Not so long ago, in white collar employment land, companies hired you to think big thoughts about how to design/make/ship/service products better/faster/cheaper/at higher margins. If you had a brilliant idea about how to do any of that at 3pm, the company owned it. If you had a brilliant idea about business at 3am, you owned it, but you were probably asleep, so it was moot.
Then the world started to shift. The output of our work became the knowledge itself that was created. McKenzie spawned its minions and Tom Peters had his 15 minutes. Global connectivity meant that people were up at 3am having brilliant ideas. Some of them took their ideas and ran, but mostly, people still gave them to the company. Especially in pure knowledge work, where people were hired to be brilliant, it was tacitly understood that brilliance didn’t necessarily happen on the clock. The word “exempt” got used a lot.
The shift continued. People set up blogs. Got known as niche experts. Built personal brands. They became as interested in their 3am ideas as their 3pm ideas because whereas 3pm ideas guaranteed today’s paycheck, 3am ideas guaranteed tomorrow’s.
Now those 3am ideas have begun bearing fruit, leading to the next employment challenge: what to do with that employee’s personal brand.
Picture it:
It’s eight o’clock in the evening. You are halfway through a social dinner with coworkers. Are you talking about business? You’re in that gray area; maybe you’re complaining about a corporate policy or something. Suddenly, it hits you! That next million dollar idea you’ve been waiting all year for! You quickly mull it over in your mind. You see how to drive the traffic, build the anticipation, and create pull-through opportunities that will generate the passive income you’ve been looking for! You tell your colleague about the idea. He sees the genius, and immediately grabs his iPhone to text your boss about—”Whoa, whoa, whoa!” you say. This is your brilliant idea… your personal brand that made the opportunity possible…
Wait. It’s not so simple, you realize: there is a big overlap between your personal and professional worlds. Your networks are profersonal, your skills are profersonal, your resources are profersonal.
And you wonder: what now?
My hunch is that we are on the very front end of what will be a very big trend, as businesses and individuals try to sort out the impact of employing people with brands that are bigger than themselves.
- Do they get marketing deals?
- What happens when the person quits or is fired—does the network have to choose whose side to take, as if they were friends with two people who just broke up?
- And how does a business protect the integrity of its brand in this world? Can a company afford to hire someone who’s brand is only partially aligned with its image? Will it lose the lawsuit when it doesn’t?
No doubt, this set of issues is coming. The question is, how will we handle it?
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I do think this is the leading edge of a trend — one that’s going to put employers in a tricky spot. Do you want to hire “rock stars” (and pay a premium for them and their great “profersonal” networks) knowing that they are also far more likely to come up with a paradigm-changing business idea — and walk out the door with it? Or would you rather stick with nice, reliable mediocrity?
m.e.—You and I know a good handful of highly capable people whose personal brands would lock them out of working for certain employers. You and I also know companies that have shaken out on either side of the rock star/mediocrity debate… and there’s more. We have to factor in dynamics like: the growing prevalence of personal brands putting upward and then downward pressure on the premium a person can command for it; network transparency increasing the pressure on companies to pay for performance; the inevitable political backlash against performance pay for something more “fair” (just wait until your company is found liable for discrimination because a star employee’s profersonal network lacks sufficient minority representation); new metrics valuing personal brands that lead to new games (it’s human nature—someone will start gaming the system); what to do with employees with personal brands that take off “overnight”…
This potentially changes the face of not just hiring, but business development and sales for both b2c and b2b companies. So may questions. This is truly exciting, cutting edge stuff.
This is an issue I’m incredibly interested in, Jason. Love the post and think it raises some great questions. I hope you’re in the session that Eric, Crystal, and Amanda do on Saturday, because these questions are solid.
Already trying to think of a good way to refer others to this post. Everyone should read it!
Great blog. It’s refreshing to see someone starting a new conversation. Recently so many blogs are starting to feel like groundhogs day.
My 2 cents. While I’m not sure I buy the “company found liable for discrimination because the star employees network lacks sufficient minority rep…” There have always been company “stars” with personal brands and big networks and for the most part we haven’t “gone there” before.
Personal brands w/ big networks aren’t anything new. The difference now is the new medium, the Social Web amplifies each pretty dramatically and because no one owns it and everyone is an equal participant the employee can have just as much of a voice as the employer.
New advantages and disadvantages for sure but even in the old days the face of a company would leave and their posse would follow…
Great thought provoking post and I’m looking forward to the continuing conversation. I especially like the word “profersonalism.” (Man, that’s hard to spell!)
@Ben—Maybe this should be required pre-reading for Amanda’s session…
@Amanda—Oh, hi! Just talking about you… Agreed on all points. The dynamic isn’t new, but the new social mediums amplify it and put it in everyone’s face… and that does represent a change… because whereas previously a few people who “got” it could take care of this thing more or less privately, now the deals need to be done in the open… and that means a whole lot of people are going to be involved then who don’t “get it.”
@Kari—I’m feel truly grateful every time I get through the words “individual” and “presentation” without misspelling or mistyping them. When I get “profersonalism” right, I do a little dance.
Great post Jason!
This is a huge problem for technology companies. When you join a company like IBM, they require you to sign over all intellectual property (minus any specific exclusions you list right there and then) to them. So that 3AM idea is the 3PM company’s property when you’re a salaried white collar worker, and the company has the right to it first. So needless to say, when you join a company like that, it’s nice to have another business entity that owns your other IP (blogs, networks, etc) and state that up front.
I’ve heard stories where corporate recruiters have been asked to sign over their LinkedIn accounts when leaving a search firm or company they were recruiting for. I think it’s really important to set those things up before joining any company, and to make sure they walk out the door with you when you go.
In that I am in the process of leaving an organization where I happened to build – not necessarily on purpose – a personal brand of a sort, the question that you raise, Jason, is very relevant:
“What happens when the person quits or is fired—does the network have to choose whose side to take, as if they were friends with two people who just broke up?”
But I think its more than whether the network has to take sides. “Whose network is it anyway?” is another key question. The network has been built on the premise that the individual has been working on behalf of the organization and has been built by the individual, ostensibly for the benefit of the organization, and due to the association of the individual with the organization. Whose network is it? And who can do what with that network?
You Can’t Take It With You? or can you?
When business relationships become personal relationships and corporate brands and personal brands overlay, these questions become more relevant and important.
My relationships and contacts are more than names, phone numbers and email addresses. When your reputation is more than your business title and the relationships go beyond basic business – meaning that you’ve developed the relationship in more dimensions than what initially brought you together – are there new responsibilities on both the businesses and individuals involved when the initial businessemployee/contractor relationship ends?
I am in the process of thinking and working this through now following a seven-year business relationship that has concluded.
Eric
Jason — I’m not sure this is really novel. I suggest the older sales paradigm of “Who owns the client — the sales pro or the company?” materially informs this conversation. After all, networking originated out of sales, and social media is networking on steroids. And like a sales situation, things only become a problem when there are secrets and hidden agendas. Transparency and bright lights prevent problems from developing in the first place.
Ultimately, “who owns the idea?” is really a fair compensation/ROI problem that is a win-win in its natural state. If I’m a company owner, I might be pretty perturbed to find out that my employee investment is being undermined by a self-serving employee that is withholding ideas. If I’m an employee with a game-changing idea, I want to make sure that I’ve negotiated a side deal to reap both financial and non-financial rewards. As an owner, I want to boast to clients about my innovative, talented team members. As an employee, I want future employers/clients to know about my innovative, talented team work. It only doesn’t work when one party is trying to get over on the other.
Jason,
I think what’s so interesting about your post, is that the phenomena, in part, has to be related to the fluid nature of the employment market today. As you mentioned, the 3AM idea is now tied to the idea of the new opportunity – and today, that new opportunity is a different opportunity outside of the company that has your 3PM ideas. At a time when the idea of employment itself was tied to the notion of working for same company for 20 to 30 years, tying the 3AM idea to that company made sense – because that WAS the next step.
So yes, personal brands are certainly enabled through technologies – but I think the need to develop those “brands” is just as much a reflection of necessity.
As to loyalties, and what happens after a “break up”: the customer is always right. Customers and networks, in my experience, self-select the individuals over time that they want to work with, and anyone who doesn’t “get” that that is going to happen (e.g. controlling employers), miss the boat.. . .and eventually the business.
Thanks for the post! – VV