University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
The Brand You 50
Book

The Brand You 50

Fifty Ways to Transform Yourself from an “Employee” into a Brand That Shouts Distinction, Commitment, and Passion!

Tom Peters
Knopf, 2000
First Edition: 1999
Buy book or audiobook

Read offline

Amazon Kindle

Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable

Recommendation

Tom Peters strikes again with this segment of his trilogy on the changing nature of work. It’s a list and it sounds light until you read it as this seminal expert’s prescription for curing the lack of workplace security in the globalized world. This is required reading if you want to know what you should do - now - about the new precariousness. Amply sprinkling his lists and prose with capitals, italics and cussing, Peters takes you through 50 distinct yet interrelated concepts about work as it exists amid international business, technology and the Internet. He maintains that only the white-collar workers who brand and “Inc.” themselves will survive the changes that he anticipates in the next 15 years. And then he tells you how. As Peters says himself, the revolution has started; it is time to get on board. Given that call to arms, getAbstract recommends this hands-on book about how to take control of the rest of your career.

Summary

Reinventing Work

Not too long ago, you could work in obscurity, laboring away without poking your head above the top edge of your cubicle. You cannot survive if you do that today. The game is played differently. Since the mid-1980s, the rules of the employment game have changed, forever altered by high technology, globalization and the Internet. In today’s marketplace, you have to stand out to have an enduring career. By the end of this decade, the vast majority of today’s white collar jobs will be radically different, or gone. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. Do you want to live your father’s work life, trudging daily to the office, every day identical?

The key to the future is changing your point of view about work. Instead of envisioning yourself as an employee, recast yourself as an “independent contractor.” Rely on your own abilities to get work and keep it. Take charge of your track record and your achievements. Develop an individual relationship with the marketplace, just like a brand, “Brand You.”

You now live in a “Brand You-world” not an “employee world.” The employee-world has been left behind; it is the world of the last generation. If you...

About the Author

Tom Peters is the co-author of In Search of Excellence (with Robert H. Waterman, Jr.) and A Passion for Excellence (with Nancy Austin), and is the author of Thriving on Chaos, Liberation Management, The Tom Peters Seminar, The Pursuit of Wow!, The Circle of Innovation, and the Reinventing Work series, of which this is the third book.

Comment on this summary