Page 30 - CCCA 278683 Magazine_Spring 2018

{ FEATURE }

"going through the crisis, there are two advisers I've
paid no attention to," said Michael McCain, CEO of
McCain Foods, to reporters during his frst press
conference of the Listeria Crisis of 2008, a tragedy
which would ultimately kill 23 people and sicken
tepping in front of the dozens more. "The frst are the lawyers and the sions that will ripple out beyond
cameras shortly after he second are the accountants. It's not about money or just you. And as the job market
slearned it was his com- legal liability. This is about our being accountable becomes more and more com-
pany’s food that had sickened for providing consumers with safe food." petitive, those who have mind-
people, McCain won the trust fully built their personal brands
of a frightened public long be- are more likely to succeed.
fore the crisis was even close to
being contained. Brave New World
Ed Burkhardt, CEO of MMA, the rail company whose train
derailed causing a massive explosion in Lac-Mégantic, took a By 2025, as many as one-third of the jobs we have now will
different approach. Showing up days after the disaster and jok- be automated. There is a 50% chance that AI will outperform
ing about needing a bulletproof vest, Burkhardt and the com- all human tasks within 45 years and all human jobs within
pany defected responsibility for the tragedy onto the train and 120 years.
track workers who had been on duty the night of the accident. Any task that requires less than a second’s worth of hu-
Months later, he refected on the “big pile of money” he had man thought will likely be turned over to AI—if it hasn’t been
lost because of the accident and commented that he was “also a already. And I don’t need to tell you that AI is disrupting the
victim of this whole thing.” legal profession.
Burkhardt’s company fled for bankruptcy within a year of Lawyers will have to reinvent themselves again and again
the accident. McCain’s returned to almost pre-crisis proftabil- to stay current in a changing job market. What won’t work is
ity within two years of the crisis. trying to out-robot the robots. Companies will be looking for
Each man became the public face of contrasting crisis com- those who can help interpret and explain the data that AI gen-
munications strategies which refected their personal brand- erates. That skill requires more, not less, humanity.
ing choices. Fortunately, building your brand also requires the same
skillset. Investing in your personal brand makes you infnitely
Branding Has Evolved more employable.

That might sound like an odd claim to make, particularly to Building Your Brand
those who still equate corporate branding with logos, and per-
sonal branding with clothing and voice tone. So where to start? First, defne the
Indeed, branding used to focus mostly on the “whats.” For fundamentals of your brand:
companies, that was often the look and feel of the physical rep-  Mission
resentations of a brand—logos, websites, repeated messages,
etc. Personal branding often referred to things like body lan-  Values
guage, clothing and other physical elements that signalled what  Vision
the person wanted the world to know about them.
your mission
Why Before What Simon Sinek wrote a very good book called Start with Why in
which he posits that great leaders (and you are the leader of
It’s not that the “whats” don’t matter, but increasingly we rec- your brand) inspire others by rallying them around the “why”
ognize that the “whys” underneath those “whats” matter even rather than the “how” or “what.”
more. Because at its core, personal branding comes down to Every brand, including yours, has a mission, and your mis-
who you are and what you stand for. sion is your “why.” It’s not the stuff that you do. It’s why you
Now maybe you’ll never have to step in front of the media are driven to do the things you do. It’s what gets you out of bed
and face a shocked nation anxious to get to the bottom of a every morning. It’s what keeps you going through the most dif-
tragedy that has cost dozens of people their lives. But, inevita- fcult of times. It’s the passion that separates you from others
bly, you will have to win the trust of others and make hard deci- who just go through the motion.

30 CCCA MAGAzine | SPRinG 2018 PRinTeMPS