Sy Yang, founder of Agentis Partners, was featured in Fast Company’s guide to managing a personal brand, sharing how leaders can make their expertise legible to the people who need to see it.
In 1997, Tom Peters published “The Brand Called You” in Fast Company, a piece that introduced the idea of the personal brand and reshaped how a generation of professionals thought about their careers.
Nearly thirty years later, Fast Company returned to the theme with a two-part special report on managing a personal brand. Sy Yang, founder of Agentis Partners, was featured in the second part, “Managing a Personal Brand: Fast Company’s 196-Point Guide for Leaders,” written by Shalene Gupta.
The guide gets at something we believe deeply at Agentis: for accomplished leaders, the challenge is rarely the expertise itself. It’s legibility. The people who most need to understand what you do, your buyers, your peers, the institutions you want to reach, often can’t see the full shape of your work. The reputation is real. The infrastructure that carries it is not.
Our contribution focused on how leaders can close that gap: treating a personal brand not as self-promotion, but as the system that makes genuine expertise findable, credible, and durable over time.
It’s the same thinking behind the work we do for expert-led organizations and the leaders who run them. Make the work you’re known for legible to the people who need to know it.