Taking Ideas to Scale Through Thought Leadership with Rhea Wessel and Peter Winick – Clip 4

Source: Taking Ideas to Scale Through Thought Leadership with Rhea Wessel and Peter Winick – Clip 4

Peter Winick was a guest for the Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs’ Thought Leadership Writing Incubator 2023 hosted by Rhea Wessel, Founder and CEO – Institute for Thought Leadership.

Transcript

Yes, I was going to ask about the importance of writing a book in the journey to thought leadership.

Yeah, so I’ll take the consultant’s play on that – it depends. So, um, for an individual author, thought leader, etc., traditionally, it was really, really important to do. It’s less so now. At the organizational level, it also depends.

So, a book is a heavy lift. So, I again, I love books, but I look at a book and I look at a book a little bit differently. And I look at it and say, okay, so that represents six or nine months of somebody’s time. That represents, you know, x amount of dollars, x amount of energy. Is that the most effective way right now, today, for that person to achieve those goals? Right? It is a mass-market tool. Is the market big enough to warrant the book?

I’ve never written a book, right? Because my market’s not big enough to warrant it, in my opinion. There are other ways for me to reach my market that are more effective. Right?

You know, I had a client that wrote a book, that spent a year and a half writing a book that was 600 pages on Corporate Social Responsibility 10 years ago that was so technical and so wonky that nobody would buy the damn thing. But I came in and said, wait a minute, hold on a second, like you already did this. So we can’t undo what’s done, but let’s get this book in the hands of the 500 people that control the largest Corporate Social Responsibility budgets in the world. Let’s just get it in their hands and see if good things happen.

So, I think books are great, but is it the right tactic to, you know, does it warrant the investment that it will inevitably take? And there are other reasons intrinsically you might want to say, ah, but I have to get this out of me. Okay, that’s fine, that’s cool.