Get your personal brand ahead – by a leap second or two!

Rather predictably, especially given the current economic climate, the news headlines for today, February 29th have been about the extra costs the leap year brings. Extra payroll for hourly or weekly paid workers, extra power to run businesses, extra IT costs to deal with computers and chips that cannot allow for the extra day.

There’s also a leap second — the extra moment added to atomic clocks to keep them in sync with the earth’s rotation, which is slowed by the gravitational pull of the Sun and the Moon. It’s been added 24 times since 1972, the year the International Telecommunication Union defined Coordinated Universal Time. Last month, a timekeepers’ meeting failed to agree on whether or not to scrap the leap second (perhaps they ran out of time!). This has come under criticism because every time a second is added, the world’s computers need to be manually adjusted, a costly practice that also boosts the risk of error. Defenders of the leap second say without it, hi-tech clocks would race ahead of solar time, amounting to a discrepancy of about 15 seconds every 100 years.

However on the positive side here is what an extra day means for your personal brand;

- One extra day for you to work on defining and developing a clear brand message.
- More opportunities to communicate that brand at work or to clients and get noticed.
- Using a leap year to do something on brand that really gets noticed because its only one every 4 years!

And finally Happy Birthday if you are one of the approximate 5 million ‘leapers’ globally. You probably have to make up at least 4x for missed birthday opportunities!

Paul Copcutt first aligned with personal branding after reading Tom Peters ‘Brand You 50’ in 1997. Now a sought after speaker and media resource he has been featured by Forbes, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and Elle. He works with executives, managers and teams for leading Fortune 500 corporations.