Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 113 – Charlene Li

Peter Winick

Thought leaders need to invest a lot of thought and energy in developing their brand. But what’s the distinction between developing your own personal brand, and developing a brand for your company?

Our guest is Charlene Li, the founder of Altimeter and author of the New York Times bestselling book, “Open Leadership.” Her new book, “The Disruption Mindset,” will be available on June 11th, 2019.

For the last two decades, Charlene has been a respected adviser to Fortune 500 companies, helping people see the future of digital transformation and leadership. Charlene walks us through the process she took in building Altimeter and positioning it to be acquired.

Charlene and Peter discuss the changes in the publishing landscape between the release of her first book 11 years ago, and her new book on the horizon. Plus, Charlene shares the importance of culture to her thought leadership, and discusses how building an honest and open relationship with your audience helps you in countless ways.

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, the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. My guest today is Charlene Li. Charlene, for the past two decades has been helping people see the future, which is sort of an interesting thing to have as a career. She’s the author of five books, including The New York Times best seller Open Leadership. And she’s the coauthor of the critically acclaimed book Groundswell. She was the founder of Altimeter Group, an analyst firm that was acquired in 2005 by Prophet. She’s a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School. I’m thrilled to have you. I’m a little I’m a little fanning out today because I’ve read all your work and have been a fan for a long time. So I’ll try to not get all giddy on you. But thank you for joining us today.

Charlene Li Thank you for having me.

Peter Winick Great. So let’s talk about sort of your journey. You are in lots of different things, right? You’ve got the speaking side. You’ve got the research side, you’ve got the consulting side. You’ve had an exit of your business, successful authorship. How have you sort of unpacked all these things? How have you played these things out in such a way that have achieved such great outcomes like they have?

Charlene Li I feel I still feel like I’m still trying to achieve it, so I just put it that way. I think more than anything else, I’ve always been very curious about what the future brings and in particular, how do people deal with it and make the most of it. I like to say that I live for what I call the moment, which is why the search is so interesting because I I’m kind of curious on what the answer is.

Peter Winick So part of this is your own sort of curiosity and your own sort of being a lifelong learner. So once you decided to sort of go down this path, how do you choose sort of when to publish and how to connect, speaking and consulting? Because where I where I was going a bit earlier is you’ve achieved some amazing success and things that people hope to achieve as they sort of dive into this world of thought leadership. So what are the some of the things that you’ve learned from what you’ve done along the way that others could benefit from?

Charlene Li I think from the research side of it up to point of view is when do you publish, you publish when you think somebody could really benefit from it. And I’ve never published anything to get followers or to build my reputation. It’s always been to be able to help other people. So that’s what’s always guided my publishing. So I sometimes publish things when I’m really not comfortable with it yet, but I feel like I have to get it out there. And then the speaking kind of comes with the publishing. People want to hear more about it. They want to have it applied to their situations.

Peter Winick Got it. So how does that relationship work where someone, someone you know, reads an article or picks up an your blog or picks up your book and says, wow, this this trolling is really fascinating. We should bring her in for our conference. Or is it that they’re seeing you speaking and then it leads to other opportunities on the consulting side and then books? Or how are those how are those two connected from a business perspective?

Charlene Li It’s actually very connected. When I write my research, I start with a design thinking approach, which is a is to focus really specifically on the problem I’m trying to address. What’s the problem when we spend a huge amount of time on that. So when somebody reads it with that problem, then they call me like, Hey, you seem to know something about my problem. I feel like you’re standing over my shoulder watching me work. Can we talk?

Peter Winick So that’s interesting. And when you say that’s my problem, well, let’s talk about that for a little bit, because some folks come into the space and say, listen, I’m smart. I’m curious, I’m an academic, whatever the case is. But I’ve got to pick something that is a problem that needs to be solved. So how do you sort of balance that, like your discipline around the research and then you go, wow, that’s a that’s a problem that people actually pay good money to have solved. How do you how do you untangle that web?

Charlene Li Well, I always in my interviews ask people, so what’s on your mind? What would you like to see me research? What do you not have the answer for? That’s where I begin and often end all of my conversations. What else would you like to know? So a colleague of mine said, Always do the ABR, always be research. Okay.

Peter Winick I love.

Charlene Li That. I will constantly asking that. And then from there I start parsing apart and really taking that. What is the real question? Is that really the question? Or it’s something deeper than that.

Peter Winick So interesting. So people will tell you what they need. But then just because a random individual makes a comment doesn’t mean that you’re going to then spend 18 months of your life writing a book on that. So how do you sort of sort of dive in? I like what you said about diving in deeper, but how do you sort of take something that at first is an moment to you and either decide to go deeper or to sort of toss it away? There might not be enough meat on the bones.

Charlene Li Well, I’ll talk about my next book, which is called The Mindset was coming out in June. And disruption has been around for as a buzzword for 20 years, the entire time of my career as an analyst. And people would ask me, so how do I actually create this question? How do I actually create meaningful, deep, transformational, disruptive change? And well.

Peter Winick Okay.

Charlene Li And I realized I didn’t know the answer to that. So that’s a good question. Let me go look at it. So I’ve been teasing it apart. What does it mean to be really disruptive and how do you do it? Because there is a philosophy out there that you need to be disruptive. But hey, if you’re a big incumbent company, your toast, right? You can’t be this, right. And I find that to be not true. So what is it that these companies who are able to disrupt themselves, what are they doing?

Peter Winick So let’s push on that. So now that gives you the validation. You can say, there’s a book here because there’s a real hero here. Right. In terms of how does one disrupt if we all want to be more disruptive? The next logical question is how might I go about that? And that’s sort of the promise of the book. And I assume that would naturally lend itself to consulting relationship after that, where organizations say, Hey, can you help me develop these disruptive capabilities inside of my organization? Is that is that a fair statement?

Charlene Li Yes, very much so. I write the books to be helpful to people. And if they can go off and do this on their own, all the power to them, if they want me to come and help them take that first step with a workshop or speaking, I can do that if they want deeper handholding and then my parent company prophet can go do that.

Peter Winick Interesting. Okay.

Charlene Li Again, that’s how I kind of parse it out. I don’t have to do all of it. I can’t do all of that.

Peter Winick Sure. So I love that. So let’s go backwards a little bit, because I am fortunate enough to be working with lots and lots of consulting firms from around the globe and all sort of founded by thought leaders, people who are writing books and have a perspective, etc.. Given that you’ve founded a successful consulting firm and haven’t had an exit there and then have stayed on with the acquirer, which is profit, which is a great company. Could you talk a little bit about that? Like what are the things that you might do differently if you were to start another consulting company or advising someone on how to do develop another consulting company with potentially an exit in mind?

Charlene Li Yeah. Again, I think the key thing to always do is to never start a company with an exit. Okay. Because you’re doing that. You’re doing it for the wrong reason. When I started ultimately again, I saw an opportunity there to do things very differently as an analyst firm. And even when I started, the process of being acquired by profit didn’t start out that way. I was in the search for a strategic partner and an investment to grow the company. And I had as an option in the back pocket the opportunity to be acquired, but had to be the right circumstances. So when profit came along, I’m like, Well, if they said we won’t, we don’t want to do an investment, we just don’t do that. But we’d be interested in acquiring you, right? Well, that’s interesting. Pull out the back pocket when we work on it. Literally, I have it written down so you don’t get swayed. Like, what are the circumstances? And there were two things on there. There had to be a strategic fit, right? And there had to be a small connection to culture. And that’s why I have stayed on that profit is because the culture is so strong. It’s so in line with the things that I believe in. So I love that a lot of people like, I just want to get out of there. I’m like, I’m pretty darn happy.

Peter Winick So let me one is sort of correct something I said. My intent wasn’t build it with the intent to sell it, but build it with having that as an option to have potentially an exit. Because I agree with you, if you just build it for the sake of I’m going to build this and do this for three years and have an exit. So let me sort of reframe the question What are the things now that you’ve been through an exit that you may have done differently or that you did that worked well, that when you’re starting a company, it’s good to be thinking about, even though it might not be on the other end.

Charlene Li But I think it’s two things. I think having a brand, a brand is so important because in many ways what Prophet was acquiring was our brand in the digital space. And they. Wanted to be more famous and have a better brand in the digital space. I have an opening. So really investing in brand back in the very beginning was really important.

Peter Winick So give me some examples of that because I agree 1,000%. But what’s an example of an investment? I mean, writing a book could be an example of an investment in the brand and investing in thought leadership. But what are the other things that you do to make smart investments into the brand?

Charlene Li As a fellow leader, it’s so tempting to make it about you. So which is which? The brand is that you the thought leader, or is that an umbrella brand? And the thing that we did at Altimeter was each partner agreed that the personal brand and the company brand lived in harmony with each other.

Peter Winick Not easy, not easy to achieve.

Charlene Li And not easy. And so you need a special kind of person who understands what brand means. And for some people, the ultimate a brand was I mean, a lot of people no altimeter and don’t know me. Sure, other people know me but don’t know altimeter, so why not promote? Can you actually promote and lift up two brands at the same time? That was counterintuitive and it worked brilliantly for us.

Peter Winick Great. And I agree with you. And I think when you it’s a balancing act. There’s a time where it may be wise for you, the individual, to be the brand. If it’s more personality based, if you’re more on the keynote side. But ultimately, you know, one of the things I always tell my clients is, listen, the objective is ultimately to make you irrelevant or obsolete. And you can’t do that if all everyone is buying is the name on the door, which is yours. So that that’s great.

Charlene Li So, yeah, if you want to be acquired, you can’t be with the name of yourself, right?

Peter Winick Exactly. So that’s good insight there. Let’s talk about the other. So now the other things that you said in terms of what went well for you at profit is the strategic fit and the cultural fit. So let’s talk about each of those. So culturally, you could have a great strategic fit, but there were things that you were probably sniffing out as the acquired to go. I, I feel comfortable here or this is going to be a disaster. Right. So how did you how did you know it was a cultural fit?

Charlene Li I walked in and sat down and everything and the discussions constantly was, how do we make this work? How do we make this work? And one of their the values is being just human. Just this this sense of vulnerability, humility, not knowing the answers and just being all the things that being human is wonderful for. And that just really spoke to me.

Peter Winick But let me pause for a second if I could. So there are plenty of consulting firms where the culture is a little bit of hubris, a little bit of arrogance, a little bit of smartest people in the room and not that that’s a good thing or a bad thing. We could debate. And I think we know where we land there. But that’s just the culture, right? So if you think about some of the big, big firms, we don’t get to name them. That’s just their culture. And, you know, the little firms sort of being gobbled by the bigger one. You’re not going to change that. So I think it’s really, really wise how you sort of did a culture detection there and said, this just feels right, this feels human. We have the same value.

Charlene Li Right. And the reason why is because if you’re aligning your culture and your values, you can work out the strategy, right? You can change your strategy. Very, very difficult to change your culture totally.

Peter Winick So interesting. So that that was the indication that it’s a cultural fit and obviously you’re still there and happy. So you made the right choice. How do you know, you know, strategically what’s a strategic fit for you as the acquired versus the acquirer? Those two things have to be equal, right? So how do you know that? How do you how do you get a sense of that?

Charlene Li We really sat down and had really deep discussions about why are you interested in this? Why would we be interested in you? Where are the synergies? I mean, the typical ideas, but also tapping into how have they worked with other thought leaders, how they work with other authors. And here’s a it was a really big test. Almost every single person on the executive committee had written a book.

Peter Winick So you weren’t the first sort of experiment. They’ve done this before.

Charlene Li Or shove it. Far from it. They all realized what it was. Their executive chairman is a perfect example of David Walker, who was a professor, and literally the thought of a brand. Right. And it is so awesome to sit down in the office and just brainstorm stuff with David that day. I got this thing going, What do you got going? So it was like talk of talk with each other over the watercooler, literally about our big ideas and books. I mean, how cool.

Peter Winick Well, I was going to say, it says something about the values where you have an executive team where each and everyone has their own sort of flavor of thought leadership that they’ve invested in. So not only do they know what it takes to do that, but they also I mean, what great conversations must happen around the lunchroom. They’re like, That sounds awesome. Yeah, very interesting. That’s how you knew. How do you think they knew that you were the right fit for them both strategically and culturally?

Charlene Li Again, I think the culture fit was a key part of all those conversations. They looked at our values and look at the way that we talked with each other and how we frankly had to go through a negotiation gives you a lot of insight into how it’s going to work, because there’s nothing more contentious than arguing over how you. To be bought, right. The that other part was the strategy. I actually went in profit. It’s done a good job of other acquisitions. I asked to be connected with all the other CEOs of the companies I had acquired.

Peter Winick Got it.

Charlene Li And I asked them, So how did that go? What worked but didn’t work? What should I be looking out for? So of course, any sort of integration is hard. I mean, that first year was really miserable. So and in so many ways, and I don’t sugarcoat it, this is hard. This is hard to integrate a company into another one. But the thing that kept us going were these two things that will leave that was there and the cultures kind of smooth things over.

Peter Winick That’s fantastic. Well, that’s awesome insight. Let’s talk a little bit now around authorship. So you have a new book coming out. You talked about, you know, it’s time to write when you know you’ve got something to answer. What are things that you’ve noticed that are different in the publishing world today than maybe when you wrote your first book? And how are you adapting to that?

Charlene Li So yeah, I got my first book published in 2008, doing this one just 11 years later. My first book had a significant royalty upfront. It was put to auction. I had an agent, I had lawyers. This one I’m self-publishing.

Peter Winick Right. So, so fascinating. Right. So so let me drill on that a little bit, because I think way back in the stone ages of 2008, right, where we I think we all had AOL accounts or whatever we had. Then if you said self-publishing, that was sort of code for, I’m so sorry you didn’t get a big New York publisher to accept you. Right? It was sort of welcome to loser Bill. That’s not the case today. So tell me how you went about making those decisions.

Charlene Li Well, I think that the opposite is true. Now, if you. So it’s true. If you self-published, you can’t get one, but you also self-publish. If you have such a strong base, you pretty confident you can try the sales without the help of a publisher. And over the this is, I think my fifth or sixth book now depending on how you count it. But my fourth publisher relationship and my other publishers have been fantastic. Right. But this time I wanted to do things with the book that they couldn’t do. Sure, I wanted to be able to customize a book whenever and however I want.

Peter Winick So creative freedom.

Charlene Li Creative freedom, total creative freedom. And frankly, as any author knows, you’re doing most of the heavy lifting for marketing anyways. So the last part is the economics. I really got sick of buying and had, you know, twice of what it cost to actually print it. And because I do a lot of speaking, I want to include the book in my speaking and I just didn’t have the flexibility to do the deals I wanted to.

Peter Winick So I love it. So instead of you being relegated to, you know, a royalty stream of a book or to a book or whatever the case is, you now have the lion’s share of it, right? You actually have cost of paper and ink and blah, blah, blah. But, you know, now it’s an 80% margin product. And once you come to the realization that you’re the primary sales force of that product, not the publisher, there’s a math piece of this that people often discount.

Charlene Li Right. And you go, wait a minute. This doesn’t make any sense. So. And also, if I’m using the book as a promotional vehicle, it’s a pretty expensive vehicle. If I have to buy the book back myself versus being able to print it myself. Exactly. So there’s a lot of different reasons why I decided to do self-publishing. Why are they else? Because I’ve done it. I’ve done it multiple times now. I’ve seen how it works. If you’re a serious business author trying to build your platform, I highly recommend to first time authors to get a publisher because this is too much.

Peter Winick Too, too overwhelming. Right, right. Right.

Charlene Li It’s too much. Writing a book is hard enough to self-publish a book on top of that, to drive all the marketing and the planning and everything else. That’s really difficult to do.

Peter Winick But if you think about it at a little bit of a later stage, your second, your third, your fourth, you’ve got a little bit more infrastructure. You’ve built the platform, you’ve got a database, right? So, yes, you have to focus on creating a good book from a content perspective. But there are some assets that you have developed as an entity that can be deployed in service of that after the first one.

Charlene Li Exactly. Think of it as having a platform. Once you have a platform, you have your lists, you have your followers. Becomes so much easier.

Peter Winick Got it. Okay, So let’s assume now that we’re talking to you 10 or 15 years ago, what advice would you give you as you were just starting into this world of thought leadership? Because there’s definitely people out there that to that model.

Charlene Li It’s all about your lists. Okay. Okay. The best advice I ever got, which I didn’t follow, was to have a really good email newsletter list and be really consistent about posting on it. So the shorthand is it’s all about the list, but who do you have a direct relationship with? I decided not to do the email newsletter because it was getting very confusing between my personal email newsletter and my company for newsletter. So I wanted to the company, so I have a great list for altimeter. I don’t have a great list for myself, but I do have a huge social media platform, so that’s what I invested in. So think about your platform, think about your list and invest in it.

Peter Winick And when you say when you say invest in it, I’m going to translate that and correct me if I’m wrong. I mean, you have an obligation, right? So you can get it. It’s not hard to anybody to sign up once, but you have to nurture that community. You have an obligation to feed them great content and be of service to them and give them insights. And because I signed up once, doesn’t mean I’m going to be loyal to you for next 5 or 10 years if you haven’t sort of provided me with value and interest in content.

Charlene Li Yeah, exactly. And I think that the best thing that you can see from people who are really good influencers is really consistent about creating meaningful content. And the reason they do that isn’t just to put content out there. They’re thinking actively about what does my audience need, what kind of relationship do I want to build with them? Right. And I’ll give you an example. One of the things that people do after I come, I do a speech is they come up to me like, hey, that was a great speech. Or they say, I really enjoyed your book. And I go, Thank you very much. What was your takeaway? But that follow up question is so essential because it says, I’m interested in you. I’m interested in how you are learning because I learned from what you learned from. And yeah, by asking that question, I’m saying I want a relationship.

Peter Winick And this has been really, really wonderful. I wanted to just take a minute and thank you for holding for all that you’ve shared with us today, your journey, the way that you go about creating content, the way that you go about thinking about the business, sharing with us, the acquisition that you went through and everything else that you’ve shared. It’s really, really been chock full of great information. I appreciate your work and I appreciate your time with us today. Thank you so much.

Charlene Li Thank you for having me.

Peter Winick 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.