual” based on personal branding. In the field of interim management, many traditional interims managers are either giving up or becoming contractors.
Personally, I have always been a passionate fan of Dale Carnegie, and Positive Thinking. There is now a huge “self-help” industry and advice abounds on personal marketing. Personal branding is a specialized type of personal marketing. The concept of personal branding was probably first introduced by management geru Tom Peters.
TO BE CONTINUED
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Reblogged this on Dr Alf's Blog and commented:
Looking back, this is worth a read. It’s one of our most popular blogs
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Personal branding will assist an interim or an aspirant employee diffentiate themselves from others when competing for assignments or full time work.
A sense of personal identity and a recognition that the seemingly all powerful malevolent forces in this world will eventually be swept aside is what I find sustaining.
One only has to look at the profusion of nature in practically any environment to see that the natural order of things is balance and equilibrium and not chaos.
The universe itself, according to Professor Sir Stephen Hawking is a multiverse comprised of 13 panes, each with a series of portals or “stargates”, which facilitate interstellar travel that would otherwise take trillions of years to be undertaken in an instant.
One of these portals sits within the museum in the capital of Iraq which was the first building to be placed under heavy guard when the Americans invaded that country and toppled Saddam Hussein.
The small elite who sit above all our rulers think that they are above this natural order and can go on creating wars, sowing dissent and confusion, financing reconstructions and collapsing the world financial system forever.
The first time round it was possible for them to crash the world financial system and profit immediately whilst blaming greedy banks and poor mortgage holders in America.
The second time round they overdid things and caused some damage to themselves, this time round their plan to create 10 regional blocs and fuse them together as one has backfired because Europe has failed to produce any nett new growth for 25 years or a single nett new job.
The architects of this folly came up with Globalisation and then Climate Change as a way to respectively, drive down wages and create a new way to tax the substance out of people. The plan was then to use the money to finance a world war against China and Russia. Now there is a proxy war between Africom and the Chinese for the mineral wealth of Africa and Turkey is being aided by Nato to invade Syria, a Russian ally, who have sent warships there plus very powerful missiles aimed at Turkey.
America already has warships there and off the coast of Iran at the behest of Israel who is keen for others to go to war on it’s behalf.
Europe was supposed via Nato to assist in the ultimate war for the Eurasian landmass but the Euro crisis intervened and a bailout fund which needed to be 2 trillion Euros is only 440 billion.
The rest it was hoped by the elite would come from China and the BRIC countries after the Germans put more money on the table.
The Chinese knew about the plans for war through their own Ministry of State Security and the Russians know through their FBU.
Consequently the Chinese will only help Europe by buying up infrastructure and Western banks as they have started to do in the UK with the purchase of Northern Rock by Richard Branson’s Virgin Money Group(the Chinese Sovereign Wealth Fund was Sir Richard’s partner).
This means the plans for war and the “reordering of the pieces on the global chessboard” desired by the architects for the Project For A New American Century(PNAC), have had to be delayed because Europe cannot bail itself out alone or without the aid of China.
In short, the elite who are by and large European and American Bilderbergers and the old Black Nobility have through their own greed and purported omnipotence, temporarily checkmated themselves, become divided and made fatal errors.
Their fallibility gives me cause to think that they will and have already miscalculated in other areas and will ultimately have to stop their meddling.
We collectively have to resist the drumbeat for war,not allow our sons and daughters to be sent anywhere on the basis of bogus threats and become as self sufficient as we can.
If we do that we can stand our ground,send these lunatics packing and when we Google our names we can remain true to ourselves.
John,
Many thanks for reading my latest blog and providing a detailed response.
I am pleased that you agree with me about personal branding.
With regard to Project For A New American Century(PNAC), this is not my field When I Googled the organization I came upon the following link which strongly suggests that PNAC has been disbanded http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century.
Again I was nor familiar with Bilderbergers, so I checked this out as well.
I’m uncomfortable with your comments about global/regional confrontation and possible wars for two reasons. Firstly, this has little to do with Personal Branding. Secondly, PNAC & Bilderburgers are outside my area of knowledge and expertise.