Heretical Thought Leadership | Justin Foster

Peter Winick

Going against the grain of traditional thinking.

An interview with Justin Foster about drawing attention to your thought leadership, thinking outside the box and committing to the format, you have a passion for.

Today’s guest is Justin Foster, the author of Oatmeal vs Bacon and co-author of Rooting Up. He is a speaker consultant and co-founder of Root + River a practice that specializes in branding for defiant leaders.

Justin shares his path to thought leadership and the tricks he learned along the way, including a brilliant method for how to get in front of potential clients when they won’t answer the phone for a sales call.

Breaking through the noise to have your voice heard amongst an abundance of other consultants is tough enough. So, how do you get heard without coming across annoying or worse like a jerk? Justin tells us how conviction and originality can be the key!

Finally, we discuss methods of generating content. We reveal the pros and cons of going with the method you are comfortable with versus the method that your audience might expect from you.

This episode is filled with a ton of TLPM (Thought Leadership per Minute) so grab a pen and take notes!

Three Key Takeaways from the Interview

Being an expert in your clients business is just as important as being an expert in thought leadership you look to delivery to the client.
Your thought leadership cannot afford to be bland. You have to have an original take on an idea and the conviction to stand by it.
It’s okay if your thought leadership is heretical or counter-intuitive, so long as you can prove and defend your content.

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, sales and other aspects so you can devote yourself to what you do best.

Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Justin Foster. Justin is an author. He’s a speaker. He’s a consultant, and he’s the co-founder of a pretty cool consulting firm called Root and River down in Austin, Texas. Justin I had the opportunity to meet many moons ago. We’re working on a client project together, so that was kind of fun. So welcome. How are you doing today?

Justin Foster Justin right here. Thanks for having me on.

Peter Winick My pleasure. So let me start with what are the steps that you deliberately took or not deliberately took to become a thought leader? How did this happen? Because I don’t think you dressed up for Halloween as a going to be a thought leader in six.

Justin Foster And maybe I did. In hindsight, being 50 gives you a sense of the arc of time and its patterns. I think I think early on, Peter, in my So I have a very road not traveled less traveled life just grew up on a cattle ranch in eastern Oregon, tried college, dropped out, got married really, really young, 18, had my first son Logan, when I was only just barely 22. And my career, my career prior to launching and getting into brand strategy, brand coaching and all that, which was 18 years ago. But my prior career was in sales and B2B technology sales. And what I learned quickly in that is that the technology is the commodity. My competitors add similar technology.

Peter Winick What probably is good plus or minus is yours.

Justin Foster Exactly. And a lot of us preference biospace, you know, based off of what they’d heard and everything. And it was primarily for the first a number of years it was for first like 4 or 5 years it was for retail and restaurant point of sale systems, which was less so. Now it’s very intensely competitive marketplace.

Peter Winick This is back in the days of Open table and all that. Get all that stuff.

Justin Foster Yeah, yeah. Mike Gross There was a product from a called Excel 2000 that became that got purchased by Microsoft. And then there was. So there’s a bunch of these tools. And what I realized that I could be an expert on, on the technology, but if I wanted to get deals, I needed to be an expert on their business. And so I immersed myself. And one of my favorite stories is I sold a I was the head of sales for a software company that sold software to retread plants of all things and plants. And one of the retread plants I was trying to get to buy the software, they provided tires for Swift Trucking, which is the third largest trucking company in the United States. And what I did is because I couldn’t get a return phone call from the plant manager or anything, I went to Swift and I said, I’m doing a study on the value of retreads based off of a it’s a model that was out there and they participated in that conversation. I wrote it up as a kind of a white paper, and it was probably the first realization that I could. I could tap in. And what happened is, is that I showed that white paper to the to the prospect and they end up buying the system from me because their client.

Peter Winick Yeah. But I want to I want to push there because that’s a brilliant concept that still does not get used enough today. So I mean, most people think in a linear way. So I’m going to create something. Maybe it’s an article, maybe it’s a book, maybe it’s a white paper. I have sort of kind of maybe a target audience in mind that it would resonate with. After I spend weeks, months, years, whatever, developing this thing, then I need to get it out in the marketplace. And then rainbows and unicorns, right? Then good things will happen, right? I think that you can conflate business development with content development if it’s done in a thoughtful way, because you could have also called the guy from the retread place and said, Hey, you know, I indirectly want to sell you some stuff, right? Probably not going to take that call. But you’re calling to, as an expert on something that they’re intrigued by, interested in is relevant to them. Of course, they want to take that call and they’re in total not sales mode. Right. So people in sales mode are they’ve locked the checkbook, they’re in there, They’re braced for, you know, like brace for impact and ready to reject everything you’ve got to say. If you say I’m just an I’m a salesman trying to sell you some stuff, but let’s have a thought leadership conversation. I don’t think enough people do this often enough. And it is my experience one of the most cost effective ways to develop relationships and build clients.

Justin Foster Yeah, it’s such a door opener. You know, even now, we don’t do this enough to your point of, you know, we’re going to write a piece and reach out to a KMO that we’ve been trying to get in front of, right? And we have done it and it’s worked. We have a program called Being Marketers, which is a community actually, and we have we’ve used that for outreach to CMO’s as to invite them on as a guest. And I think the other area, Peter, that has been that goes way back for me is the willingness and eagerness to be a heretic. Yeah, I think, I think that it’s almost impossible to be a thought leader and not be a heretic.

Peter Winick Because look it. But stay there with me for a minute because I think there are some that come out there and say and confuse being a heretic with being outrageous, outlandish. Dropping the ball like being just like my hair on fire, being carrot top, you know, and don’t be Carrot Top because that’s a, you know.

Justin Foster Yeah, that’s not, that’s being an asshole. I mean. Yeah.

Peter Winick So but so, so. Thread that needle though, because I think some people say like, you know, this is the things that I can do to get attention. But how do you do it in, in, in a way that’s honorable as a thought leader.

Justin Foster Right. So I think it comes from conviction, first of all, of this idea that if you’re going to be a thought leader. If that’s what you feel like is important to you, is that there needs to be some sort of activism in it. There needs to be some sort of change to an industry, a community, a sector in the marketplace. If you’re if you’re going in and you’ve got your own like slightly different take than your some other thought leader, it becomes it becomes a war of attrition and commoditization, which is who has the most articles on the biggest platforms and the most. Yes. And most of us that are thought leaders can’t compete in that sort of weapons of mass destruction approach to thought leadership.

Peter Winick And it’s also a regurgitation problem. I’ve heard that before very differently. So I was asked yesterday, I was interviewed to define thought leadership. And the piece of it that I’ll touch on here is there’s a leadership piece. You have to have the bravery, the courage, the conviction to say here is where branding or whatever your spaces and I want to lead this conversation in and it doesn’t have to be crazy, but in a slightly different way and in a counterintuitive way, and I can back it up with research data, etc., etc.. But it’s the leadership piece because a lot of people are thoughtful, right? But they’re not leading. They’re just, you know, it’s sort of, you know, a top ten album.

Justin Foster Like that’s what I referred to. Michael They’re like they’re like Michael Bublé. There’s there they can be famous, but be have zero originality.

Peter Winick You know? I mean, he.

Justin Foster Seems like a wonderful guy and everything, but if he didn’t have David Foster, would he be famous? Probably.

Peter Winick He’d probably be playing at your local.

Justin Foster Camp or in Vegas or whatever. And that’s fine if that’s what his thing is. And I’m not being critical of him. What I’m saying is, is that in order to be a thought leader, you’re right, Peter, you have to be a leader. And you also have to have some high emotional intelligence. You have to have a conviction of some sort of belief in a better way or an alternative way to something. And the biggest one of all is there’s nothing new under the sun, but still be an original.

Peter Winick 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 us a review and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps as well as at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com/podcasts.

Peter Winick It’s a live show, but stay there for a minute because I think that some people think that part of the process is we don’t want to ruffle any feathers. You know, I want to be somewhat Canadian or Midwesterners, be polite, be nice, you know, and even though I’m from New York, I’m not anti nice. But I think that sometimes people need to have the courage to say. And if you don’t believe what I believe in, if you don’t see the world the way that I do, that’s okay, too. And in fact, if you don’t get, you know, five, ten, 15, 20% of the folks exposed to your work going, I’m going to call B.S. on that. Justin, you probably watered it down too much.

Justin Foster That’s right. And it goes back to if you’re watering it down for consumption, then you’re just participating in the sameness and you’re contributing another bowl of oatmeal to the conversation.

Peter Winick I know nobody wakes up and craves, you know, an ellipse, frozen pizza. Like that’s not a right. That’s a that’s mediocrity, right? Like wake up and crave, like, the best pizza from the best pizza joint in New York or Chicago or whatever.

Justin Foster Because anality, we crave originality. And partially, it’s because we live in the too much information age. Yes, there’s too many thought leaders to some extent. I would also point out, Peter, that if you look at let’s take your more like, say, well-known thought leader, some of my favorites I’ll just rattle off or Brené Brown, Ryan Holladay, Tim Ferriss and Angela Duckworth. They all have this idea in common that I said there’s they have original ideas that are well researched but are heretical in their view. So Brené Brown and vulnerability, the idea that vulnerability is the greatest act of courage and a leadership trait was really not spoken up until she made it so and that’s the.

Peter Winick And the reason people believed her was, number one, she’s an academic so she’s not some whack a doodle. She’s got some serious credentials underneath her and she ate her own dog. She was very vulnerable and put herself out there to tell her story. So it was an interest and I think it was a point in time where a little bit of luck doesn’t hurt either.

Justin Foster Yeah, sure, sure. But that, you know, that Providence is attracted to aggressiveness or boldness, you know, So, you know, you went out and doing something. And what I see people doing, the thought leadership, is they kind of thought leadership is an Olympic pool. Yeah. There is no shallow end. And if you don’t know what you’re doing, you will drown. And so there’s no, like, dipping your toe in. Just frickin go in and get in the water and start doing it. And what I would also say is that if you don’t have anything to say, don’t make something up just because you want to be a thought leader. Work on do the inner work.

Peter Winick But those are two counterbalancing issues, right? So there’s the one school that says ready firing. All right, I got an idea. Let me get it out there because the market and by the way, get it out there quickly. We call it minimum viable thought leadership. What can I get out there to test this idea? And by the way, the world will tell you pretty quickly if it’s a crappy idea or a good idea. And I wouldn’t invest a year of your life writing a book to test an idea. I’d invest a couple hours for a couple of blog post out there and resonate well. Right. So how do you sort of thread that where it’s I got to get it out there quickly to test it. And then the other piece is, well, I just have to get things out because I’m going to get things out to keep my name on top. But I’m not really saying anything. And I think people see through that pretty quickly.

Justin Foster I agree. Yes. And there’s pablum that kind of an insipid ness or shallowness to it. It’s like a lot of books, business books, which are really just kind of like puffed up, you know, Harvard Business Review articles. That’s why you can read a summary of the book and get the book. Most of the.

Peter Winick Time. Well, there’s you know, there’s the left handed compliment. You know, there was the Ted talk, that sort of state of Ted talk. And then there were very few Ted talks that are worthy of the Ted talk. I can get the essence of it for a Harvard Business Review in 20, 30 minutes. A book is a I don’t care about the 25 bucks, but now you’re asking for five, six hours of my life. The exchange rate of that is you better give me something. There needs to be more meat on the bone, right?

Justin Foster And so I love the idea of a minimum viable thought leadership and so on. Our philosophy with this is you brand slow or you slow down to brand so you can speed up to market. So in this case, with thought leadership, what I mean by brand is you have to know who you are. At your core, this is this is a one of the worst things you can do with a marketing strategy is go into it with an existential identity crisis because the markets aren’t going to tell you who you are. You have to know that you have to be deeply convicted about and aware of who you are.

Peter Winick And it’s not a game of clue. Like, I don’t have the time to decode what is just in a ballot. You need to hit me square between the eyes and talk to me like I’m a nine year old and say this is who I am. This is what I’m about. Loud and clear. Neon lights.

Justin Foster Yes, exactly. The other aspect of brand is having something to say. Having what we call a leadership point of view. And if you don’t have anything to say and like I said earlier, then you’re not ready for thought leadership. So I have something to say in the third thing. Then you get into the execution and then, you know, that’s you know, that’s going to vary depending on what the strategy is. But the third thing is, is you got to know who you’re talking to. So in our case, so thought leadership. We’re speaking to an archetype that we call the fires. And these are founder CEOs, heads of marketing that have a propensity or an attraction to doing things differently because it gives them joy.

Peter Winick So we would stay silent. We could talk for hours. So to me, I would call that an avatar. You come up with this.

Justin Foster Same idea.

Peter Winick Called Into Fire. And the way you describe that is exactly how we think about it, is there are demographic characteristics. But if you don’t wrap that around some psychographics, it’s nothing, because you and I are both sort of white males of a certain age, certain income bracket. So what? Like, okay, let’s draw tens of millions of others.

Justin Foster Exactly. Yeah.

Peter Winick But the day fire, as soon as I hear that, I lean and go, okay. So that was someone’s probably in a decision making place. Yes. Probably questions authority, probably as a lifelong learner. Probably is results oriented. I’m just surmising here. What do we know now that you tell me you were to fire if someone’s a comply or. Right or. I just made that up. They’re probably not for you and you’re not for them. And that’s okay.

Justin Foster That’s okay. That’s why we have a warning label on our website. I love that. Yeah. So it says Warning label. And so if you if you do those things now we go to now we can think about speed to market. And that’s really you know, not my area of expertise is what leadership platforms I know you’re a master at well all of this but specifically in the kind of the right fit for the right strategy. What I do know, Peter, is this and this is more meta than anything is you do the thing that you already have energy for. If you like talking, start a podcast or now get on clubhouse or something. If you like shooting video, if that process gives you energy to do that. If you like writing, do that. Just do something with that would.

Peter Winick Challenge that a little bit. I would say yes and right. So I think about that in terms of everybody’s got their preferred canvas, right? So some people like to write right. Some people like to speak. However, you can’t do that in in in a vacuum, Meaning, you know, if you’re an academic and you write into academies, which is a fancy word for, you know, language that nobody else will read, and you’re trying to get to a mainstream business audience and you’re not willing to flex, you’re going to fail. That’s not going after, you know, a certain generation and you’re not on certain platforms. Or if your business is very visual and you’re not on Instagram, it’s going to hurt you. So I think you do have to stretch it a little.

Justin Foster Yeah, I agree. And just to be clear, what I’m saying is do the things you have for energy for first.

Peter Winick Person, okay.

Justin Foster Could not do the other thing because there’s a there’s a force multiplier behind that. You know, there was I always remember the story of Elvis before every concert would sit at a piano behind the stage and play gospel music he was doing all the energy for and that got him that and uppers got him, got him drunk.

Peter Winick And banana peanut butter sandwiches. And that’s a whole other story. But there’s but.

Justin Foster There’s, there’s some lessons in that of doing the things that at first that you have energy for. So that gives you a different perspective. If it’s all a grind, if it’s all a grind, then you’re working on the wrong problem.

Peter Winick No, no, I agree. So if it’s easier for you to get your stuff out there in video, whip out your iPhone, do some stuff on video, then you could refine that into the written word, etc.. If you’re more comfortable with a cup of tea at a keyboard, you know, banging it out words than do that. Yeah I think that I agree with that.

Justin Foster Yeah cool well this is we pack more conversation per minute you know like stand up comedians have LPM. Have you heard of LPM?

Peter Winick No. Laughs for a minute or a minute.

Justin Foster And they measure that and it’s like they want to you want to average like a good comedian is 3.5 laughs per minute or something like that. And really, I think that when you and I talk, we have a like a tell PM it’s all well.

Peter Winick And then we got Elvis and Michael Billionaire. I was going to ask you to like, you know, take us out with a bad lounge act of, you know, the lovechild of my.

Justin Foster Whole career bad lounge act. What do you mean?

Peter Winick Are there good lounge acts? I think the lounge anymore. I’m ready for any lounge these days.

Justin Foster That’s true. Except a cruise. I still don’t want to go on a cruise. Mostly because other people go on cruises. So. Yeah, it. Yeah, I myself. That would be awesome.

Peter Winick A cruise by yourself? Yeah. I’m like, that’s not a petri dish for everything.

Justin Foster Gross Right. Yeah. Well, all right.

Peter Winick So one day we’ll get you your own cruise ship. That’ll be your. You’re like, no lines at the buffet. No, nothing.

Justin Foster Right. Exactly. All the food.

Peter Winick Would you bring anyone? It would be just totally lonely.

Justin Foster You would be, like, by hand selection, you know? Okay. It’s how evangelicals treat heaven. So on that note.

Peter Winick On that note, well, cool. Well, this has been. Great as always. Yes and no. We will have to come up with a metric of our total per minute, because I think it’s true that it’s pretty dense conversations. I might want to listen again. So thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. This is a lot of fun. Thanks, Justin.

Justin Foster Thank you. Bye.

Peter Winick 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 Thought Leadership Leverage dot com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.