Developing Your Personal Brand: Best Practices From Thought Leaders

Coffee With Digital Trailblazers

00:00 / 01:00:15

Participants

Hosted by Isaac Sacolick, CEO of StarCIO

Special Guests

Nora Osman

Digital Trailblazers

Summary

This episode of Coffee with Digital Trailblazers focused on developing personal brands and thought leadership in the technology industry. Isaac moderated a discussion with several experienced speakers including Nora, Joanne, Martin, Derek, Joe, Heather, and Liz, who shared their journeys of building personal brands through writing, speaking, and various professional activities. The speakers discussed how they started their thought leadership journeys, the challenges they faced, and best practices for others looking to develop their personal brands. Key themes included the importance of consistency, finding the right channels that match your personality, being authentic, and starting with small steps before expanding your efforts. The speakers emphasized that building a personal brand is a marathon, not a sprint, and should be approached with authenticity and discipline.

StarCIO Research

Transcript

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Greetings everyone. Welcome to episode 168 of the Coffee with Digital Trailblazers. I am thrilled to have you here listening, participating, joining on the comment stream. This is one of the events that I’m hoping you ask your questions. This is a topic that I think impacts everybody who is in leadership.

It’s a topic for anybody looking for a job. It’s a topic for anybody that wants to be influencing.

It’s talking about developing your personal brand.

We’re going to have everybody here explain and share their journey of becoming a thought leader and in some cases opening their own businesses.

And I hope you all learn from this. This is going to be both a personal, truthful, learning, best practices, what to avoid and if you’ve ever had a question about this for transformation leaders, this is the time to ask it. This will be a micro live masterclass around this to kick things off. I just want to pay a little tribute to everybody who’s a normal speaker here at the coffee hour. And then Nora Osman, who is joining us, joining us for her second visit as a special guest.

And what you can see here is just a long list of different areas that we all contribute to. Thought leadership, developing our brand, developing our company brands, writing, speaking, podcasting, nonprofit work books and you know, contributing to associations. And I think with every single person here, I did not capture everything that’s on here. If you can go to the URL star cio.com Coffee Thought Leadership I’ll place this in the comments stream in just a little bit, but you can get access to this screen. Every one of these is a link.

And my suggestion for everybody here who is looking to become a thought leader and like I said, that should be all of you or is looking to think about branding themselves and that should be all of you.

Listen to everybody’s story here and connect with one or two of us either by making a connection on LinkedIn or go looking at some of the content they’re sharing or understanding how they’re positioning their brand.

You can reach out to them on the Digital Trailblazer community.

Many of my regular speakers are members of that. It’s at drive that starcio.com join if you have not joined that yet.

But all of their thought leadership is here and I’m going to make a commitment to share this screen. You know, I don’t know once every three or four episodes because we’re all adding to this.

It is all something that we’re very passionate about and I hope that you’ll share your questions and learn about how to brand yourself a little bit from this esteemed audience.

So with that, let’s just jump into our discussion today.

And I don’t remember exactly how this came up. It came up during one of our past coffee hours. But Nora, I want to start with you. I want you to think back to all of us were working day jobs somewhere in our leadership careers and something happened that got you thinking about contributing, publishing, writing, speaking, doing something with your voice, doing something around thought leadership, doing something that would eventually become part of your brand. I don’t think any of us. And you know, on the speaker group here, and correct me if I’m wrong, I didn’t wake up one day and decide I wanted to be a thought leader. I didn’t wake up one day and decide I wanted to create a personal brand. Somebody told me my startup needed to plug into the blogosphere in 2005 and so I started a blog and I just started sharing very minute best practices. I was a little bit more hands on at the time. There’s this thing called observability today and you can read about what I wrote as a standard for application logging as my very first blog post. And that’s how I got started.

And you could see from that dashboard that I left, I’ve been adding to things that I’m doing almost to a fault for 20 years now. So Nora, think back at that very first time you’re. You’re leading. You talk about your story in zero to hear your new book. I just posted a review on it on Amazon. Great, great book for those who want to understand how to lead from the trenches and move from individual contributor into leadership roles. So Nora, thank you for sharing your story. Go back to that first moment and share what you were thinking.

[00:05:13] Speaker B: Well, first, thank you for inviting me back. I really, really love this forum and I’m so, so happy that I can contribute. And as you were talking, I thought back to two things that I’m going to link together. So just bear with me. I was very focused on brand building internally in my last company because I was leading a large service management organization and we were at the early stages of creating an.

So I remember the moment I was in a big all hands meeting, probably close to 100 people present and I started to get them into this exercise of what do people think about when our team is mentioned? And they started to shout out words and I started to take notes and surprisingly most of the words started with P. Till this day, I still remember them. Passion, purpose, positivity, patience and pride. That’s what we end.

[00:06:07] Speaker A: Oh, oh, I gotta capture that. Say it again.

[00:06:10] Speaker B: Passion, passion, purpose, positivity, patience and pride.

So when those words got read out loud or said out loud, I said, oh my God, those are our core values. That’s our brand.

And so from that point on, I said, you know what, we all need to enact that all the time. And I went as far as actually prayer putting that onto a badge edition. You know how you have these badges that are all laminated? Well, I had those core values and the name of our group laminated to put on the back of the badge so that they wear it with pride. And if every once in a while this flips over, it’s a curiosity moment. So I started that journey of brand building internally.

But fast forward to a point where I felt like I needed to pivot to my next role. I was signed up with a coach, a phenomenal leadership coach. He doesn’t consider himself a coach. He considers himself a career concierge. I’m going to share his name because he’s amazing. Ken Ferguson.

And he listened intently and he knew that I was on this journey to move to the next C suite position. And what he said to me is, it sounds like you’ve done so much work on the inside of your companies. Everybody knows who you are, you have a lot of respect. You, you’ve transformed these organizations. But how much of what you’ve done do people know outside of your organization, outside of the vendors that have worked with you once in a while, outside of the people that have worked under you or your colleagues or your bosses?

And that was a huge aha moment because I realized I was non existent on the outside.

To the outside world, I was absolutely an unknown. Unless you met me at a conference once a year or whatever, nobody knew me.

So he said, I’m going to challenge you to do something.

Start telling some of these stories and articles on LinkedIn.

And he shared a person he was coaching who was doing once a week. And to me, that was a ridiculous once a week to actually write a real article that’s polished. But I said, you know what I can’t do once a week, but I will do every other week I will do something called Thoughtful Thursdays. And I’m going to make sure that I focus on something that just happened or something I learned or something that really affected me. And there it began. It was, I think February of 2021 or something that I started to do this.

And lo and behold, as I started to do that, my brand evolved Externally.

And I realized that I really enjoyed writing about these things.

And my community started to grow in leaps and bounds. I mean, literally, I went back a few weeks, a few months ago, and I looked at how much I was growing my LinkedIn community and it was something like 30 to 40 new contacts a year back then.

Now I do that in a week. The amount of people that either follow me or that I connect with because I’ve expanded my brand so much and I’m upwards of 120, 130 articles now.

That has really, really been a huge part of my identity shift. Going to more external facing, focusing on truth telling, explaining these moments of truth, sharing the stories and the lessons and the frameworks in a very positive and more open way. You never really know who your readers are or listeners are. But that’s really what put me on the path to writing a newsletter, eventually writing the book, getting acknowledged publicly, getting awards, because I leaned in and I listened to that advice. Build your brand externally, share what you know and make sure that you are allowing yourself to be vulnerable.

[00:10:05] Speaker A: You have a lot to unpack there. The very first thing I want all my speakers to do is share something about what is your brand, your five p’s, Joanne’s five whys. I have a lot of elements to mine, so I just put you always be transforming. That comes from my book, Digital Trailblazer.

Two really important pieces of advice here, I think worth understanding is picking modes of expression. That’s easy for you.

It doesn’t. You know, if you’re not interested in video or audio, don’t do a podcast just because your friend told you to do, but pick a cadence that makes sense, right? You are going to be involved as a thought leader.

You know, whether it’s, you know, being on social media daily or writing a blog post every other week or posting something on YouTube once a month, you need that regular scheduling. And then another part of this is recognizing that you know, your audience is not going to tell you who they are. You know, the tools that are out there that will explain who’s reading your blog or who’s reading your book.

It’s not as transparent as you think, and so it’s horrible.

And so the only way you, you, you address that is you have to define your audience. You have to speak to an audience that you want to reach.

And when you do that, well, they will respond.

[00:11:33] Speaker B: Go ahead, challenge something you said a little bit. You know, I tend to not always agree with everybody, but that’s just my style.

I would say that you may be afraid of a channel, and that’s okay. And I would say, do it anyway. Try it out, because you’d be surprised. Did I think I was going to be writing 120 articles? I was going to be a fellow in the institute. I did not know that. I just was challenged to do something outside of my comfort zone. And it manifested over time in much more comfort and a more natural way. So you won’t always know that it’s going to evolve to that until you try it.

[00:12:14] Speaker A: Absolutely. I don’t think you disagree with me at all.

I think we’re on the same page there. Let’s go to Joanne. Joanne, I know you’re only here for part of this session. We’re talking about that very first moment where you left a. You know, your responsibilities of your job and thinking beyond your resume and saying, I need to contribute to thought leadership. I need to develop my brand. Tell us, go back to that first moment, what you were thinking.

[00:12:47] Speaker C: So I. I kind of fell into this because I had been.

I grew up in the corporate environment like many other people, where, you know, you go step by step by step up a food chain. And I was just about to take on a role as CIO in a Fortune 500.

And I had always had a certain amount of alacrity in my business dealings across organizations. I was known and I had achieved a level of respect, etc. And then one day I was talking to the current CIO and a bunch of other folks at a board meeting and I said, you know, there’s a meeting coming up within our industry and we really should have a presence there because this is around the beginning of B2B and we’re jumping on this bandwagon and we need to make that known to people. And they were like hemming and hawing. And finally I got a bit of a budget prepared and I said, okay, we’re going to host a town hall type meeting.

And I was very nervous about it because even though I had spoken publicly previously because of work I had been doing in developing technical standards, I really had never organized something like this outside the organization, etc.

And knowing that I was carrying a heavy mantle of a mandate, it was a big deal. And basically what the board and everybody else was saying to me, maybe 25 people will show up for this. We didn’t expect anything, you know, more than that. And they thought it was like, well, maybe you’re not the right face for it. Maybe we should get marketing involved.

And I started to get very nervous about it. Came the day of the event, 283 people showed up.

The venue was overflow. There were people in hallways.

It was a bit of a facilities nightmare. But I spoke, I said my piece got a lot of accolades for it.

And that’s when I said I need to develop a brand voice of my own outside the four walls of an organization, but still staying within the boundaries and carrying that mantle. And about three years later, started being recruited by the Big Five and Gartner and everybody else. And that’s how I ended up becoming an industry analyst, because I found that voice and I found it both in a technical circle and then very slowly began to translate that into C Speak and boardroom discussions.

So that’s how I started. And to this day, I still participate heavily in a variety of organizations developing technical standards. I’m going to be at NIST at the end of May doing something on AI and manufacturing. But the notion is develop your brand through organizations that are somewhat outside the four walls of your confine, and then take that a little bit broader every single opportunity that you have. I would tell you also, at the very core of me, I’m actually very shy.

And so these kinds of public speakings and events and whatever, I do many podcasts, I do many articles publicly. It’s.

That’s how it began, began, began. And like Nora, I challenged myself to break through that barrier that was basically internal, you know, empathy, the E stuff, the five whys, all of those are personal branding things, I guess. I haven’t developed them in any particular way. They’ve just come out by osmosis.

[00:16:40] Speaker A: Joanne, thank you for that. And you see, I left one comment here. For those of you working at companies, the easiest expression to become a thought leader is to go to a conference and be a speaker at it.

And just about everybody on this call is leans toward introversion, including myself. There is a bit of a fear factor when you’re up there on stage for the very first time.

But you have to realize something. The audience generally is kind. You know, unless you’re an analyst or you’re really positioning yourself as sharing something that’s controversial, for the most part, audiences are kind and you’ll build up your confidence to continue speaking. And it’s the very easiest way to get there out there. It’s the easiest way to get your company to pay for you to go to conferences.

Highly, highly recommended. Let’s go around the room. Martin is raising his hands first. Martin, think back to your first moment. Want to hear about it?

[00:17:45] Speaker D: Okay, so I’m going to tell kind of two different kind of histories. One related to personal brand, one related to getting yourself out there and being a speaker at events because they’re kind of parallel but different stories. So let me start with the personal branding. So like quite a lot of people like Joanne mentioned, I spent my first. I sometimes say my career is in three sections. My first career was 23 years with a very large, you know, Fortune 100 company.

And what often happens in those types of companies is you become a function of your position as opposed to having a brand in your own right.

So I’m Martin Davis. I work at this company.

And quite a lot of those really big companies like that, you may get a chance to go to conferences occasionally and things like that, but a lot of them don’t go to lots of conferences or don’t encourage you to be a speaker because they’re very. Quite a few companies are very private about what’s going on. Depends on the company, depends on the culture and things. But a lot of very big companies, you can get lost within them.

So that was kind of my first career. And then I kind of moved out of that company and started to become a CIO in a number of companies.

And it was at that point I kind of realized that I wasn’t Martin that works at this company.

I was Martin who is a really good cio.

So it’s kind of that realization that you are more than just that company. You are who you are, you are what your profession is or you are what you want to put yourself out there. And at that point I started actually saying, okay, I’ve done a lot of studying on, for example, change management. I’ve been studying on change management since the early 2000s.

And I had. So I started a blog and I started writing about IT leadership. I started writing particularly about change management. That was around about 2011. I started doing that. And yeah, since I’ve done 150 posts, I don’t post very often or anything else. So 150 posts on that side of things and also led me to starting another blog on Industry4O and IIoT in that in 2019 and there’s not 26 posts on there. So started writing about things that were really came part of what I was studying and believing in and things like that, just putting that out there. And those have been very rewarding from my own perspective because what I found was if I was writing about something that was pertinent to what I was doing, then it forced me to study and research that More. And through writing I actually structured my thoughts so the writing was putting it out there. Also helped me to with my day job in actually doing the work as well. So it’s kind of mutually thing. But that thing around deciding realizing who you are is all important.

You’re not just a function of the company you’re working for. And you get a lot of people traditionally that stayed with the company all their lives. And it’s just, yeah, I am person X that I work, who works for this company.

So that’s one of the key, key mindset changes you’ve really got to get into.

Then the.

The second piece is I wanted to talk about kind of public speaking, conference speaking, things like that.

And I was a little bit shy, so back when I was in college, I forced myself to. And I liked music. So I started doing a little bit of DJing, college discos and things like that, which kind of brought me out of myself a little bit.

[00:21:36] Speaker A: And then you’re shy, but you.

Yeah, seriously. And then I started. Martin.

I was shy and I was. I was. I tried being as a lead singer in a band in my high school.

[00:21:48] Speaker D: Seriously. Seriously.

[00:21:50] Speaker A: I was.

[00:21:50] Speaker D: Yeah, I was always a bit kind of. My social graces weren’t the best and whatever else. So I. I did some of that. And then after I left university, I joined a charity radio station. And that got me doing more speaking, practicing speaking and doing outside broadcast for the radio station as well. So it kind of got me out doing things publicly. And you kind of lose a lot of those inhibitions. Yeah, you’re quite prepared to go up on stage with a microphone and just talk about whatever in front of an audience and those types of things. Just kind of volunteering to do something.

[00:22:23] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:22:24] Speaker D: And then later on I got invited to actually do a conference presentation. So I did a conference presentation.

And yeah, it develops from there, but some of it is just going and doing it. Yeah. And volunteering these unpaid gigs. They’re things that you can do and you can be very rewarding. And as Isaac said, you’re not going to get an audience that’s being abusive to you unless you’re being a total idiot.

[00:22:49] Speaker A: Love it. Martin.

The idea, if you’re working inside enterprise, being able to translate something you are doing to a best practice that doesn’t, you know, reveal intellectual property or a company secret. Being able to write about it publicly, I think that’s really important. I mean, that’s essentially how I got started. Let’s keep going around the room. Let’s go to Derek.

Derek How’d you get started?

[00:23:20] Speaker E: Good morning.

[00:23:21] Speaker F: So mine started my mindset in college, out of college. And when I first started my first job, it was working as a prototype design engineer. And I was asked to develop things that were going to be resilient, high availability. And that concept stuck with me. So as I went through corporate industries from one to another, I always would work with developing their product, but also how to make it more resilient. And people started looking at that and they said, you know, they had the standard product, and then there was things that they would ask me to do. What would you differently? And I would tell them, and they said, I like it. So I started being put on special teams. So they said, derek helps develop resilience, whatever product we’re dealing with, and it makes sense. So this kind of stuck with me. And I said, because I was being put on special teams with every corporation I was working with, what I was really helping to do is transport transitional enablement and helping them figure out how they can get the customer beyond what they were selling. And by doing that, I realized in 2008 I might as well do this for myself. I decided to leave corporate industry.

And doing that, I looked at what can I do that will be a differentiator in the marketplace to help businesses really understand how they can do that transitional enablement for cyber resilience. So I was focused on security quite a bit. And part of that process was looking at how I could be that differentiator and offering providing, as mentioned earlier, with the five Ps. But mine was looking at confidence, integrity, endurance and resilience. And that transitional enablement allowed me to work with customers that were trying to figure out how can they get from point A to point B while still maintaining their business operations and generating revenue. What’s caused me to start a company called Continuum Strategy as a continuum, if you’re starting on a line and you’re moving from one place to a new place without skipping a beat in the process.

And as I started working through this, you talked about speaking. I was asked, because the, the mindset that I had, somebody said, well, you’re doing cyber resilience, you’re doing strategy, doing transitional enablement. Have you ever thought about speaking?

And I said, no, I have not. So I had somebody reach out to me. They said, well, Infosec World in ISC Square, they’re actually looking for speakers. And because you speak on cyber resilience, that would be a great topic because you’re talking about the transition of that. And I said, okay, I’ll try it out. So this was in 2015, and I was nervous. I put together an abstract. They liked it. And I did my first presentation. 100 people in the room.

[00:25:40] Speaker B: And.

[00:25:41] Speaker F: And in doing that, I was looking at delivering my message, but also making sure I was being relevant as far as what people were taking away from my message.

And I thought, okay, I did okay. But what I found out afterwards, I did better than okay. And they said, well, can you write another paper? We want you to come back.

So from 2015 to even now, I’ve been writing these papers and going to these speaking stages, from ISC Squared to Security Congress, and helping them figure out how to do strategies now work with artificial intelligence and getting their mind wrapped around resilience, thinking, what does that look like? And how could I help them better be proactive with the things that they were doing? And this translated, this resilience, not only from just the cyber stuff, but 10 years ago, I actually became a prostate cancer survivor. And part of that was because I came from three generations of prostate cancer. And somebody said to me, with your story and your mindset with resilience, you should take that story about the prostate cancer and you plan it for it, because you came from a generational aspect of that. And I said, okay, let me think about that. And I did. And then, sure thing enough, when I started doing that, it started resonating because other people are trying to figure out how they can navigate this. So the resilience mindset is something that stuck with me, and that’s kind of been my brand, how to take people from where they are to where they need to be, knowing the challenges that they would be facing along the way. And in doing that, also, I’ve been able to resonate and work with different companies and helping them to figure out how can they get from point A to point B by helping them understand, by asking the question, what do I need to do differently to overcome the challenges that are in front of me? And by doing that, that’s what I’ve continued to do. So I enjoyed it, I continue to expand on it. And it’s one of those things that’s dynamic. So the brand continues to tweak based on the changes in the environment, the challenge that we’re faced with. But my whole focus has been resilience moving forward.

[00:27:30] Speaker A: I think your whole message has been, how can I help? I mean, I think that’s the one thing listeners should really take away from this. I mean, yes, part of your motivation in building your brand is for yourself. But if all that comes across, it’s very easy to read, you know, and you just won’t build an audience around that.

It’s what a lot of marketers get wrong. You know, it’s really about, you know, how you are helping other people who probably are going through a similar situation or have similar questions or need, you know, some expertise around. I think that’s really important. And then one of the things, the harder things today you mentioned is where can you differentiate? You know, all of us got ourselves started when we were much younger in our careers, which I highly encourage all of our listeners to do. But you know, there’s this thing called language models out there. And if you’re going to talk about, you know, generic stuff and put all your heart into telling something that people already know, you know, the reality is they can get them those answers from a language model today and it doesn’t help. So I think that’s the hard part today is having a unique voice where you’re actually helping people.

Joe, take me back.

How did you get your start?

[00:28:54] Speaker E: Do you want to do your break? Because I’m probably.

[00:28:57] Speaker A: I want to hear your yours first. And I’m going to take my break.

[00:28:59] Speaker F: Okay.

[00:29:00] Speaker A: I have a question for Heather that I want her to think about during the break.

[00:29:04] Speaker E: All right, fair enough. Well, there are three reasons I think that you want to have a strong brand.

The first is you want to get a job, right? You’re, you’re unemployed. The second is you want to develop business. You, you have some product or service that you want to sell. And the third is sort of altruistic. It’s to give back to the community. I want to take you through the history of my career, Isaac. I promise it won’t take the whole 30 minutes we have left.

As an undergraduate I worked on a government sponsored project and I had to write code.

Now I’m dating myself and Fortran. NC66 Fortran wrote about a million lines of code to build a simulation model, a highly complex network simulation. Way, way back in my college days, I was asked to present my portion of the model and to justify it, explain it to a relatively small audience. It was only about 25 people, but they were the heads of the IT function at every major institution in the country like MIT, Stanford, you know, all ahead, all the top colleges, these were the top technology guys. I had to stand up in front of them and explain my complex model that gave me self confidence that you can’t buy.

And that was kind of level zero for my career.

Then I went on to be a partner in a small consulting firm. I was a hunter, what I call a hunter chef.

I had to find it. Then I had a cook it needed because I not only had to get the business, but I had to deliver it. And that’s where I really developed grit.

You know, you know the old saying, right? You don’t, you don’t catch anything, you don’t eat, you starve. So I was a hunter chef for about 11 years.

Then there was a very fortunate thing. I was able to pivot and become not a consultant, but actually a line manager. I was director of IT and then CIO at a few companies.

And here, as some of the others have cited, I developed leadership skills both out of need and out of desire to be successful.

And along with that, I wanted visibility. I wanted visibility for my company and I wanted visibility for me. So I was a speaker at a number of conferences and I attended a lot of conferences and joined professional associations where my leadership skills and indeed my whole professional career was really shaped and honed and, and beat into, into a good, a good shape.

Then in 2011 I was unemployed. And so my motivation for having a brand sort of developed out of that need to find my next opportunity. And that’s when I initiated my blog.

I had been a speaker, I was engaged in various networks of different business associations. And I was playing with Google at the time, their teams like platform. So I started writing about things and at one point I had almost 30,000 people following my blog. I have about 200, over 200 entries in my blog. I don’t write much anymore. I occasionally write something if I’m inspired. Like this show has inspired me in the past.

But that, that created that brand awareness and it was an opportunity for me to really look at myself and understand what’s my secret sauce? What? What. As I look back over my career, what is it that made me different, unique? What was my superpower?

And I came up with this tagline, chaos to order.

I take messed up IT departments or dysfunctional groups and I straighten them out. And as I look back at the couple of opportunities I had before that and the subsequent opportunities I had, it’s very much reaffirming that that was my strength. Natural leadership in the, in the sunset of my career, where I am now, it’s all about that third part. Give back to the community.

Very active in sim. As you know, I run the MIT program. Every week I talk about building your brand and the need for networking and the need to keep a positive attitude and looking forward. And I could talk another 30 minutes on that.

But it’s, you know, it’s sim.

I sit on a couple of boards of nonprofit organizations obviously participate here, which I enjoy thoroughly. Every Friday I go to the Spark conference and I go to a lot of other networking opportunities to help other people and to give back. So that in a thumbnail sketch hopefully didn’t take too long. But that’s been my journey.

[00:34:01] Speaker A: Joe, that was an incredible story. You know, I captured a pseudo phrase about your brand. I fixed the broken, but that’s not what you say. What is your actual I’m a chaos to order guy. I am the chaos to order guy. Can you fix that for me while I go into my break? Folks, thank you for joining this week’s coffee with digital trailblazers. We’re talking about developing your brand best practices from all these thought leaders.

I shared a dashboard. It’s a PDF whatever it’s@starcio.com Coffee Thought Leadership. Thought leadership. You can see the URL on the right hand side. I’ll paste it in again for you.

This links to all of the thought leadership that are speakers here have to offer from their own personal brand, their writing, their thought leadership, their businesses.

I encourage you to get to know a couple of us as all of you should be thinking about avenues of developing your personal brand.

That can come in the form of speaking, it can come in the form of writing. I love this idea from Keith about speaking and being a professor or teaching somewhere.

You know, Joe is involved in the MIT program. That’s the member in transition program at SIM and at nonprofits.

So there’s a lot of different ways that you can grow who you are and what you’re doing outside of the walls of where you’re working. And as Martin mentioned, you know your brand as a CIO or ciso, whatever you are at your company, that’s temporary.

And so what we used to say is stay current because of the pace that technology is changing. But I think today the most important thing is even more important than that. It’s really hard to stay current.

But you have to use your experiences to create a narrative and that narrative is going to take you to some of the places that Joe described. Why brand? Get a job, get a business, give back to your community. There’s loads of other reasons to do that. Heather, I’m sorry I didn’t ask you the question beforehand to think about one thing I hope you will comment on. Some folks work in industries and for companies that are more particular about letting their Employees go out and speak or write or do anything. Public facing, I get this all the time. I don’t know if I can come on the coffee hour because I have to clear that with my communications department and I’m not sure if I can do that yet. I actually had a speaker last week that I wanted to bring on that couldn’t do that. So, Heather, I’d love to hear how you got started and any thought for people who that want to do this but feel like they’re a little constrained from their companies. Hi, Heather.

[00:36:54] Speaker G: Hi. Thank you.

I don’t know if I’m going to. I think everyone that has spoken so far resonates with the audience in some way or shape or form.

I kind of fell into it after being downsized three times. First time, shame on them. Second time, shame on me. And third time, what are you stupid? You have to be prepared.

So I finally decided that I had to take.

That I had to take control of my life.

And I said, what is it that I really like to do? And if I looked about in my, in my past, things that have come in and out and job opportunities, and it always revolved around building teams, working in recruiting, connecting people and finding stuff.

So I thought about how I could combine all of those things and recruiting was the natural result.

I allowed myself to work underneath someone else and realizing, why am I doing it for him?

I know what to do now and I.

And I can do it on my own. So it’s. It basically was taking that leap. But even in that, you think, oh, I can just go find people to go fill a position where you still have to find the position. And I found myself. I’m very busy. I would say I’m. I’m very busy. But busy doing what?

So I ended up joining a group. I was very fearful of it. It was a lot of money.

And what I. I learned techniques, I learned strategies, I made contacts and I just gained the confidence to move forward.

So in connecting people, I see the value of changing someone else’s life and not just, you know, from business, from investment banking, filling, lining the pockets of other people. So this was my give back because I can change someone’s life by giving, helping them to clarify what it is that they’re looking for and finding them a new job.

I think Joe said about the secret sauce, it’s recognizing what your strength is. You know, you can say it’s your superpower, whatever it is that the description that resonates with you, it’s being introspective enough to say, this is what I’m good at. And then once you realize or you think you know that you’re good at and you want to share that, you have to get to a certain place where you believe that someone else cares what you have to say. And I think for those of us that are introverted or shy or just not ready to take the leap into public speaking, speaking out in a safe environment like this coffee hour has helped me. I don’t feel the nervousness that I used to feel anymore.

Thinking of joining other podcasts and speaking, and I’ve been invited to so many, I think, because I speak every week on this. So this has been a great entree. So the first one, you don’t even realize they come organically, but it’s about confidence. It’s about what you have to say has to be authentically.

[00:40:11] Speaker A: You.

[00:40:12] Speaker G: You have to know what you’re talking about and being able to say, I don’t know.

But sometimes it just happens because you have to and be willing to take that risk.

And if it takes a little bit longer to get out and, you know, maybe I don’t, I don’t know what session Isaac, where I started to speak more comfortably, but it was well into the three digits, I’m sure of episodes. So it’s just making you feel comfortable in your own skin and being in an environment with people who make you feel comfortable and support you.

[00:40:50] Speaker A: Love it. Heather, do you have any advice for those people who feel constrained by the companies they work for about publishing, about speaking?

What should they do?

[00:41:01] Speaker G: Well, I think it’s first of all about the topic and you have to be careful with being political. So if you’re going to speak about that, make sure that you’re going to, you know, take any backlash. But if it’s on the industry that your company is in, present it to them in a way that shows that you are supporting the organization, positively supporting it. Don’t never badmouth, never go against.

And if you are part of the corporate structure and this goes a little bit against, you’re not defined by your company. But if you’re speaking out and you’re saying you’re a member of this community, this company, you a little bit are representing them. So some things you just have to go with the process and ask in advance so it’s not last minute, and just find out what the parameters and rules are. And if you have to follow them, so be it.

[00:41:59] Speaker A: Ask in advance so it’s not the last minute. I think that’s really good advice.

If anyone listening is struggling with this, do reach out to me. I had that experience after my company was acquired about 20 years ago.

And my company at that time was very encouraging me of me writing and speaking and the acquiring company not so much.

And their employment contract basically said that I’d have to stop and I left that business as part of that.

All the more reason from Heather’s recommendation is you don’t want the path to be paved for you, you want to pave it for yourself. And I had that long history of being a thought leader to ride upon to get me my next role. So thank you for that, Heather. Liz, where. How did you get started?

[00:42:53] Speaker H: Oh my goodness, how did I get started?

I was just a geek, you know, literally a coder, a geek. That was it. Whatever you put in front of me, I would dive into it, make it the best I can, and that’s how I built my reputation. And for the first X years, maybe even 15 years of my career, I was just a coder and a technical geek. And what I realized that at some point there’s only so many languages you can master and that maybe there was challenges with dealing with people and understanding businesses. And that was actually more interesting because it was not only because it was more soft, but it was less defined.

And I also realized that a lot of technologists really don’t know how to communicate and don’t really understand business. And so as I moved in towards project management, program management, working with, you know, business leaders and creating that bridge between business and technology, I mean my PMO skills naturally just, just came out.

And then eventually I realized that here I am in the room with all these quote unquote high powered execs and all of them have MBAs except me.

Maybe I should fix that. And so I went to Columbia and got my MBA and then fixed that problem so nobody could talk circles around me anymore. And the more that I worked in that vein, I realized how much I love strategy and how much I really had a good feeling for value.

And so taking what I know about how to organize a portfolio, track a portfolio, KPIs, project management, agile, all the different methodologies, and taking that and actually bringing it to the fore in terms of lining that up with strategic initiatives, making sure it matches to a company strategy, understanding how there’s a, a line that runs from the tagline through the strategy, all the way through initiatives, into the business units, into whatever projects are doing and all the way out to the output they’re producing and beyond a project to make sure that KPIs actually deliver on that.

That’s where my value lands and you know, being able to speak about that.

I’ve worked with Joe P. For a long time working on my brand.

He is the goat, there’s no question.

And a lot of the, the way that you own your brand does come from cultivating your thoughts in writing. So commenting and articles. And even if you’re commenting on other People’s posts and LinkedIn, it really does. I mean, a lot of people said it’s here today, but it helps you refine your message and who you are and what you have to offer to people.

[00:46:05] Speaker A: I think what you’re describing, Liz, you’ve heard from everybody else that as you are sharing more, it expands your platform, it expands where your comfort zone is, expand your skill sets, captures more areas where you can contribute.

And you know, I’m going to disagree with Heather a little bit.

You have to have some expertise in what you’re presenting a writer about, but don’t feel like you have to become an expert first.

You know, yes, if you’re going to do that in a paid engagement as an analyst, that’s a different story. But for most people, you might get some negative feedback at some point in your contributions and take that as learning. But don’t worry, wait for your becoming the expert in the room before you’re starting to contribute. I think that’s an important lesson for everybody.

[00:46:59] Speaker H: 100% consistency actually is more important that you’re consistently giving your message out. I mean, look at how many articles you’ve written, look at how many blogs you’ve done, look at every, how we do digital trailblazers every Friday. It’s a testament to your consistency.

[00:47:16] Speaker A: Thank you, Liz. Let’s go to John and then I want to bring Nora back for a question that I’m going to close out on. Go ahead, Liz.

[00:47:24] Speaker I: Isaac, thank you.

[00:47:26] Speaker A: Sorry. Go ahead, John.

[00:47:27] Speaker I: Yeah, thank you so much for having me on. And, and I just love to hear what people have to say. And, and my, my career has really been pretty non traditional and I really grew up in tech consulting and I got a brand in the company as somebody that fix things and build services and build, you know, human based services and then, and then launched a lot of, you know, building tech services, web services and things that were often for product companies. And one of the things I learned is if you are a utility player and you, you know, for 20 years I had people call me saying, hey, I had this problem. Is there any chance you can, you can help me with it. And you know, I’ve had people call me to like, hey, can you move to China to work on something? And. And I ended up not moving because we had her third kid. And going to startups and other things, IoT companies and analytics companies and services companies and you know, 20 years of being asked to work on something.

But when you actually go to think about who you are and what your personal brand is, one of the things is if you’re a utility player, you can really have a story that comes out like mud.

And so one of the things I’ve really kind of learned over the last couple years is you really have to think about, about what parts of your story do you tell and what parts do you not tell. And I got a really good lesson on this one, which is this is like 10 years ago. I ran a record to report it portion for a very, very large tech company for about a year. And it wasn’t my favorite thing. And so my mentor said, be sure you never ever talk about that ever again in the future so you’ll never get staffed on something like that. And I’m like, oh yeah, that’s great. And so, yeah, so if you are a utility player and, and you want to have a good story, you really have to think about what stories you talk about, which stories you don’t. And it’s really good to just intentionally talk about the things that are contributing to your story. Otherwise it all comes out like mud. And that really is confusing to people.

[00:49:21] Speaker A: I love that. I actually put that on the notes, John, and there’s a great book on this. I’m going to try to find it and put it in the comments while we’re still here. And one of the things they advise is actually to write a one line story and a spreadsheet every single day because that becomes your portfolio and then you have some choice, right? Then you don’t have to tell, you know, a story that doesn’t make sense for an audience or something that you should just keep private. I think that’s something to just be cognizant of. I want to bring Nora back. We’ve got 10 minutes. Nora, you and I follow a similar path. We went from one medium to another for me. I went from blogging to speaking to video to course.

I’m sorry, video to book to course to this coffee hour. I’m sort of like spread all over the place. I don’t know if I would recommend that for everyone.

And then Nora, you share with me just all the avenues that you’re sharing also, like me, a lot of articles, a lot of podcast appearances now. Great book that’s out there.

What are some of the realities people should have in their mind? You know, it’s one thing to take a first step out and start building your brand.

You and I, I think, in one can argue, we’ve spread ourselves very wide in all of our different avenues. So what are some of the realities people should have as they’re embarking on sharing their thought, leadership and brand?

[00:50:54] Speaker B: Well, it’s. It’s capacity, right? It’s a matter of how consistent can you show up and do things where you’re not diluting your brand because you do it to.

To, I guess, randomly, right? So, for instance, my newsletter is a weekly newsletter that means it has to go out every week. It’s not an option. And it’s called 2 cent Tuesday. So if I’m late and it goes out Wednesday, that’s not great, you know, so there’s a discipline factor. If you’re approaching a certain channel and you set the stage for it to be a certain way, you have to go in eyes wide open.

After writing every other Thursday, I was just sharing this on my keynote on Wednesday.

I kind of got tired. I was like, I had a Forrest Gump moment where I said, I think I’m done running now. And I didn’t think I needed to do it every other Thursday. I don’t want to force an article out. I want it to be so much more natural.

And so if it comes to me, great. I think I have enough of what’s happening in my world that I’m going to share it when it’s interesting and it has impact, and instead of just doing it because of a discipline.

And so I would say that you have to remember to have fun doing what you’re doing.

And if you’re not having fun, then you need to stop because then it’s not going to be authentic. And people can feel that. You know, I had that first keynote and sorry, Derek, you couldn’t join. And I know that, Isaac, you wanted to be there. And it was really, really awesome to be in front of a small crowd on a Wednesday night in New York City and to talk about something from the heart and to talk about the book. I didn’t force that to happen. It kind of happened naturally, and I found myself living in the moment, and that’s why it landed the way it did it. So I think whatever avenues or channels we choose to.

To go, we have to recognize our own capacity. We have to remain authentic, make sure that the clarity of the messaging remains at the top and we have fun.

[00:53:03] Speaker A: Thank you, Nora. It’s really good advice.

I think a number of us have talked about the consistency and the cadence. I think having fun is really important. There are times, yeah, I feel like I’m done, you know, and I’m toasted out. And then there are other times I feel like that marathon runner that, you know, is itching to get on that treadmill and start writing again.

I have enough to share and I’m in the right moments around it. So start slow and get used to the feeling. And as you go from I’m trying this to I’m going to make this a channel, make sure that you can deliver it with consistency and cadence. Really love that is

[00:53:47] Speaker B: it’s a marathon, not a sprint. If you approach it that way, then you pace yourself and you do not burn out quickly.

[00:53:53] Speaker A: Thank you, Nora, author of Zero to Hero. Great book.

Highly recommend it. I got six minutes, Derek Martin and Joe, I want to hear from all of you. Go ahead, Derek.

[00:54:04] Speaker F: Yeah, As I mentioned earlier, I love the, the passion statement that Nora had mentioned and also the transparency bill. So she said it’s, it’s not a race, you know, it’s. It’s a long game and I think people need to be consistent with that understanding. It is a long game. As your brand new statement, you need to be able to state a brand that’s going to translate complexity into clarity. You need to be able to focus on that consistency. But also notice that your brand will evolve as times change and things change. The root, the core of your brand will remain the same, but it may pivot a little bit just to get that message out. And the most thing also just, you know, the resilience of your brand is going to be tested. You know, the people that interact with you, the people that comment on you, the people are going to criticize your, applaud you. Those things are going to happen and just be ready for it and just know that, you know, you’re going to be you. But as you come, as you’re authentic to you and you’re passionate about it, it will prevail.

[00:54:54] Speaker A: Thank you, Derek Martin.

[00:54:58] Speaker D: I think I would add a couple of thoughts. One is be concise in what your brand is. Try to say. You heard Joe say, you know, chaos to order. Yeah.

Have that kind of elevator pitch, that kind of real brief ability to explain what you are. That’s real, really key.

And then the second thing I would say is if you’re Thinking of doing writing or you think doing public speaking? Look for non traditional ways to in order and safe ways that you can actually do that. Yeah, I said I joined a charity radio station. That got me out there.

It put me in front of the public and things like that. So all of those things help you develop as a person. It doesn’t have to be business related stuff that actually helps you develop those skills.

[00:55:44] Speaker A: Excellent. Thank you, Martin for all your contributions and today.

Go ahead, Joe.

[00:55:49] Speaker E: I think Martin hit the nail on the head. Your brand should be simple, concise.

You need to understand what it is that you’re really all about and be able to convey that in, in something that people remember.

That’s one piece of advice. The second is spread your brand. This is your personal advertising methodology. Leverage your network, whatever that network may be. Professional, social, friends, family, LinkedIn, any place, get your brand out there. And for those of us who maybe aren’t as adept at writing, can’t. You’re not up to doing a blog. There are a lot of things that you can do.

Comment on other people’s posts. It’s very easy to read somebody’s post and then say, yes, I agree or no, I disagree. And why don’t just like it? Put some commentary around there and reflect some real thinking about it. If you, if you feel so inclined, you can repost somebody’s post and add your commentary to it.

That’s even better. And then once you kind of get your legs out there, you get your sea legs, as it were. Maybe you’re up to writing your own pieces on LinkedIn or starting your own blog. So those are just some simple ways to propagate your brand.

And with that I’ll turn it back over to you. Isaac.

[00:57:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I do think that for those of you who have done tried this, find some simple things.

And you know, Joe, what you’re describing has the double benefit. Not only are you working on extending yourself and expressing yourself, you’re also networking, right? A lot of the things that we’re talking about, when you talk about writing, you know, there’s no little networking component to it. When you talk about speaking, you’re hoping that, that somebody at the end will ask you a question or come up to you after the event. But when you are writing to somebody on social, you’re starting a dialogue. Liz, got a minute left?

[00:57:43] Speaker E: Isaac, I have to say the thing that I talk about every week is, you know, a lot of people say it’s important who you know.

It’s not important who you know. It’s important. Who knows you and what you can do. That’s what’s important. Who knows you and what you can do? That’s what you have to spread around your network.

[00:58:04] Speaker H: Yep.

[00:58:05] Speaker I: Yep.

[00:58:05] Speaker A: There you go.

[00:58:08] Speaker H: Joe is the goat. No question. But a lot of folks when they’re thinking about doing their brand, it’s like a little scary because oh my God, it’s all up to me. I have to generate all this, this stuff. But you know, the bad news is it is all up to you. And the good news is it is all up to you.

[00:58:25] Speaker A: It is all up to you. Great last words for this conversation today about developing your personal band best practices from thought leaders. Nora, thank you for joining us this week. Thanks for contributions from everyone.

Thank you Nora. Thanks Joanne, Joe, Heather, John, Derek, Liz, Martin, Dave at Martin.

Thank you everybody. I’m just reading it off so I don’t forget anybody. Derek, did I leave? I think I got Everybody do visit starcio.com Coffee Thought Leadership I saved the URL in the comments a couple times that has links to everybody’s business thought leadership brand.

Do reach out to any of us around ways that your questions on ways that you can enhance your brand. And do join us for our future coffee with digital trailblazers. On the 17th we’ll be talking about AI coding competencies hype realities in the future. I have a few experts on vibe coding and using AI for co generation that will join us. That’s happening on the 17th and on the 24th, tomorrow’s workforce apprenticeship pathways for the AI driven organization. If you have ideas for topics, do let me know. If you have an interest in being a guest speaker on here, do reach out to me.

I will be. I have a long list of places I will be over the next two months. Orlando twice, Vegas twice, Tucson twice, Anaheim, Houston and I’m forgetting one a couple of those out there. So if you’re in any of those areas and you’d like to meet up, do reach out to me folks. Have a great weekend. Thank you for joining this week and we’ll be back next week on AI coding competencies and have a great weekend.

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