The Future Belongs to Disruptive Thinkers not Personal Brands

What are personal brands? Typically they are uniform thinkers. They are soldiers in a mass army. They follow orders well. They have developed online personal brand profiles that are a result of reading blog post that provide a macro view of basic online personal branding strategies. They listen to the pseudo expert telling them to set-up Twitter accounts and add thousands of empty bodies so that they can say they are influencers.

But a disruptive thinker realizes that owning the future has little to do with having a Facebook Fan Page or Twitter account alone. Disruptive thinkers don’t think linearly. They don’t add by addition. They think exponentially. They bring who they are to whatever they are working on which doesn’t fit in the current workplace.

  • Personal Brands: A personal brand takes a hardbound book then looks to format it to produce an iBook as a glorified PDF file.
  • Disruptive Thinkers: A disruptive thinker when he/she curates contents for a book creates a product that is multi-dimensional experience that traditional publishing would never do it justice.

Disruptive thinkers change industries. Disruptive thinkers make you have to take notice. They are going to force corporations/organizations/brands to change their corporate culture to mine them. In the future this type of talent won’t be attracted to your company by traditional means.

Note: This blog is a by-product of a recent post on Mashable.com where Seth Godin said he wasn’t Gives Up on Traditional Book Publishing and a conversation with Vincent Hunt.

Checkout Seth’s iPad Version of Linchpin.


It is time to be disruptive!!!

About the author

Hajj E. Flemings Hajj is the founder of Brand Camp University . He has been featured on Fox 2 News (http://bit.ly/Hajj_Fox2News), ESPN.com and BusinessWeek.com on the subject of Personal Branding. His clients include Walt Disney, Ford Motor Company, Skechers Footwear, U.S. Department of Defense (Telecom Division). He has spoken at Iowa State University, Davidson College, University of Michigan and numerous colleges and universities around the nation on personal branding, social media and career development to crowds of 3,500 plus.

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  • http://www.hunchfree.com Nick

    Nice work Hajj…..it’s always those who think and act differently who breakthrough.

  • http://www.BrandCampU.com HajjFlemings

    Nick,

    Thanks for commenting. One of the biggest concerns I have with the personal branding movement is that I believe we are creating a uniform army and people are blindly following without understanding their true value. The foundation of personal branding has little to nothing to do Facebook or Twitter. If you are garbage you are garbage and those channels just help you in spreading your garbage faster.

  • Mary Rosenbaum

    I agree with you Hajj that most people have little understanding of the underpinnings of what personal branding really means. Reading a book and defining your brand sounds more like a marketing driven technique where the goal is packaging, not gaining a better understanding of how your values, passions, talent, and skills set you apart and enable you to contribute to something greater than you. Personal branding requires synthesizing information from both inside out and outside out - from introspection and from those around you (business and personal). By definition, a personal brand is unique, as individual as your finger print, and authentic to who you are - not conforming to some idealized version of who you should be. Those who understand who they are and how they contribute are often empowered to be individual creative thinkers or to use your words, disruptive thinkers. Thanks for creating a dialog on this.

  • http://www.BrandCampU.com HajjFlemings

    Mary,

    Thanks for providing such a detail perspective and I hope the dialogue continues. I feel very passionate about helping understand their true value versus creating a superficial presence that doesn’t connect with who they really are. The easiest stuff to talk about is the new shiny object of social media which I believe is done for the most part at the macro level. I look forward to talking with you in the future.

  • Toni Jones (POWEROrgMath)

    Hi 5! Disruptive Thinkers move others to action for the greater good but in a manner that only they are wired to behave!

  • http://www.davidlawyer.net/2010/09/disruptive-thinking-fuels-a-strong-personal-brand/ Disruptive Thinking Fuels a Strong Personal Brand | David Lawyer

    [...] BrandCamp University - What are personal brands? Typically they are uniform thinkers. They are soldiers in a mass [...]

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