^B00:00:00 >> From The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. ^M00:00:05 [ Pause ] ^M00:00:23 >> Yvonne Dooley: I want to welcome you to The Library of Congress, and thank you for coming out for our program, Stand Out. Our program is actually sponsored by our Science Technology Business Division, and our Chief is here today, so we are glad that he came out for this. And it's also being offered in collaboration with LC GLOBE, our Library of Congress LGBT Employees Group, our LCPA, which is our Library of Congress Professional Association, along with our District of Columbia Library Association, DCLA, here in the D.C. area. On that note, I would like to introduce myself. My name is Yvonne Dooley. I am the Business Reference Librarian in the Business Reference Section here at The Library of Congress. And if you're here from the Library I want to note that today is the celebration of National Library Workers Day, so clap for you guys and congratulations. We also want to - I thought that with the celebration of National Library Week and our Business Section here at the Library that a program on, such as Dorie's, on standing out in our profession and in the workplace would be an awesome program to offer on this particular day. So, without further ado, I will introduce Ms. Dorie Clark. She is the Author of Reinventing You, Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future, and Stand Out, How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It, which was named the number one leadership book of 2015 by Ink Magazine. A former Presidential campaign spokeswoman, she's frequently contributed to the Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Entrepreneur and the World Economic Forum Blog. Recognized as a branding expert by Associated Press, Fortune and Ink Magazine, Clark is a Marketing Strategy Consultant and speaker for clients, including Google, Microsoft, Yale University, Fidelity and World Bank. She is Adjunct Professor of Business Administration at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and a Visiting Professor for IE Business School in Madrid. She has guest lectured at Harvard Business School, the Harvard Kennedy School, Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, the Wharton School, the MIT Sloan School of Management and more. She is a frequent guest on MSNBC and appears in worldwide media, including NPR, the Wall Street Journal and the BBC. We are honored and so excited to have Dorie Clark here today. Thank you. ^M00:03:17 [ Applause ] ^M00:03:21 >> Dorie Clark: Thank you so much, Yvonne. All right, I'm used to having clip-on mikes and being able to wander around a little bit, so I'm going to contain my impulses and stand here in front of you because they're recording this session here, but thanks so much for coming out. Today, we're going to be talking a little bit, as Yvonne indicated, about how to stand out at work. I mean the world that we live in today is a lot like this. In fact, this was probably your metro commute this morning. We live in a world where literally in the past minute that Yvonne was up on stage doing the introduction, when I wrote Stand Out the statistic then it was 100 hours of YouTube video was uploaded every minute. That is now obsolete, its 300 hours of YouTube video is uploaded every single minute. We are in an era where even if we wanted to, even if we tried to consume all the information that is out there it's a losing battle and we're falling farther and farther behind every day. We can't do it. And the problem with that professionally for all of us is that it's not just us that is feeling that burden, everyone is. The average professional gets about 100 e-mails per day. This is a number that is increasing at a compounded rate of 15% per year. If it's not unsustainable now, it is very rapidly becoming so. And with all of these obligations, these meetings, these e-mails, these things that we're supposed to read, the tweets we're supposed to respond to, what gets left behind is that other people are not really able to tune in and pay that close attention to you and to who you are and to what you're doing. Even your boss, even the people who are theoretically responsible for watching out for you and your career arc oftentimes just don't have the bandwidth to do it. And, consequently, unless we want to live our professional lives essentially buffeted by fate and just ending up where we happen to land, we need to somehow begin to start taking control of our brand, of our narrative, of how we are known by others so that our true talents can actually be heard and understood and appreciated. Otherwise, if we don't do it, frankly, no one else will. Now I fully recognize that there are some challenges and perhaps some resistance to the phrase personal brand, and so let me just rewind for a minute and take a step back to talk about where it comes from. This is actually the genesis right here, this is a 1997 fast company cover story. It was written by a guy named Tom Peters, who was known in the 1980s as one of the original management gurus. He wrote a bestselling book called In Search of Excellence that was very popular in the '80s, it sold more than two million copies. But 15 years after that he wrote this cover story, The Brand Called You. And you'll note it is not an accident that it has the Tide colors and logo. The idea, and some people loved it and some people hated it, was is it true, should we think about it, that people have brands the way that a detergent is a brand? What are we to make of that? And a lot of people get sort of offended by that concept because they say, well, you know what, I'm a lot more than a soap or a cereal or a detergent, I am a complex and unique individual and I don't want to have to resort to selling myself in this way. And so when they think if personal brand this is what they think about. But I want to posit something slightly different to you, which is that even though personal brand is a charm that was invented fairly recently, you know, 19 years ago now, what that phrase is referring to, what it is talking about is something that has existed not for 20 years, but from the beginning of time. Personal brands is really just a synonym for your reputation, that is what we are talking about. And if we frame it that way it begins to put it into a little bit more contextual clarity. You wouldn't really hear a professional say, well, I don't care what my reputation is or why do I have to have a reputation, the way that they might about a personal brand. Because when you get down to it your reputation in a lot of ways is all there is. How, if you lose a job how are you going to find another one? If you want to move into a different career, you want to get promoted, how are you going to make sure that you're the person that gets chosen for that? Ideally it's because you have a reputation that speaks for you. Ideally it's that people think of you the way you would like to be thought of. You can't opt out of having a reputation or personal brand. People think something about you. The question is what do they think and does it match up with what you would wish? And so what I wanted to talk to you about today is this process, which for me actually was a very personal one. I started to think about personal brand, to learn about personal brand now fifteenish years ago. I started my career as a newspaper reporter, and I have this cover here because this I saved probably about 20 of these in my attic. This was the very first cover story that I ever had for my newspaper. ^M00:10:02 And at the time we, you know, I was a Political Reporter, it was a newspaper that had a little bit of politics, a little bit of everything. In fact, you will note at the top here we covered some truly important issues here. I don't know if you could see that, In Sync vs. Hanson, very critical at the time. [laughter] But I love my job as a Reporter, but unfortunately I was part of the first wave of layoffs. Now this today is not too unusual. Actually, literally, just two weeks ago I looked up the statistic, I needed it for a paper I was writing. I looked up the statistic and would you believe this is the number from the American Society of Newspaper Editors from 2000 to last year, 42% of American journalists lost their jobs. That's decimation of a profession. But I had the good fortune, you could say, maybe the bad fortune of being one of the earliest people to be in that wave. I lost my job in 2001, and I wanted to stay a reporter, but to be honest I couldn't, there weren't any jobs available. And so I had to reinvent myself, and I feel fortunate that in the intervening years I've been able to do a lot of cool things. I went from reporting on politics to working in politics, perhaps some of the people here in the crowd do the same, but I was a Press Secretary on a Gubernatorial Campaign, I was the Spokesperson on a Presidential Campaign. You'll note I never moved to Washington because we lost. [laughter] But, you know, I tried. I ran a nonprofit for a couple of years. And eventually about a decade ago I started doing what I'm doing now, consulting, writing and speaking and teaching. But what I learned through all of those reinventions was that when I would talk to people that I knew, you know, I'd run into somebody that I hadn't seen for awhile, and inevitably they'd be glad to see me, they'd be happy to catch up, but they would ask me about the job that I had had like three jobs ago. They were not keeping up with what I did. And it was pretty dramatic at the time because I was changing careers pretty frequently. But something I realized is that even if your changes and transitions are less dramatic, even if you've just been at the same company but you've been promoted or you shifted functional roles or even if you have stayed in the same position over the period of a few years you have been learning and growing. You have been experimenting and doing new things. You've been gaining new skills. And the truth is other people oftentimes are blind to that, their perceptions of us are stuck in time. They are fossilized in amber. And unless we somehow break through and get them to notice and to be aware of the changes that we have been through and what we have been learning and where we are going now they're going to think of us in that old way and it means that we will not be top of mind for the kind of opportunities that we want now. So how do we solve that puzzle? How do we break through that conundrum? I'd like to talk to you today about a three-step process, which I learned about in the course of writing my book, Reinventing You, which really sprung from initially the idea came from my own experiences reinventing myself, but in writing the book I interviewed dozens and dozens of successful professionals who had made these transitions to try to understand what made it work for them, what enabled them to be successful, so that hopefully we could get some common characteristics and begin to carve out a bit of a roadmap for people. What I realized is that fundamentally standing out at work, reinventing yourself to the place that you want to go so that you can have the career that you want to have is a three-step process. First, discovering your brand because, as we said, no one is a tabula rasa. Second is creating your brand, proactively setting out what you want to be and how you want to be known. And, third, living your brand, manifesting it on a day-to-day basis. So let's start from the beginning, let's talk about how we discover our brand. One of the things that I suggest in Reinventing You is something called the three-word exercise, and the reason that I do this is that what I discovered in talking with many professionals and interviewing a lot of executive coaches, people that work with the creme de la creme, you know, of course we all have blind spots, of course there are things that we don't really recognize about ourselves, but there's something that is even a bit more profound than that. Because the truth is by and large we probably have a decent sense of who we are, maybe how we're seen by other people. There could be exceptions, but we have an okay sense. But there's one piece that even the smartest among us have real difficulty with, and that is knowing what it is about us that is most unique or most distinctive in the eyes of other people because the truth is we know ourselves too well. Everything about us is normal to us. You could read a book a day, you could blitz through a book in an hour and you'd never know that was abnormal until you talked to other people and they said, whoa, you read that fast, that's incredible. And it's like it for almost any other trait that we have. We don't know what is different or unique or exceptional except when other people shine a light on it and point it out to us, which means that oftentimes we're really missing the boat when it comes to understanding our strengths. And so this activity that I suggest, it takes two minutes, it is not a hard thing to ask other people. Basically, what it entails is over the course of the next week or so ask about let's say half a dozen people, friends, colleagues, people who know you decently well. I mean ask them this question, if you had to describe me in only three words what would they be? It's pretty simple, pretty fast, it takes them a minute to answer, and they should in fact answer off the top of their head. But what becomes telling about it is by the time you get to the third, the fourth, the fifth person I guarantee you are going to see patterns in what they are saying and you'll begin to get more of an understanding of what other people see as being uniquely different, uniquely meaningful about you, begins to give you some clues about strengths that you can leverage. But I also want to point out your strengths are an important building block, but it's not the whole game. This is a woman that I profile in Reinventing You named Libby Wagner, and I loved telling Libby's story in the book because oftentimes when we hear reinvention stories there's kind of a way that they go typically in the American psyche, right? And the way that a story about reinvention typically goes is you have someone who is this hard charging professional, you know, they're a management consultant, let's say, and they really do some soul-searching and they say, all right, I'm going to do what I am passionate about and they go off and they become a poet. And we tell the story, and we say, oh, that's so amazing, they found what they were meant to do, they lived the dream and we celebrate that. And that is worth celebrating, that's a great thing, we should all be doing things we are passionate about. But what I liked about Libby's story is that that story, the archetypal one, it's not the only story. Libby was a poet, she had an MFA, she was a University Professor, she published three books of poetry. She was established, she was successful. She decided to give it all up, quit her job, and she became a Management Consultant. [laughter] And to tell you the truth that's actually even harder to do. We can understand why a Management Consultant might want to be a poet, but no one understood why Libby wanted to become a Management Consultant. But she was interested in making change, and she thought an organization is a place you can really do it. But she was worried, she thought that no one would take her seriously if they knew that she was a poet, that that was her training and her background. So her solution to it was she didn't tell anyone, she literally kept it a secret for the first few years she was in business. She did not talk about her background, at all, and she told me she basically lived in fear of discovery. ^M00:20:23 But slowly over time she began to realize that nobody cared too much, nobody was badgering her, asking, well, where did you get your MBA? What they cared about was results, and she was getting results for people. And a little more time passed and she began to realize something else, which is that even though it was very true that the people who had MBAs and had traditional training had things that Libby didn't, she had things they didn't. She began to realize that if you are a corporate CEO and, let's say, you have some sensitive communication that you want to get across well, thoughtfully, effectively to your staff, to your customers, to your stakeholders, maybe, just maybe the person you actually want to have on your side is the person who has spent a lifetime immersing herself in language and who has trained for years to understand the nuance of words. And so she slowly began to come out as a poet, she would tell a few people at first and then a few more. Eventually, she started an e-mail newsletter called The Boardroom Poet. Eventually, she started to have workshops about language and literature and business and how they all fit together, and she began to realize that what in her mind had been her biggest weakness, the thing she was most afraid of having discovered, the fact that she had trained as a poet actually could become a strength and a competitive advantage. So when we're discovering us, when we are thinking about who we are now, what our current brand is it pays to understand our strengths, but it also pays to think about our weaknesses because those may be like Libby our strengths in disguise if we frame it the right way and begin to understand it in that light. But, of course, that's just the first part, discovering our brand. What comes next is creating it, proactively thinking about who we want to be, how we want to be known to others. And so I wanted to share a few stories with you. This is a gentleman named Michael Lecky. Michael is someone that I profiled in my most recent book, Stand Out. And I was interested in his story because in a lot of ways it's a situation that many of us face. Michael was an executive in a large research company, he was a Vice President of Human Resources, and he had responsibility for a lot of different things related to talent development. He began to become really interested in coaching and training. Now this was something that was kind of related to his job duties, but it wasn't part of his official job description. He was certainly not responsible for getting good at coaching people, that was not really something that he needed to do, but it fascinated him. He was interested in it, he wanted to learn more about it. And so his company had hired an outside consultant that they brought in to help with coaching, and Michael took his course, thought it was really great. And so because he started with a spark of interest he decided to follow it up and see where it led. So he reached out to the consultant and he said, hey, the next time you're offering this could I help you, could I assist? And he started in small ways, you know, you can start by helping people set up or break down or clean up, you can start by helping people make handouts or lead discussion groups at tables. But he volunteered to assist, and before too long he started to make himself indispensable, he was pretty helpful. And so he began to co-lead the seminars and over time he got better and better, and he eventually began leading them himself. Now what happened inside his company is that before too long he began to really develop a reputation as the person inside his organization who knew about coaching and training. He didn't start out that way, he didn't start out with any more knowledge than anyone else, but he had an interest and a willingness to learn. And what he told me when I interviewed him for Stand Out is that if you are humble and recognize where you're coming from, you can't immediately start out and say, oh, I'm the expert, but if you're clear about what you know and what you don't know and you're willing to share that knowledge with others along the way they're going to be appreciative and they're going to start to seek you out because you're going to become a big fish in a small pond. You don't have to know the most about coaching and training in the world, but if you know more than the people around you you make yourself an invaluable and indispensable resource. It doesn't take a lot to develop and expert reputation, just a little focus, just a little humility, just a little willingness to tell other people and help them along with you as you learn. One of the other pieces that becomes critical as we think about how we get known for the brand that we want, how to begin spreading that inside and outside our organizations, is the circle of people that you have around you. This is a woman that I profile in Stand Out named Cary Anderson. And I've known Cary for a number of years, and one day she told me something that was so unusual it just captured my attention, and I thought I have to tell this story. And here's what it was. A lot of people have mastermind groups, you could call them, personal Boards of Directors. This is a concept that goes back 80 plus years to the world of Napoleon Hill, you know, little groups of people that get together regularly to hold each other accountable, talk about their businesses, et cetera. That's, you know, it's a cool thing, but it's not an uncommon thing. So Cary has a couple of those, but the part that was amazingly uncommon is she told me that one group that she's been meeting with was formed in 1989 and the other in 1994 and they have been meeting every single month since then, now for more than 20 years and more than 25 years. she told me that the people in these groups with her outside of her immediate family are the people that know her best in the entire world and that participation in the group has become for her the defining characteristic of her professional life because they are the people that know her so well, when they give her feedback, when they give her ideas, when they push back on her a little bit, she knows that she can trust it implicitly because they know her so well and they have no agenda, they have her best interests at heart, which is something that perhaps too often in our modern life we lack. Now what Cary's story bring sup for me is this, when I talk to groups of professionals I'll ask them sometimes, you know, who do you spend time with? Who are the people that you surround yourself with, the people that you have lunches and meetings and coffee with? And oftentimes what I hear is, well, it's the people who e-mailed me and asked or it's the people that I happen to sit next to, it's the people that I happen to be working on a project with. If our professional lives are defined by the people that we connect with, why so often do we leave that to chance? We need to start getting deliberate about who we want to surround ourselves with, who we want to be learning from. And so I will challenge you, as you go home today, go back to your desks, to ask yourself who are the people, the three or five or seven people in your life that you respect the most, that you want most to learn from, the people whose skills you wish that you could be more like? How can you arrange it proactively to spend more time with those people? We learn through osmosis, we learn through presence. How can we change our behavior just a little bit so that we can be around the people who bring out the best in ourselves? Because the truth is those are the people who can become your brand ambassadors, the people who can give you the feedback you need to take your ideas to the next level, and the people who inside and outside your organization can represent you to other people and help you get the opportunities that are dearest to your goals. Now in this professional world that we live in what we're fundamentally known for is our ideas, and this can be a little bit tricky sometimes because ideas are ineffable, right? ^M00:31:07 How do we know if somebody's ideas are good? We have to share them. We have to find ways of expressing them and we have to really think about how we can start prompting ourselves to think differently so that the ideas that we generate are not just the same thing that everyone else is doing. You know, in a global networked world the world doesn't need more of the same, the world needs people who are suggesting things that other people haven't seen or thought of yet. But the question is how do we put ourselves into that state? How do we make that more likely to happen? And so I wanted to share with you a story about someone who actually is a local, at least originally. Her name is Rose Schuman [Assumed Spelling] and she grew up in the suburbs of Maryland. Now up until when she was about 18 years old she had a pretty traditional upbringing in suburban Maryland, but when she was 18 she took a family trip to Nicaragua, which is where her stepmother was from, to go visit the stepmother's family. And that was something that changed the course of her life. It was shortly after the end of the Contra War in Nicaragua, and when she went there the country was in disarray. There was one functioning streetlight in the entire country. The systems, the institutions that she had taken for granted growing up 20 miles from here were nowhere to be found. And that was when she decided she wanted to devote her life to development work, and that's what she did. She went to school for it and she graduated. Took a job with an NGO. And so a few years later she found herself one day walking around town, wandering around, and she was thinking about a puzzle, a problem that had occupied her for years and, in fact, it had occupied a lot of people for years, which was the question of how can we harness the power of the internet for the world's poorest people? Now there had been a lot of reasonably good solutions to that. Many of you may, for instance, have heard of the one laptop per child initiative, pretty good idea, right? Cheap laptops, give them to people, it's great, but that's not still a perfect solution, particularly if we're talking about the poorest people in the world. Because the truth is the laptops might be cheap, but they're still a little pricey, costs money to make them. If you're giving them to someone the people who receive them have to have a safe place to store a laptop, which is not necessarily true for the world's poorest people. You have to assume if you give them the laptop and want them to access the internet they have to be literate, which we cannot always take for granted with the world's poorest people. And even more to the point they have to be literate in a language that is widespread on the internet, and if we take that to the extreme of the poorest one billion people that is almost never the case. So how do you bring the power of the internet to them? Well, one day Rose was walking around and she noticed something, she noticed something that she had seen a million times before and you probably have seen a million times before, maybe even this morning on your commute, which is a call box like you'd find at a transit station. You push a button, talk to somebody on the other end, they answer your question. And she realized if you could put call boxes in the world's poorest places people wouldn't even need to understand the concept of the internet to take advantage of the power of the internet. And so, thus, was launched Question Box. She told me that she spent the next four hours feverishly writing in her journal coming up with the idea, sketching it out, and she spent the next decade of her life working to implement it. Today Question Box operates in India and in many countries in Africa, and it literally is a call box that is placed in villages, people can go up, push a button and they are connected on the other end of the line to a bilingual operator in a centralized location who will Google the answer to whatever question they have. And, in fact, the recent Ebola epidemic in Liberia Question Box became a critical tool for the people there because most of the international aid workers had been evacuated and one of the few ways that people in remote villages could get accurate information about Ebola and preventing its spread was through the use of the Question Box. I tell you this story because when it comes to being known for our ideas, which is fundamentally as a knowledge worker, as a professional today, one of the best things that we can do for our brand, for our reputation, so much of it starts with doing what other people are not, which is noticing. Instead of being glued with our heads down we need to notice what's around us and make connections. And one final thought on creating ideas and connecting, sometimes when I talk about developing ideas, being known for your ideas, I hear from people and they say, oh, that's great, that's wonderful, but I can't do that, I don't have any brilliant ideas, maybe other people do, I don't. And that brings me to Daniel Goleman. Some of you guys may be familiar with him, you're almost certainly familiar with his work. Daniel Goleman is an Author, who is the bestselling Author of the book, Emotional Intelligence, which was a bestseller literally for years, spent years atop the New York Times Bestseller List in the 1990s. The Harvard Business Review called Emotional intelligence the most important management insight of the decade. Now emotional intelligence, of course, you're probably familiar with it, it is the idea that IQ is not everything, it's not just about your intellectual horsepower, it's about how you behave in the world, how you relate to other people. That might, in fact, be far more predictive of your ultimate success personally and professionally. Today that's well understood, well accepted, but when Daniel Goleman wrote his book it was not IQ, for the past 50 years had been the be all and end all of how people measured and predicted one's success later in life. I didn't know a lot about Daniel Goleman when I started writing Stand Out, but I was interested. I thought where this idea has become so seminal, where did it come from, how did he develop it? And because I hadn't given it a lot of thought, what I assumed, frankly, was I assumed he was a researcher and that he had written a book about his research. But I looked into it and I discovered that was actually not true. Daniel Goleman was a reporter, he was a science reporter, and he read a journal article about the study that showed emotional intelligence was so critical. And he said this is important. People need to know about this, but if he had not popularized it, if he had not taken it and brought it to the mainstream probably it would have remained a relatively obscure phenomenon that only a few researchers really knew about. ^M00:40:08 When I was writing Stand Out I interviewed a couple of gentlemen who are behind a biennial ranking of the world's greatest management thinkers, it's called Thinkers 50. And I asked them, you know, what does make for a great management thinker? And they told me something fascinating, their perspective, they said, was that when it comes to a truly great, truly innovative business thinker originality they said is overrated. Instead, some of the greatest thinkers are synthesizers, they're people who spot great ideas, underappreciated ideas that need to be heard and they help them become heard, like Daniel Goleman did. If you don't feel like you have any great earthshattering ideas, that's okay. What you need to have is the ability to notice, like Rose Schuman did, the ability to talent spot, not just people but ideas, the way that Daniel Goleman did. If you find ideas that deserve to be heard, that deserve to have a wider spread and you're able to help get them heard that's one of the most valuable functions you can serve and it's one of the best ways that you can make a mark and become known inside and outside your organization for your ideas. Now, finally, it comes to living your brand because the truth is sometimes I'll talk to people about their brands, about personal branding in general, and they'll say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, your personal brand, that's like your elevator pitch. [laughter] And kind of, yeah, your elevator pitch, you know, what the short little thing that you say about yourself, that's a piece of it for sure. What do you say about yourself when people say, so, who are you, what do you do? That's important, but the truth is if we think about it, if we think about how we determine what we think about other people it's not just based on what they tell us about themselves, right? That's the smallest piece of it. What we think about other people comes from how they are in the world. It's about how they act, what they do, how they live their lives, how they relate to others, how they treat us, that's their brand. Yeah, it's a little bit what they say, but by no means is that the end of the story. And so the real challenge, the real opportunity is how can we live our lives in such a way that our brand's message, the message that we would like to get across to other people is unmistakable, that it is transmitted so clearly that other people cannot miss it. Let's talk about a few ways. One of them that I think is especially important is the idea of connecting with other people because your brand never happens in isolation. Ronald Burt is a Sociologist at the University of Chicago and he has studied what is called network theory. And this is basically how do you make yourself indispensable in a network. And what he discovered, and I think this is quite important, is that the best way to make yourself indispensable is to become the red dot in the middle rather than a blue dot on the periphery. And what this means basically is that he discovered in every organization, literally, no matter how hard they try to root it out in every organization it's human nature that siloes are going to appear, certain people who should be talking are not talking, certain departments that should be talking, not talking. Field offices and headquarters, not talking. But if you, if you can be the bridge to build those connections. Now another key piece, especially in the internet era, is sharing your knowledge with other people. You can have the best ideas in the world, but if other people don't know you have them then it's the ultimate tree falling in the forest, right? You're not going to get credit for it if other people don't know it or haven't heard them. So how can you begin to get them out of your brain and into a place where other people can actually be helped by them? Well, that is one of the things that I learned when I interviewed this gentleman, his name is Robert Scoble, and he is well-known in the technology space, he's sort of an influencer in the startup world. and he told me a life FAQ you could say to use in Silicon Valley terminology, a life FAQ that I think might be useful at least metaphorically for all of us. Robert gets literally hundreds and hundreds of e-mails a day, sometimes close to a thousand e-mails a day, more than any human being could respond to. And a lot of them are pretty similar, a lot of times people are asking him questions and they want to know advice about different aspects of startups. And so what he started doing, because he realized he couldn't possibly respond individually to all these people, he started e-mailing them back and he told them I would be glad to answer your question, but not on e-mail. And what he told them instead is he asked them to post their question on QUORA, which some of you guys may have heard of, it's a question and answer website, spelled QUORA. People post questions online and then other people answer them. And he said if you post your question I will answer it there. And the reason, he told me, is that if he e-mails one person back he's helped one person, it's great but it's not scalable, it's not sustainable, but if he answers the question online with that one action, that same action, he's able to help five people or 50 people or 500 people. We all have the same 24 hours in a day, we all are being pulled in a million directions. If we can begin to ask ourselves how can we leverage our knowledge further to share it with more people, to make it accessible and helpful to more people, that's where we can begin to have more of an impact. And over time people begin to recognize the value of your insights, they begin to read those answers and say, wow, that makes a lot of sense, I like the way she thinks. It doesn't have to be posting them on QUORA, it could be an internal social network in your company or maybe you like the logging or maybe you like giving speeches or maybe it's just speaking out more in company meetings so that other people hear what's on your mind rather than keeping it buttoned up. But he more we can begin to share our ideas, the more other people can benefit. When it comes to living your brand I wanted to make sure to conclude by talking about something important, which is the question of conformity versus authenticity. Now it's pretty clear from our history culturally that we used to live in a world where conformity was really what mattered. Did you dress like other people? You have the same credentials as other people? There was one right path and you needed to adhere to that right path in order to succeed. But in the past 20 or so years in a lot of ways things have changed. ^M00:49:45 Some, you might argue, are negative changes. You might say, well, there's more job insecurity or people have to carve their own paths more these days. People aren't working for the same company their whole lives, there's more uncertainty. But, of course, as with Libby Wagner, where your weakness may actually be a strength, there's another side to it, there's a lot more opportunity for change, for growth, for innovation. But there's also something powerful that's emerged, which is that in a world where there's an infinitude of choices, of information, of resources, of people competing for the same jobs, I can tell you what has become a commodity. What has become a commodity is yes men. What has become a commodity is people who think the same, do the same things, and contribute more of the same because there's plenty of that. In order to be successful today what companies need, what the world needs, is different thinking, people who can see around corners, people who can see what's next. People who like Rose Schuman can make connections between things that may not have been brought together before, but when you finally see it it makes sense and it opens up a new way of doing business. People who can tap into new audiences and new constituencies and new ways of being. That is what is in short supply, and if we can be the person that contributes that, that makes us indispensable. There's some research that was done by the Center for Talent Innovation in New York City, and it is kind of fascinating actually. And I especially wanted to throw this in here because this section is cosponsored by The Library of Congress LGBT organization, but I think that it actually applies to everyone. What they discovered, interestingly enough, when they did a large-scale study is that it turns out, they surveyed LGBT employees and they asked them do you feel isolated at work, do you feel stalled in your career? And you might think that openly gay employees would maybe be feeling the brunt of this, that they had taken a risk, that they might be paying a penalty for it. I mean, after all, that's why people stay in the closet, right, is because they feel that there's a risk and a penalty to being out. It turns out, ironically, that out employees were far happier and more successful than their closeted brethren. Now I'm putting a big asterisk on this because, of course unfortunately, we still live in a country in which in many states people can still be fired legally for being out. But in situations where that is not the case, where state or a company has an antidiscrimination policy, these are pretty stark numbers. If you are out you are less isolated. If you are out you are more likely to be successful in your career. Why? How could that be? Well, it turns out that what they discovered is that when people are holding back a fundamental element of who they are it occupies so much of their psyche it's actually harder for them to concentrate on other elements of their job, like building positive, open connections with their coworkers. People feel like they don't really fully know you, there's a little bit of a distance. And so it's harder to connect and break through. Now that's a piece about LGBT employees, but let me tell you how it applies to everyone. Deloitte University and the Leadership Center for Inclusion did an interesting study along with Professor Kenji Yoshino of New York University, and it's on a subject called covering. This is based on work that originated in the 1950s with a famous Sociologist named Erving Goffman, and they've expanded it and updated it. And basically what covering is if you think about the LGBT case, when you're closeted you are totally saying, you know, you're totally not telling anyone about your identity, but covering would be maybe a less extreme example. People might know that you're gay, but you are minimizing their exposure to that identity, so maybe everybody else has a picture of their partner on their desk but you don't or everybody else talks about what they did with their spouse over the weekend and you don't, you say I and not we or whatever it is, that would be covering. But that's not just a gay thing. What the Deloitte and NYU research discovered is that in the modern workplace almost everyone covers in one way or another. They found examples of African-American or Latino employees that felt a need to play down their cultural identity in order to fit in. They found examples of women who were just a little careful about talking about their families or their kids at work because they worried they might not be perceived as a really serious worker if they were also seen as a mom. And perhaps shockingly but not really if you think about it the study showed that 46% of white men, 46% of straight white men reported covering in one fashion or another. When I first gave a talk, in fact, about this a gentleman came up to me afterwards and he said what you talked about, that's me. He said about 10 years ago I got divorced and I became a single father responsible for my kids, I never told my coworkers because I didn't want them to think that I would be distracted. It could be health issues, it could be mental health issues, it could be almost anything, but in our workforce even though we are in an era now where what we need more than ever is difference and individuality and being real too often we find ourselves in a place where we're just a little bit hesitant to go that final mile and really be that real because we think that we need in some ways to still hew to that man in the gray flannel suit ideal. What the Deloitte and NYU study revealed is that covering, no matter who is doing it, if you're gay, if you're African-American or Hispanic, if you're a woman, if you are a straight white man, when you are covering you are less effective at work. You're not able to really form the relationships, the honest relationships with your colleagues that you need to be successful, you're not really able to bring your best ideas to the table because we become so concerned about managing perceptions and managing our identity rather than our jobs and really being able to be fully present to excel there. and so what I want to leave you with is as we think about how to stand out at work, this process of understanding what our current brand is, creating the future vision that we want and moving towards that, and then finally living it out, every day taking those steps, we need to not be afraid to bring our whole selves to work. the more we do that the more we empower other people to do it, and the more we can create the kind of culture that is beneficial, not just for us but for making the entire workplace, the entire company, the entire culture better. What we need more of is people willing to stand out and to be authentic, and it starts with us and the decisions that we make, that's how we can stand out at work. So I'm thrilled to be here, and I think we have time for questions - is that true? For anybody who needs to leave early I'll just mention if you want to stay in touch or get a free resource, a 42-page workbook that I've developed from Stand Out you can get it on my website at dorieclark.com. But thank you so much, and I'm going to hand it over to Yvonne to do questions and we can chit-chat and bond as much as you'd like. Thank you very much, everyone. ^M01:00:30 [ Applause ] ^M01:00:35 >> Yvonne Dooley: We're right at one-thirty, but I'm sure we can take a few questions if you would like to stay back and go ahead and ask Dorie that. >> Dorie Clark: Thank you. ^M01:00:46 [ Inaudible ] ^M01:01:40 Yes, great question. Thank you. And it's one that certainly has been bubbling up over the last few years because, you're right, in many ways it is a power struggle, right? Whose brand is more powerful, the company's brand or the individual's brand? And if the individual's brand is stronger will recruiters come to them, will they get offers from other places? Yes, that's actually true, the company is correct. But, that being said, would a star performer want to work for a company that deliberately suppressed them and kept them down? Probably not. And so it's kind of a balancing act, and I think that companies have to make a decision do they want to be the kind of entity that is a strong brand that only attracts B players, where they are always bigger than their employees and that is how they keep it, or are they strong enough and expansive enough that they are willing to take in a star performer, an A player that, in fact, could attract more business to them because people say, oh, wow, so and so is on your team, that's amazing, I want to work with them and so, therefore, I want to work with you. I think, I mean it's a legitimate concern, if someone really is a star performer, if they can literally write their own ticket could they be poached? Sure. But I think that we also need to start thinking, you know, I mean companies like sports teams sort of need to choose their strategy, right? But I think more and more people need to adapt to the reality that Reid Hoffman talked about in his book, which actually originally sprung from an HBR article called The Alliance. And the idea is that we need to become a little bit more comfortable with the idea that taking a job may become in certain circumstances a sort of tour of duty, like you would do in the military for instance, you know, you sign on for two years or five years or whatever it is with an understanding that, okay, it's a fixed period of time, but can we both benefit from having you here for five years? Actually, yes, even if you leave at the end of five years it will have been good for both of us to have that mutually beneficial association. So I think it's a tricky situation and companies really need to ask themselves what kind of an environment they want to create. So thank you for raising that. Yes, other thoughts, questions, stories about standing out? Yes, sir? >> So when it comes to standing out in the workplace how do you recommend navigating generational shifts? Because where you have management Gen Xers or Baby Boomers it's sort of that got to work 18 hours and put everything into it, where with Millennials it may be I'm going to work 18 hours but I may do two hours from a Starbucks and three from a bar, and it's not that, you know, it's just different work habits. And so how do you advise navigating that because I see that with a lot of my friends who are in that Millennial category? >> Dorie Clark: Yes, yes, and questions about flexibility and telecommuting and things like that. I mean you're absolutely right that for a long time the model has been that the ability to have that flexibility is a privilege, not a right. You have to ask your employer, well, can I please on Friday work from home, or things like that, and it's something that you earn over time, et cetera. And so if people are coming in, let's say if Millennials are coming in fresh from college and they did all their homework assignments at the Starbucks and, well, why can't they do it for work, you know, isn't it about getting it done? Why does it matter where they were when they actually accomplished it or wrote the memo or whatever they needed to do? It can create misunderstandings or different expectations. I'm a fan, personally, my personal bias is toward maximal freedom and flexibility, but as with a lot of things the progress comes in fits and starts. One of the things that I thought was actually most interesting, a few years ago when I was researching Stand Out, when I was first coming up with what are the ideas that I wanted to write about and explore further one of the things that I actually thought about including at the time was a concept, you guys may have heard about or been familiar with, pioneered at Best Buy in Minnesota called ROW, Results Only Work environment. This was a very innovative idea much talked about in management circles that for several years was the law of the land at Best Buy Corporate Headquarters, which was extreme freedom and flexibility. There were no set work hours, you know, flexible vacation policies, and it was considered a real model for an innovative workplace in the future. And it operated for a few years and then they shut it down. We look at Marissa Mayer, famously, ending the policies at Yahoo saying, nope, sorry, you guys come back on in here. And so we're still, there's no cultural consensus, you see different managers kind of pulling in different directions and so there's a lot of tension. How does this apply to standing out, how does this apply to your personal brand? Well, I would say we, of course, as individual performers, if I'm working in a company you always want to try to be as keenly attuned as possible to your boss and your boss' expectations, that's just a reality that you have to deal with. This is the person who is primarily responsible for your future at least in the context of that company. So to a certain extent they set the parameters of what you can do. However, my addendum to that is that even if you are having to play along with rules that are not your preferred rules, that is why I would encourage everyone in the workforce but perhaps particularly younger workers to not put all their eggs in that basket. If you devote 100% of your life and your attention to pleasing your boss that's great and it works pretty well if they're always your boss and you always want to work at that company, but that may not be what you want. If I was advising somebody who is 24 years old I would say plan for maximal options for yourself and what gives you options is building a brand simultaneously outside your company, build a network, join professional associations, don't just join become an officer at professional associations, start to get known, start blogging. You know, if you're allowed by your employer start blogging about your field, create a Twitter account and start following people and building discussions and sharing and curating ideas about your industry. The more well-known you are outside your company the more respect you get inside your company because they know you have someplace to go if you ever want to, and that kind of freedom, you know, we were talking earlier about the power balance of whose brand is bigger, yours or your company's. And so if you can maximize your brand it actually helps your company, too, I mean hopefully they see it that way that the rising brand tide lifts all boats, but it gives you options and power if the tide turns and something bad happens at your company. You never want to be in a position where you do not have a plan B and a brand, a strong brand always gives you a plan B. So I want to be respectful of folks' time. If people want to come talk to me afterwards please come on up. It's wonderful talking with you. Thank you for your questions and have a great day. ^M01:10:20 [ Applause ] ^M01:10:25 >> This has been a presentation of The Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^E01:10:32