Why Every Thought Leader Needs a Plan Before They Publish Writing a book isn’t just…
Human-Centered Thought Leadership | Ethan Beute
Focusing on the human experience when creating thought leadership.
An interview with Ethan Beute about human-centered design and facing the problem, not the product.
We are assaulted by digital pollution on a daily basis: spam calls, fake e-mails, harassing chats, phishing scams, and worse. With all the noise, how can thought leaders create a message that our audience wants to hear? How do we make them understand that our outreach is important?
To help answer these questions, we’ve turned to Ethan Beute, the Chief Evangelist at BombBomb; a company that uses video messaging to build better business relationships. Ethan is also the co-author of Human-Centered Communication: A Business Case Against Digital Pollution. This book is a great read for anyone who needs to generate attention, build trust, and create engagement online!
Discover the pitfalls of “digital pollution,” and how it negatively impacts our ability to reach potential customers. Listen in, as Ethan shares insights about Human-Centered Design, and how it breaks through the noise to reach customers, and make sure the message they hear is deeply relevant to their needs. He discusses his job as Chief Evangelist, telling us how he is a staunch advocate for Human Centered Design. Learn why boasting about your product instead of addressing people’s needs, emotions, and challenges, can cause your audience to stop listening.
Some content modalities come easily, while others require greater amounts of study and even coaching. Ethan explains how he began by using his strong command of short-form writing, and over time, has mastered the ability to host his successful podcast, The Customer Experience; communicate with his audience through a video format; and even take the stage for live events.
This is a great episode for anyone struggling to ensure that their brand doesn’t get lost in the noise.
Three Key Takeaways:
- Thought Leadership built on Human-Centered Design should focus on desirability, feasibility, and viability.
- Spreading your Thought Leadership through short personal video messages can have greater results than mass e-mail blasts.
- While evangelizing your Thought Leadership, focus on your client’s problems, not the product you are trying to sell.
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!
Transcript
Bill Sherman It’s an incredibly noisy world. We live in a digital age where automated attempts at personalization are everywhere. And so if thought leadership is an incredibly personal activity, how do we put people at the center of our work? My guest today is Ethan Butte. He’s the chief evangelist at Bomb Bomb and also the co-author of a recently published book titled, Human-Centered Communication. In this conversation, I’m eager to talk with him about the book and his work as a chief evangelist. I’m Bill Sherman, and you’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let’s begin.
Ethan Beute to the show, Ethan. Thank you so much. I’m excited to be here. I am a relatively new listener, but I’ve taken down several episodes. I love it and I’m happy to participate.
Bill Sherman Fantastic. So I’m excited to have you on the show, Ethan, because one of the things I want to talk about is the concept of digital pollution and the challenge of getting ideas heard in a noisy world. And so let’s begin with the baseline. What is digital pollution?
Ethan Beute The way we define it in short is unwelcome digital distractions. And I think for anyone listening, as I offer a couple of these ideas, every one of you will have multiple ideas of your own, but just think about, you know, on the innocent end of the spectrum, you have that group text message that you really didn’t want to be in. So you pick up your phone and you’ve got 75 messages. You’re like, why was I in this? Like no ill intent there, but still frustrating. We all have, you know, I use T-Mobile and so. when those unwelcome calls come in, it’s read as spam likely. So we always joke at my house because we’re all in a family plan that spam likely is the most popular caller of any of our phones. Of course, we all have inboxes that are filled with things that we don’t understand why we got them. They don’t seem to be for us. They have fake personalization and they slow us down and they trip us up. In some cases it’s. Is this even from who it says it’s from? Is this link safe to click? Is this attachment safe to download? Because on the far other end of digital pollution from the innocent end, you have the intentional pollution like phishing attempts, malware, cyber attacks, all of these things, we see them in the headlines all the time. And then you have this broader issue. You know, recently Facebook and Instagram were in the headline for, you know, research that documents the ill effects on young women. And so this pollution concept is much bigger. then we typically teach it in a business context, but we think it’s important to bring it down to that level while we still observe that this is a societal issue that tears at our social fabric, the same as environmental pollution draws down our natural capital. Digital pollution is drawing down our social capital and that trust that binds us together as individuals, as teams, as communities, however you wanna define that, I don’t think we can afford to let that be under threat.
Bill Sherman So one of the things that I’ve said over the last few years is I think we live in a golden age of ideas. That there is absolutely no shortage of ideas out in the world. There’s a constant sea of them that we’re all floating in. But I think the corollary to that ties nicely to the concept of digital pollution. The idea that might be deeply relevant to you may be incredibly irrelevant to 99% of the world.
Ethan Beute Yes, and we take this industrial approach to a lot of our work because we’re only, you know, 200 years out of the onset of the industrial revolution, only 100 years or so removed from the onset via Henry Ford’s assembly line. So we still approach a lot of things that way. And we just think, you know I just need to crank this out, crank this, out, crank this sound. We don’t give thought to who actually really might need or want to hear this. What’s in it for that other person? And just simply that act alone, immediately. makes the whole messenger experience better.
Bill Sherman So this human-centered aspect of communication, targeting to the people that need to hear the message, I think often in thought leadership, it’s easy to mimic the approaches of broadcasting, whether that’s advertising or content marketing, when really in thought-leadership. narrow casting or even point casting is far more effective. And so let’s start diving into what do you mean by human-centered communication?
Ethan Beute It’s really interesting. So at BombBomb we make it easy to record and send video messages, but that’s the mechanics of what we do. And we’ve known for years that as practitioners ourselves inside the organization, having great relationships with our customers and broader community, we know that there’s something more powerful going on there. So an internal cross-functional team met periodically for about a year’s time and they emerged with this language of human centered communication and what they sought to do. was to take something approximately familiar, not familiar to everyone, but still a familiar concept. And that concept is human centered design. This is a 30 or 40 year old practice. It’s a way to design and create really any product, service, system, process, anything you’d apply human centered designed to anything. So we’re applying it to our daily digital communication as a means of breaking through the noise and pollution, actually creating trust. enhancing your reputation, creating engagement, giving people something that is separate from the noise in general, by focusing first on the human on the other end of that messenger experience.
Bill Sherman Well, and I think we’ve all sort of cringed it. The mail merge fail of hello, first name, comma, last name. Right?
Ethan Beute And people are trying to do that with video now too, by the way, they’re trying to fake that thing, but you just think so deep fake. Oh yeah. Yeah. And, and you can just imagine how funny that’s going to be because we’ve all gotten the deer first name or the deer. They tried to greet you by your first name, but it’s really your last name or scrape LinkedIn. And so they take this kind of bit thing from earlier in your career and treat it like that’s your current title or something. So much comedy
Bill Sherman But with that, I think there’s a craving from the audiences that we’re trying to reach for something that’s relevant to them. And you can break through the noise when you’re delivering something human and deeply relevant. But how do you signal that in the first, you know, five to eight seconds so that people know, hey, this is for me, rather than, you know, probable spam given your phone?
Ethan Beute Yeah, so it starts with that question. What’s in it for them? So I’ll give you really quickly, for folks who aren’t familiar with human-centered design, I just wanna draw out something in your minds. It’s three circles that all overlap and they meet in the middle. It’s just kind of a common Boolean-type treatment. So the three characteristics involved in human-centered design are desirability and the needs of humans, what people actually want. Adjacent and overlapping is feasibility, what technology allows. And then on top of these three, the third circle is viability, the definition of business success. And where we so often start so much of our work is that we start with, how do we define success? What is the business need and want for itself or the organization or the mission or whatever it is? What do we want for ourselves is where we start. And then we immediately go to what does technology make possible? And then, we operate there. And what’s missing, obviously, is the big circle of what humans want. And the interesting thing is that we should start any human-centered design process with the needs of people. When we start with the need of people first, before we consider how we’re gonna technologically or feasibly deploy this or execute it or whatever, and how it maps to our business success and our desired outcomes for ourselves. If we start other people, we’re in so much better a position. Last thing here. When you operate at that intersection of viability and feasibility, what you want for yourself and your business and what technology allows you to do, that’s where you see all of this pollution created because it’s so selfishly motivated and it leverages this insanely powerful and decreasingly inexpensive technology is getting less expensive. And so you can do more faster, but that doesn’t make it better. It’s again, and it goes back to this industrial bias toward efficiency. without sufficient respect for effectiveness.
Bill Sherman Well, and for me, one of the things that I’ve seen over the years is that there’s value in tailoring ideas to individuals and making them feel that it’s relevant to them and was created for them. And you can do that for a group through narrow casting, or you can create communications or an idea and deliver an idea designed just for one person. and that fits like a custom tailored suit.
Ethan Beute It does, it’s bespoke and it’s interesting. I think so many people tell themselves that they can’t or that they don’t have time or that won’t scale and these types of things that you hear all the time. It’s like, you never really pushed the limits of scalability in this scenario or unscalability. You just decided at the outset because you can get a piece of technology inexpensively that allows you to do this 50 times a minute or 50 times an hour or 50 a day that you should go to that because it’s. Cause technology allows us to do it. And, and to your point, just a quick fun story there. So we, Steve and I, Steve is my longtime friend and team member, chief marketing officer here at bomb bomb. We co-authored a book together. Um, the new one is human centered communication, but a previous one rehumanize your business, which was very specifically about video messages in particular, and we did that two and a half years ago. So lunch was two and half, three years ago and we killed. with mass emails. We sold a lot of books, got a lot of replies, drove a lot of traffic, and it’s funny, just two and a half years removed when I rank three characteristic or three approaches, mass emails delivered by far the least in terms of response and engagement and sales, although it’s really kind of can be difficult to map that. a separate topic for a separate conversation is attribution, but it definitely significantly underperformed relative to two and a half years ago. And the two things that totally outperformed one, I had a mission of sending one-to-one truly personal videos to individual people. I probably got two to 300 of them out in about two and half months, just chipping away at it, just a few more every single day. And that provoked so much better a response. I’m positive. that I sold more books that way. And I got other opportunities too. Some people replied and said, awesome. I checked out the bonus packages, give me 25 or give me a hundred. Other people replied and said this is great. I’m thinking of a friend of mine who totally needs this. Other people said, awesome, I’ll post to social and share it with other people. Other people reply and said oh man, I need to get you on this podcast or I need introduce you to this person. And it’s because everyone was personal, greeted them by name, reset the last time we connected. I shared exactly why I thought of them. It wasn’t. Hey, I need you to help me sell this book. It’s because I know that you see this in this particular way. And we address that. I thought it’d be interesting to you. And so your point of going to point casting, it’s super effective. And it goes to a deep, deep human need, which is I need to be seen, heard, valued, appreciated, respected as the unique individual human being that I am. It is a need that we’ve always had. And it’s a need we can fulfill as fellow human beings so much better than a machine can.
Bill Sherman There’s so much to unpack there. I’m going to pick one thread of it and we’ll run with it and we will see where it goes. So one of the things that I look at in that is you are a master of the short video message and in that you bring a level of energy and excitement and I hope the listeners can hear it in your voice in this conversation that I think enthusiasm and energy is infectious. and you managed to convey that through a screen. And there are a lot of people in a COVID-based world who are hungered if not starving for that human connection and energy. So talk to me about the philosophy that you use in creating that human communication through the camera lens.
Ethan Beute Sure. So first and foremost, thank you. That’s very kind of you to say, and a nice thing to observe. And I do hope that people can hear it through this conversation, which brings me to the biggest thing overall. A lot of people, whether it’s guesting on a podcast or showing up effectively on a Zoom call or leading a meeting or a presentation or recording a video message for one person or for 1,000 people, they feel like, okay, I need to be a particular kind person. But I want to share with people what’s unique. I think that you identified in what I’ve shared with you, we’ve communicated back and forth for a while now, is that I care. I believe in what i’m saying. I am passionate about these ideas. I think they can help other people. And my sincerity, I think, is what drives that, that you don’t have to question do I believe what I’m saying. You’re you, which was, which is a place where a lot of us stop. Like, is this guy saying this because he wants something from me? Do I like, so this gets to intent and motivation and, you know, do I have your best interest in mind again, deep human things that we’re trying to judge all the time to protect ourselves. It’s dangerous if you place your trust in the wrong person in the wrong way, so I think whether it’s through your voice or whether it is through video, this ability to communicate your sincerity, your enthusiasm, your gratitude. Anyone can do it if you believe you have something of value or you can be of service You believe in what you’re saying you believe in the product service people movement mission that you represent Then the best thing that you could do is to get on camera Live or recorded and my last thing here is that it’s for anyone. I said it once already, but if you’re more of a methodical Analytical thoughtful person that’s still okay because the fact that you care will come through in that because it’s sincere. And so I think the key thing is, and I think it’s a neat characteristic about all the folks I’ve heard on your show is that they believe in what they’re doing. And I think that’s the starting point for all good things.
Bill Sherman If you don’t care about what you’re doing, your audience will never care more than you do. And so if you can’t bring an authentic level of passion, if you’re not excited to talk about this again and again, guess what? Your audience checks out. They can hear it immediately.
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 Leveragigethoughtleadership.com. You’ve talked around your role as an evangelist, and I want to explore what that role is like and what it looks like on a day-to-day basis, because I know that evangelist is a role that is more common in the software industry, but outside of software, people may be asking, What is an evangelist and what does he really do?
Ethan Beute That was my dad’s first question when I got the title. Okay.
Bill Sherman Yeah, so we painted a picture a little bit. Yeah. And is it a real roll, right? It’s probably what your dad was asking.
Ethan Beute Yeah, if you go to LinkedIn and you Google evangelist, just evangelist product evangelist or something like that, or chief evangelist. You will see like Amazon’s got several of them, Microsoft has several of them. It is a common term, but it really is. And I told you this before we started recording. I feel like when I encountered your podcast and what you’re up to personally, I felt like I found my people because you’re all evangelists essentially. And the core characteristic of it is that you’re evangelizing the problem. not the product. So I am in marketing. I came up in marketing, my previous title was VP marketing, but I could really have come from anywhere. And in most organizations, people are evangelizing. They just maybe don’t have someone with a particular title or they don’t know that they’re doing it. But it’s this idea that if you are innovating, and by innovation, I mean a couple of things, any or all of these, you’re solving a problem that didn’t have a solution before. That’s an obvious innovation. Or you’re solving, uh, in, in that case, people don’t even know that the problem exists. That’s kind of where we are with video messages still, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars of VC that have come into our space in the past couple of years, it’s still, I don’t know that I have this problem. I don’ know that this faceless typed out text is limiting my opportunities and confusing and frustrating people and not putting my best face forward. So I’m evangelizing that problem. but you might also be solving a known problem in a different or better way. And so there’s this idea of creating a more interesting conversation in a much broader and more welcoming community, a bigger tent if you will, by talking about this problem and some of the different ways to approach it. Everyone’s welcome in that conversation instead of going straight to the product. And so… If I’m going to spend 45 minutes engaging with a group, uh, in some blend of teaching and Q and A and whatever, you know, bomb bomb might come up, but very often it doesn’t. But the replies that come back and some of the, when you get to the Q and a, it’s like, Oh, can bomb bomb help me with this? And so It’s just a more interesting and engaging conversation. It’s of more use to more people. It’s less threatening to people because they don’t feel like most people who will encounter me even in a commercial context are not going to feel like I’m trying to sell them something. And I’ll tell you straight up, I’m not. I want more people, I feel like maximum there are a half a million people on earth using video messages on a consistent basis. I think tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people can and should be doing it. I want more people to do it. I want to help people who want to do it. Now, do I prefer that most of them use bomb bomb instead of our competitors? Sure. But ultimately, I sincerely believe that if I can get more people doing this and together as a community, we can get more people to do this in the right ways, at the right times, in the right spirit, that we’re modeling the right behavior as a group, that the group will just grow and grow and grow and will certainly in the end. It’s a little bit of a leap of faith, But in the end… You know, we’ll have our fair share of customers for having created this conversation and created these opportunities for people to learn and grow and improve their results by behaving a little bit differently.
Bill Sherman I think that’s the intersection between organizational thought leadership and evangelism. It’s about taking an idea to scale, but the paradox here is you’re using sometimes narrow casting and point casting methods to reach scale. You use the ad example in terms of point casting and out individually to people about the book, and someone saying… Oh, I’ll share that with 25 people. Give me 25 copies, right? And so if we try to reach scale on our own, it’s often difficult to impossible. It’s pushing the rock uphill, right. It’s a Sisyphean challenge. And so what we have to do is recruit allies and ambassadors who will either open doors for us or speak on our behalf. And so you can’t recruit. allies and ambassadors with a mass marketing email campaign, right? You have to bring a human touch.
Ethan Beute Yeah. I mean, you can go fishing a little bit because the other thing I would add to the way a different word that I would to that is that you can identify them, like not just recruit them, but you can also identify them. If you do create these kind of more mass opportunities, there are signals, especially in any digital space or even in a physical space, you see people whose eyes light up. You can see people who put their phone down and look you in the eye while you’re maybe on a stage or something. So you can identify these people that like, you can see that light bulb go on or you can their excitement, or they want to, you could tell they want to jump in and add their own thing. And, and so you can, identify those people too. And so that’s a fun thing about the role, like practical side of the role really quickly, because this is where I identify people and recruit people is I do this, I go have conversations with other people to see where our shared values intersect, to see if their community or their audience is interested in these ideas. So. I’m hosting a podcast. I’m guesting on podcasts. I am giving presentations. I do that externally. I’m doing it for customers. I engage with our sales team and helping out in that process, sometimes directly by communicating with the customer, but sometimes just by consulting internally with the team and equipping them and sharing the things that I’m learning. It’s really this inside-out, outside-in dynamic where I’m constantly out in air quoting for listeners, the market at large. You know, where are we with this? What are some of the themes? What are it? Some of the newest trends and you know, what’s going on out there, bringing that into the organization and then taking, you know what we’re learning internally and taking that back out into the world in a variety of formats. Publish things, videos, blog posts, you know, written two and a half books on the topic. And so there’s all this, it’s just really fun to, to learn and teach simultaneously.
Bill Sherman So I’ve got a question about you and your preferences. You’re on podcasts, you’re hosting podcasts, you’re speaking, running workshops, you writing. That’s sort of like the triple threat on Broadway. In some ways, what are you naturally wired for? And were there modalities that you had to stretch yourself to be comfortable in and to do?
Ethan Beute That’s a really good question. I have not thought about that, or I haven’t thought about it this clearly, the way you’ve articulated the question, you know, I think my greatest strength that came up in local broadcast television. So I ran marketing teams inside TV stations in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Chicago, and out here where I am now in Colorado Springs. And so I had this really strong like writing muscle, but it was all very short format. So it was really easy to move into social media, um, and then to kind of push that out to blogging. And the first book that I wrote was in some ways, and I think most people who’ve written a nonfiction business book would acknowledge that it’s some collection of the best ideas from your blog posts and your PDFs and these other things that you’ve published and presentations you’ve given on a stage perhaps and stories you’ve collected over the years and all of that. So that was a pretty natural one to me. Video is certainly a developed skill. I mean, I think a lot of people You know, we use this false language in my opinion of I need to find my voice or discover my voice. You don’t find or discover your voice. You develop it and you develop it by exercising it. And so I love that triple threat, by the way, it’s really fun to think about, but video was definitely an acquired developed skill. Um, I think Nat writing was also developed, but it was developed before I ever got into this company, much less this, uh, this role. And then podcasting was newer to me. Like I’ve only been aggressively guesting and hosting for about two or three years now, but it’s a really natural format to me, it’s somewhere in between, you know, it’s that’s why I love podcasting. It’s just such a, it, it a more loose conversational format and you can explore your ideas a little bit better, especially to the degree that you’re in a good conversation where people are sincerely interested in one another like this one.
Bill Sherman Well, and I think your point here, in terms of building the muscle for video, people, if they receive a video from you, will go, oh, he was born to deliver video, right? And that you’ve developed the muscle far enough that to someone who hasn’t done it, you look like you’ve climbed the mountain top, right. And so one of the things I think for thought leadership, both in getting ideas out there, is that, like you said, it’s a skill that’s developed. start with what’s comfortable, whether that’s writing, one-on-ones, speaking in front of a group. You may be asked over time to stretch yourself into zones that are less comfortable, but if you don’t start developing a muscle and putting ideas out there, you’re never going to go down the journey of influencing people through ideas.
Ethan Beute You’re exactly right. I’ll never forget the first webinar I deliver. There were only, there might’ve been dozens of people on it. I don’t remember the exact number, but it was nerve wracking. Um, and that was probably eight or nine years ago. I remember the first time we got a speaking engagement, um, at a pretty big conference, there’s a breakout at a big conference and they’re like, Ethan, you’re going to do that. Like, oh my gosh, like, you know, I had to get a new suit because my other suit wasn’t amazing and I never wore it. And, uh, and I was, uh pretty nervous. I was overprepared, but all of that stuff, we don’t have time. I don’t think for the story of how I wound up in an evangelist role, how our CMO is like, we need an evangelists and you’re the guy. But the reason that he pointed to me was that I had done that over the years. I took the webinars and figured out how to deliver them and get comfortable. I took to stage presentations and learned how to. develop my voice and my comfort and confidence in that space, um, guesting on podcasts and all these other things. And it’s, they’re all highly approachable. Someone that listens to a show like this is a highly competent, intelligent person who really can do anything that she or he sets her or his mind to. And I think for a thought leader or an evangelist or whatever title you might find yourself wearing at any given time, I do think that this mixed modality, this ability to exercise your ideas in writing, in speaking semi-formally and speaking casually like this, in appearing in videos, whether it’s a recorded video for a YouTube channel or it’s recorded video to send to five of your team members or 82 of your community members or whatever the case may be. this ability to get comfortable doing this, it’s. There’s a well-roundedness to it. And if you make it part of the journey, you learn a lot in that process because these different modes challenge you in different ways to capture the thoughts and share them. You know, it’s really easy to hide behind what I call the cloak of digital anonymity. And simply blog and post to social because you can edit the heck out of it. You can tweet the heck of it, you can, even after it’s live, you could kind of retract it a little bit or edit it on the fly, you have all of this fight, like deep, deep, finite control into the degree that it’s imagery. It’s pixel by pixel. You can control the heck. Out of all this stuff in this podcasting format and video formats require you to let yourself go a little. To be in the moment and to experience that. and to have confidence in those moments. So I think it’s a really nice add to any thought leader or evangelist’s skill set to operate in modes that they’re not necessarily as comfortable or familiar with.
Bill Sherman So what I think of is in some ways, sort of like I’m a runner. And so if I go out running every single day, I’m working the same muscles, right? And so just like you can’t, you shouldn’t make every day leg day or every day arm day. You’ve got to work different muscles to have. a healthy, complete body, right? And that’s sort of the way that I think for thought leadership as well is if you default only to one modality and stay there, it’s like going out running every single day.
Ethan Beute Yeah, I’ll tell you what, I’ve definitely injured myself because I was not consciously aware that I also run and I would exclusively run and hike and walk and my body was not properly developed and it was healthy in a lot of ways. No one would look at me and say like, oh, you’re so unhealthy. At the same time, there was so much imbalance in tension in different places that you can become blind to until you hit that point where all of a sudden this muscle group is saying like, Uh-uh. not anymore. Nope. You know, you crossed over and this other muscle groups going like, I’m, you know, grossly underdeveloped. And so, you know. So there are these problems or, or opportunities, um, lurking kind of just outside peripheral vision or just out of view, or just waiting for one acute moment to kind of set off awareness that there’s something that could be better or healthier or more balanced or stronger. I like the analogy and I can relate to it, obviously.
Bill Sherman So we’re heading towards wrapping up here. But before we do, I want to pull you into a bit of a time machine and take you back to that moment. And you alluded to it where your CMO came to you and said, we need you in the evangelist role. My question to you is you’ve got the time machine. You can go back and you can give that version of Ethan some advice. What advice would you give? to Ethan of that moment, to be better at practicing in evangelism and thought leadership, because we have many listeners here that are either just starting out in their journey as a thought leadership practitioner and are asking, how should I be doing this well? So what would See you soon.
Ethan Beute Gosh, there’s so many directions I could take it, but where I am in my mind right now, kind of calls back to an earlier point in this conversation, I’ll just, I’ll, just describe it differently. I could have had an even stronger relationship orientation. My default, my bias as a person, as it, as a professional is, is a task orientation, you know, line it up, organize it, knock it out, you know, get what you need from other people, give what you give, what other people need to them. But I think. If I had had a stronger relationship orientation, again, now we’re talking muscle groups, I guess, upper body, lower body or whatever, which it doesn’t matter which is which. In this scenario, I continued to, I guess out of comfort or something or confidence, confidence in an ill-defined new role, I guess is how I’ll justify my behavior. I bias toward the task orientation, but you can go so much farther, so much faster, not just by. what you can learn through a stronger relationship orientation. But also, you know, to what we were talking about before is identifying and equipping and empowering and recruiting other people to carry this message to places where you can’t reach, where your digital footprint doesn’t cover. And it just carries the message so much farther, so much faster. And it’s this relationship orientation, mapping the opportunity to individual people or to segments of people in a way that lights them up. that fulfills them, that gets them motivated, that gets to share some of the passion and excitement and interest and value that you identify in the problem or the opportunity that you’re taking a thought leadership position on.
Bill Sherman Thought leadership in how you’re articulating it is a deeply human activity and a relational activity. Whether you’re practicing evangelism, you’re an advocate, or even have thought leadership in your title. There’s so much we could talk about, Ethan, but I think we’re going to have to leave it here. Thank you very much.
Ethan Beute Thank you. It’s been a pleasure, and I look forward to doing it again, whether or not the conversation’s recorded.
Bill Sherman Fantastic. If you’re interested in organizational thought leadership, then I invite you to subscribe to the OrgTL newsletter. Each month, we talk about the people who create, curate, and deploy thought leadership on behalf of their organizations. Go to the website orgtl.com and choose join our newsletter. I’ll leave a link to the web site as well as my LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Thanks for listening, and I look forward to hearing what you thought of the show.
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