Ángel Cabrera: Global Leaders Can Be Made

When you Google “Thomas Crampton,” the first website that will show up is www.thomascrampton.com, his personal blog. What is so remarkable about this is that Tom has worked as New York Times and International Herald Tribune correspondent for years. He has written hundreds of stories from all over the world and reported on political events, social and economic issues and even from war zones. And yet, the first thing to pop up on the web about him is none of that work, but his own personal website (he left the NYT less than a year ago).

It gets better (or worse, depending on your perspective): The top 10 Google search results also include his space in YouTube, his LinkedIn entry, and a reference from Japanese blogging guru Joi Ito. Only two entries refer to content he has produced for the IHT.

I have known Tom since before his blogging days. I had lunch with Tom in Hong Kong last Tuesday, before heading to Tianjin for the World Economic Forum meeting. In addition to a few survival skills for the typhoon that was approaching, he explained to me what he refers to as “global identity.”

We used to say, “you are what you eat.” My sense is that a generation from now we will be telling our children “you are what you blog” instead. Our global identity may be shaped not so much by what we do, or what we believe in, but what a Google search may make available about us.

As a novice blogger interested in corporate global leadership and global citizenship, I wonder what this means to companies trying to build their identities as committed corporate citizens. As important as it is to develop a core corporate citizenship strategy that is aligned with one’s business strategy, it is probably just as important how that positioning is reflected in the information that is most readily available: Your corporate digital identity.

You’re not what you do, but what the blogosphere says you do!

– Ángel

Posted: 09|27|08 at 6:37 pm.
Filed under: Global Citizenship.
Comment | Trackback