importantly, recognize the gaps in your personal brand and invest the time and energy to overcome thosegaps.On one hand, you have the functional aspects of a personal brand. A leader’s functional brand promiseis to deliver successful, objective results: to achieve profitable growth, to introduce a consistently successfularray of new products to the market, or to reduce costs. What’s more elusive to identify, much less to build,are the intangibles or the emotional benefits of a personal brand: being an inspirational visionary, an articulatecommunicator, or for most of us, simply being a compelling and confidence-inspiring leader.But make no mistake. It’s the emotional benefits delivered through your personal brand that make thedifference between being seen simply as an able business-person and being seen as a true leader.A personal brand is incomplete if it’s built by emphasizing either functional or emotional qualities alone.These qualities must work in tandem. Proficient functional skills and the ensuing results establish yourcredibility. The emotional benefits broaden the value you deliver. If built upon functional attributes alone, yourbrand risks a similar fate as products that slip into commodity status. You will be evaluated on a checklist ofattributes and will be seen as being far less nimble and flexible if the markets, industry or external events turnagainst you.How many times have we seen the whiz kid from finance or the guru from marketing ascend to the topspot, only to flounder in a role that requires more than just functional skills and results? Douglas Ivester atCoca-Cola, for example, had established an enviable record as an operational whiz while serving as the No. 2to CEO Roberto Goizueta. Few questioned Ivester’s functional prowess or begrudged his contributions toCoca-Cola’s success. But some questioned his intangibles for the CEO’s chair. As it turned out, Ivester neveridentified the gaps in his personal brand and was never able to establish the value of his leadership style.Over the course of his two-year tenure as CEO, concerns about his management style and Coke’s businessdifficulties were
both
blamed for knocking billions off the company’s value. When he mishandled a series ofissues ranging from a racial discrimination case to tainted product in Belgium, he lost the confidence of Coca-Cola’s constituencies altogether and resigned abruptly from the job that he had always wanted. From abusiness perspective, the timing was odd -- Coca-Cola’s numbers were improving, but from a brandperspective, the company and Ivester realized that his brand just wasn’t delivering any emotional value. AndCoca-Cola learned that the concept of brand applies to its people as well as its products.Warren Buffett, on the other hand, has created his functional brand as an investor who successfullycapitalizes on value investments – with consistent and fully-realized personal traits of the homespunEveryman. (Never mind that he’s one of the richest men in the world.) He lives up to his brand promise on thefunctional end by delivering results, achieving an enviable five-year growth rate for Berkshire Hathaway. Healso has achieved emotional relevance through the consistency of his actions and his championing of issuesthat connect with his constituents. In recent years, for example, he’s been a vocal critic of both inflated CEOsalaries (his salary is $100,000 a year), as well as actions that undermine the true measures of value investing,such as the liberal use of stock options in executive pay packages. Mr. Buffet’s brand is a complete one – andwhat’s more impressive, he has maintained it extremely well over several decades. In the face of the most
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