Tom Peters told workers they were CEOs of "Me Inc." in a 1997 magazine article.
In August 1997, management writer Tom Peters published a cover story in Fast Company magazine titled "The Brand Called You." The article argued that in a world of disappearing organizational loyalty, every worker needed to treat themselves as a brand. "We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc.," Peters wrote.1
The article landed at a specific economic moment. Outsourcing was accelerating, corporate restructuring had eliminated the assumption of lifetime employment, and the internet was creating new platforms for self-presentation. Peters identified these forces and proposed that workers respond with marketing.
Peters recalled in a later interview that the idea came partly from visiting Hewlett-Packard and noticing that an engineer's badge displayed a number, not a name. "Slowly climbing the ladder by sucking up and then sucking up some more wasn't going to work," he said.2
The concept spread rapidly. More than 100 books on personal branding are available on Amazon. LinkedIn, launched in 2003, became the primary infrastructure for the practice, giving professionals a permanent, public, searchable identity tied to their career narrative.3
Peters himself expressed frustration at how the idea was received. "My biggest problem with the reaction to 'The Brand Called You' article is the number of people who have taken it as a self-promotion piece, and I just despise it," he said in 2021.4 The concept he intended as a call to develop genuine expertise became, for many, a mandate to perform expertise. The resume documented what you had done. The personal brand projected what you wanted others to believe.