Anyone with expert or consultancy status would do well to read this before their next marketing investment. We all know that Social Media has re-written the script on buying, we can often see how real expertise is being replaced by gazillion-view teenage influencers. We even have senior politicians telling us: “people have had enough of experts”. As if that’s not enough, now we have the additional challenges of AI. And yes, you might be fondly thinking of the past – remembering the past “credible you”, who could demonstrate wisdom based on years of knowledge, testimonials and experience. But now, you might be feeling your degrees, background, experiences are no longer needed? Did you just need a YouTube channel all along? So how do you find your clients? How does a serious buyer look for a credible advisor? What’s happening to credibility?  What do you, the expert, do – to prove your own?
Answer: We need experts more than ever to help find our way through the attention-grabbing, loud, sparkly, vacuous fall-out. Fortunately, Debs (in her inimitable style, with humour and self-deprecation, and a LOT of actual experience – despite her youthful looks she’s no millennial!) has taken the nebulous and essential concept of Credibility and provided a flexible framework for the credibility crisis that we are now in.

Almost 60 years ago, Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan wrote a song called “It’ Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding). In it he has a line “That he not busy being born is busy dying.” He wrote this when mainframe computers took up tons of floor space and required massive cooling and other infrastructure. Only academics and large corporations had access. Today we carry more computing power in our pockets. With this acceleration of technology, Mr. Dylan could update his lyrics to say if we are not busy being born, then we are BUSIER dying. No need for this update because in “Stop the Credibility Crisis” Debbie Jenkins has covered this. Unlike Mr. Dylan, who only makes us wonder what to do, Ms. Jenkins provides several how-to techniques to confront the crisis in credibility we all face. (Yes, all of us!) Even if you work inside of a company, your credibility can be (or already is) in crisis. (For the record, Debbie says she has not written a how-to book, but she has put quite a lot of how after telling you why you should do something to up your credibility.)
Her three tenets of Disrupt, Create, Connect sound simple. Nevertheless, they require action, intentionality, and effort. (Perhaps Mr. Dylan knew it would take work to be ‘busy’ being born?) She provides great ideas for how to keep busy and become even more credible. If you need more reasons to read this book, the endnotes provide information and entertainment. Where else will you find references to Drucker, Epictetus, Emerson, AND the movie “This Is Spinal Tap”?