I got to be in the live audience yesterday of a Tom Peters webinar where for an hour he railed, riffed on great quotes, told stories, and test-i-fied. Hell of a performance. While the rest of us are nattering among ourselves, Tom is out making converts among the heathen. Go, Tom!

I nodded my head continuously for an hour. Business is about passion. Leadership is about being able to say “I don’t know.” “Don’t rebuild. Reimagine.” “Don’t hire someone who had a 4.0 GPA. The definition of a 4.0 student is someone who’s bought the act.” And he tells how the war in Afghanistan was fought much more efficiently because direct, person-to-person communication was enabled — Instant Messaging was way important among stealth soldiers on the ground — rather than mediated through the Last War hierarchy of command.

And then he talks about branding and I find myself struggling to translate it into language I understand. Tom tells us to brand ourselves at work. My hackles go up because corporate branding suffers from two flaws: First, it reduces rich complexity to an annoying jingle. Second, branding exercises are the most cynical activities companies engage in. People sit in a room — I’ve been there — and try to come up with a corporate image that will sell. It has no connection to what the company is about. Can this be what Peters recommends that we do to ourselves?

No, it’s not. Although Peters doesn’t use the word “authenticity,” he assumes it as a value. The people he admires aren’t faking it. In fact, they’ve shaken free of the corporate pose that says that managers can never admit weakness, are not permitted to risk an original idea, and must “not rock the boat.” So, when Tom tells us to brand ourselves, he does not mean that we should invent a persona. He means we should work on figuring out who we really and what we really do for the business.

That’s what I tell myself as I cringe hearing the “brand” word applied to individuals. Tom’s really talking about the enthusiastic embrace of self-understanding. He puts it in terms of “branding” because his audiences consider corporate branding to be a good thing.

I find it more useful — given my wanting to hurl when I hear “branding” — to think in terms of “reputation,” a term that’s begun to be used in place of “brand” in some corporate marketing departments. “Reputation” has three big differences from “brand”: Reputations are earned, reputations are bestowed by others, and reputations can be rich and multifaceted.

Brand myself? Nah. Let me build a reputation. That’s how I take Peters’ talk of self branding.

On the other hand, Peters has been getting through to businesspeople for twenty years while we’ve been nattering. For example, last night at dinner, the waitress said that everyone at the restaurant is taught to be creative and human in their responses and to exhibit their passion for their job. The source? In Search of Excellence. Too cool.

[The fact that Peters ran an interview with me on his site last May certainly has not affected my opinion of him. I’ve been liking what he says for 20 years now.]

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