Thought Leadership and Liminal States
The Infinite Hallway of Hell (in Beige) | Photo by Bill Sherman
“Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow”
–T. S. Eliot The Hollow Men
I’ve been thinking a lot about “liminal spaces:” that fancy word anthropologists use to describe the “space between spaces” that’s not yet there. Long hallways. Airport layovers. But anthropologists also use it to describe times of ritual, of transformation, of becoming.
As I write this, our book, The Thought Leadership Handbook launches in five days. July 21, 2026. Those of you who have written books before will probably recognize this “not quite yet” moment. The book exists. I’ve held it in my hands and sent out copies to people who appear in the book or who endorsed the book.
But publication date feels meaningfully different. It’s a threshold moment where the book and its ideas enter the public square. And hopefully spark a conversation about thought leadership.
As a thought leadership consultant, I’ve seen many of our clients go through the journey: manuscript–>editing–>pre-pub—>launch day. But as a student of the field of thought leadership, I want to record my thoughts inside the space. Not because I’m a raging narcissist, not to feed my ego, but because this space has felt “@#% weird.”
Fragments of memories:
- I remember in Montessori school desperately wanting to learn how to read. Some would call me precocious. I just wanted to know what the teacher’s instructions said at the top of each activity.
- My father was a librarian his entire career at the high-school and college level. He taught me to love stories and the written word. He also taught me to respect the physical book. Don’t crease the spine, don’t mark it, and don’t get the pages wet. I remember him chiding me for taking a library book in a bathtub. I think I was six and it was an X-Men junior novella. (Sorry dad.)
- In college and grad school, I struggled. My fellow students would mark up their textbooks and books. I kept my books pristine and filled notebooks with notes about what I read. I was constantly flipping between the source book and my notebook.
- In 3rd year grad school, James Joyce’s Ulysses brought me to tears. I finally took a mechanical pencil and rule to a book, and I made notes everywhere. My relationship to books changed. They were still sacred, but I was now in conversation with them. I was having conversations with dead authors.
My career pulled me into the world of books and authors. Highly successful businesspeople who had written books. Some of these authors had planned to make an impact through their ideas. Some of them had simply written because it was initially a checklist career item. And then the book took on a life of its own.
And I saw how the books had transformed them. Some changed during the writing process itself. But many changed after the book published and sparked a conversation. The book writing process was a liminal state. A ritual transformation where one became “an author” not because you strung together 30,000 to 80,000 words. But it attached because you had something to share and had hopefully found an audience for those ideas.
For the first ten years or so in thought leadership, I stumbled. I couldn’t find my voice. I didn’t know what I might say. I tried talking about social capital and thought leadership. I spent years talking about organizational thought leadership. I wrote articles. I created videos. I posted here on LinkedIn. I became a podcaster. But I would have rejected that I was doing “thought leadership.”
In 2024, I started writing a book that I never thought I’d write. I filled out Amplify’s one-page proposal form in just one day. Not because I was hasty, but because there was a framework of a book already inside of me. I finally knew what I wanted to talk about.
And like many authors, I wanted to write the book that a younger me desperately had wanted. In 2004-2005, I was actively consulting on thought leadership. I scoured libraries (and bookstores) for books that would answer three questions:
- How does thought leadership work (from a practitioner perspective)?
- How can thought leaders make greater impact (however they define impact)?
- Why do people practice thought leadership? (and how can it add to a well-lived life)?
The first two questions were based on the questions my clients needed answers. The third question was one that I wanted answers to. I’d seen people wear themselves to exhaustion explaining ideas to strangers. Why? (yes, seriously, why???)
I’d seen people mock thought leadership with a knowing wink. As if they were proving how smart they were by saying anyone who advocated for an idea was clearly self-serving. And that landed wrong. Sure, people made careers as authors, speakers, coaches, and consultants. But criticizing them for that work seemed cruel.
Did we want a world where experts stayed silent? Where only a small group of people could afford to pay consulting fees to access knowledge? Or did we seriously expect experts to give their best thinking away for free and receive nothing in return? That mindset would limit thought leadership to those people who are either independently wealthy or willing to embrace a life of poverty. None of these options make sense. If ideas have value and create impact, they should also create value for those who advocate for them.
The world needs more and better thought leaders. We need more skilled voices who share what they know and cast light into their corner of expertise. If experts stay silent, the public knowledge commons erodes. We’ve seen people bemoan the public square (such as LinkedIn) become polluted with plausible AI slop. Algorithms change and shift our reach. And yet, I deeply believe experts have a duty to speak and share their “little t” truths.” Because we essentially have three choices:
- We can stay silent and never share what we know.
- We can live our life based on what we know (role models and make a living based on our expertise, sharing what we know with those who pay our fees.
- We can also choose to speak and put what we know into the knowledge commons. Not solely for altruism. But because sharing knowledge advances the conversation, creates real impact, and also creates demand for our work.
Thought leadership rejects #1. It embraces the metamodern both/and of principles #2 and #3.
I spent most of my career in the second space. My ideas stayed behind the paywall. And in writing a book about those who had chosen to speak, I realized that I needed to do the same.
“Ideas can’t speak for themselves. You can.” That’s the platform identity of our work. It encapsulates the problem as well offers a solution for those who want to step out on the journey of thought leadership.
Our book, in the few months that it’s been in the world as a digital galley, has reached people that I’ve never met (and probably will never meet). When the book launches, I won’t be the same person I’ve been. I feel parts of my identity and reality shifting. And yet, I don’t fully see yet who I’m becoming. The uncertainty excites me.
Social media creators always say, “let me know what you think in the comments below.” And here, I’m quite serious. In part, I wrote the book because I feel it’s time for the thought leadership community to face some uncomfortable realities (can we please end the angst over the terms “thought leader” and “thought leadership?”), let’s address AI as adults and realize that expert voices can’t retreat behind the paywall. We have to let go of our ideas, and perhaps even accept plagiarism/reuse of the ideas if we want them to travel and make impact.
Five days. Can’t wait.
