‘Thought Leader’: A Punchline Worth a Life’s Work

Is thought leadership just a buzzword? After twenty years in the field and 2.6 million words of interviews with thought leaders, here’s what the critics get right, and what they miss.

Thought leaders have been mocked in high-brow articles in The Atlantic, lampooned in mass media such as Saturday Night Live’s Matt Foley skit, and even Wikipedia’s “thought leader” page mostly rolls its eyes at the term. The thin page devotes more than half of its 371 words to criticism and parody. Those of us in the field of thought leadership have allowed critics and parodists to define our work.

The criticism is clear: ego-driven, attention-seeking individuals who recycle old ideas for financial gain. I’ve been in thought leadership for over twenty years. The criticism stings hard because it contains truth.

Yet, if that’s all thought leadership was, I would never have stayed in the field. There are deeper layers: ones that inspire me and, yes, even haunt me.

Too widespread, and too costly, to be just a punchline

I have seen thought leaders spend 80-100 days on the road per year sharing ideas with complete strangers. Travel across three continents in one week and still find the energy to deliver their message. Explain their core idea with joy for a 1,000th time. And create a new YouTube series about their body of expertise even in their final weeks of life, while dying of cancer.

That fourth example pushed me to ask, “why do people practice thought leadership?” And I didn’t let myself be satisfied with the surface answers.

Sure, money, status, praise, and intrinsic rewards are all nice. But thought leadership requires people to spend a large part of their life sharing ideas with strangers. Some they will only meet for a few hours in a workshop or a keynote. Others they reach only through books, videos, articles, and social media, and will never meet in person.

If thought leadership is simply a buzzword or a marketing ploy, then these behaviors make little sense. People want to be seen as thought leaders. Their organizations want them to do the work of thought leadership.

LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator tells a different story. As of June 2026:

• ~680,000 people have “thought leadership” or “thought leader” somewhere in their profile.
• ~6,000 people have one of the terms in their current job title.
• ~21,000 organizations describe their work with one of the two terms.

If we focus only on people who have a thought leadership title in companies with 50 or more employees, that’s still 3,000 people, about the same number of professional cartographers on LinkedIn.

What ‘thought leadership’ actually is

Working with thought leaders for twenty years, I’ve come to believe thought leadership is a buzzword and a necessary, deeply human activity. It’s how we transmit our knowledge, our little-t truths of business and life, to people who might find them useful.

Thought leadership is about stewardship of an idea and generous service to a specific audience who needs that idea. You have a duty to speak your imperfect truths, but you have no right to an audience. You must earn it.

If audiences find your ideas valuable, then you can make a living from sharing them.

Yes, I’m biased. I’m the COO of Thought Leadership Leverage, co-host of the Leveraging Thought Leadership podcast, and the lead author of The Thought Leadership Handbook (July 2026). Many of my clients call themselves thought leaders or thought leadership practitioners.

What 700+ interviews with thought leaders revealed

As I wrote The Thought Leadership Handbook, I reviewed the 700+ interviews with practicing thought leaders. The podcast transcripts totaled 2.6 million words. If I printed them out, it’d be a single-spaced stack of paper over three feet high. And while I used AI to help me sort through the transcripts, some words kept appearing interview after interview:

Words we often elevate: Service. Stewardship. Generosity. Give. Share. Help.

Words we rarely name: fear, doubt, uncertainty, unplanned, struggle.

Almost every thought leader had stumbled into the world of thought leadership. Being a thought leader wasn’t on their career plan or life goals. They’d found a little-t truth about business or life that they felt was worth sharing with others and they’d persisted despite the difficulty. And others started listening and leaning in.

I celebrate the work of authors, keynote speakers, facilitators, consultants, and coaches who practice thought leadership every day. And more importantly, I celebrate the people who have advanced the field of thought leadership: people who have focused their professional careers on understanding how thought leadership works and teaching others how to practice it better.

Critics say too many people call themselves thought leaders. That it’s a hollow label worthy of ridicule. And yet, we’re not going to rebuild old media’s walls. Those days have ended. Conversations will no longer be dominated by a few privileged points of view.

We live in an age where plausible hallucinations pollute our digital commons. AI slop grows faster than any single individual can think or write. We’ve reached a point where many people see AI as a rival to human creativity. The traditional gatekeepers of truth have bent and buckled. And the public square has become a raucous place where those who shout the loudest earn the most attention.

Whenever experts choose silence, the quality of the conversation erodes.

And this is where we come back to you, the 680,000 of you here on LinkedIn who list thought leadership or “thought leader” in your profile. And those many more of you who do the work of thought leadership but haven’t yet put it in your profile.

Thought leaders can make a good living and live a life of purpose. That has always been true.

But we can, and must, do better. The world needs people to lead through ideas, enrich the common knowledge, and spark much-needed conversations.

The world needs more and better thought leaders. Will you choose to speak?