Curiosity as a Career Catalyst In this episode, Laurence Minsky and Bill Sherman discuss…
Mastering Innovation and Clarity: Best Practices from 2024’s Thought Leaders | Best of 2024 with Bill Sherman
Stories of Vision, Discipline, and Engagement from 2024’s Most Impactful Minds
What drives success in thought leadership? In this year-end episode, Bill Sherman revisits 2024’s standout guests, uncovering how their resilience, focus, and groundbreaking ideas shaped their impact in entrepreneurship, innovation, and audience engagement.
In this year-end highlight episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership with Bill Sherman, we revisit the journeys of six incredible thought leaders from diverse fields. They share insights into their evolving work, the hurdles they’ve faced, and the laser focus needed to connect deeply with their audiences. From startup leadership and immigrant entrepreneurship to innovation management and clarity in communication, this compilation reveals the powerful interplay of passion, precision, and perseverance.
Martin Gonzalez explores the role of data in refining startup strategies, pushing past biases to uncover actionable truths.
Neri Karra Sillaman underscores how personal experiences, such as her journey as an immigrant entrepreneur, shape impactful ideas and groundbreaking research. These leaders remind us that the questions we dare to ask often define the value we create.
Clemence Sop takes us into the luxury industry, where understanding your audience at a granular level transforms social selling into a high-touch art form.
Peter Boatwright and Jon Cagan, authors of Managing the Unmanageable, dive into managing chaos in innovation, using experiments to show how structured management enhances creative output without stifling originality.
Finally, Ann Latham shares her journey to mastering clarity—an elusive yet essential skill in thought leadership. Her unique framework transforms abstract ideas into actionable insights, proving clarity is both an art and a discipline.
Each story offers lessons for those aspiring to lead through ideas.
Transcript
Bill Sherman The journey of thought. Leadership isn’t easy and the road often isn’t straight. In this year end Summary episode I present five thought leadership practitioners who are each at different stages of their careers. You’ll hear from Martin Gonzalez, Neri Caro, Suleiman, Clement, SOP, John Kagan and Peter Boatwright and then Latham. As you listen in, listen to what I listen for passion. Clarity of message and self-awareness. In this episode, these best of 2024 guests share how they approach their thought leadership work, how they overcome challenges, and how they relentlessly focus in on the audiences that they serve. If you practice thought leadership or want to practice thought leadership, there are lessons to be learned here. I’m Bill Sherman. You’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Martin.
Martin Gonzalez Thanks for having me, Bill.
Bill Sherman So you went to the literature and said, okay, why do VCs say startups fail? 65%, right? Yeah. Now, a reasonable next assumption would be there’s a lot of research done into, well, why does this happen? Right. Yeah. And details. You would assume there’s a fertile field out there. Yeah. I assume you did pretty soon, either in building that first workshop or soon after. Look at, you know, what the literature said next. Yeah. Was there all that?
Martin Gonzalez But while So it’s interesting you say that. So there were a few really seminal pieces during that time that we leaned on that were academic and then kind of more practitioner oriented in nature. But there wasn’t anything that really honed in on like what specifically do founders at that very early stage during these hypergrowth periods, like what do they need to be doing kind of as leaders as they build the company, as they build a team around the product? In fact, one of the people we had reached out to was Linda Greer, who was then at Stanford Business School. And I come to her with this question of like, okay, we’re building out this very kind of no frills program. I would love to at least grounded in some research. And at that time, she was teaching a course at Stanford called The Psychology of Startup Teams. I thought, okay, great, there must be an answer here, right as one where there’s.
Bill Sherman An entire, you know, class devoted to that within that course.
Martin Gonzalez Right. That’s right. And so I asked her. So if I were to ask you to summarize what the traits should be or what the behavior should be of effective founders, like what is that list? And then she kind of says, well, you know, it’s an early field. There really isn’t that much that’s been studied. But here’s kind of what I teach in the course. And I look at she sends over the deck and I look at the deck and I think it’s based off a Forbes article that’s like a listicle of like top eight things or ten things that you should be doing as founders and look like no job. And I think that’s how that’s how early fields operate. Right. It’s let’s take our best guess. Let’s put it out there. And you know that’s kind of gathered reactions spur on your research. So essentially there was really not not a lot to lean on. And so it felt like, wow, we should maybe more seriously like go about the work of, you know, assessing founders and then validating that assessment tool, which is exactly kind of what we do over time with this program, because we ran a 360 degree feedback survey, you know, with the founders and these programs.
Bill Sherman Well, and there’s a couple of things that pop out from the Forbes article and listicle, right? And like you often someone puts sort of the early footpath down and then someone says, Well, how would we test this? How do we measure it? What are the even the hypotheses and brings rigor to something that we’re, you know, a smart person has sat down and said, you know, I saw a pattern. I’m just going to create a listicle. I think listicles are a great way for spawning ideas, but there’s this tension between the absence in the academic literature. And one article in Forbes, It wasn’t even in the pop literature.
Martin Gonzalez Yeah. And, you know, so. So the first thing to say is I think the jury’s still out. I won’t say that while my work, therefore, you know, answered the question, I think there was a.
Bill Sherman Next step on the journey. And you’re going to spin off other research hypotheses, Right?
Martin Gonzalez Right. And so, you know, everything begins with descriptive analysis, right? Like, what do we see and how do we describe what we see? And then you can go on and do more correlational analysis, which is stuff that I do and I do with a collaborator Valentine Casanova from Wharton, where you now correlate this with real startup outcomes like do startups fail, do startups get go to IPO and. And so we can’t. But at some point you want to then go to the, I guess the gold standard, which is let’s do experimental stuff. Let’s run. AB You know, let’s, let’s kind of run a control group, experimental group, and you know, each of these steps of kind of building thought leadership has its own challenges, right? So at the very beginning, these listicles, they do suffer from survivor bias, which is usually the writer of this will look at successful founders and then conclude that what they see that they do or what they claim that they do is the formula for success. Well, unfortunately for that to be really true, you’d have to check kind of if the people who failed did the same and failed anyway. And that’s kind of what we try to do with the data we had, which is we looked at, you know, the best and the least effective. Put them under a microscope and try to see what was different between those two cohorts.
Bill Sherman Well, and in addition to use survivor bias, there’s also probably a file drawer problem of people who have collected data that might be relevant but has either never been published or yeah, it’s buried in a way that you don’t realize the existing pieces of it, right? So some of what you’re doing is putting a spotlight on the research question and saying, Hey, we’d love to engage with other people who may have had an idea either anecdotally, anecdotally, anecdotally where that or actually a full dataset, right?
Martin Gonzalez I agree. And, you know, through the years I’ve learned. So one is I’ve learned to instead of asking the question on Google.com as the question in Google Scholar, then yes, then you come to you at least you unearth some of what’s been done. But recently I’ve been doing the search on r n, which is kind of a database of papers that are that have not yet been published, that are kind of in the review process. Then you start to see like some of the early thinking, especially now in this moment where there’s a lot of energy around Chapter VII and there’s a lot of research going on. But for you to actually know what’s going on society and seems to be a really good place to to start because, you know, the review cycles in these peer reviewed journals, while really robust. Wow. It takes forever. It takes years.
Bill Sherman Welcome to the show.
Neri Karra Sillaman Neary Thank you. Be very, very happy to be here.
Bill Sherman So you point out a couple times where you either found in your Ph.D. studies a difference between your passion and where you thought you were going to research FDI versus the immigrant entrepreneurship, and then finding that gap in the scholarship. Finding that gap that leads to the that allows you to ask the questions. No one’s focused yet. And. To be able to. How the passion and then the insight is a powerful combination because you’re coming from a place of lived experience. You talked about, hey, when I was studying, I was using my own company as a laboratory writer.
Neri Karra Sillaman Yes. Absolutely. My thesis, my thesis consists of three different articles. We are going back many years now. Almost 20 years ago I brought. I use my company is a case study for including one of my papers talks about auto it no graphic research where I study where the researchers study is his or her own company or background or culture. And again everything is in my thesis was very much personal. And I think even today what I write about and for those of us or those who listen to us in our careers, how they can find their breakthrough idea. It of course, always comes from our personal experience, passion. And this is what I would say, not misled me, but when I was trying to figure out where can I make impact? I was thinking. I don’t I don’t know if I want to I don’t know if people will want to read about immigrant entrepreneurship. And this was a this was a mistake in some sense because. I was thinking it has to come from a person, from your lived experience is your imagination. And if I did want to express it would be that to focus on what you know. Focus on what you are passionate about.
Bill Sherman Well, and I’ve said many times here that your audience, for your ideas, will never be more engaged than you are in the topic. Right. And so. If you find questions that cause you to say, why is that? Why do you know current form companies survive longer than average? Or why are immigrant founded or children of immigrant companies overrepresented in the Fortune 500? Or in unicorns? That’s a question that’s intriguing and say, what can we learn from that? And really a deep question. And there are plenty of reasons and variables and possibilities and study designed to try and figure out what’s going on. This is what I like about what you’ve done. There is you’ve taken. Complexity and drilled it down to a question. That someone can listen and say, I didn’t know that. That’s interesting. Tell me more. And more importantly, what’s going on. I don’t have to have the same lived experience as you do as a migrant monster, nor to to say, what can I learn? Right.
Neri Karra Sillaman Very true. So, in fact, my book, the Audios is not about is not immigrant entrepreneurs. Is there anyone? And years ago, again, when I was writing and researching on this topic, I had an idea to write a paper about build Your own Sanity. Because when I look at immigrant entrepreneurs, they build businesses based on almost any price, which is, you know, these the heroes share the experience. We have this shared history that binds us together and makes us work towards a common goal. And I thought, how can any anyone else. Copy and do the very same thing in their own company, in their own workforce. They don’t have to be immigrants, but what are the principles that you can take from immigrants and apply them to your own company? And that’s what the book is about.
Bill Sherman Welcome to the show. Clemens.
Clemence Sop Thank you for having me.
Bill Sherman So I’m excited to have a conversation around the hypothesis testing and thought leadership and really bringing an organization together to create impact. Right. And you’ve had an interesting career in thought leadership. I want to jump first to one of your early roles and then we’ll come back to what you’re doing now. So you told me early on that you were involved in yard sales.
Clemence Sop Tell me a little bit about.
Bill Sherman That and the process of selling high ticket item.
Clemence Sop Well, the Luxor industry is very complex, right? So you have to do your homework and make sure that when you’re reaching out to a potential buyer that he’s ready to buy you because he’s a little afraid. We call it conservation strategies. When you’re cultivating a high school degree, though, you have to invest a lot. So you have to make sure that as you’re doing that, you’re doing the right thing so you can land the deal. We always go for almost 98% conversion rates. Otherwise, you’re wasting a lot of money and resources. Right. So how do you apply beetle knowledge or digital college social listening or digital information in into stand up, high profile engagement? There is huge power and potential in digital networking AI. So when you’re scraping through the net and you’re finding information about specific individuals, it helps you to engage at the right time, at the right place with them and improve this conversion rate. Let me tell you a story of how we did this particular example, though. This wasn’t a recent because I always you know, I wear many hats at the same time. Right? The planet indicates I already left the company, but they reached out to me because of my algorithm knowledge and because I study all of this, that B2B platform. So they reached out to me again during the pandemic and said, We want to break into a new market. We need your help to understand how we can break into a new market. And we in we call being a new target audience and it’s new to us. So what did we do? We went on LinkedIn. I might decide on LinkedIn because LinkedIn is always very tangible and it’s a people to people platform. We always have to define a spokesperson. Eye to eye. One What I’ve learned over the years is that you can build trust very fast from a person as a person than as a brand. Really. If you want to break into a new market, building that was at the personal level always brings you results faster. So we add a spokesperson as we identify the key target audience on LinkedIn deals of skill obstacles, be companies who could be potential buyers of this product. Then we had a our top leader spoke about the product that we were selling and now this kids we hired, you know, every non-celebrity to be the brand ambassador. Also on LinkedIn are we created a community on LinkedIn. We create a private group as these spokes for the thought leader and ambassador. We’re inviting our target audience to this group. And in the group we were nurturing them, I know. And then we started inviting other people as the recommendation. Would you invite 4 or 5 more people as you would the same similar profile of yours to join the group? That’s how we I call it like social networking plus social selling, right? Because we started the conversations online and then took it offline. Stephanie Example.
Bill Sherman That’s a great example. And I want to go back to something that you said early in your response, because I want to underline it for our listeners. You said, Hey, we needed a 90% conversion rate, otherwise the effort for marketing and sales didn’t make sense, right? And so. With a high-ticket luxury. Good. You have a small population target audience, right?
Clemence Sop And yeah.
Bill Sherman And so with that, you can spend the time to get to know them well. It’s a relationship selling piece, but instead of broadcasting or even narrow casting to an industry, you’re really doing point casting. You’re targeting individuals where in many cases you’re researching them by name, by profile and saying what is important to this person? What do they value? How are they going to respond? That’s a very high touch approach to bold leadership.
Clemence Sop Yeah, it’s high touch, although we combine it with a multiple touch approach, Right, Because. Right, Yeah. We have a pool of people that we were targeting, so we went meticulously one after the other. But there is one we call it lookalike audiences. What he said. I think the communication on all social platforms is always twofold. Once you position yourself as a trusted advisor and you put your content out there, the algorithm works in ways that put your company in front of people who would invite you. And if you’re answering their questions, guess what? You put us up on your radar and they were not part of your target audience. So you’re also multiplying your efforts by doing that. That’s is what I wanted to highlight.
Bill Sherman If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a five-star review at rate this podcast.com/ltl and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps as well as ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com/podcasts. Welcome to the show Peter and John Thank you.
Peter Boatwright It’s great to hear.
Bill Sherman So both of you have spent the better part of your career studying the work of innovation as process as well as how to lead it. And the reason that I’m excited to have the two of you on this podcast is many people who practice thought leadership often do it in an expansive, exploratory way. They get excited about the next big idea and don’t know when to pause that exploration. They’re always interested in the next article they’re writing, the next book, the next piece of research they’re doing, rather than taking it to scale. And so I want to ask you around your book, Managing the Unmanageable, which is around the innovation process within organizations, what does it mean to manage the unmanageable Peter?
Peter Boatwright Sure. Well, the unmanageable that we’re talking about is product and service and patient. And we recognize that, you know, there’s lots of tools and methods, etc.. But it’s a chaotic realm, lots of exploration. But you need to at some point bring that together to make forward progress and make decisions so that, you know, what we’ve looked at and researched is how to allow for and benefit from the chaotic nature, but also move forward productively towards bringing our products and services. So that’s the unmanageable particular that we’re talking about.
Bill Sherman And the structure of the book. And I want to give a little bit of an introduction to this. John is really written and framed to someone who’s tasked with leading an innovation team. Right. And rather than a textbook.
John Cagan That’s correct. And it is really written for people who are practicing the management of innovation and innovators. It’s very different than how you look at a process for innovation. What steps do you follow to create the product or the service? We’re looking at how do you manage those people that are on teams that are actually going through that process?
Bill Sherman And so, John, I want to ask you to start with a story tied to your research. And it involves Peanuts and Schelling, for example. Could you share that story with our audience in the research in terms of what that the difference of managing that process looks like?
John Cagan Sure I’d be happy to, Bill. And so I did a study at Carnegie Mellon with a couple of colleagues, Josh Geary and Ken Kotowski. And in particular, we really we were trying to understand what is the impact of managing a process versus going into and actually doing the design itself. And so we had a process of problem set up. We had five different designers. They were engineers, they were mechanical engineers who were all working on real time trying to design a device that would shell peanuts by crushing the peanuts and removing the nut itself unharmed. And then separating that out. But it was for a rural area where there’s no electricity and there’s no fuel. So we gave them an hour to work on this problem. And then we had another set of conditions where we actually removed someone from that team or a similar group of teams. So now there’s only four people working on the problem instead of five, and we replace them with a manager and that manager was the manager of the process. They didn’t go in and meddle with the design itself. What they looked at is how are people communicating? How are they interacting? Are they staying on task? Are they solving the problem? If not, they would intervene and nudge the team just on the process itself. And at the end of this we took the sets of designs from both sets of teams and we had them evaluated. And if we look at excellent designs, which really are the ones that we want, if we’re going to be doing innovation, there was a five fold increase in the excellent designs from the managed teams versus the unmanaged teams. So what we showed really was that management makes a huge difference, but it’s management of the process. You want to let the innovator be innovative. We want to manage them and not try to meddle with the design of the solution itself.
Bill Sherman And if I sort of step back from that, one of the things that I, I recall is that the manager or the observer was limited not only in how they could communicate with the team, but the types of suggestions they could. I think they had no cards. Is that correct? That they could hold up?
Peter Boatwright Right. They had a limited library of interventions that were deemed appropriate ahead of time and they could only use those. And I know had Payton those no cards, they weren’t having a conversation, they would just put the note card down and it was up for the team to look at it, to recognize what the manager was saying and then to if they chose to, to act on that.
Bill Sherman And I love that because by limiting the vocabulary. You wind up having a richness that you didn’t have, right? Whereas if you freed someone up to say, Hey, I could say anything, let me give them feedback on how the I think the idea is all of a sudden it’s easy to get sucked in.
Peter Boatwright Well, it’s that. And it also gives us rigorous data absolutely distant from our experiment to be able to truly be able to isolate and identify, in this case, the manager. In terms of what we’re trying to understand about the manager.
Bill Sherman So, Peter. When you think about someone who is responsible and is managing a creative team, an innovative team. You and Sean distilled down a list of 13 recommendations. But there’s a lot of literature out there, let alone the research that you’ve done. How do you take what could be an endless list of recommendations? And similar to the experiment that John just described. Keep yourself a limited vocabulary. What are you going to communicate on process. So how did you come up with the recommendations?
Peter Boatwright So I think this partly comes from our experience in managing teams. It partly comes from conversations with others who are involved in innovation. And these were I mean, a lot of material is known or pretty logical. We don’t need to write about things that we that managers would anticipate. So these tips were ones that struck us as interesting and interesting is partly that there’s some there. There’s something that we weren’t really sure if you took the hypothesis up front, should the manager behave in no way A or method B or should we structure teams in one way or another way? It’s not necessarily obvious ahead of time. But then we explored and found out answers. So it’s that kind of way that we decide on what tips to write about or the ones that we found intriguing.
Bill Sherman Welcome to the show, Ann.
Ann Latham Thank you. Great to be here.
Bill Sherman So you have built thoughtful leadership around clarity. And my question for you is, how did you come to land on clarity as the area that you were focusing on?
Ann Latham That’s a great question. So before I quit my corporate job to start my independent consulting business. I. Reading books about how to be a consultant, but I knew that my value proposition was critical. So I sent an email out to all to my boss, my previous bosses, my colleagues, coworkers, just anyone I could think of and said, What is it I do especially well that is most unusual. And I got these wonderful, thoughtful responses that would talk about how I take in large quantities of information and cut to the chase and find the kernel, find the essence, get everyone on the same page and move them forward with concrete decisions and concrete ideas and plans. And so after reading all these different emails, I said, I create clarity. So it was pretty clear.
Bill Sherman So was clarity a word that kept popping up in those responses, or was it one that you sort of had to infer and distill down from responses?
Ann Latham It was both. And they used the word and it was pretty clear the way they were talking about things that that’s what I do. Or then I search for a new URL that made sense. And I had a came up with uncommon clarity because they said I am uncommonly good at this. So uncommonly clever uncommon clarity was available and that my website.
Bill Sherman And that’s a great start to clarity because it answers the question not only what are you good at, but also. How do you make it memorable for others? You’ve got a great sort of hook into the name of the platform. Uncommon clarity rather than, well, common clutter. Right? So my question. Really lies then? You said you had this. I’m good at clarity. Got to take the next step up. How am I good at clarity? How does this happen? Right. And so how did you decode clarity?
Ann Latham That’s another great question. So I. Said, I create clarity. That was what my value proposition was all about. And what I discovered is. That. That’s. Not something people want to buy. It’s too vague. It’s too unclear. They don’t know what the value of that is. They don’t know what the purpose of that is. Everyone thinks clarity is a great thing, like mom and apple pie, but it’s not. There’s no urgency there. So while I was looking at, you know, how I create clarity and I started writing about how to create clarity and how I do it right away, I did strategic planning, I did team effectiveness. You know, I did process improvements. I help people with all kinds of things. But clarity improves productivity. It improves confidence in eliminates mistakes. It makes everyone be able to maximize their potential. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. So I could weave that into pretty much every aspect of how you run your business.
Bill Sherman It leads to a question of what is clarity? Is it a skill or set of skills? Is it a mindset? Is it a process? Is this a system, you know, that leads to, you know, it’s a word we use often? Hey, I need more clarity here. But it’s not like there’s a barcode at the store, you know, where you can put it on the checkout counter and go, Hey, I picked up, you know, three units of clarity. So what is clarity? A mindset, skill, talent. You know, are some people born with it and that’s just locker.
Ann Latham Clarity is a word that’s incredibly unclear, which is really sad. And when you think about it. We have more shared vocabulary to talk about the temperature of soup than the degree of clarity, because soup can be scalding hot. It can be very hot, nice and hot. It can get down to, you know, warm, lukewarm, cold, frozen. You know, there’s so many and we know what those are and we know what order they come in. When we talk about clarity, we talk about things being a little unclear, a little confusing, not very clear. We need a little more clarity. It’s just like there’s this nebulous point in the sky and we’re always just a tiny smidgen off that point, right? We’re never grossly unclear who are just a smidgen or so. We don’t have any words to really agree on. How unclear are we? So I created a spectrum from this clarity, which is the complete lack of clarity because I got tired of typing, lack of clarity. So from this clarity on one end to uncommon clarity on the other end, and I chose the uncommon because most people think they are clearer than they really are. But I don’t think very many people would say they are uncommonly clear. So now we have a spectrum and we can talk about you.
Bill Sherman You created a scale basically, right? Yeah. So the equivalent of a thermometer readings of exact and we discuss and agree. If I think I’m at one level of clarity and you’d think you’re at another level of clarity, then we’ve got to sit down and have a clarity conversation.
Ann Latham Right, Right. And we don’t even have to agree on exactly where because what happens is and I, I wrote the book The Power of Clarity. The first chapter is we’re not as clear as we think we are. And there’s a ton of examples about why we aren’t. And, you know, I said that people always think they’re just a smidgen off being clear. And when you look at those examples and you go, where are they on the spectrum, guess what we don’t hear on the dis clarity end over and over and over again. So that’s closer to our natural state.
Bill Sherman Okay. You’ve made it to the end of the episode and that means you’re probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are three recommendations. First, check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game and thought leadership as well as just starting out second. Subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership. And finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights take them to scale through the practice of thought leadership. Maybe you’re looking for strategy or maybe you want to polish up your ideas or even create new products and offerings. I’d love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.
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