Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 85 – Daniel Pink

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What are the building blocks of effective thought leadership? Is it all about content, or does it require a more personal investment to build your brand?

Daniel Pink, New York Times bestselling author of “When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing,” and “To Sell is Human,” is our guest in this episode. Listen in as Daniel and Peter delve into the cyclical nature of business books, what agents really want, how to manage the publishing industry, and what it takes to build a successful content business.

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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.

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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 our podcast today, Leveraging Thought Leadership. I am thrilled, I’m delighted today to have with us Dan Pink. And I’ll give you a quick intro to Dan if you don’t know who he is. Dan’s the author of six provocative books, including his newest, which is When, The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, which spent four months on the New York Times bestseller list. His other books include the long-running New York times bestsellers, A Whole New Mind, and the number one New York Times bestseller, Drive, and To Sell is Human. His books have won multiple awards. They’ve been translated into 39 languages. He lives in DC with his wife and three kids. Little known facts or somewhat little known facts. He was a speech writer to Al Gore for years and he’s been in the top 15 on the Thinkers 50 for six years running, which is a pretty impressive run there. So welcome, Dan, welcome aboard. Thank you, Peter. So how do you go from? sort of your background and then law school and all that to blink fast forward it’s 20 years, New York Times best seller, keynote speaker, blah blah blah. How the hell does that happen?

Daniel Pink Really, as with most things in life, in a half-assed, unpredictable, chaotic way, it took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up. And so I went a fairly conventional path in that I, you know, I did, as you mentioned, I did go to law school. Once I was in law school, I realized that I wasn’t really cut out for the practice of law. It wasn’t, really, like, my strength, what I was interested in. So I started working in politics and… politics, something that at the time I was deeply interested in. And I just kind of fell into speech writing, as is often the case. I mean, and this is some of the advice that I give to young people is like, if something needs to get done, and no one else wants to do it, raise your hand. And so for me, I think it happened when somebody needed like I was working in campaigns and other kinds of jobs and somebody needed to speech I need the speech in… there’s, you know, whoever that was in charge turned around and saw me first and said, Hey, can you do that? And wisely, I said, Yeah, I can do that having no idea how to do it. And never done it before, right? Yeah. And then and then I did it reasonably well. And then they said, hey, you want to do again? I said okay, you wanna do it again? Okay, and suddenly that was my job. Anyway. But I ended up leaving that world after several years for two key reasons. Number one is that I realized I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life working in politics. And number two is that I realized I was much more of a writer than I ever had imagined throughout my life from the time that I was in high school even to college, into law school, into even jobs that I had when I was 30 years old. I was always, quote unquote, writing on the side. I was writing magazine articles, newspaper columns, and things like that. I did it as like a hobby in the same way that people play golf, and it never occurred, and it finally occurred to me, you know, thanks in part to the product of my wife, this thing that I was doing on the site, essentially for no money, was really what I did and what I was about, and so. 20 years ago, 21 years ago I left that job and decided to go out on my own saying, hey, I’m going to figure out whether I can make it right in my own stuff. And, you know, it wasn’t this wild and wooly leap into the future because my wife had a job. She didn’t give up her job. She didn’t give up our health insurance. And so I just started following, you know, doing what I was interested in because I figured if I was interested in something, a lot of people would be interested in it. And that’s pretty much how it, that’s That’s pretty much the tail. It wasn’t as if… And I mean, again, again not to belabor this, but you know, I think I have two kids in college, and so they’re at the stage in life when they’re thinking about, hey, what do I want to do? Where’s my you know what I want to do for work? What kind of contribution do I wanna make to the world? And you know want to try to emphasize to them and any other, you know young person who against their better judgment might seek me out for advice is to say, you know, it’s very. Things are very unpredictable. Life takes a lot of swerves and turns. And so don’t go crazy just trying to map out everything. Just do great work, be a good person, learn, learn and learn and be nimble enough to take advantage of opportunities.

Peter Winick Great advice. So a couple of things I want to sort of put out there. So now you take the stab at writing. It’s worked out well, I should say. One of the things that you do differently than most and actually differently that I advise my clients is you don’t stick to the same thing. So there’s very few people that sort of break what I call sort of the rule of being the X guy and the leadership is solve for X. Marcus Buckingham is the guy. Keith Ferazzi is the relationship guy. Daniel Pink is not an ex-guy, right? So you go from sales to drive to timing, yet it seems to work for very few people. It works for you, it works for Gladwell, works for Godin, but tell me, contradict me a little bit, like how come the why not being the ex-guy has worked for you?

Daniel Pink My honest answer is I don’t know and but again, I mean, I’m seriously Peter and it wasn’t as if There was a conscious strategic decision not to be the X guy

Peter Winick Yeah. All right.

Daniel Pink All right, so again, so I don’t want to, you know, you’re sort of seeing my schema here. My bias is that things are much more random and uncertain and unpredictable and nonlinear than we realize. And when we look back on them in retrospect, we see patterns that might be true, but that weren’t necessarily intentional. All of which is to say that for me, writing a book is so freaking hard. It’s so hard, as your clients know, as you know, Peter, it’s so that I only wanna work on something that I’m deeply, deeply interested in. And so most things, most ideas that I have or that might be interested in exploring, don’t scale that bar. They don’t satisfy that. And so, and what for me, and maybe not for other people is I don’t wanna be one of those people who writes the same book. every three years. And you know that that is out there.

Peter Winick Well, that used to be the formula where you talk about, and I won’t name names, but like, oh, so-and-so is awesome. They’ve written 32 books. And I’m like, well, it’s kind of the same book. They’ve wrote one book 32 times. Exactly. They’ve written one book 32 times.

Daniel Pink Or they might have to be more generous. They’ve two books 16 times. Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. And I’m sort of agnostic on that as a strategy, but in terms of, maybe I’m more narcissistic than strategic in that I don’t want to do that because it’s boring to me. So narcissism trumps strategy. Maybe narcissism.

Peter Winick is a strategy. Who knows? So I like that. But let me show you. So what’s interesting here is, you know, when you put something out, I don’t mean to sort of be overly flattering as people who know me will go ahead.

Daniel Pink Oh, go ahead. No, please do.

Peter Winick Yeah, no, okay. I’ll make an exception. You know, it’s good. I look forward to it, right? So and I never know what it’s gonna be most folks you can predict sort of at least from a path or a direction What might be next for them, but you’re coming out, you know, you go from Drive Which is motivation to sales like well where’d that come from and now it’s like timing of effectively doing things life hacking However, you want to sort of bucket that and what’s interesting is not only is it really good and you can tell you’re A lifelong learner. You’re a curious guy. You doing your homework. You during your research, etc But the fact that it stays on the best seller list for months and months and month, leads me to know, and not just believe, but to know that this isn’t some jiggered, artificial, let’s do a campaign blip, it hits screenshot, Amazon best seller, three in the morning. Oh.

Daniel Pink Oh, no, no no no

Peter Winick It’s the real deal. So I think back that it’s market validation from that perspective is interesting But from a business side so flip to the business side here of you know Dan has time to spend and Dan can do lots of different things One would argue hey the effective thing to do Dan is you know be the drive guy and go go go go, um, because you almost have to reinvent the not reinvent, but once you come out with a new piece of content It’s a little bit of a different audience. It’s different speech Will it work in a speaking environment? Not everything sort of parlays into the other. modalities that you can monetize your content in. But it seems like you’re somewhat, you know, car, it’ll work out? Or how do you think through those things?

Daniel Pink I mean, I don’t want to sound Pollyanna-ish about this, and I don’ want to give the impression that I’m not thinking strategically about how I earn a living, all right? But I really don’t pay a huge amount of attention to that, because I feel like, if I do good work that I believe in, then I’m gonna be personally satisfied. And if I’m doing good work that I believe in. the work itself is gonna be good. And I am relentless enough about promoting the work that it’s gonna work out. I’m not, so I’m one of these, so for instance, when I, so, I have a book, I read a book. I have, I’ve been with Riverhead Books, part of Penguin for, ever since A Whole New Mind. So this is, Wynn, that’s latest book, is the fifth book I’ve done with them. I have another book that I’m doing for them. I love them. When and and I and I have and I’ve been working with the same publicist for several years now. She’s extraordinary But I say to her You send me Wherever you want you have me do whatever you think is best to publicize this book Within reason I will go anywhere and do anything. So it isn’t as if I say oh If I just put my heart and soul into producing good work, then the world will come to it. No freaking way I put my heart and soul into producing work that I’m proud of. And then blood, sweat and tears to get it out there. And then relentlessly try to get the word out there

Peter Winick And I think that’s interesting because the only thing harder than writing an amazing book is getting it to be successful. And a lot of people get fearful, reluctant, I don’t want to be salesy, whatever. But if you have a publicist that you trust, or other resources that you use internally, whatever.

Daniel Pink since I revere.

Peter Winick Yeah, which is awesome which is unusual because most people when you tell me about your publicist that you know Yeah, review is usually not the word that comes up. Yeah, but that comes from experience and you’ve worked together a long time You know what it takes and you got this rhythm and you say I’m tell me where to go and I’m gonna do it Because I need to work as equally hard getting this book out into the world, you know as I did in writing it No, oftentimes run out of gas there.

Daniel Pink Absolutely

Peter Winick Give me a sense then, you know, the other thing that you mentioned there, which is unusual in today’s world, is a long-term relationship with your publishers. So I don’t know when a whole new mind came up and said, a dozen years ago, how old?

Daniel Pink Uh, that came out in, jeez Louise, yeah, you’re about right. I think it came out of 2005.

Peter Winick Okay, so the publishing world, very different then. That’s the ancient, Google it if you’re under a certain age, that’s pre-Twitter, books at that point was a physical item that landed with a thud and whatever, it was the Flintstones and all that. If you’ve been with the same publisher, I would assume that they’ve evolved and what would you be telling someone today to look for in a publisher? Be that traditional, the path you went, or some of the other options that are out there today.

Daniel Pink If you’re looking for a traditional publisher from the handful of remaining big publishing houses and the several dozen quality commercial imprints out there, I guess I would look for three things. I have to say, the two main things would be, do you have an editor who’s going to make your book better and is the house, that is, is the team there really all in on the book? Like, are they really behind this thing? Or is it gonna be one of 14 cans of corn that they stack on a shelf to see which one grocery store shoppers buy?

Peter Winick So how do you know that? Because editor is fairly easy. That’s more objective than subjective to say someone’s a great editor or not. But how do I know, you know, how do get a sense of whether the team’s phoning it in or not?

Daniel Pink This is, okay, it’s a great question. So this is why it’s important to have an agent you believe in and an agent that you trust and an agency who is smart. So I’ve had the same agent for 20 years. Awesome. I can’t imagine writing a book without this particular literary agent, a guy named Ralph Segalin. Sure. So that’s important because that can be, that in many ways is a writer’s most enduring relationship because of turnover and publishing houses because of As you know, Peter, consolidation of publishing houses, et cetera, et cetera. The appearance and disappearance of imprints. The other thing you can do is, and again, I guess I can advise other writers about this, is that… You know, books are a business. And if you are in the book business, you should pay attention to the book businesses. No kidding. What’s selling? What’s not selling? What kind of things are getting publicity? Wow. Look at all these kinds of books. These books are all getting like a lot of coverage and publicity. Wait a second. They all come from Riverhead or they all come from Knaf or they all come from. Uh, you know, they all have been blessed by john carp or whatever, you know, that’s a great point. Pay attention.

Peter Winick Pay attention to the business and there’s also a cyclical nature So, you know, I don’t know if you remember but right before the market crashed in 08 Every third book on the business shelf had the word happy in right happiness advantage and happy

Daniel Pink Absolutely.

Peter Winick And it was great because everybody was happy because we over-mortgaged our homes and we were driving fancy cars and then the shit hit the fan. And the next wave of books were about resilience, where zero, the new growth and so we went through a period of resilience. So there is a level of cyclical nature to the trends in the business book and it’s almost like if you’re in the fashion business and whatever the fashion this year is skirts above the knee and you’re coming out with a long skirt going, geez, I wonder why that didn’t work. like there’s something around the trends. Does and don’t totally totally right because I think to some degree you’re not shaping your content to following a trend You’re being aware of it to understand sort of the competition and what’s being consumed and what not and all that other stuff

Daniel Pink That’s a really good point, and let me just add one thing, because again, I don’t want to convey the idea that, oh, I hope I’m not, that’s like, oh I just do what lights my fire and let the chips fall where they… You know what I mean? You’re an East Coast guy. That’s West Coast way of thinking. You’re like…Yeah, I mean, here’s the thing. It’s like, I actually think if you do something you really love and put your heart and soul into it, that’s actually the building blocks of an effective business. It’s necessary, it’s not always sufficient. And so I do pay attention to those kinds of trends. So if I were to, I don’t necessarily, it doesn’t necessarily shape, it doesn’t shape what I do, but it might shape what don’t do. Okay, so it’s like, Oh, you know what, here’s a book on on

Peter Winick But innovation’s hot for a while.

Daniel Pink Yeah exactly so here’s so like maybe but it’s like oh wait a second I feel like that like that orange has already been squeezed.

Peter Winick Or you might also feel like I really don’t, I’m not all that curious about that topic and I don’t know if I have anything to add to it and I don’t.

Daniel Pink That’s another impromptu point to I’m with you on that. I wish more writers would say, I wish more writers will say, what do I have to contribute to this conversation?

Peter Winick And I always say, just the world need another book on sales or execution. If you’re not adding to the conversation in a really unique and different way, then who cares? We don’t need another leadership book on the shelf.

Daniel Pink Yeah, although there’s an insatiable demand for leadership books, that’s what I found.

Peter Winick For, yeah, but.

Daniel Pink I’m not going to write them, but there’s an insatiable demand for them.

Peter Winick Good ones which are few and far between.

Daniel Pink That’s true.

Peter Winick I want to pivot to, you know, another important sort of leg in the stool, if you will, which is the speaking world. So if you think about, you’ve been at this for 20 years now, and that was a time when the agents pretty much ran the business. I see sort of the Louis B. Meyer with a big cigar back in the Hollywood days. It wasn’t quite that bad. So the agents are important, but a lot of people are booking business directly. How do you, just give us sort of a high level, how do you think that for you and what works for you and what doesn’t work for you?

Daniel Pink I’m glad you asked the question in terms of what works for me because I think what works for me might not work for everybody and other people’s mileage may vary. I, both in the literary world and in the speaking world, I like having an agent. I like someone who represents me. I know that I myself am a better advocate for other people than I am for myself.

Peter Winick So when you said that you’re talking about the awkwardness of negotiating on your own behalf and finding out about all that stuff, which is a little funky.

Daniel Pink Exactly. I would much rather have someone else do that. And I even know that I am actually can be a reasonably effective advocate if I’m advocating for someone else. So I have had, again, the writing is central to everything. Without the writing, nothing exists. And it isn’t what I don’t because I think it’s… pollutes the pond of books and it screws readers is people who write a book merely to have it as a calling card for other lines of business. It’s like, oh, I need that book to establish credibility to be a consultant. I need the book to have so that when I try to sell speaking services, I can say I wrote a book.

Peter Winick So it’s a check the box.

Daniel Pink Right, right, right. So for me, if you think about it, you know, if you think of it as a circle at the white hot center of it is writing. And if that goes away, nothing exists. It just it collapses into that hole. Now for the for the speaking, which is a subsidy, or it’s a spoke on that wheel. I like I’ve had the same speakers agent for like 13 years now. Yeah, the and Speakers Bureau. Great, folks. And, again, I… like working with people who are smart and have integrity and do great work and care. And I’ve found that they do that. And so that’s work for me. I can understand why, again, I don’t want to say that’s the only way to do it because there is something to be said for, you know, if someone is in huge demand, there’s something to said for her booking the deals herself and not paying the commission. Definitely. Definitely.

Peter Winick Well, especially if you’re investing in the launch of a book, let’s say, and as a byproduct of that, people are leaning in and saying, oh, can you come and do my conference or you come and this and come and that. In that instance, the agent isn’t really adding value to the equation. It’s more of a concierge service or a convenience or whatever. And I think it really depends. You’re at a different place and you can do this for a long time and you’ve got a brand and you got a reputation and all that. And I like the way that you framed it is what works for you. you know, you’re a long-term guy.

Daniel Pink Yeah. And again, people have different views. There are plenty of people out there who don’t go exclusively with one speakers agency who spread it around to people who do it directly. You know, it’s like, you know, I think that if I’m if I am in a position to offer advice to people are contemplating this, it is like try out different ways and see what works for you. Great.

Peter Winick One of the things you keep going back to, which I think is correct, is the power and the strength and it all sits on the foundation of writing, which is based on not some formula that says if your last book rocked, then come out with version two of that and version three of that, version four of that. You’re coming out with things that you’re passionate about. Have there been times where you thought something would be really exciting, interesting, whatever, you spend a bunch of time thinking about it and going, yeah, this sucks, I’m going to just scrap it and start all over again? Not a chapter, but a whole Can you give an example?

Daniel Pink I don’t know if I want to give an example of the topic itself, but that has happened to me, Peter, many, many many, partly because sometimes an idea isn’t good at that moment.

Peter Winick It’s a TED Talk, or it’s just a TED talk.

Daniel Pink Yeah, exactly. Some of those things have turned into articles and whatnot. But yeah, that’s happened to me many times. And so, for instance, when I do a book, even though I’ve been with the same publisher, I always write a book proposal. I always wrote maybe a 30, 40-page book proposal, and the reason I do that is to… It’s easy to say, hey… I’ve got an idea, I should write a book about blabity blah, and right, it sounds great. And you feel that warm glow. And you say people, hey, I got a book about blabbity blah. And I can talk about blah, blah, and blah. Everyone says, that sounds really cool, Dan, you know, and you’re like, great, that’s what I’m gonna do. That’s thin, to put it mildly. And so what I do is I will write a proposal, saying, here’s the book I’m going to write. Here’s generally what I think it’s about. Here is how I’m going to go about writing. and reporting and researching it. Here’s why to your earlier point, Peter, know it’s unique in the marketplace. Here is who the audience for this book is. Here is the rough timetable of how I’m gonna write it, blah, blah, and I will write that 30 page document. And what that does more than anything else is it tests it for me. And there have been, as you say, as you were intuited at least. There have been several times where I’ve started doing that and, you know, I literally wrote, you know, 25 page proposal and said, you know what, this is not a book or there’s no there or yeah, there’s no there or good God. Like this is this board, the shit out of me. Imagine doing it for 350 pages rather than 25 pages. And I had a moment, I was, so I’ll give you, so this is several years ago, because I remember where I was. I was actually working in a different office. We lived in a different house. So I’m picturing the scene. So this might have been in like 20 or, I don’t know, maybe a little bit before Whole New Mind, somewhere around there. Anyway, so, I really wanted, I had this idea for a book. It was sort of like a book about trends. And I thought it was going to be awesome. I thought I was going rock the house, but I just couldn’t get started writing the proposal. Our kids were littler, and it was around the dark days of winter here on the US East Coast, mid-December, something like that. I said to my wife, I said, let’s do this. I just can’t get on track. Why don’t you take the kids, go see, take them to her parents who live in New Mexico. you know, everybody likes to see the grandparents and the grandparents like to see kids and blah, blah, and what I do, what I will do here is I will just stay in my office for 10 days and just crank. And when my family is gone, I basically live like an animal, you know? Like I eat out of containers and don’t bathe regularly and all that kind of stuff. So. You’re in solitary confinement with pizza and buy food. Totally, yeah, you’ve been there, Peter. So. it’s the eating out of containers that really delights me the most. It’s like, oh, you know, it’s like I’ll, it doesn’t happen that often, but like, I’ll be by myself for say, you know, four or five days and in the entire period, I have used one plate. But anyway, enough about my bad habits. So I sent my wife and our kids away. And after about, I think it was six days, I called my wife, and said, I’ve got some good news and some bad The good news is that you can come home now. The bad news is that this is not a book, but here’s the thing, I’d rather take that hit six days of quote unquote wasted time than commit to doing something that doesn’t work. It turned out that some of the things in that book ended up being other projects, so it wasn’t a complete loss. The idea here is, as I was saying at the top of the show, writing a book is such gigantic pain. It’s so hard, at least for me. It’s it’s really, really, really, really, really hard. It requires enormous effort. It is in some ways. Certain days are like for me are like torture. And so if you got to do something you really like and you really believe in, or else you’re going to be even more miserable.

Peter Winick Well, great stuff. Well, so as we wrap up, we’re running out of time here. Throw out just two or three things to get folks that are in this space, thinking about being in this place, to think about doing that are working for you or to stop doing because you just think it’s silly and not effective.

Daniel Pink Yeah. So on the stop doing, I sort of alluded to this before. I just think that the idea that I’m going to quickly write a bad book and that’s going to be a calling card for lavish income streams on other things is a really bad idea. I have to say, as a writer, it irritates me a little bit when people do that because they come up with a bad book and not pollutes the pond. And so someone picks up their book, a reader picks up their book, and it sucks. And that makes them less likely to pick up my book because they’ve been they’ve had the experience of being disappointed Uh, but leaving that leaving my own You know visceral distaste for that. I think it’s a bad business model I think, it used to be a viable business model. I, think it is no longer a business model So that that would be in the that would, be in, the uh in the don’t category. Um You know in the do category I think there are a lot of dudes, both on the strategic, I mean, even on the sort of the strategic business side, the tactical business side and even the personal side. One of the things that I would recommend on sort of the personal strategic side is pay attention to what’s going on out there. Read books. I’ve always thought that we could cut the number of business books by at least a third if people who wrote business books had approved. that they have read a book before preferably the one they allegedly yeah yeah yeah right so you know so pay attention to what’s going on out there because it’s all about ideas and it’s exciting and you got to know what’s Going on and don’t like you know there’s so many people who out with stuff and it’s like, okay, you realize that 11 books like that over the last five years. So what are you doing? How do you not know that? So pay attention to what’s going on out there. Read widely, listen widely, and so forth. That’s one thing on the personal side. The other thing on a personal side is it’s where being a good person and being a business person often overlap. I do think that there are returns to generosity. that in general, if you help out other people, first of all, that going back to happiness, like one gets a sense of happiness from that and, and you learn from that. And, you know, at some point, maybe down the, you like, like you help about 10 people at some point, maybe. So first of, all you feel good about that, because if they’re decent people, actually, that’s inherently satisfying. But you know who knows one of those 10 people down the road might be in a position to help you out. you know, in eight years or nine years or 10 years. So, be generous. It’s also, I just find it easier to be a little bit generous rather than to be like.

Peter Winick There’s no need to be a jerk. I mean, it’s a great, it was a fun way to make a living. It’s reputational as well. Totally.

Daniel Pink That’s true, too. That’s a good point. That is a tactical benefit of that. But again, it’s like, so anyway, so those like, sort of pay attention and be generous, which I think are generally good habits for any profession. And then, you know, tactically, you know, I would say, it sounds stupid, but like, do work you’re proud of. Well, I agree. Do work you are proud of and that way, if it lands and it’s a success, I think you enhance your chances of it being a commercial success. If it’s not a commercial, at least you have that satisfaction of doing great work.

Peter Winick And don’t waver from that too. This has been awesome, Dan. So I am incredibly thankful that you came on. You’re one of the writers that I enjoyed the most. I can’t wait till your next one comes out. I mean that. Obviously, I read a lot and see a lot. And you do have a phenomenal reputation. Your work’s great. And it’s obviously worked out quite nicely for you. So I appreciate your time. And there’s a lot here that you shared with us. And I would. Yeah. I like the way that you framed it. Hey, it’s worked for me. So it’s not the prescription. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly Five steps to a dominant pink. No way, no way, But thank you. Thank you so much for your time and for your transparency and all that you shared with us today. Appreciate it very much.

Daniel Pink Thank you for having me, Peter. It’s been a lot of fun.

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.com And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.