Academics and Thought Leadership – Helping Thought Leaders-Dropping Bombs Ep 217-Peter Winick

So all the bigwigs and the academics coming out of Yale, Wharton, Dartmouth, the London School of Business, they come to you and say, “Hey, I want to create a better or even the invention of a platform.”

I would say the invention. So the academics that we deal with are incredibly elite. So they’re at places that never would have taken me and certainly wouldn’t have taken you into school. Right. Like we wouldn’t have gotten there.  These are really smart people. And typically what’s happened is they’re acknowledged in their field, which might be fairly small, it might be some level of popularity. But then, there’s some event that happens and the event could be a TED talk, the event could be they go to Davos and meet some cool world leaders, it could be a media appearance, a book. And all of a sudden they’re flooded with demand, with attention, with all this sort of stuff, and they don’t have a system or processes in place. Because what they’ve got is their academics. They teach, and they research, they usually do a little bit of speaking, a little bit of consulting, a little bit of advising. But you’re ultimately dollars for time. And now the demand comes in. So what do you do you? Increase the price. That’s cool. Board of directors will pay you 50 grand to roll in for a day and tell you about your strategy, or innovation, or creativity, whatever. But they’re still missing the forest for the trees. How do you codify what they’ve got, which they’ve spent 20, 30 years putting together and make it more approachable? Put it in a format that can be digested by more people, more often, and not be limited to them being in the room with their content for dollars to change hands.