July 31, 2007

Trademark 2.0: New Book

Globalization has taken on a whole new definition and meaning since 1999 when only a few organizations sent work overseas during the Y2k crises. Today, just about every organization is trying to stay competitive by sending operations, development, and design to countries such as India, China, or Russia. For the information worker the facts can be unnerving to say the least. While the percent of jobs lost due to outsourcing remains in the single digits, no one can deny the trend of expotential growth will continue. With research firms continuously publishing reports on how organizations can leverage technology from these countries, there will be no shortage of fear in the coming years.

Hardly an information technology book or magazine can be picked up that does not mention the focus to achieve enterprise effectiveness or share information in a manner that allows the organization to react in an effective manner across the entire supply chain. The result of these efforts to lower the costs and gain a competitive advantage within the supply chain has lead to a much more diverse community of individual suppliers. This transformation from hierarchal controlling structures to distributed flat organizations has created what Dan Pink calls the Free Agent Nation. The reality is that free agents may not come from next door but rather the next country. Employees need to adapt by creating unique value propositions that are captured with their Trademark.

This book will discuss several dimensions of building a personal Trademark. Unlike other books on this subject, this book will focus on the “How” an individual can move from local labor to global talent in the new world defined as Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 commonly refers to organizations that operate under an open communication model where interaction and communication is encouraged from the top down. Enterprises are accomplishing this feat by not only addressing the technology requirements of Web 2.0 but the social and organizational changes required to sustain a competitive advantage.
Subject

The domain of the book is the creation, development, and ongoing utilization of a personal Trademark. Wikipedia defines a Trademark as follows:

A trademark is a distinctive sign of some kind which is used by a business to uniquely identify itself and its products and services to consumers, and to distinguish the business and its products or services from those of other businesses. A trademark is a type of industrial property which is distinct from other forms of intellectual property. Conventionally, a trademark comprises a name, word, phrase, logo, symbol, design, image, or a combination of these elements. There is also a range of non-conventional trademarks comprising marks which do not fall into these standard categories.

The choice of the Trademark over the conventional term branding is by design. Information workers think of themselves as members of a trade. A trade is a long term progression where skills, competencies, and experiences come together to create subject matter expertise. The new world of business is built around ambiguity, collaboration, networks, distributed leadership, loosely coupled processes, and a dispersed workforce. For many in the industry, the transformation has been overnight and the majority of us are not prepared to handle a world without hierarchal structures. The Trademark is a physical representation of who you are as opposed to the concepts of branding which are more metaphysical. Much of this book will focus on the physical creation of informational elements that define a brand or brand position. Generally speaking, information workers are more receptive to the hard elements of a Trademark versus the emotional elements of a brand. Historically, trademarks have been associated with professions like the pharmacist’s mortar and pestle, the anvil for the blacksmith, the red and white pole for a barber or the wooden Indian statue for tobacco stores. These symbols represented something about the profession and those that practiced it.

In the 2.0 environment, these physical trademarks have been replaced by more meta-physical ones such as logo, slogans, and reputation. Still, like every organization, we must learn to build both the physical and meta-physical trademarks in order to compete in the next 25 years. This book is designed to give the information worker an overview of personal branding and provide a process for the creation of their physical Trademark in a 2.0 world.

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Posted by Todd at 11:54 AM