The Godfather's Top 10 Personal Branding Tips

The Godfather is full of personal branding. Every character in it has a personal brand, some evil, some good, some good and evil. Here are my Top 10 Personal Branding Tips from The Godfather.

1. It's not what you know, it's who you know

The Godfather epitomizes this more than anything else. It's all about your personal brand and how that engages, influences and communicates to people who can help you do business and how you can help them. The quote from the film that best sums this up is "Friendship is everything. Friendship is more important than talent".

In this one quote it's stating what everyone knows if they think about. You can be the most talented person in the world at what you do, but without a personal brand that people respect and want to work with and if you have no network, no friends, no associates who can help you get to where you want to go you are nothing. Your talent is meangingless.

Friends, and in this context I'm using friends as context for business associates too, can enable your dreams to come true and you theirs. It's quid pro quo. It's all about your personal network and your personal brand standing within it as to how much you can get done and how much people help and enable you to get things done. Or not of course as the case maybe....

2. "Someday, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me. But until that day, accept this justice as a gift on my daughter's wedding day"

I have a t-shirt with this on because it's a wonderful quote from the movie. Your personal brand is so powerful that someone comes to you for help. It is clear in the relationship that this person needs your help because you can make things happen that they cannot.

In return what this is saying is that this person helping will not necessarily ask for anything in return. However he holds the right to do so if he should need that favour. The essence of power and a strong and awe-inspiring personal brand.

3. "I'll make him an offer that he can't refuse"

Clearly there are ways of doing this and in business it's all about the strength and power of your personal brand and what you can negotiate with and what you can offer. If you hold all the cards then you have the best negotiating position.

You can indeed make an offer that someone cannot refuse in any context, it's often how far you are willing to go to achieve or do this that counts. How you use this power and how you can get what you want taking into affect the repercussions of using that power on your personal brand is of course up to you to decide.

4. "Great men are not born great. They grow great."

It's so true. Leaders with silver spoons in their mouths rarely become great actual leaders in the real world. You just have to look at royal families and rich dynasties across the world to see how this manifests itself.

True leaders with great personal brands are made and grown over time with experience. The Godfather is full of wannabe leaders. Not all have the charisma, nous, personal network, human touch, ruthlessness and wiseness to make it actually happen.

You grow into becoming a leader through enhancing your personal brand, adding experience, making connections, building and investing in your network, taking time to build relationships, launching and building companies, succeeding, failing, succeeding again, everything an entrepreneur has to go through to enhance their personal brand.

How you act with greater seniority, experience and connections determines your personal brand's greatness.

5. "Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgement."

This is a great quote. One that I wish I could put into place more often! Emotion clouds your judgement. It makes you do things that you look upon later and wish you hadn't. Taking time to consider your response, your email reply, text reply, action can save you thousands of dollars, save other people from harm and hurt and save yourself from both.

Business is an emotional business. Entrepreneurs are passionate about what they do and how they do it. They are passionate about protecting their workforce, personal brand, livelihood and shareholders from attack. How your personal brand copes, deals with and leads through these times can determine how great an entrepreneurial leader that you really are.

I use cycling and the gym to force myself to do this. If something bad happens at work or I receive an email/text that stirs my emotions I try and force myself to cycle/go to the gym, take time to consider a response.

These places enable me to force myself to be away from my lap top/mobile so that I can't respond. I also am removed from the heat of the battle in the office/out with friends/having a drink and therefore cannot reply/respond.

If you combine both emotion, hatred and alcohol together the repercussions though can be even more dangerous and everlasting. Best to remove yourself from all of them before responding. Best to talk to neutral people, business coaches, non-executives, friends about the situation before replying.

Your personal brand can be harmed or enhanced by thinking before acting. Acting without emotion and hatred in a cold, focused way.

"It's not personal it's business" is born out of this and is key to a powerful personal brand. Also a great quote from The Godfather.

6. "Revenge is dish that tastes best when served cold."

Continuing that theme, business is full of ups and downs, sleights and mishap, deals that didn't turn out as you both planned, people who let you down or attempt to screw with you and your business either deliberately or unintentionally. How you respond to this determines how strong your personal brand is and how seriously people take you.

Act in haste in vengeance and you can often pay the price. Think carefully about your revenge and create a strategy to exact cold hearted revenge and your personal brand will not only be enhanced, your revenge will probably be more effective and that person will think twice before acting against you in the future and warn others of taking you on in the same circumstance.

It takes a great personal brand with great patience willing to look at the long game, the deeper more effective long term strategy, the bigger picture, to rise above the human notion and desire for speed of vengeance. You want to exact it now not in the future. Take you time and the satisfaction will be greater and longer lasting and more likely that it be more effective as you will have thought through all the angles and options, downsides and repercussions. Your personal brand will have grown in strength,

7. "A friend should always underestimate your virtues. An enemy overestimate your faults."

Your personal brand is multifaceted and shows different characters to different people at different times. As this quote from The Godfather demonstrates a friend should always be surprised and delighted about what you can and want to do for them.

An enemy should always think that they can get the better of you. Constantly surprising your enemies with moves and actions that they do no expect is often key to your success and bettering them in deals and life and enhancing your personal brand.

8. "The lawyer with the briefcase can steal more money than a man with a gun."

Bearing in the mind the context of The Godfather this is a great quote and goes to the heart of an effective personal brand. Violence rarely achieves anything. Business is all about outsmarting your competition, working with your partners and impressing and delivering for your clients.

Being smart in business and creating and cultivating clever and effective win-win deals will always pay off greater than acts of violence which can't be controlled an never lead to good outcomes.

9. "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer."

Often in business it pays to get close to your enemies, competition, people who want to exact vengeance on you or get the better of you. You can find out more about them close by, how they work, what they're up to and what they're planning, win their confidence and then take action when they least expect it.

Your personal brand is seen in many ways by friends and enemies. Keeping people unaware of your real intentions or as this quote suggests keeping you enemies closer than your friends sounds cynical but is very pragmatic in the long term. It also personal brand accentuating.

10. "Time erodes gratitude more than it does beauty."

I love this quote from The Godfather. It makes me think that for your personal brand to thrive, survive and become ever more powerful and effective then you really do need to invest in your relationships and build you network and keep maintaining them all the time. People forget easily.

Never take any anything for granted, always reach out to people, be proactive, don't always leave it to other people to do this. If they don't and you don't you both lose out. You also soon find out who your real friends and business associates are that you can rely upon and trust to help you and whom you can always help.

People forget, remind them. Your personal brand grows increasingly strong as you do so.