Thought Leader Development | Scott Miller

Peter Winick

Developing thought leaders.

An interview with Scott Miller about developing thought leaders at Franklin Covey.

Today’s guest is Scott Miller, Executive Vice President of Thought Leadership at Franklin Covey, the host of On Leadership with Scott Miller and co-author of Everyone Deserves a Great Manager.

This conversation focuses on how both Scott and Peter both work to develop and launch new thought leaders, they compare methods and tactics. We explore why defining your audience is the biggest challenge most thought leaders face. We talk about how social media plays a massive role when looking to publish a book. Also, we explain why you need to know and understand who your competition is. In addition, we look at why it is important for a thought leader to focus on a niche and the smallest viable market.

This episode is chalked full of insight from two people with decades of knowledge on helping thought leaders find success. If you want a jump-start on your thought leadership career, this episode is for you.

Three Key Takeaways from the Interview:

Thought Leaders need to find and understand their audience. Your content can not be for everyone.
Social media has become a very important platform thought leaders need to cultivate if they want to get a book published.
Your content doesn’t have to be 100% new ideas. It is okay to stand on the shoulders of other thought leaders and expand the conversation.

Do you need help articulating your point of view to an audience? If you’re looking to further develop your thought leadership, contact Thought Leadership Leverage and we help you devise a strategy to move you forward.

Transcript

Peter Winick Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, our guest is Scott Miller. I’m really excited about this episode. I’ll give you a brief highlight of his bio and then we’ll dive right in. So Scott is entering his 24th year with Franklin County. He’s the VP of Thought Leadership, which is the coolest job in the world other than mine. He’s the host of the Franklin Covey, sponsored on Leadership with Scott Miller. He leads Strategy Development, a publication of Franklin companies bestselling books and thought leadership. And he has been the EVP of Biz Dev and Chief Marketing Officer. Plus, he is also as if you need another box to check the coauthor of Wall Street Journal bestseller, Everyone Deserves a Great Manager. The Six Practices for Leading a Team. So welcome, Scott. Don’t even know where to start. So you you’re what I call sort of the hat trick guy, right? So you’re, you’re front of the house and back of the house in terms of, you know, your career, sort of supporting other thought leaders. And then you are one and you’re supporting others. So.

Scott Miller Well, I’m not sure I am one. I’m trying to fight my way into that group. So I don’t think you yourself one. But you’re right. I spent the majority of my career Peter back of the house. You’re right. Producing, directing, running the ticket office, so to speak. And about two years ago had a bit of a pivotal moment and thought, You know what, dammit, I think I got some things to say that could be helpful. So I wrote a few books and host a radio program at iHeartRadio and I think column and trying to figure out what’s my best medium right now. We need shall be you will be as a guest on your show maybe that’ll be my turning point This.

Peter Winick This could be. If this is the highlight of your career, then I’m you know, we’re all in trouble. Don’t say it.

Scott Miller Yet.

Peter Winick So let’s go backwards then. So I want to talk a little bit about your role more on the marketing and business side. So you’re the person inside of Franklin Covey responsible for sort of the sales marketing business development strategy for the other thought leaders. That’s one function that you have to launch that, right? So that is very similar to what I do. You’re like the in-house guy, right? That’s what I’m you know, our firm does that for lots of people around the globe. So I’d love to sort of riff with you a little bit in terms of your process and methodology and see where we’re aligned and where we might have slight differences in terms of yes.

Scott Miller The big difference is somebody else is paying for my mobile phone, you’re paying for your own.

Peter Winick That’s a different size. It might be more than that. Well, but given that you’re in-house, I would assume and correct me if I’m wrong, that whoever you’re working with, there is a framework or methodology, right? You’ve got to answer questions. So walk me through. So, you know, it comes from some meeting or whatever the process is and they say this person, we’re going to think about making them a thought leader and then what are you?

Scott Miller Great questions. I think first I kind of define thought leadership is this sort of highfalutin term that we all throw around, you know, thought leadership, in my opinion, Peter, really, it’s the new public relations. I mean, gone are the days where you have a PR department chasing down reporters in newsrooms or issuing press releases. There are no more reporters in newsrooms. They’re fired. They’re gone. Right. Thought leadership is now really, you know, articulating your point of view out to an audience that has interest in it and might want to adopt it in their organization or their life.

Peter Winick So, yeah, so, Well, let me see that in review one though. Yeah, I agree with that. Where I would raise that is unlike PR it’s not have been driven right so it doesn’t have to be limited to X because typical PR is what happened or books coming out, you know a short game, my legs whatever the case may be. Right. That’s number one. And traditional PR doesn’t typically have the guts, the courage, the wherewithal to actually hold themselves to account as it relates to direct ROI, net new client acquisition.

Scott Miller Isn’t that true?

Peter Winick Other things like.

Scott Miller That word impressions, Right. We made 400,000 impressions. Great. How much revenue should I put on the deposit slip? Right. I totally.

Peter Winick Agree. Yeah. Why we say yeah go to go to the bank to pay your mortgage this month with an impression impressions and see how long that lasts. Right. So I guess my point is it’s beyond PR, it’s not just interchange that PR used to be said.

Scott Miller I feel like we’re brothers from another mother. Some, you know, in our organization, you know, we’re somewhat unique because a lot of the thought leaders, the authors, the speakers are independents, right? These are people like Dave Pinker, Seth Godin or Liz Wiseman, and they don’t have a public bureaucracy around them, right? I mean, we’re a public company with a board of directors, the SEC watching our moves, right? So we have a different kind of framework. But really to your question, what happens is Franklin Covey is a professional services performance improvement training consulting company. Right? We’re very deliberate on the solutions we develop. We’re not trying to be the Amazon of training. We are very calibrated on what are the jobs to be done, what do our clients need us to solve, what are the problems? And when we articulate. We then decide what is our point of view? And we’ll often work with an individual very deliberately on making them our spokesperson because they have expertise in the area. When it had that job function for 20 or 30 years. So to your point, we carefully groom people up. I tell you, I think thought leadership is really more about articulating your point of view verbally and believe it is in writing. I mean, you know, honestly, anybody can write a book. Sure. Anybody can write a great book. But the future of thought leadership is someone who has, you know, the ability to persuade and influence on stage, on a podcast, on a radio program, on a TV program. Can they in Can they with, you know, 12 minutes notice, take a phone call from a radio producer and pop on a major radio program literally in their car and go from one call to another and be authentic and impressive.

Peter Winick So let’s do let’s stay with that for a minute, because I think the old model and by old, I mean maybe 15 years ago of the path of a thought leader, whether there was someone at your organization or outside. Right. Would be they’ve got this expertise, then typically they get a book deal. Magic happens, right? They get a book deal, then they write a book. Right. And then they probably would start speaking. And then there’s a lot of other problems, right? Yeah. Today, the book is more important and less important. Right. So number of books sold times dollars made per book is not the formula. If this was any other business and I was in the pen business and I had a new pen and you and I invested in the pen company, we’d say, okay, great. How many pens did we sell? What’s our margin? What’s our contribution? How we’re growing? It wouldn’t be well, for every pen that we sell. 12% of the people that buy pens buy these other things from us. But that’s really what this is about. I want to touch on it. Typically fairly easy for a thought leader to go from writing a book to speaking with some exceptions. Today, the modalities are just limitless, which I find exciting in terms of possibilities. But there are many thought leaders that choke on that meaning, you know, if you’re more of an academic, if you’re someone that’s more deliberate, more introverted. Tick tock might not be your jam, you know? You know, to your point of going from call to call to call to call, doing five minute soundbites and then, you know, doing things that are visual. You’ve got to have this mixed modality. So how do you how do you support folks in that? Because doesn’t mean they have to be experts in that. But how do you how do you support the folks that you work with and getting them up to speed?

Scott Miller Yeah. Not just mixed modality, but really mixed platforms, right? I mean, publishers won’t even touch you right now if you don’t have, you know, a half million YouTube subscribers or, you know, 500,000 Instagram followers. Unfortunately, social media or fortunately, is a big, important medium on distribution. Now we look for a couple of things. We look for credibility first and foremost.

Peter Winick You know, until.

Scott Miller You have credible experience, sorry, you can’t write a leadership book at Franklin Covey. If you’ve been a consultant for 20 years, sorry, but you have to have like hired and fired and performance planned and met a pencil and run a business for 20 years.

Peter Winick So you don’t have any 23 year old life coaches.

Scott Miller And we don’t we don’t see how that works. It’s why a lot of our authors are right are, you know, maybe in their mid-forties. Most of them are 50s and 60s because you got to have the credibility, you got to have the character, you have to align to our brand, you have to have the reps. I tell you, I think some of our best thought leaders are the people who can stand up in front of an audience virtually or physically 100 or 10,000 and share stories of their journeys like real stories. This happened inside. She said this and then I did that and that. He did that. And then together we all went and did this right. We took nothing and turned it into something. And here’s all the mistakes that we made, right? And here’s the insight from that. I think that storytelling ability is so important. The ability to really reduce your words into thoughts and writing and speaking, you’ve got to have some charisma. You’ve got to have some exact age ability, related ability.

Peter Winick I think all of that translates and that’s not a requirement for a great author. Not at all. No. You could be the most introverted, quiet, shy, whatever that writes, the most amazing, brilliant book. But you’re not going to win in this game. Right. Just and it just or it’s fair or not doesn’t really matter. It’s going to be really, really difficult to win. And the flip side of that is I’ve seen plenty out there that are, you know, all charisma, no gravitas that we’ve seen them.

Scott Miller We we’ve seen them. Right. You know, go to the World Business Forum in New York City here and.

Peter Winick There every year.

Scott Miller Yeah, right. I mean, I go every year for 15 years and you see, you know, some of the flash in the pan that have no credibility. But they’re funny and engaging. You have to hire them to come to your own company conference. And then people that are, you know, Nobel laureates or, you know, economic advisor like it was a narcoleptic sleep or they had 40 PowerPoint slides and they put you into an hour eclectic sleep. So there is this art of authenticity. And also does this person have to. Chops mean when someone is becoming a thought leader in our firm? I rigorously put them through the sausage grinder and we fly them to some of the biggest theaters in the nation. And so, you know, Aerosmith was on stage last night, literally Aerosmith last night. And then today we have the stage with one person and spotlights and a coach sitting way out, like in seat, you know, 6000. Right. With a blow horn. No start walk back on. Why are your hands in your nose? What are you doing with them? Right. I mean what is your pacing? It’s an art and it’s also some science. So we work diligently on your presence, your physical presence. We work on your authentic voice, on your social media, curating your stories, making sure that you can speak credibly to different audiences, that you can master podcast, radio interviews. Yeah, webcast that you’re both good on video and on audio, right? I mean, we go through all those things. We have to train some users.

Peter Winick I think you implied it, but there’s a style piece where it’s not prescriptive, but some folks want to be more transparent and more casual. Some folks are more buttoned up, some folks it’s more logical where they’re doing a short form video in the back of an, you know, an Uber talking about things for others that would be awkward. And there is no you have to do all of true. That’s true. I think some of it is experimental because there’s nothing worse than without naming names, you see certain folks that have been out there buttoned up, whatever, and all of a sudden they hit, you know, like 55, and now they’re wearing hoodies and you’re like, what the heck is that all about? Yeah, yeah. I just like, that just doesn’t work.

Scott Miller You see it in political candidates. You see that the you see what they tried to do to Sarah Palin, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Cindy McCain, who’s obviously a phenomenal person, did not succeed. You know, what am I? One of my best stories is Stephen M.R. Covey. Dr. Covey’s eldest son wrote a phenomenal book called The Speed of Trust. Right. Great pinnacle of the game. A few years ago, I was sitting down. I was not as wise or as mature as I have grown older to be. I sat Stephen down and I said, Stephen, I want you to do this and this and be this and be this and be this. I was coaching him on his personality and he looked at me and he said, Scott, I can only be myself.

Peter Winick You know, it’s funny because Stephen M.R. is a great example, so I’ve been fortunate enough to see him speak several times and he is not the typical and I don’t mean this with any disrespect because I love his work, high energy, not only, you know, he’s more of an academic, but there’s a level of authenticity that’s beautiful. Right? And I think he knows he’s not he’s not the guy that you’re going to get up and go woo woo or walk and calls and all that. But he’s really, really comfortable in his skin. And you can tell that every word that he puts out there has been thoughtful and crafted.

Peter Winick 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 podcasts, please leave us a review and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps as well as at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com/podcasts.

Peter Winick I want to go in a little bit of a different direction. So one of the things that is often a challenge when we’re working with clients early on is getting clarity around their platform and defining their market. So yes, client comes to me and says, you know, whatever, Hey, here’s my stuff. And great, so here’s your mark. This would be awesome for everybody. And I’m like, okay, great. Unless you’ve got the marketing budget of Coca Cola or Walmart who literally can market to everybody. That’s not going to work. So to me, it’s about defining your platform. You need to be the next guy or gal and who are the initial markets you’re going to serve because you can afford to serve them. Know where to find them. Know how to get them, and know what your competitors are doing. Could you touch on that for a moment?

Scott Miller You have nailed the biggest challenge that everybody faces because you think that your message is for everybody and perhaps it could be received by everybody. There is no one in the world that does this better than Rachel Hollis. Rachel’s a friend of mine. I’ve been on her podcast and I have an hour and she says, This is the model. Rachel Hollis is the model. She, first of all, she’s a genius marketer, great writer. Her modality, her breath, her range is remarkable, but she is insanely focused. She knows her market better than anybody I’ve ever met. Her market is her She calls her. She calls her. She knows what she eats. She knows how many kids she has. She knows what her husband said to her last night that made her cry. She knows what her struggles are this morning, her weight, her hair color, her nails. I mean.

Peter Winick So it’s fine. So we take our clients through a process we call it, because we’re not as creative as that in just creating avatars. Right. And it’s not just the demographic of, you know, professional making 60,000 plus a year living in the Midwest, 30 to 42 with a B.A. There’s psychographics, there’s demographics. And it’s really, really important to put them on the table every time you develop a product. Can say, does that work for them? I’m the newly minted manager at a pharmaceutical company. I’m 34 years old. You know, I drive a Prius and it’s my first time managing people. And I’m a little stressed and got a dog. Right. Like, how does this content solve a problem that they have? And I think developing that avatar is difficult. And by the way, it doesn’t mean you only have to stick with them forever. But if you pick 2 or 3, we find 2 or 3 avatars that are somewhat tangential, tend to work. And then from there, you could you could blow it up a bit. But if you don’t start small.

Scott Miller Yeah. So insightful, right? Seth Godin calls it the smallest viable market. Right. Exactly. Person that’s going to buy your book or the one person that’s going to subscribe to your podcast. It’s Tim Tempting to boil the ocean, right? It’s fun. It’s exciting. It feeds your ego. You’re exactly right. I mean, I’m an officer in a public company with this firm for almost 25 years. You sea level. You would think that my audience might be other sea level officers. It’s not.

Peter Winick Right.

Scott Miller Not at all. My, my. I don’t call it your. You call it your jam. You know, my posse is not sea level officers, even though I think I can hold my own with a lot of them my off my market is a little bit more down not down scale but it’s sort of you know that six figure barely manager leader that’s well intended starting out that’s like me you know doesn’t have the interpersonal skills. Sure, sure. So I’ve had to learn that who you are is not necessarily who others gravitate towards and vice versa. You have to be really thoughtful, self-aware. Check your humility on that one.

Peter Winick Right? And then the flip side of that is people making the mistake of everyone’s like them, which is a huge mistake, right? So like, I know I’m a dork. I read two business books a week, right? So if I were to extrapolate planning for my clients on behalf of well, everyone must be like me, I would be woefully wrong, you know, totally, totally, totally wrong.

Scott Miller In believing in believing your own press. Right? I mean, yeah, my team around me will get so excited that this happened or this call that guys don’t believe our press. Right. Our brand is never as big as it really is. We had exactly how do we get the humble, humble ourselves? Never the client last week that called it wasn’t happy with what I said at their annual conference. Remember that right. Remember the ones. The critical feedback will keep the humble.

Peter Winick So. So let me ask you this. I totally agree with that. Is the other one of the other things that we work through with clients from a strategic perspective and it’s shocking to me when I ask them, okay, so who are your competitors? And when I say competitors, I don’t mean Coke and Pepsi. And it’s a zero sum game, right? But who is out there that has a share of the market that you’d like to take? Who is out there that is similar that you who is out there that has clients buying their stuff and so often like probably north of 85%. I get the deer in the headlights. Like, does that apply here? Well, this is a business story. Money is changing hands. You have to sell, you have to market, etc.. So, you know, if you’re going to open whatever a local cafe in your town, you’d know who your competitors are. But here you go. And I think there’s a I don’t know if it’s naivete or hubris or somewhere a little bit of both where they go, I never thought of that. And you’re asking to invest tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars into building this. Don’t you want to know why you’re better, quicker, cheaper, faster than the other guy to go? What would how would you respond to it?

Scott Miller In some cases, it’s not who you think it is, right? I mean, I saw an interview with Reed Hastings where they he was asked who his biggest competitor was. He said, sleep. Right. Exactly. Your sleep. Right. And, you know, the famed author, Clayton Christiansen, who passed away recently, would often say our biggest competitor is non consumption. Exactly. Assuming any of the products. So it’s not always your obvious, not the one that you like the most or the most people are consuming. It might be something very different. And oftentimes I’m not sure Peter, the thought leader, even knows it may take someone outside of his or his realm to offer them some counterintuitive thoughts. You know, I once I read a book that Karen Dylan coauthored, She’s a former editor of the Harvard Business. How will you measure your life?

Peter Winick Yes.

Scott Miller And her coauthors, of which Clayton is one quoted as quoted a research paper that said that, quote, 93% of companies that had achieved economic success did so with an emergent strategy. I thought their deliberate strategy, which means these companies crushed it with a different strategy than they actually set out with.

Peter Winick I think that’s a conservative number. I think, yeah, yeah.

Scott Miller It said 93% then. Yeah. I think that speaks to thought leaders also, right? Sure. What is your jam? What is your channel? What is your message? May not be what you start out with and be humble enough to listen to advisors around you. Well, you know, this is your sweet spot because it might be counterintuitive.

Peter Winick Well, I would say. I mean, the advisors are great, but listen to the market is most important. The other thing I want to touch on with you is oftentimes we arm wrestle with clients. A little bit around. It’s got to be totally new and unique and. It’s never been done before. And I say, well, in some instances that is so. But more often than not, it’s you’re standing on the shoulders of giants and you’re telling the tale in a different way. You’re adding to the story. So you’re used to even more. For example, he clearly didn’t invent trust. He didn’t put this concept out that trust is important in business relationship. Absolutely. Thousand percent not. What did he do? He brought it to life in a way that was brilliant. By using the the tax and the dividend. Right. So when you say, right. So when you when you establish trust with another individual that pays a dividend, ooh, dividends are good. And when you do something that violates that, that’s a tax. We taxes are bad and it was more than that. But he changed the conversation. He put it in a different format, in a different framing. And guess what? Commercially that did phenomenal. So even I guess my point is I wanted to get your take on the struggle to, my God, it’s going to be, you know, white space. It’s going to be totally new.

Scott Miller Again, I’m philosophically aligned with you. You know, Dorie Clark is an up and coming thought leader in New York City. I think she was at Duke and such, and she has 4 or 5 books out. Yeah, I interviewed Dorie at my podcast. Dorie said, You know what? She was exaggerating a bit, but she said, You know what? Most stuff’s been invented now. Now the thought leaders are really What’s your twist on an already existing idea? What’s your unique twist? I think that some people might critique that, but I thought that’s really wise. I think too often we try to go out and farm brand new territory. No.

Peter Winick What’s your twist? Could be your twist. Could be gender. Your twist could be generational. Your twisted Greek could be. Dale Carnegie wasn’t talking about Twitter. Yeah. So how do you take sort of the Dale Carnegie principles in a social media world? That’s an opportunity. So I agree with that.

Scott Miller And then another point is Chester Elton. Yes. Due to a friend of ours, right, is Chester. Elton will tell you that, you know, the reason he and Adrian got to write a book every two and a half years because there’s a shelf life and there just competition. And they need to also reinvent themselves and disrupt themselves with new ideas. So there are they are a idea generating machine. They’re not Einstein. They’re not trying to, you know, invent something new, but they’re looking at what it can be fresh, not because they’re trying to just make a living, but what are the issues people are facing in 2022 versus 2021? I interviewed Rita McGrath this week, the book called Looking Around Corners. I think she said, just like that’s a geat book. Did you? Yeah, yeah. And you know, it’s such a wise skill, right? It’s kind of where the puck is going to land. You hear it as a catchy phrase on the stage. In your own world, we know what to do with this, right? What do you do with that? Yeah, I think Doris got it right. What’s your twist on an existing idea? You can write a huge wave with that.

Peter Winick Exactly. Well, this has been phenomenal. I appreciate violently agreeing with you on almost every now, and it’s kind of boring.

Scott Miller Let’s find something we don’t agree on. Okay, I’ll give you this.

Peter Winick What don’t you agree on? Trump We’re not going there. Okay, We agree. There you go. Yeah, well, I’m sure there’s something maybe like a flavor of ice cream or something. Cool. Well, this has been awesome. I really, really appreciate your time and your transparency and sharing your story with us. Thank you so much then.

Scott Miller My pleasure. Thank you.

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