Actively managing your personal brand is critical if you want to make a significant impact in the areas of your life important to you. What you say and what you do influences how people perceive you, so take note that your personal branding will determine how successfully you’ll be able to make an impact in life.
Jaqui Lane is one of Australia's leading business historians, having researched and written books for the Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, EMCOR, Cleanaway, Woolworths, Patrick’s, Peter Lehmann Wines, and the Asia Center Foundation.
She has interviewed over 900 Australian business people, published over 400 business books, written 27 business history books, and authored over 200 articles.
Jaqui’s vision is to change the world, one book at a time. She does this by helping business people share their knowledge and insights through writing, publishing, and marketing their own quality business books.
There's nothing about the writing, editing, production, publishing, and selling of business books around the world that Jaqui doesn't know.
She understands how to take the idea of a business book and guide entrepreneurs, company directors, consultants, and professionals through the whole process of creating a business book that will increase their profile, build a long-lasting legacy, and propel their reputation and relevance.
Jaqui's passion for literacy is shared through her involvement in a number of charities, including being the founding chairman of The Footpath Library, a charity that provides books to homeless and needy people across Australia.
She is currently a role model for Book in Homes Australia, a charity established to provide new books to lower socio-economic and remote students throughout Australia.
Jaqui is originally from New Zealand and refers to herself as an Australasian. Growing up with three older brothers, she learned early, the skills needed to cut through, to be seen, and heard.
She has a master's degree in Russian Politics, is a keen hiker and scuba diver, and has just come back from the Flinders Ranges.
Defining Jaqui As A Brand
Jaqui got a lot of calls from people, whether they’re corporate or business people, saying that they’ve been told to call her because she’s the book lady.
Her usual response to that is that she’s happy to be known as the book lady rather than the bag lady, so her brand is a specialist book person.
Jaqui is typically focused on business books, but she also often helps people who are writing their biographies. Overall, she’s just very passionate about books.
Her brand would be somebody who is knowledgeable, caring, trustworthy, energetic, engaging, great at execution, who stands up, and who has great insights.
Helping Others Build Their Brand
Jaqui is currently working on a couple of histories at the moment, and the very big questions that she always asks her clients in the early stages are, "What are your key messages and values? What would you like the reader to take out of this?"
For CommBank, she thinks a really powerful longevity part of their brand was that they're a bank for all Australians
Their heritage goes back to 1912. After the Federation, they were the savings bank that most people joined, because traditionally, trading banks weren't allowed in savings banking.
They were the bank for migrants. A lot of new Australians back in the 50s became Commonwealth Bank customers.
So she thinks they have a long and proud legacy of being a bank for everybody, and that comes out very strongly.
Jaqui thinks over generations, perhaps that's been forgotten, as it naturally sometimes does unless you're actually constantly communicating that story.
She mentioned a great video she once watched that said you can't just tell the story once and think everybody's got it. You have to keep telling it and reminding people of it, and just when you get to the point where you're sick of talking about it, it is probably the time you need to keep talking about it even more.
The relevance piece is also underpinned by the values, according to Jaqui. So if a value for your bank is supporting all Australians, that’s a strong and enduring value.
But unless you're aware of it and the organisation is constantly referring to it and articulating it, it could get lost.
How Others Perceive Jaqui
Jaqui believes that people perceive her as direct, honest, trustworthy, knowledgeable, a little cheeky, enjoys a good laugh, and is more interested in her cat than in herself.
She also thinks other people perceive her as someone who’s very considerate and who has great curiosity and intellectual interest.
Her subset of skills around how to publish a book is kind of a given, and it’s really more about the intellectual capacity that she can bring to a discussion.
Jaqui is currently working with people on a book on AI and ethics, data analytics, how to run a psychiatry practice, the caring economy, empathic leadership, and others. They’re a very broad range of topics, and she’s fascinated by all of them.
Given that Jaqui’s mission is to change the world for the better, one book at a time, she believes you can only really effectively do that if you’re at the forefront of the issues in the world you are facing.
She thoroughly enjoys the process of understanding what they are as she works with some amazing people who are leaders in those fields. It keeps her unbelievably up to speed and relevant.
The Importance Of Reputation
In New Zealand, when Jaqui was doing her master’s degree in Russian Politics, she had a part-time job, and that was helping to research a book on the history of the New Zealand National Party, which is the equivalent of the liberal party here in Australia.
She got to interview and meet a lot of New Zealand's politicians and political leaders at quite a young age, and then she ended up working for the National Party for three or four years.
So she learned very early in politics that your reputation is mission-critical and, in the number of the people that she met and then worked with, just being in that environment makes you extraordinarily aware of the fact that you are public property in a lot of sense.
You can't just do what you want, when you want, and that was way before social media even.
From a very early age, she understood the power of presence and the importance of being able to clearly articulate to a wide audience what you needed to communicate.
Jaqui is very careful about who she works with and she’s also careful not to judge. She would make her own assessment based on her own values and what she genuinely believes she can bring to the project.
If she doesn’t think it’s right for her, she would say so very politely. In fact, she had turned down both corporate work and other projects based on that.
Jaqui says, "I think that's an important part of that reputation and relevance thing is that you need to be very clear about where you want to play because you can't spread yourself too thinly."
She has recently begun researching the concept of reputation economy: everyone has a reputation, and it is now digital and online, and it exists whether you actively manage it or not.
It’s really very important for people, particularly business people, but really anybody to be actively engaged in actually doing a Google search on themselves regularly to understand what their digital reputation is because it's out there and it might not be what you think it is.
Establishing Jaqui’s Values & Beliefs
Like most people, Jaqui’s foundational values also came from her parents, but she really didn’t think about her values at all until she had her son.
She thought now that she’s got the responsibility to grow a human being, she really spent a bit of time thinking what the values that she wanted to instill in him were. What were the ones that weren’t serving Jaqui anymore or might not serve her son?
That was the first time she really actively thought about what her values are and she noticed that some of them are different from her parents.
Then, she didn’t think too much about it again until we worked together on my book.
One chapter that really impacted her was chapter 2 of the book, where I talk a lot about values.
She actually went through the exercise that I suggested in the book about writing down what you think your values are and ordering and reassessing them. Some she moved on, and some she doubled down.
She says, "I think the act of actually consciously looking at what your values are is probably something most people don't do enough."
Jaqui believes that her beliefs have shifted over time. She came from a very conservative local small town in New Zealand, and she didn’t really have much exposure to anybody that wasn’t like her.
She then ended up in Sydney, Australia and through learning, business, and interactions, she had to reassess a number of her beliefs.
She does a lot of work in the Middle East and she’s passionately interested in ancient Persian culture, so exploring other cultures deeply has required her to review and assess what some of her beliefs were. Some she holds firm to, and some have morphed over time.
Jaqui just read an article about the decline of Western liberalism, and for a very long time, she's been aware that Western liberal values are not the globe’s values.
There’s a whole range of different values and belief systems and she thinks that it’s really arrogant for us to think that there’s only one set that should apply to the world.
Jaqui believes that we would all do ourselves a great service in the community to be much more open to different beliefs and value systems.
She also believes that if you understand more about different cultures and systems, you will appreciate it way better someone else's perspective and also your own.
Tested Values & Beliefs
In business, Jaqui had to make some major decisions that impacted the revenue and profitability of her company.
She’s had to walk away from potential projects because the value system or the behaviour of the potential client were something that she couldn’t work with.
Jaqui always wanted to be able to walk with her head held high, so if anything didn’t feel right, she has regularly made decisions that have impacted her business because, for her, it was the right thing to do.
Separating Business Brand and Personal Brand
At the very top level, Jaqui’s business is not her name. She has a business called The Book Adviser and another business called Global Stories.
That said, those brands are out there, but most people would attach those brands to her personally.
So Jaqui’s about to make some changes in her business, so she’s not necessarily the key point person for that.
She hasn’t separated the two very successfully yet, but it was a very conscious decision she made when she established those brands.
In fact, she has two that are quite separate brands, and they perform different things, and, of course, her engagement with them is quite different.
Jaqui struggled initially to decide whether she’d have one brand or two. Completely different markets completely require different levels of knowledge and support.
So she thinks very clearly about what the potential client would want to see. How would they interact with that? What are they looking at as opposed to what does she want to sell?
It’s stepping out of her and looking at it from the potential client’s point of view.
So if you want a corporate history written, that’s Global Stories. If you want to develop a business book for yourself, that’s The Book Adviser.
It may be that her team absorbs them into one brand, but at the moment, they want to keep them a little bit separate to see how they go.
Having A Mentor
Jaqui feels very fortunate that people chose to mentor her, so she didn’t have to go out and see them.
When she was involved in politics, the head of the National Party identified her and brought her under their wing, which was great.
When she came to Australia, she formed a business with her business partner, who’s a very successful businessman.
He identified her when she was doing an interview with him for a book. He asked Jaqui at the interview if she’d be doing anything next.
She then replied that she’s not yet sure, but she has this idea to start a business. He then said he’d be happy to talk to Jaqui.
So she’s never actively sought a mentor, and she feels very fortunate that others saw something in her and offered their guidance.
But Jaqui highly recommends that people in the early stages or whatever stage they are in their career go find a mentor or somebody to give them independent, thoughtful support.
She says, "It's very hard to get out of your own way sometimes, and I think having somebody who's not a family member, who's not kind of emotionally connected with you in some way, is really valuable in terms of looking at what your strengths and weaknesses are, helping you identify what they are, having that discussion around values, and also helping you to identify what your goals are in life and then maybe how you might go and achieve them."
Jaqui also had clients who ended up being her mentors, and that’s actually a great part of what she does.
She gets to meet amazingly interesting people, and some become great friends, informal mentors, or people you develop a closer relationship.
She’s also on the stage, where she now mentors some people as a way of giving back.
The Most Prominent Brand Jaqui Has Worked With
Jaqui mentioned that our working together taught her a lot about the whole branding space.
She’s in it but she’s never had the time to look into it more deeply and effectively, but that’s what she’s helping a lot of her clients do.
She mentioned that CommBank’s history was fascinating. Aside from interviewing all the senior management and board directors, she also interviewed Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, and all the living reserve bank governors. Jaqui would love that project to just go on forever, meeting an array of really important individuals who have had a significant impact over time on all Australians.
She didn’t really know much about the banking and financial system when she started that project, and now she’s probably got 100 odd books on it, which go back to the beginning of Fibonacci and accounting.
She got interested in the ancient history of banking and finance. She went off on quite a few tangents and has an enduring interest in them now.
So, as a project, that one would be a standout for her just because the company and those individuals have and continue to have such an impact on the health of the economy and the wellbeing of our country.
Final Thoughts and Conclusions
I was hoping Jaqui would actually mention that because I think that the financial system is a cultural shaper of the country, and it's been through an interesting journey over the last hundred years, and anything that a financial institution actually does not only impacts people's lifestyles and impacts the economy, but also impacts their mindset, or the way in which they want to live, work, and grow.
I don't think people actually recognise that, and that's why a history like that is critically important.
Obviously, it must have been a real privilege to actually be part of putting that together. It's a great recognition of Jaqui’s talent and expertise that we all know so well, and I’m very grateful for what she's been able to share with us today.