Rajesh Setty was addressing some of us at Compassites on how to create a brand for the organization. One of the points he brought was that the company’s brand can significantly be valued if each one in the company can brand himself/herself. A typical software engineer if asked what he/she does answers that he/she is a developer/software engineer working for such and such company and for a project. The truth is millions of software engineers will say the same, so what difference does it make? He brought up a good analogy to explain this. The best example is a beautifully choreographed Indian movie song where the hero and heroine dance for a song and there are about 30 to 50 group dancers behind them. On the outlook it looks beautiful to have these extras add color to the whole scene but does anyone care if one of those extras is missing in a shot? Probably the audience would not even realize it. The attention is more on the hero and heroine and if they go missing the whole song goes incomplete and meaningless. It is important that a software engineer needs to add more accomplishments around him/her than doing just the job. The accomplishments help him/her to brand not just him/her but also add value to the brand of the organization. You definitely don’t want to be in the extras and be not missed when you are missing.

You can take a look at “Grassroots Brand-building Questions: A Baker’s dozen” for the questions that Rajesh asks for each one of us to answer in building a brand.
Note:- This post is part of the “Foundations” series