How to Prove You’re a Thought Leader (Instead of Just Saying It) This episode unpacks…
Institutional Thought Leadership | Jeff Kavanaugh
Building an institute for thought leadership
An interview with Jeff Kavanaugh about building a thought leadership arm for a multi-billion dollar tech firm.
Today’s guest is Jeff Kavanaugh, the Global Head at Infosys Knowledge Institute, the research and thought leadership arm of Infosys diversified technology and digital firm. The Infosys Knowledge Institute (IKI) helps industry leaders develop a deeper understanding of business and technology trends through compelling thought leadership. Earlier this year, Jeff published his second book The Live Enterprise.
Jeff explains how the institute isn’t just a place for people to have a platform but a place for teaching others to build communication and extend their voice. Jeff and Bill look at the three audiences that the institute serves best.
The Digital Brain
Next, we spend some time discussing the transformation of the digital age. Jeff and Bill discuss the concept of the invisible brain, an evolution of the invisible hand. We examine the knowledge graph and how it connects data to people and things. Plus, we investigate how the digital brain can take rules-based information that has become digitized, then automate and optimize it. Together, the digital brain and the knowledge graph set the tone for the curation of knowledge in a company.
Finally, we wrap up with Jeff giving some valuable advice for anyone who might want to turn their ideas into a book for their organization. He reveals where to start and how to actually publish the project.
Three Key Takeaways from the Interview
- Branding you thought leadership is a long game. You have to be comfortable with giving value with no expectations of something in return.
- Your thought leadership needs to have its own edge. If you are saying the same thing as everyone else you are invisible.
- When making the choice to write a book start with a four thousand word keystone. Afterwards, determine if there is still enough depth to write a full book that others will want to read.
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 Hello. You’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. I’m your host, Bill Sherman. And today we’re talking about one of my personal passions, organizational thought leadership. Today I have a few questions that I want to explore. How do you work with senior leadership to establish a thought leadership function within your organization? To explore this question with me, I’ve invited Jeff Kavanaugh, who is the global head of the Emphasis Knowledge Institute. I’m eager to talk with Jeff about several topics the creation of the institute, the interaction with senior leadership, as well as emphasis, 200,000 plus employees, and also the recent publication of their first thought leadership book, The Live Enterprise. Today we’re talking about the growth of the thought leadership function from a blank sheet of paper to playbooks. Ready? Let’s begin. Jeff, welcome and thank you for joining us today.
Jeff Kavanaugh Glad to be here. Thanks for having me, Bill.
Bill Sherman I want to start with a question. You’re the global head of the Infosys Knowledge Institute. What is the institute? What does it do?
Jeff Kavanaugh Were the research and thought leadership arm of Infosys, a $13 billion diversified technology and digital firm. I said that with bit tongue in cheek, because that’s the official definition. The real define is definition is I get to work with really smart people and develop insights on topics that are important to them. We think they’re important to the market and it’s real exciting when we see it make an impact either for someone else out in the world or a client or even a student trying to wrestle with something. So I get to do something every day that gets me up and excited. And I also think that there’s a more strategic dimension that that can carry a big impact. So that to me is what the Knowledge Institute is.
Bill Sherman So I hear a bit of joy and a bit of passion in terms of working with smart people and enjoying it. How did you land in this role? Because I’m sure that’s not, you know, the first one that you started. How did you get here?
Jeff Kavanaugh I don’t want to dip into too many cliches. It’s an interesting thing about not trusting the process or the right outcome occurring. Even though you don’t try to get there too soon. I’ve always liked to teach from a family of teachers and farmers. I enjoy the written word. You could have gone to law. You know, you like the way language is formed and want to be. No offense to lawyers, but little more practical with engineering and thought consulting, solving problems. And so over the years after manufacturing would have been in consulting for a long time, the services business and a lot of that love that had to do with tech and for manufacturing distribution and gradually product development and broader. And it’s a competitive world because you’re asking companies, executives to part with a good amount of money to go solve some big problem. In fact, even setting that part aside. You’re asking him to trust you on something really important for them. And by the way, the other people who are saying they can help them have a deep tradition and branded, whether it’s the McKenzie’s or the bands or the or the other types of consultants who legitimately, you know, very deservedly have a good name. So I found that thought leadership, being able to develop a real insight was just critical to get in the game and stay in the game because I don’t know if any of your listeners would think about, you know, the golf buddy or the three martini lunches, you know, that is of Mad Men. You know, a legacy tradition in my working lifetime has mostly been this phrase content based relationships. People want to see you because you’re bringing something. They know if they speak with you, they learn something. They gain, you know, their business gains. And so that’s been the crucible of getting the ideas. And so over time, partner and then the managing partner and whatever consulting unit and six years ago joined Infosys who was doing a lot of great things, didn’t have a management consulting practice. So it’s a nice compliment. So several of us joined around that time. And over the years I saw a lot of great things they were doing and found a nice niche for with it. And about two years ago, I guess it’s closer to two and a half now. Founder of the company now, Nandan Nilekani and President came to me and said, you know, we’d like to create this institute, this, this, this academy, this this central thought leadership unit. We don’t have one and we have all these pockets of it. And would you like to do it? And I said, No, I don’t think you’ll support it. I think, you know, like a lot of cases, these are good ideas, but you don’t have the resources because up to that point, I have been writing my white papers. I contributed to other reports. I even wrote a book on Consulting essentials, you know, for young consultants. And I was able to satisfy that, you know, scratch that itch that you might say. They said, No, no, we’re serious. And talk with some folks and realized it was a fantastic opportunity to unleash the creative spirit for many people. And I’d been consulting or in that business long enough where although I liked it quite a bit, I was thinking, wow, if I didn’t have a PNL to worry about or didn’t have some of those things, I could really dive into this and maybe create a positive impact for more people. And the other thing, the reason why we call it the institute is that beyond creating thought leadership and giving our subject matter experts a platform and a voice and a platform for our own team, myself, it’s it’s a chance to teach. It’s helping people structure their thinking and making sure they have something to say. The process of converting expertise into something that’s useful for others. It’s a fantastic experience to go through. It’s challenging sometimes, but when you’re done, every time you do it, you’re transformed a little bit. You’re changed a little bit because you’re in a new place. You think so? A topic differently in the world? Differently.
Bill Sherman There’s something that you wrote in the book and we’ll be talking about the book in a little bit. But you talked about increasing the velocity of ideas, and that really seems to fit with that process of transformation of you can have people with expertise, but if they write that white paper or they have the insight, but it never goes anywhere within the organization, let alone into the world, you have a velocity of zero for the idea. And so my question would be. What from your perspective, who are you trying to reach within the Institute? Who? Who are your audiences? Internal and external. With the Institute.
Jeff Kavanaugh Well, as my. Mentor, Jim Collins. I say mentor because closely aligned a lot of these ideas. Jim Collins would say you first confront the brutal facts, especially if you’re new to the this this thing. You don’t have an audience. You probably have several. And in some cases, they can’t wait to hear what you have to say in some cases. Who are you? You know, so you have to grow it and connect one audience. And this is if you go to our site, it was a sitcom slash A.I. right there, front and center. We say we help senior executives make better decisions, make important decisions. And yes, I’ve kind of glean that also from some others. I thought that’s a great place to start because if we’re not helping somebody make a decision. Then it’s interesting, but it could be a science project. We might as well be watching the Discovery Channel or, you know, science. So we as a business and by the way, we’re funded, we have bankers, you know, we have senior members of our company that’s that that are doing this. And so we want to make sure that we do that. So helping senior helping business people make better decisions on strategic topics of strategic importance. Okay. So it’s almost like there’s the market and trends and ideas that are out there or maybe issues, and then we translate them into not just the kind of things that we do, but, but, but the problems people have. And if an executive could be a client of ours, could be a prospect. So that’s one broad audience. The second broad audience is the millions of students, probably engineering business school students who they’ll be out in the out in the industry next year or the next few. They’ll be there’ll be potential clients. And maybe next year they’re potential recruit because we do hire 10 to 20,000 people a year. I’ve also found that if they can get something from what we’re doing that they can get some insight, well, that will start to populate their reports. It’ll form their thinking. And certainly that’s how branding, you know, it’s the long game. It’s the long game where if we show value with no expectations or no requirements of cost or payment for a while over time, that’s cumulative and we become the brand. So there’s a short game, long game. And then the other audience is our quarter of a million employees because. We had a good people here, smart people, very hardworking people, and a lot of cases we didn’t hire them because they’re great writers or they’re great communicators for them. They’re getting better and better, but they are solid at what they do. And so where there’s any friction or issues in them, converting what they know to something is useful for a client. It could be in the middle of engagement, midst of an engagement, or it could just be they did this great thing at a client. They learned something. How do they shared across their practice or, you know, extend their voice? Well, we help them with that. Some cases directly. My team, I developed the institute, hired a fair number of writers, producers, videographers, in some cases Emmy Award winners, career journalists. We had the, I guess, fortunate, unfortunate situation where traditional media was really up against it, you know, with advertising revenues and newspapers and broadcast television stations. The good news is some fantastic talent that they were being asked to work more and more hours for less money. And we gave them a place that they could ply their trade in a fresh way. And after a few months of creating a forcefield around them so the antibodies wouldn’t, you know, go after them because, you know, when you change industries and companies, it’s different gradually kind of a step back. And it’s been great because they’ve complemented our SMEs quite a bit. So those are the audiences, the clients, the, I guess, future employees and future clients, and then also our employees, our employees themselves. So they have a platform to go out and amplify what they’re doing.
Bill Sherman Well, and there’s sounds like there’s two layers of objective with your internal audience. One to share knowledge of. This is how we solved the problem here. It may relate to you. So there’s a technical knowledge sharing the old chem knowledge management question from the 1990s. How do we know what we know? But also then being able to equip people to go in front of clients and be able to tell that story successfully in a way that they say, my problem is similar to that I can trust in process with solving this problem.
Jeff Kavanaugh It is. It is. And over time, you know, my, you have paranoia of different types at different points in the journey. Not because you’re trying to keep the ship afloat as much as you want to protect but to be resilient to build that buffer. And in the early days, you don’t have a buffer because you’re new. And so there have been, you know, one of those stages of paranoia was getting too critical mass because if we do create a site and someone comes to it, is there just enough that it’s more than what you would think is just enough? You know, once we reached that, then it was about being findable and searchable. Helping our marketing digital marketing team think a little differently about how we present our information and what people are looking for. Because thought leadership marketing is different than product and services marketing.
Bill Sherman Very much so.
Jeff Kavanaugh And my mandate was. Jeff work within the engine, help everyone get better, you know, together. You know, don’t do something off to the side because one you’ll never scale and two you won’t make as big of an impact in the company. And they’ll be honest that in some cases it’s taken longer, much longer to get certain things done. And yet when it does get done, it’s at scale. So, for example, when we do work with our marketing team and social media, it’s nice to have those 3.8 million LinkedIn followers and not create it all from scratch, even if it takes longer for maybe certain functionality on the site to show and have a journey, you know, pulling people along to, to a lead generation. So it’s definitely because you think about this, for anyone out there who’s creating a unit like this in a company, somebody already does this for everything you want to do. You are literally you’re taking something from someone who is who is in some way doing it. Maybe they aren’t doing it very well, maybe even want to do it, but that they’re responsible for it. Probably some folks in marketing, maybe some people in a services unit. And it’s important to be extremely respectful because it’s a collaborative effort. And, you know, I was thinking of two phrases before this is preparing. One is. You have to have an attitude of grateful service. You are helping somebody else find their voice. You’re helping some other part of the company. You’re helping marketing reach more people. You’re helping executives with a platform. So you need to be fairly humble and fairly service oriented at the same time. You need to be just a little ambitious. You know what? It’s good to see your name on a byline. It’s good to really struggle to find that that insight or two to break through. So it’s an interesting combination of being confident, sticking your jaw out and being very humble in service. And you can’t have either extreme. You’ve got to have this interesting mix and the emotional intelligence of knowing when to lead with one or what mix to have. And I think that’s been an interesting insight, you know, as this has developed.
Bill Sherman And that tension exists in a couple of areas, not only for the individual as content creator, but I think also for the idea it’s not just about the number of likes that you get on a piece. So if it goes out and you’ve got 3.5 million followers, it’s not just how many people saw a piece and liked it. You want people to lean in. You want an idea to be approachable that people say, that’s interesting, tell me more. But it doesn’t have to be the idea that everyone likes. It’s okay to be sometimes a little bit controversial to stir the pot just a little bit with the idea and to say, okay, of those 3.5 million people, if we get one tenth of 4% that are our ideal audience and they say, that’s interesting, tell me more. That could be incredibly meaningful.
Jeff Kavanaugh Let me add two points there. First of all, you couldn’t be more, right. Rephrase that in a positive way. You’re very right. It’s because if we are saying the same things, everyone else and everyone generally likes it. We’re invisible, first of all. No, we’re just. Just, just. Just bland as bland can be. And so you do want to have an edge and you do want to not. In a, I don’t know, shock value sentence. But you do want to stir up a little bit of, if not controversy, certainly thinking like being contrarian, like, for example, you know, that’s the most important aspect of cloud you’ve never heard of. Or everything you know about, you know, clouds wrong. Well, if you’ve got the goods to back it up, that’s not a bad title because there are some things that are interesting, like I found, for example, in supply chain, especially the advanced planning and scheduling. You know, years ago when it was first you had a little bit I and wrap it in memory solving that a lot of the rocket science really cool stuff people wanted to do. If you ran to that first, you failed. If you did the boring things first, like just connected your orders and you had a better sense of your capacity, then you’re in the right for other things. So by doing the boring, you’re in the right later to do the glamorous. And that was a really big thing that people didn’t always skip those steps. So it’s I think it’s important for us to see things that are bold. And so I would rather here’s for example, if you lead with insights. I believe an insight is something that’s provocative or bold, if not obvious and possibly counterintuitive. So it doesn’t have the shock value necessarily. It might, but that’s an out. It’s an output. You start with saying something bold. You get the strength of your convictions, courage, your convictions. It’s not obvious because if it’s obvious, you’re five keystrokes searchable and it’s there anyway. And then you pick you’ve.
Bill Sherman Got two seconds of attention time someone scrolls past.
Jeff Kavanaugh In or they could it themselves. Yeah. Not obvious. Means you’ve already done the exploratory data. You found something that most people don’t know. You know what? You want to share it? That’s the social contract. I did this hard work. I’m sharing it. That’s the price of your time. And then finally, that it might even be counterintuitive. You mean that 10% of my sales force generates 90% of my revenue? The small number of customers, if I actually fire 10% of my customers, my revenue goes up. You know, these are counterintuitive things that sometimes the data will tell you. And so I think that’s one of the big aspects of getting people’s attention is not trying to get everyone to agree with you because it would be a very non differentiating discussion.
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. So I’d like to turn our attention to the book, the Live Enterprise, which just came out about a month ago. And with that, let’s start with the concept. You mentioned the introduction of how the live enterprise not only as a concept, but the book emerged. And there’s a story of Nandan Nilekani returning to emphasis in 2017. And he was one of the co-founders and then had come back and saw the organization with fresh eyes. You want to jump in there for a moment and share sort of how the transformation of the live enterprise began.
Jeff Kavanaugh I will. Although T sub zero is actually a little bit prior, I only wanted to do this because it’s like a Hollywood script. I won’t say Bollywood because we can’t go to dance and sing, but it’s. Nandan was part of this this journey, this juggernaut that went from. Seven gentlemen with a few hundred dollars in loans from their wives in India. You know, they time at their timeshare and off at Lent, you know, Y2K and code and a real zest for learning and high quality delivery. And next thing you know, it’s several billion dollars. Well, Anandan was an integral part of that. Founder president and like. Small number of those people that have achieved those lofty heights. Stepped out of the role. And went to serve at a cabinet level position in the new government because for the billion plus people. A large number of people didn’t have an identity in their villages or wherever else, and they came up with this idea of a digital identifier called the Aadhaar. And Fast forward, basically in a very short period of time, created it. It was hugely adopted. I think in six years 1.2 billion people had adopted it. And between retinal scans or fingerprints or others, it was very fraud proof because you can imagine it could be rife with. And so it gave people a chance to have a checking account, get government payments. I mean, it’s a huge deal. They became part of the grid, part of society. So we’re talking societal change.
Bill Sherman And you describe that is really a moonshot sort of program. It is. Yeah, it is. Yeah.
Jeff Kavanaugh And by the way, the six years was it took a while. The leading economists like the World Bank, others thought it would take 40 plus years. So if you think about it, there was tech behind it. There was some Iot and there was a massive rate of adoption change management. And this is the government, by the way. And so around 2017, when he was stepping out of that, he reached operational kind of maturity. Emphasis, to be blunt, was kind of going towards operational as Mike Todak, you know, diminishing returns because you erode the S-curve and sort of flatten out and some great things were happening, but they were more operational in nature. And he came back, like you said, fresh eyes. And he said, you know. If I could do this thing and transform this and this government initiative and some of these principles that you found, why not do it for a large enterprise? And why not do it for us first? And in what is it about digital Natives? What is it about the Googles and the Amazons that makes them different? And that was the journey. And he said, and as a services company, we’d be tempted to go try to sell some of these things ourselves to others, but not you can’t do anything. He said externally until you’ve shown it at scale internally. Talk about the ultimate acceptance test. And so off it went. And so all the concepts that ultimately found their way to the pages of the live enterprise, there were things that Rafi and I, the coauthor and really the chief architect. I mean, he’s there are people whose brain is big and hearts big as well. He literally is taken care of. And his responsibility, many of the most the hardest, most complex architectural and technology related issues that stitch it all together. So it’s an absolute joy to work. And to be honest, I thought we have to tell this story because when do you have so many proof points and beyond the proof points of, you know, our company functioning and it working, there were things like the employee experience score jumping to its highest client value scores, jumping in the middle of the pan in the pandemic hit. Almost all of our workers within days were able to flip to remote work because of the work that had been done. Because, see, the pandemic wasn’t the thing. We were two years into this journey at the time, thank goodness, because although there’s this plenty of stress, it allowed us to have the confidence and then to go to clients who were saying, you know what, maybe we’re back off. Maybe we had to do this, you know, no, we got. So we were describing our story and say we got your back. And after we went through it a few times, they were saying, you know, first of all, yes, we’re going to continue and maybe even do some more. Can you help us do what you just did for yourself? Because we need to do that. We need to move to remote work. We need to move things around, move some things to cloud, do this, do that. And that’s when we thought, you know what? Sometimes you get so heads down doing that you don’t share. And I think we started to move to that mode and that’s where the germ of the idea came out. And then the other piece of it, there’s an elegance and maybe it’s the in in the yang, the art in the science, that some of these concepts actually came from nature. You know, there’s murmuration of birds, for example, the way they do these incredible acrobatic swirls and flocks. There’s no alpha bird. There’s no command and control hierarchy. If you actually look at the science behind it there, there’s a bird taking its cue from the six around it, and that’s the six around it. It’s a beast. A huge number of Scrum teams all integrated. You know, and you know what? If the temperature changes, if the weather changes, if they decide to a light on, you know, some wires or trees. It all happens. And so in each one of the chapters, there were there was a story like that that both it’s a good metaphor. There are also some interesting practices that we tried to adopt and see how it would work.
Bill Sherman Well, and I’ve I want to call this out because I think it’s incredibly powerful using the organization itself as the test subject for the ideas and saying we need to do this for ourselves, to be able to serve our clients better, to be more agile, to be responsive, to be networked, to increase the velocity, the ideas and innovation so that we’re not just doing incremental innovation, but that we have the capacity to dream big things and execute them, like you mentioned, with giving the identities and to through the system for people in India, right? That’s something where instead of 40 years, can you execute it in six? You mention in the book the transformation of the digital age and you call back to Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand and you said, okay, the invisible hand was around manufacturing and breaking steps into component parts. But we’re in an age with the digital age of the invisible ring. Could you expand on that a little bit on what you meant? Because I think that concept really resonates with the concept of thought leadership at scale within an organization.
Jeff Kavanaugh Eben going back to the question that most of us talk about out loud, especially in traditional companies. What is it about those folks in Silicon Valley or the Googles, the Facebooks, the Amazons and the Apples? Why did their margins high? Where are they growing? What’s different? Yes, you could say it’s advertising or whatever, but. If you if you if you peel it back, there are some things that they did and maybe you could say that they didn’t have the pluses and minuses of a of a GE or a Boeing. You know, the economic moats maybe millstones sometimes they have. There are two concepts to answer your question. Facebook, for example, has a social graph. Everything’s connected. It’s way everything. LinkedIn, I think it’s called the employee graph. But basically everything about all the data and there’s a lot of value because every single attribute. It isn’t just, you know, name, rank and serial number. It is who you like and don’t like and what you publish and what you did, and maybe even more information than you care to share. Well, every company can have a knowledge graph. It is every piece of information that is knowable that you hopefully convert to being known. And yes, you can have the creepiness factor come in. But if you think about it as an employee, all your emails, when you do what you do, your preferences. Do you like to do this? You’d like to do that. The more that the company knows this, it starts to know who the experts are in the company, not the ones that are listed on the certain pages. But. But the real ones. It knows customer habits. It knows. And so knowing more about your customers, your employees, your assets and things that aren’t even obvious yet, if you don’t take full advantage of that and someone else does. If they either run laps around you today with their 5% better every day for the next 3 or 4 years and you’re in trouble. And so the knowledge graph is a way to connect data, people and things. And by the way, things are a big deal. You swipe your badge, you connect. So at the edge, all these sensors, they’re adding and they’re enriching so much. That’s even before you mention the machines and factories and supply chain and all that. All right. So you’re connected. You get your knowledge graph. The digital brain is the ability to take all that information. And if it’s rules based, then you can make decisions. Because the moment that a process can be documented, it can be digitized, automated and then optimized. And even the most complex set of things and flows are still just decisions that are rules based. And when those are all taken care of, you can move very quickly. You get information from the edge. You make your decision, you respond because latency is is a real issue. If you take care of something when it happens or even ideally before it happens, because you’re trending towards a certain thing like an employee, for example, that you notice the employee used to have X number of emails a week and now they’re down by 50%. Is there a retention issue? Are they disengaging? Same thing with travel. Is there a process that you can reduce a lot of the burden? Things, you know, there are pain. So the digital brain plus the knowledge graph, I believe sets the sets the tone for this curation of knowledge in a company. And that gives you the right to then think about insights and things like that.
Bill Sherman To build on that. Where I, I would add is you mentioned the latency. How long does it take for an idea to travel? What’s the delay? Right between the question and the response? If you have to ask an analyst to go answer the question, it’s going to take a long time rather than if there’s automated rules. And so with that going back to velocity, you talk about curating thought leadership with 200,000 people, I would expect. And you’ve talked about helping capture some of those people who have brilliant insights and surrounding them with writers or producers and those folks so that the ideas stand in the spotlight and they move faster. Is that a fair summary of some of the work that you’re doing with the Institute?
Jeff Kavanaugh It is. And I’d like to hit the pause button just for a second and consider this discussion of duality. It’s both a discussion of thought, leadership. It’s also just running the business. So what I’m talking about is actually running the business. So we sell more and do more and do a better job with our employees. So, yes. To what you’re saying. And we’ll get to that. But it’s not just the thought leadership thing. It is fundamental to the strategy of the company itself, which is why it’s interesting how things weave back and forth between, you know, do we do a good job for our employees with education and training services? And after a certain point where it works well, we then go sell that service externally. That’s kind of the world we’re in. So maybe it’s different than some others there. But back to what you’re saying. There’s another concept. We call it the quantum organization. Besides being a cool name, the idea that you can do many things at once, maybe simultaneously. We found that there’s a false ultimatum. I think people have it’s either a, you know, on the one side, it’s a. Old school, you set things up, you’ve got scale efficiencies and you set up your channels in your far flung operations and things must flow and well, you just deal with the fact there’s some delays and overhead and some bureaucracy. The other extreme is, no, no, no, we want a thousand garages in Silicon Valley all cranking out the new stuff and it’s unfettered craziness. And because the best stuff arrives at the surface, the trouble is, how do you scale that? You know, it’s a bunch of little, little islands. If you bring them together. And you have what we call micro-enterprises, you know, calm, small teams, we will call it. And these are small teams. The Scrum teams or unit teams are going to launch an idea, a new process, a new unit, write something up. It’s put as many people as needed from different disciplines and do it, then you might think that’s just the whole Silicon Valley garage thing. No, no. What you also have is this central group, a small central group. Has a platform. Tools, We call it a digital runway to launch ideas. It’s really a shared digital infrastructure.
Bill Sherman Yeah, it’s just shared services so that they’re not reinventing the wheel each time on infrastructure.
Jeff Kavanaugh And the important thing is that is central because then everybody can plug into it. When good things happen, they can be shared. And you don’t have to have like, for example, if you wanted to create a blog, you don’t need to go out and build a server in a stack. You can go into medium, onto WordPress, onto whatever, and instantly stand on the shoulders of those giants created something. Maybe you pay them and maybe you don’t. But the fact is you’ve got a platform.
Bill Sherman That problem has already been solved. Right, Right. And that’s the same for if you’ve got a micro enterprise within the larger organization. They don’t have to handle some of the questions that a startup working with either friends and family funding or, you know, seed capital has to solve on how do we turn the lights on.
Jeff Kavanaugh Right. And then you think, well, that works. But does it work at scale? Yes. Hundreds and thousands of these simultaneously take a venture capital mindset and say what to them, get a little bit of funding. And even if the funding might just be you’re still on the company payroll and you get to do this thing for a while, you know, that’s funding. And at some point the best ideas get more and more funding. They get more resources. They, they, they, they get promoted or formalized into a unit or a product or a function. And others say, okay, disband, do something else. And so it’s almost like at these VC stages, do you go to your next level? And it’s that combination. And continually it’s amazing to me how fast we’re able to move or how fast you need to be able to move. So we decided that six weeks is the right number. Six weeks is it’s long enough to get something done. It’s also short enough that people don’t grow bored and you can make these small changes and change your habit and go because if you try for a huge change, you know, once a year, every two years, then first of all, it’s a huge change. No one likes huge change. The market probably moved past you, and yet you can’t do something every day and just lose in the churn. So every six weeks make a change and might be more functionality. It might be slightly changing something small new org. And of course every quarter, you know, thinking about things. But we found that to be effective and you do that the compounding effect of a series of changes that continues to improve things every six weeks over, you know, the year you move the needle quite a bit.
Bill Sherman So as we begin to wrap up, I have two questions for you, Jeff. You’ve been in the chair as a head of thought leadership now for a couple of years, and there are many folks out who are listening now who are much newer to the role. They may even be in the state where you described where someone came to you and said, hey, we want you to take this over. And they’re sitting and thinking, do I take this jump? Do I become ahead of thought leadership? What advice would you give to someone either considering the role or new to the role?
Jeff Kavanaugh Well, you think about it, it’s intersection. Some Venn diagrams, you know. Are you first of all, are you passionate about it? Is it something that you enjoy doing? Because if you’re creating anything, you better have some passion, find some joy in it, because there’s difficulty in growing something. And besides, like it or not, you are a sales person. You can call yourself an ambassador and call yourself whatever you want. You are going to help somebody change the status quo. Changing status quo. Means that you have to sell your idea both to hire people to get funding, whatever it is. And that doesn’t sit well with you. You know, stay where you are. Second thing is, is there a real opportunity, other works? Does your company need this or do they just need a little bit slicker marketing copy? Because to the extent that thought leadership is needed in your company again, then the intersection of your passion and that opportunity, people will see it. And then. And then. Lastly, can you find others either full time staff, if that’s part of your budget or if you work in a more collaborative matrixed way? Can you think about the team at least that first wave of people you work with because that’s where you’ll expand your influence and impact? Maybe it’s the people who will give you some money. Maybe it’s people who will just support you with ideas or even be extensions in the writing. If you can see that first wave and get the people part right. Then did you absolutely do it? And also, don’t just think you think about what the outcome is, is the outcome. They’re going to double your salary or you’re going to somehow get a commission and everything you. Or is it that you’re going to go to a place mentally leadership wise where you aren’t today? You’re going to grow because there are no failures. There’s learning or people that choose not to learn. And especially in this kind of business, if we all are knowledge workers and it’s about expertise and differentiation, I think as long as you go into this. Staying a practitioner and not an administrator. There is no downside because you will be the chief thought leadership developer. You will grow. You will become better and better at this thing and it will mean some late nights on the administration side or figuring out ways to minimize that part. But otherwise, you are the creative practitioner. And I think that’s something that’s exciting.
Bill Sherman That’s a fantastic thing where you have to keep your one foot in that world of creating ideas so that you can coach effectively others. I think that’s absolutely essential. Last question, Jeff, I want to ask you is I know the book is the first sort of signature piece for Infosys as a book. What advice would you offer someone who’s thinking saying, We’ve got good ideas here, maybe we should do a book for the organization? What did you learn through this process? And what advice might you give someone who’s considering it?
Jeff Kavanaugh Tue. Jan So the first is don’t start with I need to write a book. First is write a keystone point of view. Write something, assuming it’s a decent idea. You know, it’s an it’s an important idea. Go through? What are the fundamental concepts. What’s already out there. What’s missing? What’s unique about it? You know, deconstructed. It’s probably 4000 words. That you’re going to go through and you’re going to really lay it out. If it’s not enough to even cover that, you probably have a book. If you have that and it’s well thought through. And then you can see in each area where maybe you could go deeper, like at one topic, you could go with more details, one topic, you could maybe go into the quantitative or the technical didn’t do like an accordion. It can expand. That’s my my suggestion to start with around 4000 words of what’s called the Keystone point of view. And you could just search me or there’s some others that have some structure of what those look like. If you do that, then it’s a good intermediate. It’s almost like a it’s not an MVP because it can actually be a nice paper on its own or misses a problem. Think beyond the PDF and think, well, maybe the right way to showcase it. If you’re in a business that has lots of either graphs or data, maybe it is an experience where people experience it in the web a little differently. See also, that’s a whole other topic about, you know, reading text versus the other stuff. But I think aim for that 4 to 5000 word mark. Lay it out and based on that, you’ll know whether you’ve got more runway behind that to grow it. And if you do, don’t think it’s an all or nothing. You’ve got to go to some place in New York City and cross your fingers and do the right thing. There are plenty of places that are low budget where you take a little more of the risk on as a company that you can get something out and, you know, love him or hate him with Amazon and then you can have a platform quickly that you can live large, especially if your websites design nicely or sell it. So it shouldn’t be a matter if your idea is big enough and you articulate it well enough, back it up and make it interesting for others. The last thing I’ll say on is make sure it’s something that people want to read or need. And it isn’t just a vanity project for someone because if that’s the case, then it’ll be I don’t see a public embarrassment, but it’ll be something that you won’t be as proud of. And just like growing your unit, you’re going to be the chief sales person for the thing, whatever you create. So let it really come from your heart and the heart of your Smee or whoever else you collaborate with. Otherwise it will come across as stale.
Bill Sherman Jeff That’s great advice. And that concept of the keystone, can you say it in 4000 words and still feel you have more to say resonates with the concept that I share a lot, which is the book in many times is the capstone and the final act of a lot of development work and testing it out in short form long before you publish the book.
Jeff Kavanaugh It’s essentially the way you communicate a body of research.
Bill Sherman Yes. Yes. Thank you for joining us today. Jeff, this has been a wonderful conversation.
Jeff Kavanaugh Thanks for having me.
Bill Sherman If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please join our LinkedIn group. Organizational Thought Leadership. It’s a professional community where thought leadership practitioners talk shop about our field. So if you’re someone who creates curates or deploys thought leadership for your organization, then please join the conversation in the organizational thought Leadership LinkedIn.
Related Posts
