Ruminations on Brand-Building and Becoming a Complete Narcissist

Aweh Dear Ruminants and Groupies,

There comes a moment in the life of the corporate mammal when the institution looks at you with the warm affection of a procurement department reviewing an obsolete supplier contract and says, in its own delicate way:

“Thank you for your service. Now kindly remove your carcass from the org chart.”

In my case, this moment arrived in 2021 when I took voluntary early retirement. Or, depending on the mood, when the institution took early retirement from me. These distinctions matter only to lawyers, HR practitioners, and people who still believe that “talent management” is a phrase with moral content. The institution was finished with me. But I was not finished with life. This, I have discovered, is where the trouble starts.

Because once the badge stops opening doors, the calendar stops barking, and the email address stops working, one is confronted with a terrible question:

Who are you when nobody is paying you to attend to nonsense?

For many years, like many corporate citizens, I had a position. I had a title of diminishing significance. I had a place in the machine. The machine knew where to put me.

But a title is not an identity. It is a label attached to a chair. And when you are no longer sitting in the chair, the label remains behind, slightly dusty, while you walk into the world carrying only your actual self.

This can be inconvenient. Especially if your actual self has not been exercised for a while.

The borrowed glow of the institution

Large institutions are very good at lending people importance. They give you a title, an office, a reporting line, a budget code, and the strange confidence that your presence in a meeting is not only required but somehow economically justified.

People answer your emails. They invite you to workshops. They ask for your view.

This is how institutions manufacture gravity. You think it is yours. Then you leave. And suddenly the gravitational field collapses. The phone does not ring. The invitations stop. The acronyms continue without you. Somewhere, a committee is formed to replace the committee you were on, and nobody even has the decency to send flowers.

At this point, one discovers whether one had a reputation or merely a role. A role is what the institution gives you. A reputation is what survives when the institution stops giving.

The abyss, and other retirement destinations

Since leaving, I have watched some former colleagues disappear into what I can only describe as the post-corporate abyss.

Not death, obviously. Something more ambiguous. A kind of professional evaporation. One moment, they were formidable presences in meeting rooms, capable of bending entire departments with a raised eyebrow. Next, they became LinkedIn ghosts with profile photos from 2009 and the occasional comment on a golf day.

This may be unfair. Some vanished by choice, which may be wisdom. Some may have chosen silence, grandchildren, gardening, fishing, wine, prayer, or the underrated pleasure of not being asked to “circle back.” Good for them.

But others, I suspect, were not so much liberated as erased. Because the institution had been their stage, their amplifier, their filing system, and their witness. When it was removed, there was no public trace of their thinking. No archive. No voice. No intellectual spoor in the sand.

They had done much. They had known much. They had seen much. But the world had no convenient way of knowing that they were still there.

This is the part that bothers me. Not because everyone must have a blog. Heaven forbid. There is more than enough incoherent bullshit out there.

But because experience that cannot be found becomes experience that cannot be used.

The vulgar little business of having a brand

Which brings me to the vulgar little word: brand.

I dislike it. It smells of consultants, deodorant, and people who describe themselves as “thought leaders” without visible evidence of either thought or leadership.

A brand is what toothpaste has. A brand is what banks inflict on rugby stadiums. A brand is what happens when a marketing department discovers adjectives.

And yet, here we are.

After leaving the institution, I had qualifications, experience, opinions, scars, and an allergy to fashionable bullshit. But I did not have a public trail of thought. I had been visible inside systems, but not necessarily outside them.

So, I started writing, not because the world had requested my wisdom, but because silence felt too much like compliance with the verdict.

The blog became a way of refusing evaporation. A place to ruminate, irritate, speculate, and occasionally commit acts of grammatical violence in public. A place where climate, energy, politics, management theory, science, South Africa, academia, industry, and the general absurdity of the human condition could be chewed slowly, like cud, before being spat into the digital veld.

Was this brand-building?

Apparently, yes.

Was it narcissism?

Of course.

This is the tension. To write in public is always to risk vanity. Every published sentence carries a tiny whisper: look at me, I have arranged some words and would now like civilisation to notice.

The question is not whether one has a brand. Everyone who is known for something has one, whether they like the word or not. The question is what the brand serves.

Does it serve contribution, or applause? Does it clarify your thinking, or merely decorate your self-importance?

There is a difference between saying, “Here is what I have learned; use it if it helps,” and saying, “Here is why I remain significant; please clap in the comments.”

The first is contribution. The second is LinkedIn.

The narcissism audit

Of course, one must still conduct the occasional narcissism audit. This is best done quietly, without forming a steering committee.

A few useful questions:

Would I still write this if nobody praised it?

Am I trying to understand something, or merely display that I understand it better than others?

Am I contributing, or polishing a statue of myself?

Have I mistaken followers for evidence?

Have I confused being read with being right?

These are unpleasant questions, which is why they are useful. The point is to remain honest enough that the brand does not eat the person.

Because it can.

Feral thought

When an institution is finished with you, it does not necessarily mean you are finished.

Because inside institutions, thought is domesticated. It is house-trained. It learns to sit, stay, and avoid biting the executive narrative. It becomes fluent in the dialect of “alignment,” “enablement,” “stakeholder engagement,” and “strategic priorities,” which is to language what polony is to meat.

Outside the institution, thought can become feral again. It can sniff around forbidden topics. It can bark at passing orthodoxies. It can dig up old bones. It can ask why the emperor is wearing a strategic roadmap made entirely of spreadsheet fog.

This is not always comfortable. But it is alive. And being alive, after being administratively erased, is an act of rebellion.

Not finished

There are many dignified ways to live after an institution is finished with you. Silence may be one. Gardening may be one. Grandchildren, travel, prayer, woodwork, teaching, consulting, or finally learning how to make a decent sourdough may all be valid forms of post-corporate resurrection.

But for those of us cursed with a restless mind and opinions, the public voice remains a useful instrument.

Not because the world is waiting breathlessly for our wisdom. It is not. But a life of thought should not end merely because you have been erased from the corporate payroll.

The institution was finished with me. That is allowed. Institutions have their own lives, appetites, rituals of renewal and forgetting.

But I was not finished with life. I was not finished thinking, writing, laughing, objecting, misbehaving intellectually, or asking why so many intelligent people can sit in a room and produce a sentence no human being would willingly say at home.

So, I built something. Not an empire. Not a movement. Not a personal brand in the scented-candle sense of the term. A voice. A small, stubborn, impolite voice in the abyss.

Because when the institution is finished with you, the temptation is to believe the verdict.

Do not.

Until next time

Bruce