Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 22 – Thomas Koulopoulos

Peter Winick

Consulting is a problem-solving business, but in our globally-connected world, problems are changing as quickly as we challenge them. To keep up, the modern consulting landscape needs to change, too.

Futurist, author, and thought leader Thomas Koulopoulos joins Peter to discuss the ways that thought leadership and consulting businesses can adapt to the challenges of tomorrow.

From the overall strategy and product design to tactical decisions and deployments, this conversation covers all aspects of thought leadership business and gives a clear idea how to plan for success when brainstorming future products. Listen in – you just might catch a glimpse of the future!

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 am the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage and thank you for joining us today on our podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today my guest is Thomas Koulopoulos. Tom is one of the industry’s leading futurists. He’s the author of ten books, including the Gen Z Effect Cloud Surfing the Innovation Zone and the Corporate Industry. He is the founder of Delphi Group, which is a 25-year-old Boston based think tank. He’s a columnist for Inc. He is an adjunct professor at B.U.. Let’s see, what else do we have here? One of the one of the most influential industry consultants by Information week. Clearly, he is a profile guest that we have on our show. He’s an author. He’s a thought leader. He’s a speaker. I’ve had the privilege of meeting Tom several years ago at a authors event. And here we are. Welcome, Tom. Thank you for joining us today.

Thomas Koulopoulos Peter. It’s my pleasure. Thank you.

Peter Winick So we’ll make this real easy and real quick. You’re the futurist. The focus of content here is leveraging and scaling and the business side of thought leadership. What’s the future of leadership? What’s the future of content in 30s or less? Okay.

Thomas Koulopoulos Yeah. 30s or less. Hey, look, you know, let me let me give you the nutshell, because I think you can sort of compress this. When I look back to how I built Delphi group back in the late 80s and early 90s and even going into the late 90s, the amount of effort it took to build a business, to attract people, to retain talent, to put in place the equipment and the resources was extraordinary. And I think back on it now and I say to myself, my God, we were living in the Dark Ages because today my 90 year old son can build a business overnight. And he has he’s built 3 or 4 businesses. So there’s this this sense of anything is possible and everything is free. So why not experiment? And that shift in risk reward is the most dramatic change I’ve seen, especially in thought leadership, where the commodity is what you know, it’s knowledge. And trying to invest in a knowledge business was always a very difficult thing.

Peter Winick So this is so the old barrier to entry of cost time, energy, effort, technical expertise. I mean, even ten years ago, building a website was not fun. Right. Now, those are the things that were hurdles are no longer hurdles. So I would imagine that would mean that the essence, the ideas and the actual thought leadership, the bar is higher. In your opinion, or how would you answer that?

Thomas Koulopoulos I think we’re going through a transitionary period here, call it the sort of the translational gap is the term that I often use. And the gap is we’re moving from a time when there was a very steep barrier to entry. And frankly, you had to have a pedigree, you had to have a patient, you had to have all the right things in your resume in order to be a thought leader. Suddenly today, anyone who can gather a following, who can create some degree of influence becomes a thought leader, and that creates noise. So the translational Gap is trying to create filters that get through the noise and see the signal. And we’re not quite there yet. So anyone who wants to be a thought leader can be a self-professed prophetic thought leader. And that creates a lot of what we call fake news and falsehoods and BS and all these things that may not necessarily be worth following, but nonetheless can create influence and can create a bit of a tribe. That’s a that’s a risk factor. And we have a crisis.

Peter Winick Yeah. So let me look at that in a slightly different way. Tom Right. So the noise and the signal, it used to be that we lived in a world up until quite recently, right? Not all that long ago of scarcity of information for whoever had access to the information one And it was, you know, whatever you got. I mean, you mentioned starting a business and the amount of research you took, etc., etc.. Now we’re living in an age of I don’t want to say too much information, but the value is not in necessarily getting the value. Isn’t that the information isn’t there, the value is in the filtering, right? So that good thought leadership is someone that’s bringing me something that’s filtered and thoughtful and adding to the conversation, not more noise because my time is more probably most valuable resource I have and I don’t want to waste it watching or consuming content. That’s faultless.

Thomas Koulopoulos True, but. But I would bet that you do, as do I. And the nature of how we do research. The nature of how we live day to day is that we are derailed continuously by that by that noise. And look, some of that noise, as is the case with serendipity, for the most part, leads us to places that we wouldn’t have wanted to go or thought to go on our own. So there is some benefit, some value to that, to that serendipity. The level of information goes up and the opportunities to find things of value also increases, right? So this area of abundance, which is what we’ve been calling for as of late, definitely does have benefits. However, the question now becomes very simply, how do you mine those benefits and how do you create value from them? And look, in my mind, it’s simple. What we’ve done by increasing the noise level is we’ve increased the degree to which the human connection is important. So what’s the most valuable aspect of human connection? Trust. So what you have to focus on is how do I build trust? How do I maintain trust? How do I avoid at all cost breaking trust? And what we’ve seen with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica is that trust applies to every organization, no matter how small, how large. Once you lose that, it is very difficult to rebuild. And from a thought leader standpoint, virtual currency or currency is how trustworthy am I? Is what I’m saying are the there’s the accuracy and the integrity of my predictions, and that becomes very transparent. So, look, I do believe that filtering is actually getting in some ways easier for those who have grown up in that in that modality. So my son enjoyment filter and he can tell you whether someone is genuine or not online in a heartbeat, it’s a little more. Difficult. So it’s not that the photos don’t exist, but we have to build them both culturally as well as tech and as a human aspect to this that goes beyond just the technology.

Peter Winick Yeah, No. Well, well said. So let me let me sort of ask you, give us the picture of sort of Delphi and your business. What are the overview? What are the ways that you are monetizing our ideas and your content and where are you placing your bets for, let’s say, the next two years in terms of modalities and such? And it could either be from a marketing perspective or product perspective. What are you doing that’s cool and new and innovative to get the message out.

Thomas Koulopoulos So let me let me approach that from a very broad perspective first and then we can sort of narrow it down. I think I’ve got a new book coming out called Revealing the Invisible coming out in in June. And as part of the book, I did some research on a fellow who few have heard about. His name was Karl Popper, one of the truly great philosophers of the last century. And one of Popper’s great insights was that we’re moving from a period of what he called clock based problems solvable problems. Think of putting man on the moon and returning them back to home, but back to Earth again. It was solvable. It required math. It was complex, but it was a solvable, finite problem. Once Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, we’d achieve the goal. Popper says. We’re moving from that kind of clock problem to what he calls cloud problems. Cloud problems are not solvable. They’re continuously changing. They don’t stand still long enough. There is no finish line. It’s a continuum of effort and progress and learning and evolution. So when I look at thought leadership businesses, I look at Delphi and how and how we’re going to evolve. In large part, it’s helping people deal with this perpetual uncertainty. It’s not we’re not dealing with solvable issues, or you can pick a product or technology. And as a result of that, progress largely rests on your on your decision for the next ten years. At best, you might be able to rest on it for six months or eight months or nine months. So it’s a continuum of learning that frankly terrifies a lot of people. When I look at folks my age and my demographic, if these are 60s, they don’t want to relearned because it’s uncomfortable. But I look at kids, what I notice is that they’ve accepted the fact that they can never rest on what they’ve learned. They constantly have to relearn. So a thought leadership practice becomes a practice that is helping organizations to continuously move through that that period of discomfort, learn, apply, learn, apply, learn, apply over and over and over again. And that sounds simple, but you know what? In practice it is absolutely And most significant cultural advantages of an organization can have if it’s competing in today’s marketplace. So I think I think, in essence, thought leadership has changed in many ways from addressing very solvable finite problems to unsolvable a constantly evolving, constantly changing problems.

Peter Winick Well, and if you’re if you’re one of the common businesses for thought leaders is consulting, which is ultimately a problem solving business. So if you solve a problem and you’re in the problem solving business or solving, maybe I should better said might be problem solving is no longer binary or static. It’s dynamic and never going. I guess from that perspective it’s more of an opportunity because what the problem is never solved or always needs revisiting or new thinking, etc.. That’s opportunity.

Thomas Koulopoulos Yes. So and I’m glad you put it that way because here’s where I was going with it and you really summarized it wonderfully. The opportunity is that as a consultant, you are constantly required to provide external insight of whatever the existential threat is. So let me not get to wordy on this, but it’s an important point because a consultant and I used to train I’ve trained hundreds of consultants over the years with the Delphi group. You would go in, identify the problem, as you said, solve it, get the paycheck and be and be done with it at that point. Right. So it was it was it was a finite engagement. Your objective was to solve the problem.

Peter Winick Well. And you had a framework based on the perspective of Delphi and the expertise. And here’s our models and methodologies and framework that we look at the world. Right.

Thomas Koulopoulos Exactly. Precisely. Now, imagine that those methodologies are constantly changing, that the framework is perpetually in flux. The onus on the consultant now and this is this is the key I can’t stress this enough, is to be that existential lens. You know, help me understand how the world is constantly changing and provide insight after insight after insight. And let me tell you, that is a tiring endeavor because one inside is not enough to insights are not enough. Every time you meet with the client, you have to provide additional insight as to what these threats are. Now, why can’t the client see it? This is the traditional consulting model because they are engrossed in the box. They’re part of the problem. They’re constrained by the same constraints day in, day out. They can’t see that existential threat. As a consultant, your role is to constantly bring insight from the outside into the organization, and the outside is changing so radically, so dramatically, so consistently that the value of that is only increasing. That, to me, is an incredibly opportune target rich sort of marketplace.

Peter Winick But the bar would be higher. Tom Right. So, so we used to be based on what you’re saying and I’m, I’m, I get it is, you know, traditional consulting methodology is here’s our model, right? Here’s this sigma model, here’s the whatever model, the leadership model, etc.. And the consulting firm sees the world through that lens and they go into the client organization, look at the gap and try to align it to fit into the lens of that consultancy, which is which is fairly static, right? You’re not you’re not revising your models on a on a frequent basis. You know, you might have a tweak or this or that. The other thing what you’re saying now is, is, is the bar is higher because that model and methodology and framework you need to question and push back on it more frequently.

Thomas Koulopoulos Much higher. In fact, you know, this is a wonderful conversation because you’re taking it back to a meeting I had with Jim Champi, coauthor of the organization’s Become Fundamental over the Years. But probably 20 years ago, I had a meeting with him and I was trying to explain to him my business model at the time he was doing some acquisitions and he said he was the first person to say to me, You know what? You’re not a consultant. What you guys do is thought leadership. And I thought, what a great title. What the heck does that mean? And I’ve learned that there was a distinction, right? Consulting is still valuable. There are areas, financial areas, financial models where consulting must be precise and still focuses on the clock problems. However, yes, from a from a surface to think about from a surface area analogy, the surface area of the cloud problems is increasing much faster than that of the clock problems. That’s why we need more thought leadership and it is a distinct type of consulting which a much with a much higher bar that requires frankly a rather passionate and pathologic personality type. You need someone truly is obsessed with learning and cannot stop him or her.

Peter Winick So let me let me let me pivot this for a moment, Tom, from sort of this. You know, high level strategic conversation, which I love because that’s sort of where I spend most of my time. But let’s drill this down. So let’s be really tactical now. You’ve got the book coming out. Obviously, the book is not going to be the primary moneymaker. It might be the driver of the introduction of this concept to the world. But give me the product is Asian, for lack of a better term plan, strategy or monetization strategy behind it. So someone gets the book and can do a bunch of marketing. You’ve got a reputation written, a bunch of books. What are the services and offerings and such that are basically derivatives of the thinking that are codified in the book that you envision putting out there? And what does that look like and how do you how do you develop that?

Thomas Koulopoulos So let me talk briefly about the direction that the book is taking us in, because that’s a cornerstone of the answer. So the book is really about the shift towards behavioral computing. We want to capture behavioral. We see this with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. So the negative side, right, that’s the dark side of capturing behavior. But we’re also seeing that the upside of capturing behavior that was starting to solve problems and create communities instantaneously that can address big challenges on a global on a global scale. So we need we need that behavioral computing to be able to effectively evolve and survive and thrive going forward. So that’s the point of the book. How do you translate that? How do you monetize that? Well, there’s three ways, very specific ways that I’ve seen these apply across the board. This is not just Dell Klein revealing the invisible. This is any thought leadership practice. Number one, you really have to balance the threat with the opportunity. I think all too often we talk about the threat. We get obsessed with it. The downside, the dark side of technology, and yet we limit our ability to see the upside. So we talk about how unemployment is going to radically disrupt our society. That conversation has never panned out. We’ve always found new ways to employ people. So the first thing you have to do as a thought leadership is identify those areas of opportunity where there’s growth and there’s new value to be created. And then identifying them actually provides a mechanism by which the organization can capture those opportunities. And let me make this very tactical. I’ve got a large bank I’m working with here in the Northeast. Banks are not known for being very innovative, but they brought me in and they said, look, here’s our problem. Our problem is that our board of directors and our executive management are very forward thinking, very visionary, very innovative. But our management is not. How can you help us?

Peter Winick So let’s do let me let me. So this is perfect because let me let me just positive for a second. Your time’s and here is the gap and here is where magic is. Right? So a great thought. Leaders such as yourself, such as many, can have that conversation with the senior leader about the strategic piece, about what they’re struggling with, about being creative, whatever. Then they say to that thought leader. But what the problem that we really need to solve is they whoever they is, their leadership, management, whatever the five, ten, 15, 20,000 people in our organization, how do you get them to do it? And then oftentimes the thought leader has two paths to go by. He goes, you know, I guess we can sell him a bunch of books or bring me in just to speak. That’s the wrong answer. Or B, here is the scalable digital whatever, whatever solution that I’ve got that pushes that answer to the question that the business leader had out to the masses cost effectively. So go there with me for a minute so that that leader at the bank says to you, Yeah, we want our people to be more creative and innovative, etc. What do you pulling out of your briefcase to say, Have I got what you need?

Thomas Koulopoulos So we’ve actually become more adept at doing is building tools that will help organizations develop their own competency in addressing scenarios that have high levels of uncertainty. So we’ve got specific tools that will go in and work with management on a regular basis to create a self-sufficiency, a capability to build a muscle, if you will, organizational muscle that is much more adept and comfortable in dealing with scenarios that involve high levels of uncertainty. So there are and by the way, back to methodologies, there are methodologies that don’t have extraordinarily tight, rigid frameworks that can be used in scenario-based planning. So we focused a lot on scenario-based planning tools that specifically address high levels of uncertainty, contextual uncertainty in a marketplace.

Peter Winick And I would imagine, Tom, and I’d like your thoughts on this. You know, the typical speaker thought leader model is someone grabs their book and go, that guy Tom. Pretty interesting. What can we do? We can bring them in here to keynote our annual whatever, and they pay you some money to keynote. And that’s all fine and dandy, but then you get to the crux of the issue and then you you’re sort of ahead of the pack here where you actually have the tools to solve the issue Talk. And you have to get specific here in generalities around the benefit of that to you. Right? So you get, you know, keynotes a day’s pay and a good day’s pay, whatever. What is the value of getting your tool deployed at scale in an enterprise to you?

Thomas Koulopoulos You know, the biggest value this might surprise you. And a lot of folks are listening in on this. The biggest value of that is the learning that happens at Ground Zero as a result of deploying the tool of working face to face, shoulder to shoulder with these folks, you begin to not just help them create value, but you create value for yourself, because that learning, that experience translates into the next iteration of that of that tool. So going back to what I said earlier about how the these are cloud problems are constantly evolving. Evolution happens in the trenches. That’s where the DNA gets mutated. That’s where the, you know, the new species of the methodology evolves. And what’s critical here is that you don’t get so attached to the methodology that you make a religion out of it. You allow the marketplace to consistently challenge, reshape and reconstitute that methodology. And that’s the key. And we’re so it’s so hard for us to do that as human beings. You know, we get accustomed to something. We you know, it becomes your child. It looks great. You love it, you adore it. You get you get used to applying it. It becomes second nature. The last thing you want to do is reinvent it. But that’s the key ultimately to sustaining a thought leadership practices reinvent things.

Peter Winick That’s awesome. So let me so let me ask you this then. In your book, there’s lots of problems that it addresses. Right. And lots of potential solutions. What is the process that you go through or your organization goes through to say, here’s five tools that we should invest in because this is what the client needs. How do you how do you decide what to do? And then, you know, the flip of that is edit out what not to create because you know, some people get inundated with, my God, there’s so many things I can pull from this book, but what are the 3 to 5 things that are the most valuable to the marketplace? How do you answer that question?

Thomas Koulopoulos So you’re asking two questions. Let me let me address them sort of in sequence. The first question is, is how do you how do you arrive at what goes into the bottom to begin with? And that’s a very simple answer. It is obsessive listening, unfiltered, listening, truly objective, listening to your marketplace. You know what’s important to them? What problems are they trying to solve? Which of their problems are unsolvable, and how can you help them better understand the context of those problems and how and how to address them? So you this sounds cliche, but it’s so darn true.

Peter Winick That’s brilliant. And it’s also the opposite of way too many folks work. Too many folks have this vision of I’m an author mode, so I’ll go and get a cabin on the lake for July and sit there and, you know, smoke a pipe and a tweed jacket and be alone with my thoughts. That’s the worst thing that you can do, quite frankly. It is not writing a novel.

Thomas Koulopoulos It’s the worst thing that you can do. But it also is it’s artificial. It’s antiseptic. Yeah, it’s all I tell folks. If you want to write a book, be prepared to throw away two thirds of what you write. And the last third will be that third that didn’t come out of you initially. It came from somewhere else. What you wrote triggered something else or a thought or an observation. And that’s what ends up in the book. So that, you know, the answer to your first question is you allow the marketplace provided for and become detached from your own thought leadership so that you can throw away those things that you thought were important in favor of those that truly are.

Peter Winick So get over yourself and listen loudly. I love.

Thomas Koulopoulos It. Get over yourself and listen loudly as I’m going to co-op that I love.

Peter Winick That I smell a book title.

Thomas Koulopoulos The second the second answer the second question, if you will. If I can be so presumptuous as this look, put the question in your mouth is, you know, so now what? You’ve got the book, you know, you’re done your up, the giving the keynote. You know what happens next. How do you take this and actually provide it in a delivery modality. And the answer here is one. Once again, don’t get so stuck on what you think is the right way to apply those ideas or organization. Because what fascinates me, Peter, and this never ceases to amaze me people will read my book and they’ll read into it something entirely different than what I. And you can be now you can be pissed off at that, right? And say, My God, that’s not at all what I intended. Or you can say, You know what? That’s a much more fascinating way to look at what I had written than what was in my head when I wrote it. Right. So I allow people to take the book and use it as sort of an instigator of their own thoughts and then listen very carefully to how they’re applying these ideas and then follow up on their interpretation, because that to me is exciting, right? How did I write something that triggered a completely different thought than what was in my mind when I wrote?

Peter Winick So are you or are you waiting for the reaction? From the book? Yes. To stimulate or solidify the sort of the tool building, if you will.

Thomas Koulopoulos Absolutely. Because you know what? The market is much smarter than. Than either one of us ever can be. Yeah.

Peter Winick No, And I you know, we’re a big believer in co-creation and rolling up our sleeves. And, you know, I think we talk more clients out of developing their brilliant idea into in terms of a training series or whatever, unless there’s client involvement. Because unless, you know, the only the only vote that matters is the vote of the checkbook of the corporate client. And quite frankly, people separate product development from sales, and that’s really silly. You know, it’s the sales, the marketing, the co-creation, the creativity, getting folks that are leaning in and have a respect for your work in content, they want to help. Right. And they’re going to have an emotional connection to it. No, nobody ever put the neighbor’s kids bad macaroni drawing on their own fridge. Right. You know, so getting them in in the R&D lab with you. And by the way, you know, back to your comment earlier on the tools and stuff, it’s pretty cheap and inexpensive and the risk is much lower now to do rapid prototyping and minimum viable product, particularly with content-based solutions where, you know, we’re not going to the moon with these things. So video assessment, you know, you’re not throwing away millions of dollars on a lark here. You can manage your risk effectively, you can experiment, you can throw stuff out there. So I love that. Thank you so much.

Thomas Koulopoulos You’re welcome. I think it comes down to less is more. And the hardest thing about consulting is that less of them is actually going to create more value for the client. It’s a tough and, you know, we’re not going to cover all that in a few minutes, you know, here. Yeah. But I would caution people to think about that philosophy when they when they deliver any service, less is more because what that means is that you rely on the client to interpret it in a way that they understand because they do understand their problem than you ever want.

Peter Winick And they’ll tell you what they want solved. So let me as we start to get to the wrap up phase here. Tom, out there today is, you know, Tom -15, 20 years. Right? So maybe they’re at book one or 2 or 3. What would you tell that person what we did, you know, and let’s give some assumptions. They’re smart. This isn’t you know, they’ve put in the work. They’ve listened loudly. They’re out there. What advice would you give sort of the young you, if you will?

Thomas Koulopoulos So I’ve thought about that often. And the advice I would give the young me would not be taken by the young. Me Yeah.

Peter Winick Well, isn’t that always the right.

Thomas Koulopoulos But that’s, that’s the best, that’s sort of that’s the, the foundation of, of this question is what would you tell a younger you that would reshape or my younger me would never listen to my older me my younger me would say, get the hell on with your life. Stop giving me advice. Obviously, just because you’re there and I’m here. But I would I would nonetheless, as we do with our kids, I would nonetheless make the effort. And I think that I would sum it up. I’d say, look, be a little less arrogant and a little more open to listening to others opinions and ideas because yours are not necessarily the greatest or the or the best. Now, that said, the younger me would say with an abundance of arrogance, you know, get out of my face. I know exactly what I’m doing. I’ve got a plan and you’re not going to stand in my way.

Peter Winick So there we have it, folks. An argument between Tom today and, you know, Tom circa 1993 or something. Great. Well, this has been great. Where can folks reach you? How do they reach you and why should they reach you?

Thomas Koulopoulos Well, the where it’s pretty simple if you stuck a lot plus any which way and Google me, you will come up with that with more than enough references. My email is tech at Delphi group.com and I’m glad to communicate with people directly. The new book is called Revealing the Invisible. It’s a wonderful look at how behavioral computing is going to change so much of the way we live our lives and the way that we work our society positions. And the why is because I love to engage with people on things that are interesting and important. For me, life is about learning and I never want to end that journey. And if I can drag a few people along in that process, it’s just a pleasure to do it.

Peter Winick Well-said. Well, I can’t thank you enough. I’m going to go back and listen to this, because this one from sort of the philosophical to the tactical, from the sort of big picture to the pragmatic pretty quickly from someone that’s been there, done that and is in the trenches every day doing some great stuff. So I appreciate your time and thank you so much for joining us today, Tom.

Thomas Koulopoulos Peter thank you. It’s my pleasure.

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.