The Power of a Good Question | Laurence Minsky

 

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Curiosity as a Career Catalyst

In this episode, Laurence Minsky and Bill Sherman discuss the power of identifying knowledge gaps, collaborating with experts, and turning curiosity into content that creates opportunities. Learn how to spot emerging trends, stay relevant, and use thought leadership to open unexpected doors.

What if curiosity could change the course of your career?

Today on Leveraging Thought Leadership, Laurence Minsky shares how a simple question about advertising portfolios led to a book deal for his first book: How to Succeed in Advertising When All You Have is Talent, that transformed his professional path. From launching an advertising career to becoming an academic thought leader, Laurence demonstrates the power of asking the right questions, collaborating with experts, and turning curiosity into action.

Laurence’s story is a roadmap for anyone looking to break into a new industry or expand their influence. He explains how identifying gaps in knowledge and pursuing them relentlessly has driven his career, leading to the publication of ten books and a thriving consulting practice. Whether it’s exploring emerging trends like conversational AI or mastering the nuances of audio branding, Laurence has built a reputation as a lifelong learner who stays ahead of the curve.

And then, Laurence and Bill explore how thought leadership creates unexpected opportunities. They discuss the importance of finding the right collaborators, the role of storytelling in creating impactful content, and how a well-timed idea can position you as a leader in your field. Laurence’s insights on navigating career shifts, adapting to new challenges, and staying relevant in a rapidly changing world will inspire listeners at any stage of their professional journey.

This episode is a must-listen for leaders, creatives, and anyone eager to turn curiosity into success. Learn how to identify trends before they emerge, create meaningful content, and use thought leadership to open doors you never imagined.

Three Key Takeaways

Curiosity Sparks Opportunity: A simple question can lead to big opportunities. Laurence Minsky’s curiosity about advertising portfolios led to a book deal that transformed his career trajectory.

Collaboration Amplifies Success: Partnering with experts and blending skill sets can create impactful content and open doors to new industries or roles.

Thought Leadership Requires Action: Identifying gaps in the market, pursuing emerging trends, and sharing insights are key to staying relevant and creating lasting impact.

Laurence discussing how collaboration is key. If you have a book coming out or are seeking to elevate your platform, consider booking a Strategy Session with the team at Leveraging Thought Leadership to see how we can work together for greater success.

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Transcript

Bill Sherman Today we explore how curiosity and a good question can open unexpected doors. I’m speaking with Lawrence Minsky, who turned his early questions about advertising portfolios into a book deal. That book launched both his advertising career and an unexpected path into academia. What stands out about Lawrence’s story is his approach. He starts with questions that intrigued him, finds great collaborators, and creates content that moves conversations forward from audio branding to A.I. and marketing. His work shows how curiosity helps spot emerging trends. I’m Bill Sherman. You’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Lawrence.

Laurence Minsky Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Bill Sherman So as we dive in, I want to focus on your journey from a marketing and advertising practitioner into the world of academia, thought leadership, and how some of the work and thought leadership opened doors for you that you didn’t necessarily anticipate nor expect. And I want to begin with the story of your first book, How to Succeed in Advertising. So you can you tell us about when that book project started and how you pitched it? Because there’s a fascinating story that.

Laurence Minsky Yeah. Exact dates. I can’t tell. But I can tell you it was at the beginning of my career when I was working at an in-house an agency. The way I got the job at an in-house agency was I took a writing test, and that was the old school way of doing things that had long gone out of practice when I was in the industry. But I hit upon a place that still used it. The practice of the time and still today is having a portfolio of samples of made up work and showing that all around and showing what you can do when you wanted to be a copywriter or an art director. So I was struggling with my portfolio because I knew I wanted to switch over to a mainstream ad agency and as opposed to just working in one vertical for the rest of my career. And I was struggling with my portfolio and I did get a little bit of freelance, unsigned stuff like that from while I was working at the publisher. And I was talking to an account executive, ideally, Campbell, who also wanted to switch over to advertising. And we were saying, I said, I wonder what the beginning portfolios look like of all these great ad people. And she said, Yeah, and we got and said, somebody should write a book about it. And then I said, Why don’t we write the book about it? And so we wrote a letter to the publisher, and the publisher wrote back and said, We love your concept, but you need a proposal. And we said, We wrote back, What’s a proposal? And they sent us an outline for a proposal. Put the proposal together, send it to them. They said, We love your proposal, but you really need a sample chapter to show that you can write. And we said, okay. And we found somebody. It was we looked at the careers of 13 top creative directors back then, and we found somebody, a creative director, who is well, well known on the national stage in the industry. And she said yes, but she kept postponing our meeting to interview her to write the chapter. And the day that we finally were able to show up at her office, we get a phone call and say, We’re going to give you a contract anyways. And Emily, an executive said, you know, that we’re going to have some expenses. And they gave us an advance as well. So they did have some stipulations that we get certain people in the book, which we did, and the book was greatly reviewed, accepted and read at the time.

Bill Sherman So I want to underline a few things here that are important, at least into me, in this story. Number one, you were at a relatively junior point in your career, right?

Laurence Minsky Yes. You know, the ironic thing was how to succeed in advertising. And all you have as talent was the full title. We had that little twist on at the publisher, said we could have any title as long as it had how to win it and the word advertising. And essentially, I worked in an in-house agency which in the industry of big consumer brands, you’d been working anything. So I was the junior of the juniors writing a book on how to succeed in an industry and in an environment I never worked in. And while I was interviewing people, one of the people I interviewed who’s president of a major ad agency invited me back. And when he heard that I was trying to break into the industry, said, bring in your portfolio. And so basically, he taught me how to put a portfolio together. And just listening to how they broke in and how they built their career and all that gave me all these strategies to break in and have a career. So I was writing this without the experience of living it.

Bill Sherman And a couple pieces that I want to additionally underline on that is many people will give the advice of go do interviews for the job that you want to have or senior and ask for that interview. What is the job like? And uses a learning and also possibly a door opening tool. You came with a book proposal that had been accepted and came with a different twist on that, right? It was something that I would assume for many of those established an eminent advertising individuals was intriguing. Hey, they want to shine the spotlight on me. Right. And they’re coming with something. Yeah, I’ll do that interview. That sounds interesting.

Laurence Minsky Yeah. They’re the star. People read the book, and I said, Where am I? As the author, I removed myself from that. The book went through two editions. The first one was with Emily, the second one I did on my own and expanded it to 18 people. And it was really each chapter was about the individual. It wasn’t about me. So I really focused on that and. You know, it’s become in many ways, the blueprint for a lot of my writing. In that I find an area that I want to learn more about, and then I get myself a book contract and I have to go write it. And that forces me to. Learn about it in a way.

Bill Sherman We’ll go we’ll go there. Right. Because the last point that I want to distill is even though you didn’t have the experience in-house, you didn’t necessarily have the network for advertising executives, but you had a really good idea based on a gap in the conversational, Hey, I wonder what these folks early portfolios looked like. How do we talk about that? And a good idea can create an opportunity. Even if you’re a junior, you don’t have the right background, etc.. And so this fits into the thought leadership of the curious mind with a really good question can create momentum. Let’s talk about a couple of your other books. I know you have focused on audio. I know you’ve taken interest in other areas. Expand on how this has become the model for many of your books.

Laurence Minsky So I have a formula now in a sense, and I sort of fell on the formula in that I try to write an article to about topic before too. I would write a book to see if it’s there is interest, the response and just can I sustain more than, you know, two, three, 4 or 10, 20 pages depending on how long the article is. So. That would be my first step is that then it’s really finding topics that interest me and I might not necessarily know much about them. And I collaborate. I work with a guy who always talk about creating geniuses. You bring two people together that have different skill sets and knowledge, and you stick them in a room and they’ll create something greater than the sum of the two of them. And that is what I would do is I would find people who had some knowledge of the area or some passion for the area and collaborate with them. So most of my books have been co-written, and it’s a way of learning. It’s a way of discovering. And by the time it’s published, I know enough about the topic to be comfortable with it. So. It’s a it’s been my formula since starting with about I have a book called The Activation Imperative, and I wrote it with a guy named William Rosen, and he approached me about that topic. And that’s about when that formula fell into place. Before that, I wrote some textbooks and some other career kind of books. And since then, I followed that formula. I did that, and then a book on audio branding, the use of sound to build Your brand. And I partnered with the U.S. managing director of the world’s largest audio branding firm. And so I learned a lot about audio branding, and the company was gracious to open their files. So we had all our case studies. Its headquarters in Paris. And then I went and did a book on global brand management, and I partnered with somebody else who my publisher was British. I had the topic, we talked about it and they said, They’ll give me the contract as long as I have somebody not from the U.S. as my coauthor. So they wanted the global perspective and he lives in the US, Alan Garber. But he’s worked all over the world. And so we were able to combine our perspectives on that. And from there I the most recent book is on voice Marketing, and that’s the use of conversational A.I. in marketing practices. It’s not as adopted yet as it should be, but it does drive customer engagement. And so now, you know, I’m the author on that, or one of the coauthors.

Bill Sherman And if we trace that line through. The topics. And I think the ten books you said you’ve published, there’s a consistent theme of I’m really interested in this topic. I want to learn more and there’s a gap in the publication space. Let me go find someone and create a great book. Right.

Laurence Minsky Exactly. And my most recent book, The Voice Marketing one on Conversational. I have lunch with one of my former students. And he’s been out of the industry. He’s been he’s a graduate about ten years ago. And he was asking me how I was able to predict that I was going to be such a big topic. It came out shortly after ketchup came out.

Bill Sherman That’s perfect.

Laurence Minsky Perfect timing. And my response was, I didn’t It was just a topic that interested me. I actually put the proposal together with my editor from two of my books and a cogent page, and then she left the company. And Kogan, I’m sorry about calling them out, but they looked at the proposal and they rejected because who’s going to read a book about A.I.? It’s not going to be big enough topic. And I had to go find another publisher to publish it. And I went back to the one from the Activision pair of Roman and Littlefield, and they were all on it. And we were going to have a little bit longer of runway for the book, but they cut a couple of months off because of techy PTT and out on the market. But it was something that interested me that was I didn’t know anything about and knew that it was a thing. And lo and behold, I wrote a book on I the year I became on everyone’s mind.

Bill Sherman And that’s fantastic. So, Lawrence, you mentioned former students, and I want to talk more about how this work as an author and the practice of thought leadership and advancing conversations led you to a career in academia because last we were talking about your career. Well, we were, you know, when were you wanting to go into advertising? How did you hop into academia and how did that door open? Because you didn’t follow the traditional path, did you?

Laurence Minsky I did not. And again, it goes back to how to succeed in advertising. So I wrote the book. I put my portfolio together based on the knowledge of what I learned. Alternatively, the what the way most people did it is after you got your bachelor’s degree is you went to a portfolio school and all that and spent time on your portfolio. But I did it on my own just using what I learned from the book. And it was good enough to get me a job at a small agency, which then got me a job at a at what was at the time the biggest and considered to be among the best agencies in the world at the time. And I don’t remember when I think the book didn’t come out until I was already at that agency, so or right before it. So it was, you know, I was able to merchandise what I learned and apply it myself. So I knew what I had was good. But while I was at the agency, the agency was a unique kind. Back then it was doing brand marketing, and so it didn’t do the traditional media advertising of the day. And we doubled in size. The year after I was here. And then we doubled in size again. And they marketed themselves as having the biggest creative staff of its kind in the industry. We’re doing brand marketing and we did everything, you know. A client needed from in-store merchandizing and signage to writing websites and digital and you name it. Thinking through future states of our clients. So somebody at the agency came up with an idea of, let’s do this program to train people how to become creatives for our industry, for our neat niche. And I helped with it and organized it. And then the agency was bought out and a new president came in of Encounter and said, Why do you have so many creatives here? Let’s just use freelance. He didn’t understand that we were, you know, it was a specialty agency. It wasn’t how you can do it. Just do TV and radio and print. And so. And my job got cut and I went to a headhunter. So when I was getting cut, my boss said, Yeah, you did a good job on the teaching. You ought to teach, because I was working on the program at Frankel. And then I went to head under and they had understood the same thing You ought to teach, and we are right. I only have a bachelor’s degree. I can’t you know, I can’t do that. And the headhunter sent me over to Columbia College. She told me to go see this guy, and I made an appointment with him. I walked in, had my portfolio because I didn’t know how to interview for academia. And I first thing I pulled out was my book. And he said, You wrote that? And I said, Yeah. So when do you want to start? And. He hired me as an adjunct, which is a part time faculty member where I had one class and taught as an adjunct for a very brief period of time because I was at the right place at the right time and they were looking to bring in a practitioner onto full time staff because that’s where the curriculum gets made. And so I. Clyde. I went through the search committee interview process and all that, and lo and behold, I was on tenure track with a bachelor’s degree and got tenure. And now I’m you know, there’s a rank system. So before tenure system, then you’re associate once you have tenure and then if once you’re on a national level, you’re a full professor. And so I applied for that and now I’m a full professor. So it’s all from walking in with that one book.

Bill Sherman And even goes back to the first book that you wrote. Right. If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcast. Please leave a five-star review at rate this podcast.com. Forward slash l t l and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps as well as ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com/podcasts.

Laurence Minsky So let’s have a little bit broader conversation because the way that you talk about thought leadership and the writing of books really seems like it has opened doors as well as created opportunities that wouldn’t have happened. Whether that’s being hired into academia or getting the position in advertising. I’d love to hear your thoughts of did you ever think you would be writing ten books and how really, as you look back, has the journey about leadership impacted your career?

Laurence Minsky Well in college. I like writing fiction and poetry and plays. So my dream was to write that. So writing ten books was not out of the question. I never imagined I’d be writing ten business books or more, which cause I’m working on a proposal for my next one right now. Of course you are. Yeah, of course. It’s a machine. Once you get going, you got to keep going. So I am. I never imagined I would end up in academia with. With a bachelors. And, you know, I. There’s two ways of being qualified to teach. One is having the degree. The other is test of experience. All the credit embodies. Look at that. And so I have enough, you know, tested experience because of my book, because of my consulting. To do that now, I never was comfortable with the term thought leadership. I get it because that’s an outside bestowed term. So I never think of myself as a thought leader to let other people determine whether I am or not. I do what I do to learn and to keep going and to satisfy my curiosity and to stay up on the skills that I need for my industry. So, you know, I’m in advertising and I’m older for the industry. And, you know.

Bill Sherman It’s a young person’s game is not.

Laurence Minsky Really is a young person’s game. If you’re not if you’re not in the top C-suite by you’re in your 40s, you’re looking for another career. And so I’m still working in the industry today and I have tons of clients working on national international brands, recognized brands. And I think the two things that keep me relevant for the industry is, one, my writing and staying up on all that stuff, not necessarily that they read the books, but I’m able I’m conversant on it when I’m with clients. And two, on the other opposite end of the spectrum, my students keep me young, so I’m aware of all the trends. And so if I’m able to bring those two together, I stay I stay relevant as a consultant.

Bill Sherman I love that as an answer. Right. And I want to circle back to something that you said. Thought leader, I agree with you is someone’s term that people tend to bestow or describe people who influence them. But at least from my mind, I make a distinction on the practice of thought leadership, much more like meditation or yoga. It’s an ongoing set of skills that you’re developing. It’s a mindset and a commitment. Like you said, you know, once you’re book ten, it’s much like a bicycle you keep pedaling, right? What I see, if I look externally from career, is a curiosity, questioning and then a desire to find and share answers. That is, looking around the corner, seeing what’s next and coming back. And the broken eye is one example of that. If you hadn’t had as many conversations as you had and asked as many questions as you did, you might not have written that book now. Sometimes dumb luck also happens in lightning strikes. But being engaged also in the community, your practice and like you said with your students, gives you a better chance if standing in that intersection where lightning strikes.

Laurence Minsky Yeah. You know, academics are supposed to be our supposed to be researching and writing and doing all that kind of stuff, too. And but the push with me, it was okay for me to just. Focus a lot of my consulting to stay relevant, but I always felt the need that. How do you stay up to date, right? How do you force them? And that’s always been a big question of mine. And I think this is how I do it. And I don’t feel like sitting down and saying questions. It’s like this is a cool area and nobody’s writing about it. I got into audio branding. I worked on a campaign where the owner of the agency said, Let’s do an audio NAMA, let’s use sound. And the big media buy was radio. It was for packets, go to grocery store item. And people shop tend to shop on the weekends. So we bought radio on Thursday evenings and Thursdays, and our competitor, our main competitor bought TV. And whenever the TV would run, they would accredit it to us. yeah, I heard that radio spot or I heard that. And they talked about our TV spots. We never did TV. What we did was a radio spot, and at the end of it, there was a sound. It was for pickles and the brand. What we discovered was this brand tends to get eaten up. Unlike most brands of pickles that start in the front of your fridge, you eat a few of them and then a little bit you have more and the eventually makes it to the back of the fridge and it sits there until they get soggy and old, and then you throw them out and then you buy it again and it goes through the process. And so we called our brand the emptiest jar in the house. So the at the end of the every radio spot, we had a glass jar with a fork that went into it. And it became an audio name that people remembered and responded to. And that was my first exposure to audio branding. And so I thought I knew about audio branding when I went to Colleen and Fahy, my coauthor for the book and said, Hey, let’s do something on this. Let’s talk about audio branding. And it was a big eye-opening learning experience about how brands today need a whole audio language. It’s not just a it’s not a jingle at the end of a commercial. Its jingles don’t even work necessarily. They can. There are some jingles that become audio brands itself, but it’s the sound of your computer opening up and starting. It’s the roar of the engine of the Harley Davidson. It’s the pop of the litter, the jar.

Bill Sherman Or the coffee, all of those things which evoke sense memory.

Laurence Minsky Yeah, exactly. And so I’m not a musician. I barely know how to hit play in in a streaming service. But I’ve always liked music and how it responds. And we are. We’re a visual society, but audio is more powerful. It’s a defense mechanism. You hear things before you. You see things. You know, you’re out in the you’re out in the savannah and you hear twig break, get run because who knows you’re going to be eaten in a minute. And so it was and I learned all learn all about it. We did an article for Harvard Business Review and then we went and wrote this book.

Bill Sherman That’s a great example. And you layered something in there that. Bears repeating. It’s not just a good question. It’s got to be a question that excites you. And as I say, many, many times, your audience will never be more interested in your topic than you are. And so the journey of doing the research to write an article, let alone the research to write a book, is a long, arduous one. And if you can’t sustain interest, you’re going to hate it the whole way, and it’s going to show up in the final manuscript. And the published book. So I love this idea of this ongoing curiosity because the world is wide and wonderful. And if you’re like me, I have more questions and curiosity than I have time, even if I was lived to 150.

Laurence Minsky Yeah, I’ve talked to some people. You know, they want to write a book and self-publish it and put it up on Amazon and watch the money come in. And that’s not how it works. Because I got to tell you, I’ve even self-published books. The money doesn’t just come in.

Bill Sherman There are no rainbows and unicorns. However, there are things that can happen and revenue and opportunities like you talked about when you pulled out the book at your interview. Doors can’t open because of a book, but it’s not. You know, you’re going to make millions on royalties.

Laurence Minsky Yeah, you got to look at the total package. What are you what is your objective? And then maybe your thought leadership could come from that. I don’t if that’s your goal. To do it that way, that’s another way of going at it. But look at the total package I will never make back. The money. I guess I have made back the money on my book because I don’t spend a lot researching them. It’s not that expensive. But when you’re doing the whole total package, you might not. In addition to, you know, since I’m in advertising and do advertising and social media and traditional and social and digital and all that, I am helping authors launch their books and help some more authors launch books that became bestsellers. And they’re never going to make back on the royalties what they paid me. They’re never going to make back on the royalties, what they’re paid. They’re PR firm, but they will make it back. What is your objective? Their objective was consulting and other you know, there’s different objectives that you want. And if the. If you’re able to achieve those, then you earn back the money. It’s an investment that pays in many, many ways. Besides the royalty check, I get twice a year or checks because I have multiple publishers. Twice a year. That’s about enough to take my wife to dinner and eat each time. You know, it’s nice dinner, but still.

Bill Sherman The dinner. Yeah.

Laurence Minsky The dinner. It’s now not my rent.

Bill Sherman And this goes to some of the findings that we have in the nonfiction author are a wise study to specifically coming to mind that those who have a clear strategy before they write their book have an easier time and more effective time writing their books. They generate more impact. They generate more leads and opportunities than their peers who don’t have a strategy in place. And then secondly, people who have a clear strategy generate a higher hard ROI in terms of financial impact. But it’s not the dollars that come from royalty and translation. And so what you described experientially is also supported by the data and a number of authors who have said, hey, there’s a hard way to do this, and there’s a smart way to do this right, because writing a book is not easy. And certainly, you can use a template, like you said you that you fell into. That only takes some of the effort out. It’s still a lot of work.

Laurence Minsky Yeah. You know, as I said in college, I like writing fiction. And many ways I try to structure the books with a story arc. Even if that’s not an arc, it’s a B-to-B book. There has to be some factor that you know how they have the suspense at the end of a chapter to drive you to the next chapter. You still got to weave that kind of stuff in. And that’s actually part of the joy of writing, is figuring that stuff out. It becomes part of the fun of the puzzle. But it does all need to come together like that. But you, as you said, you need to know what is your objective, what is your strategy? And that will determine whether you go as a self-published, whether you go as a co-published, whether you go with a conventional publisher. I as an academic, have to go with a conventional publisher. I actually go to a conventional publisher that also blind peer reviewed manuscript. So it’s a much higher level. But then at the same time, I have a higher level of authority when it gets published.

Bill Sherman Or.

Laurence Minsky Among more discerning readers. So in my library, it helps with my library distribution and stuff like that as well. And you never know where somebody’s going to come across your book.

Bill Sherman So, Lawrence, as we begin to wrap up, I have a few lightning round questions, if you will. The first one is you’ve talked about the moments of change, getting the pitch accepted for your first book, pulling it out at the interview, and the interviewer for academia said, you’ve written a book, When can you start? Or the book on air in advertising that came out within months of chat you write. How much of this would you attribute to luck and how much to strategy?

Laurence Minsky Well, the first one was a I don’t want to say dumb luck, but, you know, it’s a little both like we targeted the number one publisher of advertising books of its at its time with the concept. So they knew what was available in the category they got. They got it. And we had credibility for that. And they ran a full-page ad in Ad Age back then when people ran an actual printed magazines. And I think for I’m sure when I came into Columbia, you know, I can’t be 100% sure, but there’s a good chance that they saw that ad promoting the book. So again, that was finding the right publisher. More so. So that was. That was a little bit of strategy. But it’s also lucky we you know, you never know when the editor is going to read the pitch. It could be on a bad day and everything sucks. It could be a good day. One of the good things about blind peer review is generally. There’s a lower bar where they would send it out. So it’s not just their view, it’s three other people’s views. And you don’t need all three. You don’t need 100%. And sometimes the editor could say, we really like this. And if everyone rejected it. But it’s a little both.

Bill Sherman The next question I want to ask you and give you a magic wand, if you will, that I want you to look three, five years into the future. What would you use that magic wand to accomplish in terms of a goal or an objective? So what challenge is it that you’re trying to solve that you would want to clear out of the way? To make greater impact.

Laurence Minsky I’d love everyone to automatically look for my books, you know? It’s the awareness of the next topic because it they do build but they’re sort of in different niche areas but it’s really and time the time to write the books. Those would be the two things I would want.

Bill Sherman Fantastic. Lawrence, I want to thank you for joining us today on Leveraging Thought Leadership. It’s been a delightful conversation talking about your practice of thought leadership as well as your journey.

Laurence Minsky Thank you for having me here. I really enjoyed our conversations.

Bill Sherman Okay. You’ve made it to the end of the episode and that means you’re probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are three recommendations. First, check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game and thought leadership as well as just starting out second. Subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership. And finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights take them to scale through the practice of thought leadership. Maybe you’re looking for strategy or maybe you want to polish up your ideas or even create new products and offerings. I’d love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.