How to Prove You’re a Thought Leader (Instead of Just Saying It) This episode unpacks…
A Retrospective and Look Forward at Thought Leadership’s Future | Peter Winick and Bill Sherman
How people become thought leadership practitioners, and a look at the future of the field.
An interview with Peter Winick and Bill Sherman about thought leadership past, present, and future.
To celebrate our 400th episode, our two hosts Peter Winick and Bill Sherman disperse insights they’ve gained having spoken to hundreds of thought leaders over decades of working in the field.
We start with a look at the widely varied paths to thought leadership. There are no schools, no set career path to follow to become a thought leader. Unlike becoming a doctor or lawyer, thought leadership is often the second act of a career. People branch into it once they’ve become a subject matter expert, have conquered many challenges of their own, and have developed a unique voice that needs to be heard.
With no set route, thought leadership practitioners are often faced with experimentation as they create content and sharpen their message. Bill talks about the need to simply get content out and not be afraid of failure. Ideas need to take root, and you need defined goals in order to measure its success. Thought leadership practitioners need to shepherd their ideas, constantly look for new ways to present them, and find their best audience.
Looking around the corner, Bill and Peter discuss the drivers that will change thought leadership over the next few years. We examine how publishing will continue to shift its place in a thought leader’s toolbox, and the bar for quality content is only going to get higher as publishing becomes a simple, even easy, task. In addition, we learn why a visible digital footprint adds glue to business proposals and engagements, and why lack of visibility will be a major career impediment in the next few years. We want to thank all of our listeners for joining us over the last 400 episodes, and we look forward to bringing you more great content and exciting guests in the future.
Three Key Takeaways:
- Don’t wait for your thought leadership to be perfect. Put it out there, and if it falls short, use that as a learning opportunity.
- Your message needs to be independent of the modality. Build a strong foundation of ideas instead of focusing on how to “hack the algorithm” of the platform.
- The cost and ease of publishing is allowing a flood of new ideas to enter the milieu. This signal-to-noise ratio can only be overcome with high-quality content and good marketing.
If you need a strategy to bring your thought leadership to market, Thought Leadership Leverage can assist you! Contact us for more information. In addition, we can help you implement marketing, research, and sales. Let us help you so you can devote yourself to what you do best.
Join the Organizational Thought Leadership Newsletter to learn more about expanding thought leadership within your organization! This monthly newsletter is full of practical information, advice, and ideas to help you reach your organization’s thought leadership goals.
And if you need help scaling organizational thought leadership, contact Thought Leadership Leverage or reach out to Bill Sherman on Linkedin!
Transcript
Bill Sherman How do people get into the world of failed leadership? We’ve over the years talked with hundreds if not thousands of people, and I want to explore the concept of an origin story today. How do you get into thought leadership? And really, it’s something that I think many people only have one perspective on. So to sit down with me today, I’ve got my friend, my colleague, Peter Winick. Welcome.
Peter Winick Hey there. Yeah, I my first answer to that question, Bill, would be. Of all the hundreds, if not thousands of thought leaders I’ve spoken to over the over the last 20 years. I think there’s maybe a handful that it was deliberate, planned and intentional. Now, if you look at any other profession and thought about that, it’s actually the opposite. Nobody accidentally becomes an accountant. It’s very a you know, and well.
Bill Sherman If you ask six-year-olds, none of them say they want to be a thought leader. You get firefighter, astronaut, MC, lawyer, doctor, etc.. Yes, college students. I still think you don’t get many people say, I’m going to practice thought leadership when I go out into the work world.
Peter Winick No, I think yeah. And actually, even if you look at very successful senior level executives, CEOs, etc., they don’t even ponder that until the second act. Right. They’ve been exposed. There’s ideas that have been ruminating, they’ve been practicing, etc. Then they reach a phase in the career where they’re ready to sort of do the next thing. And it’s gnawing at them. Ooh, that would be that would be really interesting to do.
Bill Sherman And you wind up having to have had enough experience, skill, development, expertise, You know that time in the trenches, a few skin needs some successes where you look and you say, I have something to say and I know who I want to share this idea with. And until you have that sort of itch, that desire, that passion and say, I’m going to talk about this, I’m going to communicate this because the world needs to hear it. Usually that’s not on day one.
Peter Winick Well, no, I think that’s right. And I think that it may start as a total fluke accident. Whatever. Hey, there’s an opening at the conference on Tuesday, and so-and-so said, I really need you to fill in and come up with something that’s an accident. Right? But then it maybe that might be where it starts. And we’ve heard that story, but then it’s like, That was fun. That was I want to do more of that. I want to write a little bit more. I want to research more. I want to there’s a calling is a strong word, but it just doesn’t go away. And you want to sort of delve in it and experiment with it, etc.. When I look at, for example, you know, again, some of the CEOs and senior executive we’ve worked with, they’ve actually been practicing and operationalizing whatever their thought leadership is without it having a name or a label or even a process or a methodology. It’s been their personal operating system, and now it’s time to sort of codify it and unleash the power that it has into the universe.
Bill Sherman Well, you mentioned something I think that often goes overlooked. You talked about that someone calls in sick and you’re there for speaking. And that reminds me of an adventure you and I had some 20 years ago with you and a speaker stuck in an airport, I believe it was Buffalo. And I was in New York and I got the call literally from you saying, hey, our speaker is scheduled to talk. And I think it was two and a half, maybe three hours in Midtown in Times Square. We’re stuck in Buffalo. There’s snow. We’re not getting there. Can you do this? And, you know, if you would ask me where the first place I’d be speaking, I wouldn’t have said, okay, Times Square to an audience and having three hours prep.
Peter Winick Well, not really an audience, though. So even for the audience, it was a group of senior executives at a world at a top three pencil.
Bill Sherman Exactly. Exactly. This is not any rational debut sort of moment. Right. And you look and you say either you say yes or you say no. And if you say yes, what do you do in that limited clock is ticking sort of opportunity to say something, right? Yeah. And I think a lot of people stumble into that.
Peter Winick Yeah, I think a lot of people do. And it’s not just the physical anymore. They stumble into it because there’s an initiative at the organization to start writing more, to start, you know, sort of developing your thought leadership, developing your personal brand. And then it kind of works, right? So then once it works, you’re like or you realize it’s fun, you want to do it more. Right. And it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy almost.
Bill Sherman And I think as I look back and we’re now episode 400 and this is the 400th episode, I remember you and I in the Cosmopolitan Casino here in Las Vegas. Some four years ago. And you made a comment and you said, I think we should start a podcast. Right. Let’s give this an experiment and let’s see what happens. You have to seek those opportunities and be willing to put an idea out there and to build a platform. And often that means you go find the hammer, the nails, the lumber, and you start building it long before you have clarity on audience. And sometimes you do it stubbornly.
Peter Winick So I think the issue is you have to not be afraid to experiment. It’s a ready, you know, fire aim world. And we’ve seen too many people make too many excuses of why they haven’t unveiled the thing. Whatever the thing is, the website, the logo, the blog post, because they’re polishing it and polishing it and polishing it. Right. You have to be willing to ship it and you have to be have strong enough skin to go, Wow. That was an absolutely complete and utter failure. I can give you a list of dozens of failures that we’ve had along the way, although I wouldn’t really call them failures. I call them experiments. And each and every one that we did none was about the house event. None was about the brand event. And we learned something from all of them that moved into the next.
Bill Sherman So there’s a balancing act here between running an experiment long enough that you actually give it time to see if it’s successful and looking and going, Yeah, that’s not going to work. Hasn’t worked, won’t work. You know, let’s let it go, right? You can’t fall in love with your mistakes.
Peter Winick Well, and no one’s ever become an overnight success from, you know, one pithy tweet or one slick blog post. So I think the trick is. Whenever you’re going to try something new, a new format, a new modality, a new platform, a new whatever, put some parameters around it on the on the plus and on the minus. Hey, a year and a half ago, everybody was high on clubhouse. So I decided, okay, first I’m going to try as an observer. I don’t really get it. I don’t really understand it. Everybody’s talking about it. Maybe there’s something there. I’m going to go listen to some smart people doing some smart things. So I sort of got the cadence, the vibe of it, and then I was like, okay, let me try and host 1 or 2. So I put together a couple of those things and they went fairly well. But I couldn’t justify after doing I think, I think we committed to half a dozen or a dozen that it was moving the level or that it was doing any of the objectives that we initially started out. It’s got to build the brand, it’s got to drive business, it’s got to increase recognition to a market we didn’t have. So we had some clear objectives. We didn’t meet those and as a result, we just folded it and nobody cared and nobody died and it didn’t really matter. Like nobody labels us clubhouse failures.
Bill Sherman Right, right. And I think there’s something to be said about that foundational understanding of what is core on what you’re trying to say versus the modalities that you use. And you have to be able to separate the message from the medium. I know. I just sort of. Distinguished between Marshall McLuhan there. And that’s okay, right? The medium is the message for McLuhan. But here in thought leadership, the message is independent of the media.
Peter Winick Yeah, and I think that’s right. I think a lot of people spend too much time trying to figure out the facts of a specific modality. How do I went on Twitter? I do. I went on Instagram, whatever, which is a fool’s errand, because you’re never going to be smarter than the algorithm. It is not a sustainable competitive advantage to try to do that. However, the part that they skip is actually what is foundational for their thought leadership, right? Have they codified their methodology, their ideas, their platforms, their content, their offerings? That’s the hard work. Once you have that done, then you can say, how might I put this in video? How might I put this in an assessment tool? How might this look at when I’m a guest on a webinar? It’s paint by numbers almost at that point, if you’re putting in the reps on the front end.
Bill Sherman And so I think a lot of people overindex in the modality. They spend a lot of time the trip, the tips, the tricks and the hacks. Whereas if you look at so where will we be your audience be in five, ten years? You can’t predict that. I can’t predict that. Just like if we look five years in the past, what we were doing then, podcasting for us was an experiment. Now it’s a part of a core of what we do well.
Peter Winick And I think when you look at any piece of solid thought leadership, there’s sort of two, two trend lines. There’s what is evergreen about this that will be so and will be valid regardless of what’s happening today in the stock market, global economics, pandemics, on and on and on and on. Right. What is universal about situational leadership? Right. Then you say, well, what are the other things going on in the world, in the business cycles, etc., that make something more or less relevant? And I think a lot of people try to catch those waves. So everybody now is a hybrid workplace expert. Everybody a year ago was a DIY expert. Right. And when you’re trying to catch the trend, the odds of the timing being right or you actually being perceived as the expert that you’re trying to portray are pretty, pretty crappy. I think it’s better to be opportunistic against a strong foundation then. It’s easy to say. I never thought when I developed this five years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, this wasn’t even a problem on anybody’s radar. But look how neat it fixes this problem. Look how spiffy this was.
Bill Sherman And I think that’s cyclicality. A lot of people undervalue in the sense that we’ve now both been in the field of thought leadership for 20 years from the point where it was a small, less active part of the world. There were authors doing business books and people out speaking and that sort of thing. There were white papers by organizations your McKinsey’s, your Accenture’s, etc. but it wasn’t a large organizational endeavor, and there were a handful of people who were doing thought leadership on the individual level. And I think what we’ve seen now is thought leadership is very trendy right now. Everybody is saying, can I do thought leadership? They’re putting it in their LinkedIn profiles, etc.. But at the same time, I think you and I recognize there is a cycle.
Peter Winick Well, I also think at the at the organizational level, what used to be only the best of the best consulting firms, top tiers, whatever, that had the big budgets that can afford to spend millions and millions and millions on a white paper that maybe a thousand people would read because it was the right thing for them. It’s been democratized where you could be a startup, you can be a small business, you could be a high growth business. We’re seeing for the first time in my recollection, use of funds in fundraising, part of that being towards the investment in thought leadership to get the brand to stand out right So you can.
Bill Sherman Either and driving valuation at IPO.
Peter Winick Yes, right. Because not everybody could have a stadium named after them. Not everyone could spend big bucks on customer acquisition. And the reality is, in the B-to-B world, where there’s works best, you don’t need to play for the masses.
Bill Sherman Right? You can recognize that 99% or 95% of the world isn’t going to tune in or will look and go, Yeah, your noise rather than signal. And that’s okay. Reaching that 5% or that 1% of an audience that’s deeply relevant to you and you to them is exactly what you need to do. Because thought leadership gives you the tools you need to punch well above your weight as an individual or organization. And I think that’s what a lot of people are looking for now. How do we spend our marketing and sales dollars in a wise and efficient way rather than just broadcasting it? It’s the old story of, you know, 50% of your marketing dollars are wasted, but we don’t know which 50%. How do you targeted to an individual so that that individual says, yeah, that’s relevant, get feedback and you know you’re reaching the right folks.
Bill Sherman If you are enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about the podcast, please leave a five-star review and share it with your friends. We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all major platforms as well as at LeveragingThoughtLeadership.com.
Peter Winick Yeah, no, I think that’s right. And I think going back to the point you made a point that you made earlier, it’s really an exciting time for us as practitioners in the thought leadership space because it used to be our market was limited to traditional thought leaders and we loved them. And that’s still a very, very important piece of our business. Authors, thought leaders, speakers, academics, what I would call sort of the traditional thought leadership 1.0. Now, organizations are really, really embracing it in a true and authentic way that is not just, our biannual white paper or, you know, a one off heavy lift. It is an integral part of their business strategy or their marketing strategy of their growth strategy. They’ve identified who they need to reach, how they need to reach them. And there’s a whole lot of creativity going on directly, in my opinion, as a result of Covid, because it used to be, well, let’s just find the top ten five, pick a number of events. Somebody is doing the hard work of aggregating the entire market for us in Scottsdale, Orlando, Phenix, Las Vegas, for three days. Let’s just get our names on a logo, show up and be smart. Well, we had a world where that didn’t live for that didn’t exist for two years, and who knows what it’s going to look like in the future. Right. And when you miss those opportunities, I mean, CBS this year was, what, ten, 15% of what it normally was.
Bill Sherman Absolutely. In Vegas, the photos of CEOs, you could see empty hallways where it’s normally they’d be shoulder to shoulder, people packed. Right. And so the question is, if you can’t reach an audience through a modality you used to trust, that used to be golden, whether that’s a digital modality, an in-person modality, you’ve got to be quick enough and agile enough to reposition your message on a new platform, in a new environment. And if your message isn’t stable, then you’re going to struggle to adapt both medium and message overnight.
Peter Winick Yeah, and I think specifically when you’re looking at not just B-to-B, but financial services, professional services, high tech, you know, and others, those are industries and businesses that lend themselves to be able to show what their model is, what their methods are, what their thinking is. Right? So the cloud is not just a piece of technology. It’s a way to change the way you do business, the way to have information at your hands, and it opens up new problems, security risk, etc., etc., etc.. So if you’re in the cloud storage business, there’s lots of room, even if even though that might be considered a commodity for you to show your wares as a as a value.
Bill Sherman So we’ve been retrospective. Let’s go a little bit forward looking because I guess that’s the world of thought leadership in itself. So let’s go Meta, Let’s look five, ten years out. What do you see as drivers of change for thought leadership over the horizon?
Peter Winick Yeah, I think. At the individual level, the traditional thought leader, eventually publishing’s going to have a different place in it. Publishing it used to be all about getting that big New York publisher, and if you didn’t have that on your name, on your brand, you were a nobody. That’s changing radically right now. I think those business models are a mess for the thought leaders. So I think the entry point will continue to get easier and easier and easier and cheaper, right? However, the signal to noise ratio is the real issue now. So it used to be, you know, theoretically the role of a big New York publisher was if they put something out, they have vetted it, etc.. So when you live in a world absent that and I don’t know who Bill Sherman is and he puts stuff out and it’s crap, well, that’s kind of a bummer. But conversely, if you put stuff out and it’s awesome, it doesn’t matter who he is or where he is or anywhere in the world, right? So I think the democratization of it, because of the lower cost, ease of access, is going to increase the pressure to put out good stuff. Right.
Bill Sherman Well, and I think from the organizational perspective, the recognition that the cultivation of an audience is first and foremost one of your primary activities to do, because if you don’t have people listening to you, you’re doing a lot of cold calls and sales, Right? You want to increase the number of people who are coming to you when they’re ready to buy. And thought leadership is the way to do that. Now, I think also from the over the horizon perspective, organizations are going to have to deal with the question of how do we democratize the creation of thought leadership. If you’re in a regulated industry, right, you know, you’ve got a compliance thing where it’s got to be reviewed and vetted so that you don’t violate compliance standards. But more importantly, if only the top of the House is getting support from executive communications or through a handful of experts who are subject matter experts who get support for marketing, you’ve got a limited number of touchpoints. If you’ve got 10,000 people in your organization instead of 1 to 1, it’s got to be a many to one, right? You’ve got to have everyone in the organization act. Go ahead, Peter.
Peter Winick I think there’s another angle on that as well. When you reach a certain point in your career and that can be different for everybody, there’s going to be an expectations of I was hiring Bill to be an SVP of customer experience at Company X because that’s his thing, right? He’s been doing that for 20 years. Well, how did we do that today? Here’s his resume. Here’s a reference. In his resume, he’s going to tell us how great he was. Cost, savings, turnover, whatever, whatever, whatever. That’s cool. But if I’m interviewing five people and one of them I already know, even though I don’t know them because they’ve been writing, they’ve been speaking, they’ve been out there in the space, not as a personal brand, but they’re committed to the cause, right? So they are known as a leader in this space. Why wouldn’t I hire that person over everybody else? All things being equal, I’m getting a I know what I’m getting. Well, look how this person thinks. Look what he has to say. He also has a following. Maybe that’s good for us. So I think the absence of thought leadership is going to be a career impediment for many.
Bill Sherman I absolutely agree. And the tools to make it visible are much more accessible. So if you’re looking at folks who are engineers or research scientists, you can look on Google Scholar and you can see, okay, if they’re publishing academically, how many times are they cited? How many times are those ideas used, discussed and brought out into the world? If the person is posting on LinkedIn, what is their followership look like? And it may not be a quantitative pursuit, you know, broad number of followers or number of likes on a post may not be the answer. But if you look and you go, they are at the heart of every conversation. Those are the people that will be competitive going forward, and those are the people who will have their choice of position. And so if you’re looking to attract, retain and grow talent, you’ve got to look from a thought leadership strategy.
Peter Winick Yeah, I think even, you know, from a from a traditional career perspective that also I also think from a nontraditional career, if you’re an entrepreneur looking to raise money and you’re in the whatever, fintech is hot now or whatever that space, right? And you know, you and I were both going out to raise money, but I’ve been bylined a bunch of fintech conferences, spoken at a bunch of them, and you haven’t the investors are going to look at that as well and say, wait a minute, I like he already he’s been talking about this for eight. You know, everybody’s an NFT expert today, except some people have actually been talking about it for 6 or 8 years and some for 6 or 8 weeks.
Bill Sherman Well, and it used to be if you were going out and raising money, I’d be looking at your pitch deck. I’d be asking around in the. My community to know. Are you the real deal? Right. As opposed to now I can sit on my laptop, do a few searches, and I can follow your digital footprints. And I think that is something that a lot of people need to be much more aware of from a thought leadership perspective as they go forward. That people can follow your footsteps much easier.
Peter Winick Yeah. And. Wonder why or why not. Your footsteps are visible, right? And I think will point the absence of footsteps, you know, says something as well.
Bill Sherman Exactly. So if you’ve got a profile that you put on LinkedIn, you use a recognized expert in the X, Y, Z space, whatever it is, and there’s no evidence of it on LinkedIn. I searched and I can’t find it. I go, Really? What are you doing right? Are these the invite only events that I can’t find online? And there are some of those, but they are few and far between.
Peter Winick Yeah. So. So I think in summary, you know, we’ve got, you know, changes for traditional thought leaders, changes for organizations embracing it and changes for career trajectory in terms of a justification to delve into thought leadership, even if it’s not something you’re thinking of monetizing directly or becoming a speaker or a thought leader, just a way to sort of put your stuff out there, right. And have.
Bill Sherman Well, and if thought leadership is taking ideas to scale at its heart, then it doesn’t matter if you’re an individual, an organization or an entrepreneur or an employee, you’re looking to find the easiest and most effective way to reach the people with an idea and get them to take action today. And it’s not their your audience’s responsibility to break that idea down and say, What the heck do I do with it? You have to make it actionable for your audience.
Peter Winick That’s right. Well, this has been fun.
Bill Sherman As always.
Peter Winick There you go. Well, thanks. Thanks for having me on. Or having us on or I don’t I don’t know.
Bill Sherman And thanks to everyone for listening in on 400 episodes. We are incredibly grateful for those of you who choose to tune in. And we look forward to hearing from you.
Peter Winick Thank you. To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. To reach me directly. Feel free to email me at Peter at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.
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