Tom Asacker

read this a couple of hours ago. and while painting the house i meditated a little over this formula.
yes, it looks like a formula for spotting potential people-brands in the field of sports.
relevance outside of this field....???... not sure...

first of all: define success. (in sports it is easy)
second of all: integrity /// why does bill sanders mention integrity? possibly because his brands can become walking atom-bombs to the commercial brands that finance them (and him)...

so what about personal success and personal integrity. i can think of quite a number of young sports heroes - boris becker for example - who found themselves being this public figure multi-milionaire in their mid-twenties - and felt completely alienated by their public image...

look at the price these brand-prostitutes have too pay - look at the job their pr-people are doing - are they bringing these guys into the public - well, in most cases they try to keep them out of the public, to keep the image clean...

it is really great to see beckham smile, but have you ever heard him speak???

personally i do not buy this integrity thing - it is double-edged - and the true integrity lies in being true to yourself.

if you think of other people brands - those who have been brands by birth, not by personal achievement - prince charles - to my personal opinion - for example has gained a lot of personal credibility and true personal integrity - by god-damn following his heart and marrying this beautiful horse-face camilla.

...
back to the paint-job.

ha, ha!

michael graves, philippe strack... borderliners!! dare devils!! - at least in the case of p.s.... possibly also holds to a smaller extend for m. g. ...

artists' personality.. uhg... commercial artist's personality ... even worse!!!

btw - one of my all time favourite books is thomas mann's "tonio kroeger" - if you do not know it - get it. ok,it is s.th. that really moves you when you are twenty - nevertheless... aren't we all still a little bit...:)

and the other thing is - to come back to the INDEPENDENT PROFESSIONALS: michael graves has got a real job with a real business model behind it, he is an architect and works as an architect (and he started at a time where you could still establish an architects practice without much risk of success...)

the thing is - most of our FREE AGENTS do not have that.
i have been living in berlin for some time - and you might say: hey, berlin, great!!! - creative melting pot. AND THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT IT IS! it melts everything down to complete insignificance. a designer develops the identity for a hot-dog stand and has to call his next-door lawyer, who has also been waiting for a job for some time, to get the money from the hot-dog guy who unfortunately filed for chapter 11 already.
this free-agent-thing can be a terrible down-ward spiral.

another one of my favourite quotes - i think it was the composer sibelius who was asked why he was never seen in the company of musicians, artists or writers and preffered to hang out with bankers and business-men. "only with business people you can talk about art. artists only talk about money."

...
the free agents need sponsors to finance their ego-trips. a one-on-one-on-one economy does not work - at least not in a nice way (maybe i am thinking too conservative).
or - on the other hand - the free agents need a true product that can be multiplied - a book, a best-seller, they need to be real gurus.
economies of scale still work!!!

i think, tom, from your personal experience, you can tell us much more about these things...

curious to know.