How to Prove You’re a Thought Leader (Instead of Just Saying It) This episode unpacks…
Personal Branding with Thought Leadership | William Arruda
Creating a personal brand with thought leadership
An interview with William Arruda about the origins of personal branding, creating frameworks, and deploying your thought leadership.
Today’s guest is William Arruda, a personal branding pioneer, speaker, and coach. William is the author of Digital You and Career Distinction. He is the creator of 360 Reach, a web-based personal branding survey that has helped more than 1.8 million people!
William tells us how in 2001 he went from a comfortable job at IBM to having no income for 18 months after reading Tom Peter’s The Brand Called You. The hard 18 months helped him develop this thought leadership and a methodology that he uses to this day!
Next, Peter and William discuss the importance of constructing methodologies and frameworks. These can be repeated and explained in meaningful ways, which allow you to stand out from the competition. In addition, frameworks build a foundation you can used to spread your thought leadership in endless ways.
William shares the three C’s for branding: Clarity, Consistency, and Constancy. Then, he explains how to properly deploy them and the importance of each for building a brand that has meaning and is unforgettable.
Finally, we wrap up our conversation with William giving advice to anyone looking to establish or expand their brand.
Three Key Takeaways from the Interview
- Your thought leadership needs to have solid processes and frameworks to ensure it is repeatable with the same outcome each time.
- Thought leaders should consider the external view of their personal brand. Seek external feedback to verify how your brand is held in the hearts and minds of your clients.
- Every day we are overwhelmed with information. You need to be consistent and constant with delivering thought leadership to your audience.
If you need a strategy to bring your thought leadership to market, Thought Leadership Leverage can assist you! Contact us for more information. We can help you implement marketing, research, sales and other aspects so you can devote yourself to what you do best.
Transcript
Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is William Aruda, who is an old friend. He is a speaker. He is an author. He is a personal branding pioneer. And we’ll get into that in a couple of minutes. And instead of spending a lot of time reading his bio, which would take up half the show, I’m just going to dive right in because I’m really, really excited about our call. So welcome aboard. Thanks for thanks for taking time out today, William.
William Aruda I’m thrilled to be here, Peter, Thanks. Thanks so much for having me.
Peter Winick Cool. So everybody’s got sort of their flashlight. You know, that story. Right. And I think what’s really, really cool about the world that we live in, author, speakers, thought leaders, etc., is it’s typically the path is not linear. The path is not deliberate. You know, it’s the proverbial X happens, right? And then after that, life changes. So for you, you know, and you and I were reconnecting a couple of weeks ago and I could clearly remember when I got the copy of Fast Company with a brand you that look like the Tide logo. That was a meme That was. So tell us, you know, you obviously had a stronger reaction to it than I loved it. I was so delighted to actually have Tom Peters on the podcast a couple of months ago was like, Wow, I think I should just hang up my microphone because, you know, where else do we go from there? But so what did that do for you?
William Aruda Yeah. Well, first I want to say you always have the big stars. So you made me feel really important by having me on your show. So I can bump shoulders with all these really important people. You know, I will tell you that it was written today.
Peter Winick So he called in sick.
William Aruda Well, look, people always confuse us. I’ve got to tell you, come all the time. All the time. So, yeah, you know, this is the coolest thing that ever happened. I actually was working for IBM in branding. I absolutely loved my job. I loved working for the man. I really did. I didn’t think I would be an entrepreneur ever. And then there was that article, the brand called You by Tom Peters in Fast Company on my assistant’s desk, and I needed a little break. I picked it up, I read the article, and I put the magazine down and said, I am going to start the first ever personal branding company. And literally and I did. And actually, no. Can I tell you honestly, I didn’t. So I thought I was going to do. And then what happened was the next week my manager said to me, Hey, they need someone to run branding in Europe, do you want to go to Europe? And so I was thinking, go to Europe, start my own company, go to Europe. So I went to Europe and then finally I was living in Paris. I quit my job, I quit IBM, and I started my business there. And there were already four other people doing it. The good news for me is there was no business in personal branding, so those four people quickly left the field and I was left there by myself, which gives me the claim to fame of having been in the field longer than anyone else.
Peter Winick Which is amazing. So okay, so you launch your company, you’re in Paris. So my question for you is I want to take this in a little direction before we go. Go back to that in a minute. So when I had Tom on, when I interviewed him, we got into a little conversation. And if you’ve ever interacted with Tom, they tend to get really heated really quickly, even if it’s a not necessarily controversial issue. He’s a pretty passionate guy, to say the least. And so my hypothesis and I’d love for you to confirm or deny or push back or whatever is that personal branding is great. And when that came out in the late 90s, it was a game changer. However, however, the early days of personal branding was about How do I stand out right? How do I look different, How do I stand out from the crowd? And it was everything from Peter’s a guy that wears a bow tie or Peter’s the guy that wears goofy socks or whatever. And that’s all fine and dandy because in the absence of nobody else doing any of these things that we should remember, our Peter wears purple socks, whatever I believe and I’m biased that thought leadership is sort of the next level of personal branding where it’s not just a physical attribute of Couric or you’re the guy that brings the Cinnamon Donuts to the office, but your thought leadership is really, really the ultimate in personal branding, and it’s aligned when you’re at an organization and then goes with you down the road. So how does that does that resonate or repulsed?
William Aruda No, no, no. You’re absolutely right. I will say that most people, if they weren’t the CEO or a thought leader in a certain specific area, didn’t do anything about thought leadership. It was just not even expected. Right. If you were somehow working in any organization, even if you were, you know, you’re your own boss today. If you really want a brand, you need to that you need to identify that thought leadership and within that area of expertise, your specific point of view. And that is what your brand is really built around. And in addition to the things that separate you from everyone else and, you know, the superpowers that make you stand out because you’re so good at them and things like that.
Peter Winick Cool. So high five, We’re in violent agreement. I love that. We go, So you start your company again and this is like 100 years ago and Internet. Well, this is like 101 or something and. Exactly.
William Aruda one.
Peter Winick Yeah, yeah. So. So you’re like the personal branding dude and 2001 And what does that look like? What is it that you do? Who do you serve? How do you make a living at that?
William Aruda Well, I’ll tell you, the make a living part was really hard. And in fact, it was really a rude awakening for me. I was on an expat package from IBM. They paid for my apartment, my meals, my business class, trips, home whenever I wanted to stock and options and all this. I went from that to.
Peter Winick Literally the violinist. Cue the violin.
William Aruda And then I but I went to literally $0 for about 18 months. I will tell you, I sold my stock and my options and my savings and my 41K And so the great news about that, as much as it was incredibly painful and it was really hard to live through, was it helped me develop my thought leadership, my intellectual property, my methodology for personal branding. And I frankly started just working with CEOs. They were the only people who got the message and understood and really felt they needed a brand in the marketplace to be able to connect with all of their stakeholders. So that was kind of the initial.
Peter Winick So you’re lucky in that the early adopters happened to be sea level. If the early adopters didn’t have budget, couldn’t do things on a discretionary level, etc., it may have been a different story. I want to go back to something that you brushed on because a lot of people either don’t do this fast forward through it or don’t. Really understand and appreciate and respect the importance of the frameworks, the models, the thought leadership, because there are folks out there that can live on their charisma and their charm and their good looks. Not that you’re not in any of those things when you’ve got the frameworks and the methodology. Just talked about how critical that’s been for you for 20 years.
William Aruda Yeah, I will tell you, it is it’s probably the most valuable besides me and my passion for the topic. It’s the most valuable asset I have, without question. And in fact, you know what my methodology is. One of the things I did, I developed a certification program for coaches to be able to learn my methodology and apply it. So now that methodology, that three step process has been literally used by millions of people around the world and where you.
Peter Winick I want to stay there for a minute because it’s so, so, so important. It’s like, okay, that’s scale, right? Millions of people have been through it and it’s not millions of people have seen William as a speaker. That might be great. I mean, probably tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands that have. But being able to break down what you do and how you do it into the Lego pieces, the molecular level, so it can be reassembled and moved into the developing the capabilities. And others, people don’t I don’t think a lot of people really appreciate how hard that is. And to your point, like you said, that your number one asset. So talk about that for a bit if you could.
William Aruda Yeah. And I will tell you, here’s the thing. Everyone has thought leadership. They don’t know that they have it right. And most people don’t pursue it. And every organization needs everyone in their organization thinking about it. What’s my thought leadership, my point of view, and how does that deliver value for me and for my company? Right. That’s why I think a lot of the work that you’re doing is so, so powerful. And so it’s really today it’s where companies need to be if they want to be successful. That the thing about having a process, a methodology, a structure, whatever you want to call it, IP is number one. It allows you to do things in a repeatable way. It allows you to talk about what you do and your differentiation in a way that’s meaningful and understandable by those you connect with, which is really powerful. And it gives you as you’re building your thought leadership, right? So I look at my methodology, right? It’s a three step process. But in step one, there are two components. And in each of those components, there are all these things. It gives you a way of delivering value and communicating because you can pull this piece, you can pull this apart. And one day I can talk about, you know, one of the six drivers of the introspective part of personal branding is values. And so today I can talk all about values and what they mean and why they’re important at work. And so by having this methodology, it gives you the fodder or the outline of kinds of content that you can use to start to build visibility, to increase the value you deliver to others and to make it.
Peter Winick And it also puts constraints on because if someone were to ask you a same or similar question around the values piece as it relates to personal branding, six months, a year or two years from now, your mind’s going to go back to the methodology, might not have a verbatim, literal whatever, but it will be of the same DNA as opposed to, well, it depends what people have for breakfast or, you know, it depends what was ever was going on there. So, so that’s interesting. If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe.
Peter Winick If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave us a review and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps as well as at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com/podcasts. Let’s talk about the business models. So going back to the beginning. Your coaching, advising and working with CEOs, they did get the timing right. You’re in the right place, right time. You’re smart. You put your proverbial sign out, whatever. Now it’s moved. So now you’re in a totally different business. Tell me about the businesses that you’re in. So there’s the obvious. You’re an author. You get paid a couple of pennies to write a book. Yeah, you’re a speaker. Remember when that was the thing that was so quaint? That was pretty good. A little bit of moving pieces of. Of the ARU.
William Aruda The empire of Boy Empire. A nice word. Probably the first time ever referred to that way. I’ll remember you forever, Peter and I. Here’s the thing. This is the other benefit of having thought leadership diversification, right? Once you have this.
Peter Winick Momentum from, from the business project.
William Aruda From a business first, and even if you’re inside an organization, right, you can think about this is my intellectual property. How do I do this in another part of the organization, or how do I deliver value, right? So it gives you all these legs, right? And to be able to make things happen. And so I started just doing the CEO coaching, and then I moved to certification, certifying coaches. And we have a thousand coaches who work with thousands of people all over the world. Then I built a, you know, it was not available was an assessment so that people could understand their brand from the outside in. Yep. And it’s really important. You need to validate yourself perceptions with external feedback because your brand is really held in the hearts and minds of those who know you. So I created a product 360 Reach, right? Which now we’ve had 1.8 million people use and it helps them understand their brand from the outside in. So again, it’s one little element of my overall personal branding methodology, but I’m able to build products around it. Now. I have a new a new bot that takes you through personal branding on your phone with little reminders and nudges. And so it’s the same exact method. This is the thing I tell everyone. Once you develop your thought leadership, the approach you need to do is be lazy. You just keep taking that same stuff and reapplying it, applying it to different people. I work at all levels of the organization now, not just CEOs.
Peter Winick I love that because I think a mistake that a lot of thought leaders make, partly because they’re creative, partly because they’re intrinsically motivated. There’s lots of reasons is I got to create something new to talk to a new client. It’s like, here’s the book I’m working on and here’s the next seven. And it’s like, Whoa, back up like you in the real estate business. And you like the part about building homes, but not the part about renting them or selling them. You’d be bankrupt quickly in the thought leadership space. You might not be bankrupt, but you know, you investing in that assessment. And 1.8 million people have taken that and many of them paid and things, etc., etc.. And it’s based on a methodology that you built years and years ago. That’s leverage. That’s I mean, this is what we do every day is I work with our clients, like, how do you Leveraging Thought Leadership not how do you create an abundance and drown people in it, but how do you leverage solid ideas?
William Aruda And I’m so glad you say that. And that’s exactly what it needs to be. And by the way, no one’s even heard. So I have a Forbes column and I publish all kinds of stuff. Right. And 99% of the people in the world have never heard one piece of it. Right. You put something up on LinkedIn and only 2% of your followers ever even connect with because they have to be looking at your feed when their feed. Right. So I think a lot of people, they get either they get bored or they think other people are bored with their thought leadership and they really aren’t. So I mean, you really need to repetition is key. We know from Ebbinghaus it’s right, the psychologist, the German psychologist, that 660 days after we learn something, 90% of us have completely forgotten. So you really need to be out there repeating yourself and then taking it to the next level, Right? I’m not I’m not still doing personal branding the way I did in 2001. The process is the same. But when we move to thought leadership and how you make that thought leadership visible, right now we have social media, now we have different tools.
Peter Winick How do you keep an app you’ve got right? You have different deliver it. And that’s the that’s the other piece is that oftentimes thought leaders are stuck in a modality because that’s where they’re comfortable. Right? So I’m a writer. I write. You can say, well, I’m an author, I’m a columnist. I’m great. And then but you could also say, but I’ve actually developed an app, right? And that might be, geez, that’s scary. Or, you know, short form video is critically important now as a way to get things out. And sometimes people are like, I hate the sound of my voice or the, you know, whatever on video, But it’s like you’ve got to be able to get out there in all the modalities or as many as are appropriate for your work to get that message out there. Because even now, 20 years later, the percentage of the universe that has no idea about your work or you is still far, far, far greater than those that that do know.
William Aruda Exactly. And the great news is it means you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, right? So if I go and deliver a talk about personal branding, I can then take the content that’s in those slides and make it an article and I can put little pieces of that and make them into tweets. I can I can take little clips from that presentation. I just deliver it and make those two minute YouTube videos. So I’ve done something once and I’ve used all these different media and these different platforms to be able to amplify the visibility while saying the same thing. Because we know in branding, clarity, consistency, consistency, right? Be clear about who you are and who you’re not. Always be that and always be visible to the people who are making decisions about you. And by when you create stuff once and you kind of repeat yourself all the time, you’re taking the box next to the three seeds.
Peter Winick Yep. So I want to just push a little bit into, you know, covid’s been thrust upon us, right? It’s been a long, long time. The end is maybe in sight. We think there’s light at the end of the tunnel. It could be a train coming at us. It could be light. Who knows how? How does sort of the Covid coming into hopefully a post-COVID world change personal branding when I mean, is your I’m digging into the principles are the same but like for example you and I are talking on video now we’re only playing this on audio and I can see, you know, your background. There’s beautiful art, it’s stylish, it’s centered, the lighting is good. It lines up to sort of what I expect from William, right? It’s, you know, if you were sitting in a schlocky looking pub or something like that or it was noisy or whatever, I wouldn’t expect that. But how do we think about or how should we start thinking about our personal branding in this zoom world that we’re all thrust into and staying in, I guess?
William Aruda Yeah. And you know, I will tell you, the number one skill people need to have right now is understanding how to use video. Every single meeting people are having is in video. If you’re presenting to clients, you’re presenting via video and this isn’t going to go away. We know that there will be the office in the home and the third place and we’ll spend our time among those places, which means that there’s always going to be some people who are going to be need to be on video. And so, if you need to build one skill, you need to get that stuff right. And so again, it’s the same thing. It’s personal branding, but now how do I deliver my brand? How do I how am I compelling and engaging and magnetic in this new virtual world? When people are looking at me in a 13 inch screen, right? You’re not standing in front of them in the meeting room. You’re not you’re not engaging on a human level. You know, the screen is a scrim that to Luke’s your humanity, right? So you need to actually amp up how? Right. Even though your credentials are important, you need to amp up the humanity so that you can connect with people on a human emotional level. So. So these are the kinds of thing I know video is something that you work on with your clients right around. How do you create video to demonstrate your thought leadership? And by doing that you build the skills to be good on video. You know, we had a position yourself in the screen, you know, to have the light coming at you, you know, you need clear audio, right? I see you have your big fancy $10 million mike there that you’re using you’re using right now, which is why you sound so good. And those are the things that they’re now like. They used to be kind of nice to have being really good at video. Now they’re the table stakes to being a successful, acknowledged, respected professional.
Peter Winick Yeah, interesting stuff. So any other as we start to lend the plane or run out of time here if you were to send a message to someone out there now that’s maybe not in the corporate pad and in Paris with the big expense account, whatever. But there is a William out there now who’s thinking about making the leap about something into the world of thought leadership. What might you advise, advise them to do or not to?
William Aruda You know, the first thing I’d advise them here’s this is the biggest lesson I’ve learned. And you know how I learned from faith. Popcorn. You know, faith, popcorn.
Peter Winick Yeah.
William Aruda Yeah. I do trust and I absolutely love her.
Peter Winick Too. Yeah.
William Aruda Really? I was she once said this. She said, you know, most people walk around every day and things happen. And if the things don’t kind of correspond to their normal way of being, they say that’s weird and they discard it. And she said, What I do is all these weird things happen. I think that’s weird. Store it. And when you do this, you are developing like, that’s how if I if I said, Wow, that’s a really interesting article by Tom Peters and put it down and then just went back to my work you and I wouldn’t be talking today and everything would be different. And so the first step is really to pay attention because if you if you’re if you’re going to do this, you want to build it around something, What do you.
Peter Winick What are you drawn to? What’s occupying space in your brain? Why is.
William Aruda It yeah. And why do you let your brain like if you let your brain do that, then then you can make it happen and then be willing to invest the time and time and money. I think and I’m not saying this because I’m looking for clients to do personal branding with, but invest time in building your thought leadership and demonstrating it. But one of the things people don’t do today and this is really anachronistic because you didn’t need to invest in your career when you in the 1950s. Today we are running our own companies, whether we’re working inside a company or and we need to invest in that company.
Peter Winick Well, even as an IBM or I mean any IBM or if there’s a young William today that’s an IBM or they’re thinking of that more as a gig than the maybe even when you started it might have been, not a likely that I might spend 40 years here, get the gold watch and life would be good. Like those days are over with. Like, that’s not what we live in.
William Aruda And a lot of people are still acting like that’s the case. Like if I work in the company or they kind of take care of my career for me, but if I’m working for myself, maybe I have to do some stuff. And I think some of the work that you’re doing inside companies, you’re giving people this opportunity to be like, I’m delivering extra value here because I have my thought leadership, I’m delivering great value and I’m building an asset that I can use if I’m going to move and do something on my own. And we know that people are going to go back and forth, right? They’re going to work for themselves and then go back into a company. So I just think that looking at your career as this investment and spending the time, the money, the energy, the effort, the building, the patience.
Peter Winick And the thing.
William Aruda Yeah, yeah. Sitting back and thinking, yeah, so, so it’s good to make no money, right? So if you have no money, you have time to be able to invest.
Peter Winick Well then you can make a lot of money. But thank you so much for sharing with us today. William. I’ve been a fan of your work for a long, long time and it was great to have you on today. Thank you so much.
William Aruda Thank you. It’s always fun chatting with you.
Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at Peter at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.
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