Be Different or be dead

May 9, 2022

Why rare qualities in people result in amazing careers

Why rare qualities in people result in amazing careers.

Ever asked yourself these questions?

— “Am I intelligent?”
— “Am I qualified?”
— “Am I skilled?”
— “Am I competent?”
— “Am I good enough?”
— “Am I capable?”

Probably, at some point in your working life, one of these questions has crossed your life.

But have you ever asked yourself “Am I rare”?

You may not have, and yet this is the most important question of all to ask.

RARE people are:

▪️The ONLY ones who do what they do
▪️Special
▪️Unique
▪️Memorable
▪️Unforgettable
▪️One of a Kind
▪️Distinctive
▪️Stand outs in a crowd
▪️Weird in an amazing way

All the qualities of someone who is noticed in the crowd.

Someone who will attract attention.

Who others will notice.

Who will have a chance to show what they’ve got BEFORE others more commonplace.

BE RaRE.

BE the topic of conversation and object of someones attention.

BE the ONLY one who offers unique solutions to problems.

BE contrarian.

BE creative not a copycat.

RaRE is the prerequisite to success.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 5.9.22 at 04:11 am by Roy Osing
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April 11, 2022

Why your past success doesn’t mean a bright and remarkable future

Source: Pexels

Why your past success doesn’t mean a bright and remarkable future.

It’s an interesting challenge: you’ve invested your time and energy into achieving your goal and now you must continue to reap the benefits of your journey.

Resting on your laurels isn’t an option because there are so many people who would love to assume the position you’re in; who would like nothing more than to replace you.

To keep what you’ve achieved, you must keep your feet moving.

These 6 actions were very helpful to me in my career as I navigated my way through the hierarchy to eventually reach the executive suite of a major corporation.

Change it up

Never assume what got you here will keep you here or will get you where you want to go next. If you continue with the play that rewarded you yesterday, be prepared for disappointment in your current position.
This is a tough one for most people who have a difficult time morphing themselves from their past successful job approach to something new and different; they assume that if they continue to follow the vector they are on, life will be good.

I created an approach that worked well for me. I tagged it “The Magic Question” — “what do I have to do differently?”. It is a disciplined method of assessing what changes someone must make when they find themselves in a new role — a self intervention.

Continued success must be earned every day; constantly reinventing yourself is essential.

Work harder

It’s easy to drift when you have achieved the goal you have worked so hard to achieve. You sit back in your new chair, put your hands behind your head, take a deep breath and say to yourself “I’ve made it”.

The issue is, however, your current resting place is temporary; it lasts only as long as you continue to add value to the organization. Falter for a moment and there are many others who are waiting to step in.

Once you’ve got it, keep your head down, sweat more and and deliver more.

Keep your friends

Continue to nurture “the family” that has supported you up to now; you will no doubt need their support as you go forward.

There is a tendency for some people to lose contact with their friends and colleagues once they have arrived at their career destination; this is a mistake.
The more challenging the role you achieve, the more you need support around you to advise you and to simply be there for you when you have emotional let downs.

Make a point of thanking each one of your support team personally for their faith in you and what you stand for, and ask for their continues allegiance.

Learn something new

You have been rewarded for what you have learned in the past, but don’t rest on your laurels too long.

New challenges require new thinking, and anyone who believes that yesterday’s knowledge can be successfully applied to consistently solve tomorrow’s problems is in for a major shock.
Continuing to relying on the expertise you’ve gained up to now will make you stale, and eventually will lead to ineffectiveness in fulfilling your responsibilities.

Keep learning new stuff. Not only will it keep you relevant in terms of your ability to take the issues of the day head on, being ahead of the knowledge curve will provide you with the energy needed to maintain the pace and momentum you require for continued success.

Look beyond the horizon

Take the initiative to play a personal role in your organization’s future.

Get out of the confines of your new job description and develop your own perspective on where the organization needs to go to build value for ownership.
Study how customer demand is changing and the likely impact it will have on your competitive position. Develop a profile of new competitors being licensed by disruptive technologies. And build your own view of the strategic game plan that should be followed to meet these new challenges.

If you provide strategic value to the organization beyond what is expected of your current responsibilities, you will establish yourself as an asset with long life to your bosses.

Draft your next chapter

You may be tempted to take a time out, rest, and enjoy the spoils of your efforts once you’ve achieved your goal, but don’t get sucked in to playing the game this way.

Take a deep breath perhaps, but then look for a new prize to focus on — lean into the wind and keep your journey alive.

Successful careers are built on a number of successive achievements; rarely does the “one hit wonder” happen. It’s a serial process of achieve your goal — learn and deliver success in it — look for other opportunities where you can add value for the organization — move on.

Finally…

Many people fall victims to losing it once they’ve got it. This is not only a travesty in terms of not achieving their ultimate potential, it represents an opportunity cost to an organization.

The victims essentially rob their organization of the future value they could have provided had they been able to leverage their achievement into added career success.

These six actions will at least give you a fighting chance to hold and build, not hold and lose.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 4.11.22 at 06:23 am by Roy Osing
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March 28, 2022

Why a job is way more important than your career

Source: Unsplash

Why a job is way more important than your career.

Young professionals leave school with the intent of launching their career based on their study specialty; economics majors look for entry level jobs where they can apply their knowledge of micro economics and demand theory and lawyers migrate to law firms.

This may seem like a reasonable approach, but the reality is that when you begin your career journey you never really know where you will end up.

A career is an unclear destination with an unpredictable journey and a healthy dose of luck.

I graduated with a BSC in mathematics and computer science. I took a management trainee job and ended up as a CMO and president of a company we took to A BILLION IN SALES without any need to use sophisticated computer programming and differential equations that I learned at school to solve business problems.

I arrived in the executive suite after many years of strategic meandering around and up the hierarchy of the organization doing many things, developing and honing the skills necessary to add as much value as I could to the company’s future direction.

And to be positioned as the only logical choice for an opportunity should it arise.

I began as a junior systems analyst where I was required to do time and motion studies to improve the productivity of various departments.

It was a job.

I needed it to pay back my school loans and it was with an organization that was poised to undergo massive market change. But it really didn’t make use of my academic background, and I had no idea if it would result in a meaningful career.

Besides, I was married and I needed to pay bills. I couldn’t get hung up on whether the job was the right thing in the long term.

It turned out that the job was not to be my destination; it was a beginning and a learning point along the way.

When you are just starting your working life, you can’t with any degree of precision determine what your career will be.

I see too many young professionals unable to decide on whether to take a particular job or not. They agonize over whether it fits with their long term career plan; they are paralyzed and can’t make a decision.

They search and they search for the opportunity they believe to be a perfect match with their career ambitions. As a result, they make no job choice and no forward movement towards any career.

The thing is, if you don’t take a job, you will never know if it fits or not.

Every job in every organization presents the opportunity to make it your own and to craft it into something that satisfies your interests which typically are aligned with what you aspire to be ‘when you grow up’.

Find your passion

Your top priority should not be to find a job that’s consistent with what you think your career should be, but rather to look for an organization that excites you in some way and allows you to express your passion.

This is the environmental factor. If the work environment stirs a passion inside you, it is likely to be rich with opportunities and potential. If it doesn’t, it’s unlikely to produce the new challenges that feed a successful career.

Choose an organization that has a culture of mobility

It is critical to target an organization that has a program of moving new employees around and exposing them to different roles and various learning opportunities.

As a function of being a new hire from university, I was put in a management trainee program where I was placed in 6 different positions over a 24-month period.

This experience provided me an incomparable perspective on which areas were interesting and those that I would try to avoid.

Experiencing a variety of roles enabled me to architect my career path. I targeted specific areas and roles to acquire within a certain time period along with an action plan to get there.

My plan wasn’t all about getting promoted; sometimes it made sense to take a lateral move to acquire the added experience necessary to qualify for a promotion at some future point.

Don’t fret over whether a job staring at you suits your long term career goals. Look for an organization with a culture that gets your juices flowing and one that prides itself in providing different job opportunities to employees.

Take the job and it just might lead to a brilliant future if you are willing to take the risk.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

May 31, 2022 ‘Audacious Unheard-of Ways’ is coming.

• Posted 3.28.22 at 05:34 am by Roy Osing
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February 28, 2022

10 easy ways you can create an audacious personal brand

Source: Pexels

10 easy ways you can create an audacious personal brand.

Building a personal brand is more than seizing some words that you think tell the story of who you are and what you stand for. Rather, it’s a process of defining and then doing many ‘small things’ that collectively define you.

Personal brand building is a strategic process that asks more than ‘Who am I?’, it also then asks ‘Who do I need to be?’. The latter question is the strategic piece; ‘How do I need to be perceived?’ is answered as if you were creating a business plan with a competitive advantage claim.

Your brand needs to be forever relevant, for if it fades from resonating with the people around you, it’s useless.
To be effective, a brand must continue to resonate with those that experience it; they must see it as a ‘forever’ solution to problems they continue to have or challenges they continue to face.

A brand that doesn’t relate to the issues people care about in the moment is irrelevant and the person propagating the brand goes unnoticed.

Furthermore, a compelling brand is amoebic. It adapts to and changes with the circumstances surrounding the person owning it. It’s like a coronavirus variant that is searching for new ways to stay alive.
A meaningful brand position is forever in a state of flux, anxious to morph itself to survive in a new environment.

So, in no particular order, these are the actions I took to adapt and evolve my brand during my career, starting from an entry level systems analyst position to president and CMO three decades later.

Each action helped me stay relevant during highly changing and turbulent times, but no single one was a ‘silver bullet’ for success.

‘Stay relevant’ brand actions

▪️ Identify the people who you want to ‘talk to’ about who you are and what you do These are the foxes in any organization who tend to make career decisions in your space. It’s important that these people get exposed to the values you represent.

▪️ Have a good understanding of the other players the other players competing for the same brand attributes to understand the brand field you are competing with and their brand claims.

▪️ When presented with a task, ask yourself the question “How can I do this differently?” than others. This is a critical question to get you noticed (if you answer it right). Just having the subject top of mind will lead you in the right direction; use it as the lens to determine what to do and how to do it. Ask yourself this question everyday.

▪️ Purge every aspect of copying from your being.
This is tough because it’s almost second nature for people to ask ‘How did someone else do it?’; to benchmark best in class and apply best practices.

We’ve been conditioned to believe that we are better off when we follow the best in the herd, which is nonsense. All we have done is temporarily change our position in it.

Using a boilerplate that someone else developed robs you of the originality needed to stand out and be remarkable.
Copying what others do keeps you in ‘the common herd’ and prevents you from being noticed. Do whatever it takes to act with attitude and in a way that separates you from the crowd.

▪️ Look at what everyone else is doing then do the opposite. Amazing results are achieved by contrarian acts.

▪️ Learn to focus on the critical few things you need to be successful. It’s so tempting to chase the possibilities that are out there but the problem is that you are busy but ineffective in delivering quality results. Different people are “mindlessly” focused on a few critical things that are not on anyone else’s radar.

▪️ Shed the CRAP that gets in the way of your ability to focus on your key priorities. Holding on to comfy food may satisfy your appetite temporarily, but it won’t enable your quest to stand-out from the herd in the long run.

▪️ Connect with weird and different people. If you’re going to seek stimulation from others, lean in to people who don’t follow the rules and have off-the-wall views.

▪️ Be the first to take on new projects. Covet opportunities to offer standard solutions to radical problems that have not been addressed before. Your solution to a new problem will carry the ‘different’ tag.

▪️ Loosen up on planning; tighten up on execution. Most people think the value is in the cleverness of a plan; of course they’re wrong.
Jump into the messy inelegant world of implementation where results get delivered. Different people get stuff done; they don’t sit around pondering theoretical possibilities.

The do-it brand

▪️ In my experience a winning brand position is to adopt a ‘do-it’ persona. However, never act without a framework that will create a better than average probability of success. Unharnessed action may feel good at the time, but it will likely not produce the outcome you desire.

Build context for action. Action with no context is at best uncontrolled behaviour with no predictable outcome. Context could be your career goals, your personal set of values or the organization’s strategic game plan. Context sets the boundaries inside which acceptable action is defined and outside which inappropriate action resides.

Look for an opportunity to add value to the actions you take. Go beyond what might be expected; surprise the judges observing you by adding extras rather than simply meeting expectations. ‘Action - Plus’ is a way to think about it: act and do more.

Achieve with a twist; leave your fingerprints and personal mark on what you do. Doing something without leaving a trace of YOU is a missed opportunity to leave a lasting impression. If your action blends in with what everyone else does, no one notices and your brand pays the price.

Pause, then act. Be disciplined about taking action. Before moving, take a deep breath to ensure your action is grounded and will have the highest probability of making a positive impact.
Use ‘the pause’ as a necessary element of the acting process. Once you commit to act it’s a chore to shift direction so use the pause wisely.

Prepare for follow up. The results of your action must be determined in order to learn from them. Think through exactly how you intend to track the outcome and the impact it had on people. Develop an improvement plan for any action that didn’t work out the way you had intended.

Memorable action isn’t a knee jerk response; it’s taken with a sense of purpose.

Finally, Try, try and try. While others are seeking the impossible dream of perfection the do-it brand people are achieving results inch-by-inch.

▪️ Ensure that your brand addresses the critical issue of the day for your organization by continually measuring and refreshing your only claim.

And, again, remember that if your brand doesn’t respond to a compelling and relevant need that your business has, it will simply fall on deaf ears and be perceived as merely self serving.
If your brand, however, resonates with people and is consistent with the strategic imperatives of the business, it makes you the currency leader among your peers with the job satisfaction and career growth that goes along with that leadership position.

▪️ Develop the competency to recover brilliantly when you make a mistake (and you will, that’s what do-it professionals do). Fix your mistake (because that’s what people expect) fast, and then add something to the mix that surprises them. You will be remembered for your risk taking and brilliance of recovery; your mistake will quickly be forgotten.

▪️ Develop a communication plan to expose your brand both within your organization and to external audiences.
- Offer to do presentations on your chosen brand topic;
- Get quoted as a subject matter expert in any internal communications media your organization uses;
- Write articles for your organization and for external publications on your brand content; be the thought leader;
- Offer to talk to customers on your brand topic. Help them in any issues they have, and get known on the outside. In my case many of our customers were interested in what we were doing in the area of customer service as well as a ME marketing. I had many speaking engagements to air my brand;
- Talk to the media on your topic. Make it interesting for them. Get them calling you. Your organization’s reputation will overtime be influenced by you.

▪️ Listen to the conversation about you and use your social media presence as the ‘listening post’.
Dedicate time to monitor social media feeds to get real time hands-on feedback from various audiences on your brand.

And engage in any conversation to show that you’re interested in the commentary and to further reinforce your personal tag.

Online dating

▪️ Look to online dating for help. I’m not suggesting that you necessarily get involved in online dating, but I do believe the process can provide valuable insights on how to effectively position one’s brand in a highly contested world.

The crucial element in online dating is the personal profile where the challenge is to describe and ‘paint a picture’ of yourself that leaves no doubt as to who you are and what your specific interests are with the objective of attracting interest from people who are aligned with you — a daunting task given the size of the internet universe.

Bland, general and vague profiles attract few worthwhile hits whereas clear, expressive, and detailed profiles, on the other hand, stand-out to people who are looking for specific characteristics — specifics in the profile do a better job of explaining a brand and hence attract people who are interested in it.

Think of an online personal profile as a granular version of your brand and use it to express what makes you special. Over emphasize your attributes and specifically those that you think make you distinct from everyone else.

And also apply the ‘so what and who cares?’ test intended to catch the vague generalities and a helium-filled claims used by the crowd. If it’s a statement that everyone else uses, delete it and focus on what makes you special.

And don’t expect miracles overnight. You most likely will not come up with a profile that is sufficiently detailed to get the response you want, nor will it likely be crystal clear on how you are different than everyone else.
Doesn’t matter. It’s a start. Work with it and revise it as you experience its impact on your intended audience.

Wrap up

Building an effective personal brand is a journey; it’s not a one-shot exercise. And it’s not built by seizing on a single attribute or trait, but rather by consistently expressing a collection of ‘little things’ that people care about.

Cheers
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 2.28.22 at 04:33 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink