Brand yourself
The Brand You 50
Tom Peters

In today's wild wired world, you're either distinct or extinct. To survive, thrive, and consistently triumph in this world, Peters recommends becoming Brand You. The Brand You 50 is about creating a brand for yourself and your work, even if you plan to stay on someone else's payroll for your foreseeable future. It's about thinking about of yourself as an independent-contractor-in-spirit. Someone who is self-reliant and depends on his/her own skills as well as the constant upgrading of them. As it says in the book, no one has a bigger stake in your future than you.

The Brand You 50 is Peters' manifesto for today's knowledge workers. It joins his Reinventing Work series, which includes The Projects 50 and The Professional Service Firm 50. In this book, Peters sees a new kind of corporate citizen who believes that surviving means not blending in but standing out. He believes that over 90 per cent of white collar jobs will be reinvented or reconceived in the next decade and that job security means developing marketable skills, making yourself distinct and memor-able, and constantly developing your ability to network.

The employment landscape is going to be full of ‘free agents,’ he predicts, and if these newly ‘freed’ individuals want to succeed, they'll need a new approach to their jobs. One way is by approaching work as a set of projects. Find out what's the most interesting thing about each project and thrive on that, Peters advises.

Peters urges readers to forget about their loyalty to a particular company and replace it with a self-motivated dedication to the work at hand. It’s a good thought but because of it the entire book has the feel of something transcribed from one of Peters' motivational speeches. While you read, you cannot help but feel that his use of bold letters, ellipses, exclamation points and the oversize type is perhaps a better fit with the lecture circuit than the publishing world.

The idea - to visualise yourself as a company – with departments, goals, bottom lines, branding, does have its merits. And by turning everyday work into interesting and inspiring projects, Peters believes that workers will become self-motivated, their completed projects will become more innovative and that companies will become less stagnant.

Peters constantly reassures readers that they are worthy of independence. If you're looking for rose-coloured lenses for your job, Peters has what you need. This self-help series is mostly about making work fun, which, after all, isn't a bad idea.

3 quick lessons

1. Brand you is a team
2. Work on your optimism
3. Spreaders of gloom are rarely successful