Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 67 – Amy Radin

Peter Winick

Peter Winick speaks with Amy Radin

Are you just starting out as an author? Writing a book is a monumental task, but you don’t have to do it alone!

Amy Radin, Marketing and Innovation expert and author of “The Change Makers Playbook” joins Peter in this episode to discuss the process of writing her first book and what she learned along the way.

Amy talks about the long task of building your manuscript, and why it’s a good idea to reach out to other authors for tips along the way. In addition, she shares her knowledge on marketing, pricing, and content development. If you’re an aspiring business author, this is a great episode to help you get started!

If you want to scale your content to make more profit, Peter has advice for you.

Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, this is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Amy Raden. Amy is at the forefront of rewiring brands for the future that is upon us. She built a track record of success, moving ideas to performance at American Express, Citi, E-Trade, and AXA, a couple of small little companies there. She’s got a new book that is on its way out, or probably actually out by now. which is called The Changemaker’s Playbook. So she’s interesting in terms of being incredibly accomplished, but relatively new to sort of shifting gears into this domain of being into the content business and author and thought leader and all that sort of stuff. So thanks for coming on board today, Amy.

Amy Radin Peter, it’s great to be here and happy to be part of leveraging thought leadership. Thank you.

Peter Winick Thank you. So the first question is why and why now? Why did you decide to make the leap into the content universe? And why did you decided to do that now actually?

Amy Radin Well, you know, as you know I spent quite a few number of years in the corporate world and always as the, always a little bit more as the person who had the outside perspective. So the innovator always seeing things differently. And when you get to very senior levels of the kinds of companies I’ve worked at, that’s not always the most comfortable place to be. So a number of year ago, interestingly, a friend of mine who’s a journalist said, You know, you ought to write a book about this. And I sort of parked that idea. And then when I ultimately decided that I would rather truly be the outsider looking in and helping people trying to innovate actually drive change, I said, you know, I should try to write that book. So it was sort of a little bit serendipity, a little madness, and a little plan.

Peter Winick So touch on something that you said that I think is interesting. When you’re the insider with sort of, that’s an outlier for lack of a better term, there’s a risk profile there that’s not always fun, right? But when you’re an outsider, that’s the outlier, they’re paying you to say, uh-oh, that broken, that doesn’t work, that dumb. Tell me a little bit about sort of the difference or the freedom of one versus the other.

Amy Radin Yeah, I think that’s a really important point and you’re exactly right. So the roles that I always play, no matter what my title, I always gravitated to roles where I was, where I, I was rethinking the way things were. And when you’re in a big company, it’s just hard to be that person. And because big companies are set up to make things predictable, routine, eliminate risk, and I was the person. who was sort of saying, no, we have to change things. What I realized was exactly to your point, companies hire, executives and companies hire people and are very welcoming of people who are coming in just for a little while to bring a fresh perspective, but then they go away. And so I said, you know, this is a great way for me to realize my purpose, which really is to look at things differently and help people rethink things. and be sort of not have the target on my back, but actually be somebody who’s welcome and compensated purely because I can bring a fresh perspective.

Peter Winick Well, and as the outsider, right, you have the freedom of not having the horse in the race. So, so besides the fact that companies are designed to sort of get a predictable outcome underneath that as sort of the invisible, the politics, the silos, the protection, the budget protection, you know, all like, if you’ve got a new idea, inherently, it means someone’s going to win and someone’s gonna lose status, prestige, whatever inside the company. So there is a little bit of, you know, internal sabotaging or at least not, that might be a strong word, but Even if it’s a great idea, when it comes from an insider, there’s a lot of ways for someone to sort of, you know, bop you down like a groundhog in video games.

Amy Radin Well, yeah, you’re right. And whenever you have two people in a room, you’re going to have politics. And I don’t think that’s, you know, I don’ say that with any facetiousness or cynicism. That’s just the reality of human nature. And also you have budgets. And when there’s a budget, there’s only so much money to go around. And so you’re, right, some projects get funded and some don’t. And you’re also exactly right in saying that for me, being the outsider, making recommendations, although I’m certainly care a lot about what I do and I want my clients to be successful, I’m not personally on the line to make sure the idea that I propose gets implemented. So I can be much more objective and a little more emotionally detached. And that’s really great. And I like that a lot. I can even be more objective than when I was on the inside and had to worry about politics.

Peter Winick So this was your first book. So let’s start there. What was that like, writing your first work? We’ll get into sort of post-writing, but step one is write a book. So what made you decide to do that? And then what has that process been like for you?

Amy Radin Right, well, my family’s really glad it’s over. I’ll say that up front. But as I said, a friend of mine who’s a journalist who heard me talking about innovation and everything I believe about how you execute innovation, which is really what the Changemakers Playbook is about, he planted this bug in my head about writing a book. And after a couple of false starts on my own, I said this actually takes some skill. And I engaged somebody on a contract basis, who’s a professional writer, to help me make sure I had a book, structure the outline, and then I’d say she acted as my accountability manager. She stayed on my case, we had monthly calls, she reviewed my drafts, so she was sort of a working editor.

Peter Winick So, yeah, let me drill down on that a little bit. So number one is there’s a continuum, a spectrum of getting help for writing a book, right? One could be even under the rubric of sort of a ghostwriter in some instances that somebody that’s actually doing the heavy lifting and the scribing to capture your voice and do all that. On the other end of the spectrum is a coach, an accountability partner, someone that might have to write a proposal. So something along the way got you to realize that, you know, I could use some help here, but then underneath that is at what degree? So how did you sort of, you know, unpack that?

Amy Radin Well, I realized after many false starts, I said, you know, probably, you now, for over the course of a few months, trying to start to write, I realized, wow, there’s a lot to this. And then really just networking. I spoke to other, to people I know who’ve published business books and asked them their stories. Now, how did you do it? How did you go about it? And so I understood, I started to realize how often people bring somebody else in, either a co-author or somebody. you know, the writing partner who I worked with, I realized I didn’t want a ghost writer. I mean, my feelings about innovation and my beliefs, the expertise I have, is what was all inside my head. So I basically was unpacking a couple of decades of knowledge and experience, and I couldn’t imagine sending somebody else off to write it. Plus in the course of the book of writing, one of the things I did to make it really more fun and robust was I ended up doing research interviews.

Peter Winick Oh, that’s great.

Amy Radin So for each chapter of the book, once I had the outline, I did about seven or eight subject matter expert interviews. So I would do the interviews, take my notes, organize the chapter, send it out for review. So it was very collaborative, but very much unpacking what was inside my head, which was why I really had to, you know, hold the reins of doing the writing.

Peter Winick but for other people, those writing is a solution. Right, but it sounds like the partner that you picked and the process by which you chose to work worked for you because there is no right or wrong, one way that’s right or right. You found the right-

Amy Radin There is no one way. It’s like any business problem. What’s the problem you’re trying to solve? What’s your work style? What is it you’re trying to do? And for me, this was a great solution.

Peter Winick Got it. So what, if anything, might you do differently or recommend folks consider if you were to go to About This Again?

Amy Radin Well, when I went out, and as I said, I spoke to a number of people I know who had written books before, and people gave me fairly consistent advice, and all the advice I didn’t listen to, the next time around, I would listen to it. And number one is to really block, be very disciplined about blocking time on a weekly basis when you’re going to write and stick to it, so I’d give myself about a B minus on that, and I think that’s just, if you’re really having that discipline. and clearing the decks. And I wish, in that case, my elapsed time would have been shorter. So from beginning to end, the elapses time from when I kicked off to actually put my pencil down and turned over my manuscript, it was about 16 months. And I could have, you know, next time, if there was a next time I’d say, wow, can I do this in six to nine by just concentrating more time and maintaining that schedule discipline.

Peter Winick So now that you’re at the place where the book is in the process of launching, what are your goals and hopes, right? So let’s say it’s a year from now and all those are achieved. What would that look like? What does that mean to you?

Amy Radin Well, to me the book is just the first manifestation of what I hope is a content platform. And I’m still in the process of experimenting and defining what that is going to mean. But I say, you know, I have some very unique expertise that’s gone into the change makers playbook because I was a chief innovation officer and an operating executive accountable for delivering results on a topic that most people just talk about. And frankly, that often, you know, results don’t pan out.

Peter Winick So wait, so, so the number one piece, let me just pause there for a second, because I think it’s an important point is the, why the hell should anybody listen to you piece, right? So been there, done that executive. So, you know, cause again, there there’s ranges of why some, where someone comes from in terms of perspective and writing a book, there’s sort of the theoretical academic, right. There’s the consultant that’s been there on the outside and has lots of experience working on various projects. And then there’s the senior level corporate executive been there done that knows how to actually get. stuff done inside the constraints of a corporate environment, I think big check in the box there for why anyone should listen to you as opposed to this is a theoretical.

Amy Radin Right, I am not an academic and I have not a consultant in a field where there’s a lot of great thinking, but a big gap on doing. So I sort of bring the thinking, the doing together. And what I’m seeing is I’ve really been trying to follow the advice of a coach I had years ago who said, you know, Amy, you have to listen to the market and see how they value you. And where people are valuing my content is in, for example, advising startups. on how to establish business relationships with corporations. I sort of understand how to work both sides of the aisle as a board member, as a keynote speaker, as a workshop facilitator. So I’m right now in the process of experimenting with a whole bunch of different ideas that I’m being approached on as I socialize my content and increase awareness. of who I am and what I have to offer. And my hope is over the course of the next, say six to 12 months, I’ll refine that. I’m trying to be an innovator. Now I’m gonna try different things and see what works, what not work, what doesn’t work and shape my commercial platform off the content over the of course of next year.

Peter Winick Got it, and you might find the market says it resonates at the sort of training level where people wanna learn how to do this, right? It could be at the most senior level, at the board level, where they’re gonna bring you in as the uber rock star that helps them crack a real business problem that they’re struggling with. It might be somewhere in the middle because one of the things that’s interesting about the content that you’ve got is there’s lots of places it could be applied, but underneath that would dictate from a strategic perspective, the pricing. the derivative offerings and solutions that you would commercialize or monetize, et cetera. And you could ultimately have sort of the same light bulb, the same idea worth, you know, be worth X or 10 X, depending on where it’s deployed and the value that’s assigned to it by those that are suffering from what, you now, your content helps them get.

Amy Radin Clearly, and I think a great example of that would be, I do some work with very large corporations, but also with startups. So the pricing model, the compensation structures are very different. If you’re working with an earlier stage startup, you’re talking about success fees or maybe equity. You’re not billing at an hourly or day rate, right? Versus for a corporation, there’s a very, You know, it’s… can more often be time and materials. So you have to sort of understand what’s the pricing model depending upon the life stage of the client and what they’re trying to.

Peter Winick And you don’t have to have a, it’s not a binary choice. You might choose that the right portfolio of client mixes to you is, you know, X percent startup, which is high risk, but could potentially be high reward X percent, you large companies, because it pays the bills and, uh, you know, balance that portfolio and your time accordingly. Right. Cause you probably don’t want to go all risk or all fee for service or something like that.

Amy Radin That’s right. And I love the variety. So for me, this has turned out to be a great way to leverage my thought leadership, because I on top of, you know, doing the work I love, I get to do it in a range of very, very different situations with very diverse kinds of people.

Peter Winick So your is an interesting, I think an interesting question. You’ll tell me for you, you’re literally on the cusp of the launch here. We’re in the process of launching the book like any minute here. Any minute. Yeah, right. I see the countdown clock here, like it’s New Year’s, What do you have planned from a tactical perspective? What are some of the things that you’re going to do to get the book out there? And when I say out there, meaning to the right people that you are focused on to get you the results that you were looking for.

Amy Radin So I have a very active social media calendar, and so I’m out on social media. This is marketing 101, top of the funnel. How do I maximize awareness with the kinds of people who I would like them to know I exist? So a daily presence on social media, speaking engagements of all types, everything from panels and major conferences. to keynotes, to smaller audiences, to some board meetings, executive round table. I’m really working my network to book as much speaking as my calendar can handle. And some of it globally on video conferences have been really interesting. I’ve done video talks to South Africa, to India. So it’s really a lot of fun. what you can do these days because the technology is so good.

Peter Winick So you’ve got a lot of things planned, they’re focused, they’re aligned with your goals. Sort of last thoughts as we start to wrap up here, anything that you’ve learned along the way, because you’ve done a lot of sort of research and talking to other authors and speakers, et cetera. Anything that you learned that at first blush was like, oh my God, that can’t be true, that’s silly, that’s crazy, that you come to realize is actually the way it is.

Amy Radin I think the thing is that it’s a little maddening some days, but really turned out to be true no matter what, is how many opportunities come about through pure serendipity. And so the whole experience has reinforced to me why it’s so important to build a really good network where I can give as much as possible to other people and they turn out to come back with opportunities, but it’s. very unpredictable. So the good news is I’ve, I think, been pretty good about building and caring for my network over the years. And I am getting a lot of great outreach as a result. Some days you wish you knew what was coming. It’s very serendipitous. I think that’s the thing I’ve had to kind of accept and try to enjoy a little more.

Peter Winick Well, I thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing your journey to date. I wish you the best with the launch of the book. And I’d love to have you back in whatever, six months or so and say, well, how did, you know, how does that work out? What would you learn and what doubt according to plan and serendipitously what came to be and all that sort of fun stuff.

Amy Radin Yeah, no, that would be great. And also certainly if, if your listeners want to visit amyraden.com, I also, you know, part of my marketing plan was really, you know, to make a bit of an investment in my website, there’s content that can be downloaded. And so to the extent that I can be helpful to other people like me, a lot of lessons learned reflected in the way I’ve put my website.

Peter Winick Awesome. I appreciate that. Well, thank you so much, and we’ll talk again soon. Thanks. Thank you, Peter. To learn more about thought leadership leverage, please visit our website at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at Peter at Thought Leadership Leverage dot com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.