Blog of Chinh Tran

RUCHIR SHARMA is head of Emerging Markets and Global Macro at Morgan Stanley Investment Management and the author of Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles. In the middle of the last decade, the average growth rate in emerging markets hit over seven percent a year for the first time ever, and forecasters raced to hype the implications. China would soon surpass the United States as an economic power, they said, and India, with its vast population, or Vietnam, with its own spin on authoritarian capitalism, would be the next China. Searching for the political fallout, pundits predicted that Beijing would soon lead the new and rising bloc of the BRICs -- Brazil, Russia, India, and China -- to ultimate supremacy over the fading powers of the West. Suddenly, the race to coin the next hot acronym was on, and CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey, and South Africa) emerged from the MIST (Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, and Turkey). Today, more than five ye...

So what are some of the steps CIOs can take to establish or improve their brand? Darbyshire says the first step is to understand the five elements of a personal brand. The first is purpose, “why people follow you”.  Second is social style, “the way people see you”.  The third is communications, “the way people hear you”.  The fourth is history, “how people evaluate you over a long period”.  The fifth is versatility, “the way people relate to you and how you relate to them”. The next step is a “brand discovery exercise”. For this, Darbyshire uses the Johari Window assessment, where a person describes himself or herself from a list of adjectives, and then asks friends and colleagues to describe them from the same list. “It is like a virtual 360-degree assessment of words to describe you,” explains Darbyshire. These are then matched with four quadrants to understand if the CIO’s self-perception of their brand equals to how others see them and where their bli...