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Organizational Thought Leadership Strategy | Surya Kolluri
Creating an effective strategy for your organizational thought leadership.
An interview with Surya Kolluri about strategies for forming partnerships, making content, and delivering it to your audience in an effective manner.
Today’s guest is Surya Kolluri, the managing director at Bank of America leading Thought Leadership efforts for retirement and personal wealth business services with a deep strategy background.
Surya chats with Bill about how Bank of America is forming partnerships with groups you might not typically associate with banking to create valuable thought leadership to help their clients through various life stages. Surya shares how he is leading the team to act as a bridge between their researchers and the clients looking for solutions to complicated problems. Plus, we discuss best practices for delivering your thought leadership so that is not only remembered but used.
Three Key Takeaways from the Interview:
- Why organizational thought leaders should seek to form partnerships with other groups to leverage leading thinkers outside of their own company.
- How thought leaders can create deeper and emotional connections to their clients.
- What methods thought leaders should consider for the delivery of their message to colleagues, associates, and the outside world.
Creating an organizational thought leadership strategy within your organization can be difficult on your own. Do you need help coming up with a plan to create new partnerships? If you want to transform your organizational thought leadership, reach out to Thought Leadership Leverage.
Join the Organizational Thought Leadership Newsletter to learn more about expanding thought leadership within your organization! This monthly newsletter is full of practical information, advice, and ideas to help you reach your organization’s thought leadership goals.
Transcript
Bill Sherman Hello and welcome to Leveraging Thought Leadership. I’m your host, Bill Sherman. And today we talk about one of my passions organizational thought leadership. That is the people who create, curate and deploy thought leadership on the behalf of their organization. My guest today is Surya Kolluri, the managing director at Bank of America. He leads thought leadership efforts for the retirement and personal wealth business services. He comes to thought leadership with a deep strategy. Background 14 years as a strategy management consultant at Bain and at Carney, then at Bank of America. He was head of strategy and also ran a business unit. Welcome, Syria.
Surya Kolluri Bill, thank you very much. Terrific opportunity. And I’m looking forward to our conversation.
Bill Sherman Great. So let’s start with the question of how did you get here? How did you get into the world of thought leadership?
Surya Kolluri Yeah, Bill, it’s a great question. I would almost say I couldn’t have predicted that this happened. I took the traditional path of the Business School of Lincoln Management Consulting for many years, as you said, Fawcett and Carney and then at Bain and Company. And I transition over to a better America to run strategy for our wealth management business. And over the years of having done many roles, our business unit leader had asked if I could, you know, develop some partnerships with various institutions to develop research. In those days, we did not even call it thought leadership. I think the term thought leadership has come into vogue in the last couple of years. So it was just a gradual transition. I did not know what would turn out to be, but it has been a fantastic journey.
Bill Sherman So you said you were asked to develop some partnerships. What were those were and can you give an example of what your first steps into leadership were?
Surya Kolluri Indeed. So they have grown in size and number in depth over the years. But in the beginning, we first developed a relationship with the age lab at M.I.T. and we also developed a relationship with the Central Longevity at Stanford University and in the Pension Research Council at the Wharton Business School. So those three relationships give us a start. And then we founded some partnerships ourselves. And today the number of partnerships is nearly 15, as you figured imagine. And so that allows us to leverage a lot of leading thinkers outside of Bank of America in partnership with us to create thought leadership that is very valuable for our clients.
Bill Sherman And I think that’s one thing that’s very important most. And we’ll get into team and team structure. But most thought leadership teams within an organization are relatively small themselves, so they have to build partnerships with other people inside the organization as well as reach beyond the organization to build partnerships so that you can create impact, right?
Surya Kolluri Indeed. In fact, the metaphor I would use, Bill, is, I think a thought leader in a corporate environment is almost like on a bridge. On one side might be the researchers doing research on important issues. On the other hand, it might be folks within corporations trying to develop solutions for clients. And the person on the bridge, the thought leader, the corporate leader, brings those two worlds together so that important problems are solved. Using data and research and valuable solutions are then created for clients. So, you know, in other words, if you built this whole team in the corporate environment, that’s not going to be as nimble as being on the bridge and pulling folks together.
Bill Sherman And I want to explore there a little bit deeper. You have that. Depth of knowledge and strategy. Right. And you’ve led strategy. And what I would like to ask is people come to thought leadership from different perspectives. They may come out of content marketing and move into thought leadership. They may come from product. You’ve come from strategy. How does your past either working in strategy or as a management consultant or even from your engineering background, inform the work that you do today?
Surya Kolluri Yeah. And the way I would like to frame that is in terms of a time horizon. So if you think of an engineer who is either constructing something or designing something, it’s for an immediate use. If you think about a strategist, which I’ve played the role for many years, you know, helping maybe create strategic plans, you might have a 3 to 5 year old. The way I think about a thought leadership role is to think about even longer time horizons, thinking about megatrends. So one megatrend might be the aging of the global population. That’s a 3 or 5 year story. That’s a 15, 20 year story. And how do you think about positioning an organization, positioning the community, positioning societies within that megatrend? And there would be all kinds of megatrends that could be technology, megatrends, etc.. So a thought leader really looks around the corner to the future and positions to take advantage of opportunities or mitigate challenges.
Bill Sherman Well, and there’s something fascinating there. So we’re often focused on the pipeline for sales for the month or the quarter. And different business units have different time horizons, right? And so marketing sales are the most short term often. And then, like you said, strategy of 3 to 5 years and you’re even further out looking and asking that question. But I know you play an interesting role within Bank of America in terms of working with front line sales and marketing. So how do you use some of the work from looking around the corner in the future to inform what’s going on today?
Surya Kolluri Yeah, Bill, that’s a great question. And let me give you a tangible example.
Bill Sherman Please.
Surya Kolluri One of the focus areas that we have in Bank of America is to help clients leave, which are better financial lives. We are a bank and we think about it that way. And we’ve identified life stages that we go through and looked at financial opportunities and challenges people have as they go through the stages. So you can imagine if we are focused on this aging megatrend, then if you could break that aging, that 100 year life into life stages, people can think about now how to navigate those. So that’s an example of how what’s a megatrend that, you know, you have a long horizon on is broken down into how our advisors and our product development colleagues could think about helping along those lines.
Bill Sherman So can you give an example of how those life cycles come to be and what sort of impact are they creating?
Surya Kolluri Yeah. So think about it this way. One of the big topics that folks have to think about is, for example, the topic of caregiving. So particularly in today’s time, an age when we are all isolated, you can imagine elders in the family are even more so isolated with family members not being able to visit them and help them. So caregiving is a high priority. And so a lot of our research is focused on how can we help our advisors, help our clients provide information and resources such that caregiving can be properly done. Not only are we doing that for our clients, but the bank is also doing it for our own associates. So caregiving. So you would not imagine caregiving suddenly being a topic of importance within the financial services organization. But here it is, thanks to our ability to think about what are the needs clients have. And one of the big here.
Bill Sherman So let me push this a little bit further. So if I’m a financial advisor, I may be used to saying, okay, here’s a topic. I’ve got a meeting with a client coming up. I look in a set of file folders and I pull something, whether it’s a one pager on a topic or a document that just helps me prepare for that conversation. But that material could be content marketing in some ways, right? How do you help the financial advisor elevate the conversation and really create a meaningful experience between the financial advisor and the client? Can you give me an example of that?
Surya Kolluri Yeah. Well, one of the things we have done is created training for advisors on the topic of gerontology. So imagine that, that you’re not a pharmaceutical or a health care oriented organization. You’re a financial services organization. Yet in partnership with the University of Southern California, Leonard David School of Gerontology have created a gerontology certificate. That advisers could take and go to eight modules, you know, take some tests and come back out of it with a certificate, which gives them a lot of confidence to have a very different conversation with clients.
Bill Sherman So give me an example of how the thought leadership team supports financial advisors. Right. What can you do that downloading, say, a content marketing piece can’t do, for example.
Surya Kolluri So it’s a terrific question, Bill. And so I’ll give you an example. In addition to the training, we also do events for clients with advisers. So I remember an occasion in the Midwest where we did an event on the topic of cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s, which is a rather specific topic. And we did that in partnership. We have a financial gerontologist on my team. So we hit the fracture zone, just myself and a corporation that is very involved in this Alzheimer’s area. And so together we did a panel and the advisor had their practice and their clients and their families. I did this event and you can imagine the topic of Alzheimer’s being discussed with a Bank of America Merrill Lynch brand. And at the end of it, we got a lot of feedback from clients who said, Hey, thank you for putting this topic on the table that we were reluctant to discuss with the family. But now that the topic is on the table and we can discuss much more openly how we structure the communication and finances within the family to attend to this issue. So that’s a specific example of how and many of the topics you take to clients include things like, like I said before, caregiving or Social Security and other topics.
Bill Sherman I think that’s a great example. And that emotional connection that thought leadership can create where you can be relevant on a much deeper level and create, in some cases, deep loyalty where you created the opportunity for a family to have a conversation that they were struggling to have on their own Right. And opening that door.
Surya Kolluri Indeed. So what are their life stages? I was talking about life stages before and what are the life stages is around widowhood. You can imagine if you’re talking about emotion and complexity, that is really emotional in a complex situation. And I was not sure how that study would be received. But I can tell you, once we launched it and the feedback we received is, to your point, very emotionally resonant, which opens the door to have broader, deeper conversations and build a relationship with the client.
Bill Sherman It moves from transactional to relational in a true and meaningful way. When you’re standing behind someone at a truly difficult point in their life. Right.
Surya Kolluri Exactly. Exactly. And to our delight journey, there are such life events. Birth of a child, purchase of a home, retirement. Right. And each of those points you should be able to make an emotional connection with.
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Bill Sherman So you talked about being that bridge. Let’s go talk about the relationship that you have with the external research partners and how you work to create thought leadership in collaboration with them. What is that process like and how are you aligning the efforts between Bank of America Merrill Lynch and those research institutions?
Surya Kolluri Well, you know, there are many, many, many examples, as you can imagine with my team. Some some work as proprietary, some work as the sponsor. But let me give you just one example to illustrate the point. So one of our partners that we work with is the journal The Logical Society of America, GSK. And over the past few years, we’ve done a series of studies with them. So one is around the topic of the longevity economy. So as people are getting older, what is the economics associated with this older population? Very successful. And then last year, we did a study on longevity fitness, which is if you’re going to live your lives, how do we stay fit socially? How do we stay fit physically and mentally? And then, of course, how do we stay fit financially and holistically? All those pieces fit for these successful longer lives. So that’s an example of a series of studies that we are doing. We’re doing one more this year with them. And similarly to that are the partners. So we identify a topic. We put together a board of advisors. We have a professional writer through a lot of research, surveying, etc., and put together.
Bill Sherman And I think that’s a good example where, as you said, with the longer time horizon, you can ask the deeper questions and say, what does this mean and have time to explore them. Right.
Surya Kolluri Exactly right.
Bill Sherman So we’ve talked about partnerships. We’ve talked about relationship with Frontline. Let’s talk about how Ford leadership supports senior leadership and creates opportunities for senior leadership. What are you doing with your leadership? How does that work and how do you help them communicate a thought leadership message?
Surya Kolluri Well, this might be one of the important considerations of thought leadership that you’ve raised, which is thought leadership can not only create great content for advisors to different clients, we also position the entire organization, position our senior leaders as being able to differentiate your organization in the marketplace. So, so high visibility events, if you have the right content, is possible. So I’ll give you two examples. One was in 2014, the White House held a conference on aging. And given our work and our thought leadership, you were invited. The head of our business was invited to the West Wing to make a presentation that was broadcast around the nation. Another example personally for me is I was invited to a convening of the G20 last year in Japan to share our thought leadership. Similarly, there was a similar economy forum in Helsinki where the head of my business was invited last year. So huge global platforms where we can share our research that differentiates us in the market would be one way in which senior leaders are able to leverage what we’re able to produce in the top leadership.
Bill Sherman And so there’s a couple of different functions there. There’s one getting that opportunity to speak at that stage, whether that’s the West Wing or the G20. So opening that door for the opportunity to speak. The next one is what do you say during that opportunity? How do you make the most of that opportunity? And I think that ties nicely to thought leadership strength to be able to identify which ideas do we spotlight? Which ones do we put in that showcase right now?
Surya Kolluri And also importantly, it is not that we have a better product to sell, right? It is like, here’s an idea that helps the world. Here’s an idea that helps people along their life stages. So you really elevate the level of dialog that we’re able to have.
Bill Sherman And when you’re at those events, you have opportunities for connections. And so what I’ve seen with top leadership as well is when you’re at an event, you’ve got those five minute pull asides where you talk with someone and those connections spark ideas that can generate further opportunities. And so thought leadership really can serve nicely as that strategic hub where you’re looking and saying, what ideas do we need to get out there? What ideas does the world need to understand and digest, and how do we help an idea reach scale?
Surya Kolluri Bill, I want to go straight to your very important point. This might be the most important point that we’re making with an example. So I was at a World Economic Forum convening at the University of Pennsylvania, what, two years ago, which was at the intersection of health care and financial services. So was there a study group participating, a panel, etc.. But I was sitting at a table next to the CEO of the Geological Society of America. Right. To your point, it was a five, ten minute conversation. And that led to the example I gave earlier about the studies we have done with them on longevity, economy and longevity fitness. So they all came out of that networking where you paid attention and you made the connection and it led to something.
Bill Sherman Well, and that’s a perfect example of if you weren’t there or if you sat next to the person but didn’t speak to them or you just talked about, hey, how’s the coffee or busy day to day, what do you think of the session? You would have missed opportunities. And so thought leadership, whether it’s senior leadership level or down at the front line, really can serve as a way to fuel future conversations or sustain a conversation when it’s not a sales conversation.
Surya Kolluri I totally agree. So talk to me a.
Bill Sherman Little bit about your team. What is your team look like? Who’s on it? And I’m guessing you’re relatively lean as a team. So who’s on the team and how do you get done with all the stuff that you have to get done?
Surya Kolluri Yeah, so you’re exactly right. I’d like to position the team as nimble.
Bill Sherman Okay. Okay.
Surya Kolluri And so we get a lot done. And so it’s a fairly senior team, so they’re mature and they can run their work on their particular lanes. But the way we have structured it is we have a we have the financial gerontologist that I describe what is about all these living longer type of issues and caregiving, etc.. We have another person who thinks about the topic of ESG, environmental, social and governance factors, which is a big topic that we are researching and delivering on. Another person thinks about employee benefits. So if you think about, you know, your business, the retirement business, we serve many institutions and many employees of those institutions. So what’s on the minds of employees? What’s in the minds of employers? And how do you bridge that gap? So there’s another person who does that. And we also have people who work on Social Security and Medicare and health care, cost of the issues. So we cover the waterfront and then we have the services of analysts, of course. But then given that we are a larger organization with lots of support, partners in marketing and communications and finance, etc.. So virtually, you know, we punch well above our weight.
Bill Sherman And now you’re responsible as leader for a team doing thought leadership. How do you see your role as sort of the leader of thought leadership within a team as well as the role with your colleagues within the organization? What’s your role?
Surya Kolluri Yeah. So what I would say is, you know, it’s kind of three fold. One is, as we have talked about before, build deep, enduring, well-regarded partnerships. To have a top leadership agenda and relentlessly pursue it and get it done. But if you only did the first two, it’s a binder on a bookshelf. So the third piece is how do you deliver it to your colleagues so they can use it? How do you deliver it to your associates so they can use it in their personal lives? And then finally, how do you take it to the outside world and influence the agenda in the outside world that you interact with? And that delivery function needs to be very strong. But if you only did the third piece, then you’re just talking with no content. If you only did the first piece, you have only content in our talking. And so you need you need both the creation of the content and the delivery of the content. So you need to be able to do both.
Bill Sherman And that’s one of the reasons when I think about organizational thought leadership, it’s about create, curate, which is your strategy component, and then deploy it. Get it into the hands where it will spread, it will reach scale and produce impact.
Surya Kolluri And this is what we call that deployment, right? Please. It can’t be. It can be a tool. It can be a idealizing long white paper. It should be like the podcast that you and I are doing. What are those thin slices that you can get out into people’s hands? What are the talking points? What are the graphics? What are the snippets? What are the bullet points that busy executives and busy frontline colleagues can leverage in their trucks? Frustrating conversations and their calculation of conversations?
Bill Sherman Well, and that’s one of the challenges of thought leadership, isn’t it? Where you’re trying to take forward thinking topics, things that people aren’t talking about today and distill it down to an infographic or a slide or a short moment in a podcast. Right. And how do you create a sense of urgency so people start thinking about it and that they understand. And there’s a very difficult messaging challenge to take something forward thinking and complex because it’s there’s the old Mark Twain quote where he said, I apologize that I wrote you a long letter because I did not have the time to write a short one. In today’s short attention span world, we have to make the complex accessible when people aren’t thinking about it in a short window.
Surya Kolluri I’d like to call them snackable bites. Yep. And let me give you an example of a snack place right now. So when me talk about people living longer. And here’s a snackable bite. A baby born today has a 1 in 3 chance of living to the age hundred. And a baby girl born today has a 1 in 2 chance of. Wow. Right. So there’s. Yeah.
Bill Sherman Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then that opens the question of, well, if you have a newborn, what does that mean and how do you plan for her chance that she’s going to live to be 100 which is now a 5050 chance.
Surya Kolluri Exactly.
Bill Sherman For a new parent thinking about their children’s future, that’s game changing where it’s like, yeah, they’ll be around in 21, 22.
Surya Kolluri Exactly.
Bill Sherman Exactly How. So I want to close with one last question. If you were to give a bit of advice and there are many people now who are joining the world of thought leadership in organizations and they’re taking on a full leadership role either as a practitioner or a leader of a leadership team. What is a piece of advice that you would give to a new practitioner or leader of a thought leadership team?
Surya Kolluri Yeah. So I think it’s twofold. The first is be very comfortable with ambiguity. So it is not a predefined role like a product manager or a marketing executive, etc.. So it is what you make of it. And so be prepared for the person who appointed that will not have a clear definition of what our leadership is. That’s how it was for me. I made with the help of my senior colleagues what it is today over a period of time by many trials. So some discomfort with strategic ambiguity, but to focus on deliverables, create things, create content, create insights that are usable. So, you know, no need to go conquer the world, but have deliverables along the way. And as you keep delivering them and as you get comfortable with that ambiguity, new opportunities are present themselves. And then you go capture those. So those would be the twin pieces of advice I would give.
Bill Sherman Thank you, sir. This has been a great conversation. I really appreciate you joining us today.
Surya Kolluri Bill, thank you very much.
Bill Sherman If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please join our LinkedIn group. Organizational Thought Leadership. It’s a professional community where thought leadership practitioners talk shop about our field. So if you’re someone who creates curates or deploys thought leadership for your organization, then please join the conversation in the organizational thought Leadership LinkedIn.
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