Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 20 – Ron Carucci

Peter Winick

The journey of an aspiring thought leader never goes straight from A to B. To be successful, you’re going to have to forge your own path, find your niche, and create your own goals. Are you ready to set out?

Leadership expert, speaker, and author Ron Carucci joins Peter in this week’s episode. Ron is the co-founder and Managing Partner at Navalent, where he works with CEOs and executives pursuing transformational change.

Ron shares his insights on the journey he took to becoming a thought leader; how he got on track by working with a professional coach, and how he became inspired to find out what it’s like on the other side of a consultant’s desk. Ron also talks about the insight he gained by setting goals and defining his audience. This episode is tough to beat. Listen in, and hear for yourself!

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, and sales. Let us help you 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 we’re on the podcast again today, which is leveraging thought leadership. My guest today is Ron Kariuki. Say hi, Ron.

Ron Carucci Peter, great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

Peter Winick My pleasure. And Ron, for those of you who don’t know, is with a group called Navigant. He is an author. I think he’s gone down that path eight times now. He’s a contributor at each PR and at Forbes as well as a consultant. So Ron is deep in the space of thought leadership at the theoretical and more importantly, the applied. So let’s just talk about your journey a little bit, Ron. Let’s talk about what things that you’ve learned and share some of the battle scars. Tell me some of the things that you’re doing now that are relatively new and more importantly, are working for.

Ron Carucci Yeah. So, you know, it’s funny, when I so three years ago, every time when I first actually you and I first chatted, I had my agent come out. I had done very, very well. It got great reviews. It was Amazon number one. It was a ten year based on ten years of research and a great study. And I thought, my gosh, the phone’s going to bring off the wall. We’re going to be able to leverage. It’s going to bring in business. It’ll finally set us apart as a firm and some of the work we can do where we can do IT leaders and demonstrate the depth and heft of our of our substance and our insights, you know, our collective 100 years of experience as a firm and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, of course, none of that happened. I got some folk phone calls was I wouldn’t say the crickets chirping, but it was not the avalanche of inbound folks clamoring to get access to my expertise that I thought it would be.

Peter Winick Got it. So let me let me sort of play that back. So the assumption was you have a quality product, right? This is ten years worth of research. This isn’t, you know, random thoughts that you pulled out of your nose. I mean, this is this is serious stuff. This is stuff that’s got gravitas and an academic bent and a lot of blood, sweat and tears went into it. And then it reaches pretty good levels, right? Amazon and sells fairly well. Yet still, you know, the floodgates don’t open.

Ron Carucci And for me, that was perplexing. It was depressing. It was discouraging, it was confusing. And I began to sort of, you know, have it on the path of why what? Something was wrong. And I needed to understand what that was. And eventually I realized that I really had no idea what to do. And so I set out about to find help. I actually hired a coach to sort of figure out what. What was wrong. And it was very good to subject myself to a process of what it was like to be on the side of me getting diagnosed and assessed and getting our feedback report. And it was good for me to take my own medicine.

Peter Winick So for a consultant to be on the other side of the table, right, receiving services of a professional that’s got your best interests at heart is not the typical seat that you’re usually in. Right?

Ron Carucci And I would tell any person Aspire who’s aspiring thought leader, get help. my gosh, I, I waited so long. It was the best decision I ever made. It was game changing on many levels. And help me understand the many assumptions I had about the role thought leadership played in shaping a business were so flawed and misguided.

Peter Winick Well, tell me about those. So let’s unpack that a little bit. So you came in and again, this wasn’t your first time at the rodeo, your eighth book. So you’ve been doing this for some time. But what would your assumptions did you hold that were that were flawed?

Ron Carucci Well, you know, as I mentioned earlier, if you build it, they will come, Right? So the idea of having the idea of having quality thoughts that are differentiating, that are important, that people should want to listen to them, is itself the magnet that will attract the kinds of clients you want. And so, you know, a couple of and I have you share on LinkedIn or you can get some exposure in New York Times or is in good enough. It’s all going to and people beating pathways to your door. The problem was, of course, that it was alongside about 27 million other people that those thoughts.

Peter Winick Who.

Ron Carucci Claims are the same, whose language is the same, who boasts the same degree of impact and use the same ways to describe their distinctions as we did. And they didn’t have structure. They have. So now to the next consumer who’s got an untrained eye, who’s choosing from among, you know, 20 million. Consultants and not leaders. How do they pick? And so.

Peter Winick And what you’re saying is it’s noisy and the differentiation isn’t there because it’s a fascinating time that we’re living in is up until ten years ago, information was scarce, right? So having access to information was a competitive advantage. Now we’re all drowning in it. So the fact that you can put out a great quality book, the fact that you put the research in and then it goes out into the universe, it’s some filtering. It needs to stand out. It needs to differentiate from all the other noise that’s out there. It doesn’t mean the other stuff that’s out there is some part of it. It might. But separating yourself from a marketing standpoint is not easy to do.

Ron Carucci And getting yourself caught in the head of the comparison trap of, well, mine’s better than that one, why that won’t do so well or why they get who is attracting.

Peter Winick Well, get over yourself and life’s not fair. Right. That’s the that’s the gist there.

Ron Carucci So you can get you can get into a lot of discouragement and your internal narratives can play tricks on you. Sure. In ways that can also be paralyzing. So you got to get past all that material and that neurotic underbrush to get to the place where you understand why is it and what does it take to truly build a platform once beyond just having thoughts? And so one of the things, one of the findings and the first diagnosis my coach found was he said, you know, if your goal was to be the best kept secret, it’s a marvelous job.

Peter Winick Yeah, I’m going to guess that was right.

Ron Carucci And she said what it took for me to find you, what it took for me to get to you was too difficult. Should the nomination of your own networks and examination of your web brand? My examination of. Right. Who your thoughts are. You spend 90% of your time talking to people who already know you and almost not talking to people who don’t know you. And like, Well, what does that mean?

Peter Winick So let me ask you this. So when your coach pointed that out, you could have had one of several reactions. Wow. Holy cow. Never thought of it that way. Or you could have called B.S. and said, no, that’s absolutely not true. How did you how did you respond to that?

Ron Carucci I wasn’t defensive. I mean, she had an obviously, I didn’t to prove it. I didn’t disagree with her. I didn’t understand what she meant. I like what what’s the difference? And she said, well, well, your blog goes to people who are in your echo chamber. We need to broaden your reach. Why? She said why your content deserves a much bigger platform. It’s really going mature. Why aren’t you writing for Forbes or PR or faster? Then why don’t you writing for other publications? And I’m like, Well, that’s an interesting idea. I’m sure if I call those people up and say, Hey, I want to write for you, they’re not going to take my call. She goes, No, but if I introduce you to all the editors that, Well, would you like that?

Peter Winick Sure.

Ron Carucci And I’m like, Right, right. That’s how this works.

Peter Winick Well, it’s not, you know, quite frankly, I mean, because of the difference here. But many of these it’s not as hard as you would think to get there. One of the observations that you just pointed out and I see this all the time, is people put a lot of work, thought leaders, put a lot of work and energy and effort and pride into the content that they put out, but then they put it out to this universe, which is very, very, very, very small of people that already know them and love them. So this is their own newsletter on their own blog. It’s sort of behind the gate, right? And I think your coach was right in saying, wait a minute, how do you get this out to this broader universe of people that don’t know who the heck you are? Right. Because frankly, that’s a more important group for your business. So it doesn’t mean you don’t nurture those that are already doing business with you that are part of your networks and all that. But if that is the largest allocation of resources, be those time or money or energy or whatever you’re going, your growth rate as a business is going to be really small, right? Because you’re talking to the you’re preaching to the choir, if you will.

Ron Carucci Exactly. So, I mean, I said I know I’m signing a contract to write for Forbes and signing a contract to write for HPR. And now I have written probably over 100 articles for both since, you know, and then the next altitude was redefining a peer set. Right? So how do you get yourself associated with peers you want to be associated with? And so, you know.

Peter Winick So and so we never outgrow sort of middle school. We always want to go to the cool parties, right? It just definition of cool changes as we age and move into thought leadership. Right.

Ron Carucci And I you know, for me, that was a perplexing question because she said, well, who whose work do you admire? Who has shaped your career? Who shaped who you want to be? And I’m like most people who write when I write hour hacks, I’m not sure I she was like, No, seriously. So I gave her 7 or 8 names that really well, just didn’t I didn’t know what she’s going to ask me to do. So I said, Here’s the people whose material I really find substantive, even great. I want you to call them all up and interview them. I said, what? Right? He said, Call them all up and interview them as part of your you. And she said, I said, Then I going to take my call. One of them was Daniel Kahneman. He said, you know, or John Hight. I said, They’re not.

Peter Winick Right, but.

Ron Carucci Call them all up or write them. And sure enough, I wrote them all. They all said yes. I had phenomenal interviews with them.

Peter Winick They all every one of them said yes. So you were able to reach out, Cole, to Daniel Kahneman, who’s a legend and let alone a Nobel Prize winner. But truly someone that has changed the game. And the answer to that was, sure, I’ll do an interview.

Ron Carucci Absolutely. And he even when we got out, when we got on the interview, because I might, you know, here’s a little boy quivering talking to one of my heroes. Right. Saying, you know, he said, I usually say no to these, but something you something about you may want to talk to you. I’m like, what? Great. And it was a phenomenal interview. He had a great he had great coverage on Forbes.

Peter Winick Right.

Ron Carucci John Hight is now I’m now on John’s advisory board at NYU. So it led me to a group of new colleagues and friends and clients.

Peter Winick So let me ask you something, Ron, because.

Ron Carucci The egos that I interviewed became clients. Right. So the broadening of my peer set and I started relationships in a way I would have would have no more occurred to me to do than becoming the man on the moon became a great many relationships.

Peter Winick So let me ask you something, because one observation that I make in the work that we do here with authors and speakers and thought leaders is a lot of folks are introverts. Even keynote is where you think if you if you’re the way you make a living is to get on stage and do your thing for an hour. That’s almost the textbook definition of an extrovert. But it’s not actually true. And that that outreach and that asking for help and then asking to connect and then networking and sort of all that stuff is not natural for a lot of folks. And it’s even if it’s natural, it’s so outside of the realm of things that they think they should be doing, could be doing, etc.. Can you does that resonate with your world?

Ron Carucci I so you look at my Myers-Briggs scores. I’m a hybrid. In fact, I had a great interview with Susan Kane about that. Right. And she actually really helped me. She finally made me realize that I’m a closet, an introvert, that it’s not pretend to be extroverts. Right. And so my article was right. Here’s why we can all start pretending to be extroverts now. And so, yeah, it does take more energy for us. It does take more work for us, but it doesn’t it doesn’t get you off from doing it. You have to prepare yourself differently. Got it. You know, conserve your energy differently. Don’t show up in networking party too soon because you won’t make it to the whole night. You have to preserve. Right? The reality is, you know, relationships are a key part of this connection is a real part of this. Thought leadership doesn’t give your brain. Ideas are going to anybody. They don’t tell people they have to help. And so you’ve got to put yourself in the pathway of not just new people you can help. And there’s nothing and I write about this in my article called The Challenges of Being a Thought Leader a different You think because I discovered this for myself, it doesn’t. None of this is natural. There’s nothing normal about any of this to do it. I shouldn’t.

Peter Winick Well, but it’s hard work. It’s strategy. It’s putting the effort in. It’s getting outside of your comfort zone. It’s all these things. One of the things that’s interesting from what you say is, you know, you thought that the development of the thought leadership that was real thought leadership, not, you know, motivational quotes or whatever, but ten-year studies and well written books and all that other sort of things was enough, because most people can’t do that, right. And then you have to layer on the marketing. We do a lot of work in what we call thought leadership marketing, which is using the content, using the essence of the work as the way to attract people into your world, Right? So number one, where are those people? How do they prefer to consume content? Because we have a lot of different options today in terms of how we should serve it up with audio, video, podcasts, long form article, infographics, whatever, getting it out to them and using that content as the hook to get them in, to have a deeper conversation around the services that you provide and what you can do to help them. So have you now that you sort of become aware of this? Tell me how you’ve developed those muscles sort of organizationally and how it plays out in your business on an ongoing basis? Is it, you know, launch a book, go do all the stuff, and then go back to baseline or tell me what your the difference in your organization is today versus maybe three or 4 or 5 years ago when you weren’t fluent in this.

Ron Carucci You know, So we had to work at that, right? So we had to have a marketing firm come in and build out our optimizer SEO, install lead feeder install, MailChimp, install HubSpot, install all the technologies that allow us to understand who’s coming to consume our content, build our subscription list, you know, build intimacy and build audience and curate content for them. And you know, we did a this year, we did a great virtual summit. So it’s, you know, it’s broadening the platform for your organization as much as your body. While boarding your own platform. And then you’ve got to be the disciplines that keep curating new content, you know, keep doing all the mechanics and technology that extend your reach in the platform and understanding that every time Google changes the algorithm, you got to you got to adapt with it. Understanding that, you know, curating content for a list is interesting. But if you have she engaged in ongoing conversations, I get those conversations from online to offline. You don’t get to book clients. It’s curating content that, you know, your audience wants to hear, right? So now I’ve got a wonderful new client who read an article of mine in h b r about a problem he was he had just been solving. He had just been put into a brand new executive click at the bottom of that article and bought Rising to Power because he was a brand new executive. Read the book that weekend and called me on Monday.

Peter Winick So and that by the way, that’s the whole point. Right? So the point of this is not so wrong can now be a marketer and put that on his resume. The point of all this is finding net new clients without this sort of thought leadership approach. Do you believe that that person would have ever found you?

Ron Carucci No, absolutely not. There’s no way they would have known who I was. Now, is it? Is it. We have a date my. From all the time about is it sales or is it marketing? Is it about your network and working your relationships? Or is it about reaching new audience? What? Both. Yeah, of course. I mean, it’s all about relationship formation, regardless of how they enter your funnel or how well you know them. And so, you know, but the reality is, you know, if you want to build a sustainable business where you can do both. And once you’re starting out your relationships, they have to better find you. I was attracted. I was attracting all the sociopath. Yes, I was attracted to the guys who make my eyes my I made my eyes roll when I saw my caller I.D. I wasn’t attracting the clients. I was passionate about wanting to help and partner with.

Peter Winick Okay. So but let’s touch on that, though. So oftentimes what happens is somebody finds your work, but it’s not the somebody you want, right? So you have I would imagine you have a profile of your Target clients, the ones that you can serve the most, the ones that are most profitable, the ones that you have the most fun working with, etc. And that’s your ideal sort of avatar, if you will. But then you get, you know, whatever the unemployed or, you know, you said you’re a magnet for the sociopaths and all that. So when that happens, you have to evaluate and say, wait, you know, A, is it me? But more likely, where is my content going to attract these sort of people? And how do I how do I have more how am I more deliberate about where I put it to get more of the types I’d like to attract?

Ron Carucci And so that that’s about strategy, right? So, you know, one of the one of the things that I started doing with my coach early on and we now do regularly, which was show. So when we began the work, it was about attracting higher quality clients. She said, Tell me stories of two of them. Tell me the stories of two leaders that if you could have ten more them in your life, that’s what you’d want to work with. So I. I began to tell her detailed stories of these two engagements that were thrilling. And I, we done our best work and a big difference. And they’ve been on for multiple years. And she’s taking feverish notes in consultant. She’s taking good notes. That’s great. That’s what you should do. After about 15, as she turns her computer on, she has great editorial calendar for the next year. I said, what? She had been curating the stories and problems I saw, but turning them into an A calendar. So as an example. One leader I’d work with, a CEO of a major corporation in one part of the country went to be CEO of a corporation in a part of the country with a dramatically different culture, a dramatically different set of problems and a dramatically different set of leaders around him. He was really unprepared for that. He was surrounded by a team of leaders who had a very different values that than he did. He was a very principled man. One of the one of the titles she put on the Ed counter was How to Lead a Team That Doesn’t Share Your Values.

Peter Winick So she’s creating basically the narrative or the editorial calendar based on the pain points or the things that were common in the client that you loved working with to attract others that would be of the same ilk or in the same pain or maybe similar sort of engagement for you.

Ron Carucci Principle one of one was and this was like a big deal when you say, but if you want to work with those kinds of clients, you have to kind of you have to solve the problems and talk about the kinds of issues that are important to them so that they can find you. And so I know the idea of shaping content and shaping what I want to talk about around the kinds of people and telling the kinds of stories and using the kinds of data that I know the people I want to work with are interested in. It became critical. As I said, if I’m writing those 200 plus articles before I know I had to have a direction, I couldn’t just you know, both Forbes and HP are have themes and focus areas. Sure, I can. Those can be instructive to me. But shaping the narrative around the kinds of things people I want to work with are interested in talking about became critical.

Peter Winick So prior to that run, what were the guardrails that you were using when it came to putting content out there, if there were any? So how do you decide, I’m going to write an article on X versus Y prior to realizing the client base?

Ron Carucci How kind of, you know, assume there are any guardrails. So who knows what would be the answer? You know, it was I think or sometimes it was it was the worst mistake consulting firms make, which is we talk about our offerings. We write articles about.

Peter Winick Because everybody wants to hear about that. Right.

Ron Carucci I had a snooze fest. Right.

Peter Winick And so Well, so I think the counterintuitive piece here, though, Ron, is that the creative process can actually be enhanced by having constraints put on it. Right? So the constraint that your coach gave you in a good way was writing to attract the people that you want to work with. So now you’ve got some sort of a, you know, a box to stay in or, you know, lines to color within doesn’t mean you can’t be creating be incredibly creative within those set of parameters to be relevant to a certain population that you can provide value to which makes the creativity probably a bit easier and if nothing else, definitely more effective.

Ron Carucci But you have to add. Yes. And you have to be disciplined to do it right. You have to be you have to be consistent in curating content and material and pay attention to what’s trending out there. Pay attention to what it is people are consuming. Don’t want to be in that conversation. And should I be in that conversation about my right to be in the conversation? Is I going to is it going to pass next week? And then there’ll be no there’s no point. I mean.

Peter Winick When even the conversations you choose to be in have to be aligned with your brand. So there might be several things that you’re intrigued by you’re interested in or you could for your $0.02 and but doesn’t make sense in terms of the keeping the signal separated from the noise in what you put out into the world doesn’t mean you always have to be talking about the same thing over and over. But there’s certain things that are probably outside of the realm of what one would expect to hear from you. So let me ask you this. We’ve covered a lot of stuff here, Ron, and it’s been great. You know, a couple of minutes here. It feels like I’m talking to the converted, right? So there was Old Ron 3 or 4 years ago. Connects with a coach, has a whole different perspective as to how you’re using thought leadership in a more efficient way to grow your business. What would you tell folks out there? What would you tell you three or 4 or 5 years ago? There’s a someone exactly in the place that you are then right now, what would you tell them to do more of and to do less of?

Ron Carucci Well, it’s a quick way. So there’s two camps of me. There’s a there’s I believe I just don’t know what to do. And those people don’t find, you know, people are kleis don’t find us that way. So to the latter group, because I think those in my firm, I would say executives absolutely do make decisions about who serves them online.

Peter Winick Yep.

Ron Carucci 100% know. No, your website should not have a 1.5 minute hour transformation. Click add to Cart.

Peter Winick Yeah, probably not. Right.

Ron Carucci Right. Part of the decision pathway of that executive includes work online. They don’t just send out their team to go find people for them. They actually do some of the work themselves. If you are not somewhere in that decision pathway, you can. Be sure you won’t get picked. So you’ve got to be in that decision pathway somewhere. So you absolutely have to be accessible and visible because there are or whatever it is you think you’re doing that only you’re doing. There are thousands of other people who are also only doing it. You have to write a different world. Now, to those who would say, okay, well, where do I start? That can be a maddening question because there’s technology, there’s content creation, parts of it. There’s a what platform, What voice to whom? Is it worth it even? Is it right? Even start now. I’m so late to the party. You know, I had that limit interview with my coach and she said we’re all by telephone. We actually did in 1998. We all should’ve been on Twitter 23. We’re all late to the party. You know, it’s not social media, digital content. It’s not going away. Yeah, it’s getting more crowded. But you ought to get out there and start somewhere, whether it’s a blog or a podcast or content or online courses or some way to modify your ideas, to set yourself apart, to demonstrate that your ideas are worth following. Got to get out there and you have to be diligent and assume it’s a minimum of a three year journey just to get to a place where you’re starting one, right?

Peter Winick No, I love it. Yeah. This is not a get rich quick business by any stretch. The one thing I didn’t hear there, Ron, I wanted to ask this so, you know, it’s never too late to get to the party in terms of social media and getting the content out there, etc.. However, one thing that I see too often and I’d love to get your $0.02 on this is people start with one thing and sort of go nuts with it, right? So they get obsessive with Twitter or YouTube or whatever, and they’re operating without a strategy. And to me, I’m old school. Everything starts with strategy and then everything else is just a tactic that either supports that strategy or doesn’t. And people don’t have that filter there. They do a lot of stuff that’s in the dozen category unknowingly.

Ron Carucci It’s very easy as a naked eye to sort of assume all channels are created equal and then you want to fill them all with junk. The reality is, yes, there has to be a strategy in place. I don’t know that debating whether or not you should do a podcast or a blog endlessly makes a lot of sense. There may be. There may be in your first year, you have to do some experimentation to find out what works for your audience and what is your audience faster. And there’s an enormous technology component to this that I would say, go get the experts. Do not try and figure out HubSpot on your own. Do not try to figure out Lead Feeder or MailChimp or landing pages or any of those things on your own. There are people out there who understand how they work in combination with each other, how they work with your website, how to optimize your SEO, get experts to be able to do that for you.

Peter Winick Because the thing that you can’t outsource is the thought leadership. Most everything else you can get support and help with in terms of SEO or HubSpot or any of those tools, you know, you need to have a cursory understanding of what it claims to do, but you don’t have to be the, you know, the guru inside of your organization that knows that. So this has been great run. How can people find you? Obviously want to make sure people can get in touch with you.

Ron Carucci Yes. So come visit us at www.navigant.com. We have a free book free e-book for you called Leading Transformation Organizations that marvel.com/transformation. We have a great quarterly magazine we started publishing three years ago as part of building our platform called Benevolent Quarterly, which has all kinds of great articles and organizations and teams and leadership and a great example of how you know how to start your own. Should we want to see a great example? It’s worked great for us. You can also find me on Twitter at Ron Carucci and on LinkedIn as well. So happy to chat. Great article on LinkedIn called The Challenges of Thought Leadership are Different Than You Think. If you want to read about my painful, agonizing journey and what I learned along with the pain and help you avoid some of my missteps.

Peter Winick Got it. Well, thank you so much for joining. There’s a lot of stuff in here today, a lot of good stuff from someone that’s been there, done that and is on the other side of that journey, reaping some of the benefits, yet still fighting the good fight every day. So thank you for being honest and being transparent and sharing some pearls of wisdom with us today. Ron, I appreciate it very much.

Ron Carucci Peter, a pleasure being with you. Thanks for having me.

Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at Thought Leadership Leverage dot 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.