Thought Leadership Business Models | Tendayi Viki

Peter Winick

Building versatile business models for thought leadership.

An interview with Tendayi Viki about making content that isn’t dependent on personality and having an agile and evolving business model.

Today’s guest Tendayi Viki, author of Pirates in the Navy and the Corporate Startup and associate partner at Strategyzer, the global leader in enterprise growth & innovation services.

Tendayi shares how his path to thought leadership involved leaving Zimbabwe for the UK and teaching forensic psychology before transitioning to social psychology.

We discuss how Alexander Osterwalder created Strategyzer. Then, Tendayi explains how the platform was designed to deliver consistent results for clients by well-trained consultants. It allows the model to be scalable and gives the consultants opportunities to create plug-ins that modify the platform.

Tendayi and Peter discuss the danger of the personality of a thought leader. It is a cliff that can be hard to climb. They reveal if used properly you can instead be a platform to raise up others.

Finally, we wrap up our conversation discussing the changes Strategyzer went through to flourish during the COVID-19 pandemic. After the initial panic that everyone felt, they quickly transitioned their offerings to digital formats. The digital formats offered high-level engaging content that provided the same value.

Three Key Takeaways from the Interview

When creating a platform for your thought leadership, make sure the content is scalable and deliverable by others.
If your thought leadership is only based on your personality, you risk overshadowing your own content.
When creating virtual content, you need to find ways for your thought leadership to deliver the same value you present in person.

If you need a strategy to bring your thought leadership to market, Thought Leadership Leverage can assist you! Contact us for more information. In addition, we can help you implement marketing, research, sales and other aspects so you can devote yourself to what you do best.

Transcript

Peter Winick And 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. My guest today, Vicki. He is an author and an innovation consultant. He has a Ph.D. in psychology and an MBA. He’s an associate partner at Strategize here. And he’s consulted with some amazing companies, including American Express, Standard Bank, Unilever, Airbus. The list goes on. He has spent over 12 years in academia, during which time he taught at the University of Kent, where he’s now an honorary senior lecturer. And he’s also been a research fellow at Stanford and a research assistant at Harvard. So we love having type-A underachievers on today’s show. So welcome.

Tendayi Viki Thank you. I feel very small after that introduction.

Peter Winick So I know you should be proud of it. So let me ask, how did this how did you get here? Right. So there’s a clear path theoretically to get a PhD and be an academic. There is no such parallel in the thought leader world. So how did how did this happen for you?

Tendayi Viki Yeah, So it’s interesting, right? Because I was born and raised in Zimbabwe. That’s where I grew up. That’s where I went to school in Harare. That’s the city that I grew up. And I went to university there. I did my undergrad there. And so in the moment when I was growing up, because I didn’t grow up with a lot, the clear path was get out of here and get to the west of the path.

Peter Winick Go, go west, young man. Right.

Tendayi Viki Go with young man. Go with. There’s been opportunities for you there. Right? And that was the path that I was chasing. So I actually got a I applied for a scholarship to do a master’s in forensic psychology. It gets a bit more convoluted. So I so I get here to the UK and I’m doing a master’s in forensic psychology and a fintech interest of mine. I have no interest in criminal psychology whatsoever, but it was such a way out.

Peter Winick Right.

Tendayi Viki Right, exactly. So I get to the UK and I’m like, right now, how do I get to stay? So, you know, you get to stay if you’re doing a PhD. So I applied for a transition from a forensic psychologist to social psychology, and then in the middle of my PhD, my father passes away. So now I have I have more responsibilities, family responsibilities. So the next way to stay is to is to get a job. So I applied to be lecturer. That’s what they call it here I think is like assistant professor in the US. And I got my first job teaching forensic psychology again. I had to go back and like I think a branding psychologist, I’m teaching forensic psychology. I transition to statistics and all the research I’m doing is around social psychology. Sure. And then and then one day I’m in Poland, right at an academic conference, and I run into a lady who was a professor at Stanford. I think it was Jennifer Eberhardt, and she invited me to spend a year in Silicon Valley as a visiting scholar.

Peter Winick So this is the beauty of it because it starts with, okay, I got to get out of Africa, so I got to get an education. I don’t hate forensic psychology, but it’s not my calling. And one thing leads to another. You bumped into someone in Poland, of all places. I went up in London. So it would have been in Poland. There’s someone there from Silicon Valley. And of course, you know, fast forward the tape, you know, 15 years or something. And now you’re in strategizing. So that’s the.

Tendayi Viki Pathway. Yeah, because her pivot, the pivot point to get me to this moment was meeting Jennifer Eberhardt and ending up at Stanford, right where they as attending Steve Blank’s classes and learning about grief and going to Facebooks first fund and getting into innovation and taking a keen interest in that to participate in the cultural movement, if you want to call it that. And that’s really how I kind of end up where I am today.

Peter Winick So Strategize Her is an interesting organization and it’s an organization built on thought leadership. So I want to touch on that. So it’s not yours per se, right? Yeah, it’s Alex’s IP, but it’s interesting to be someone coming in and operating off of the frameworks of someone is renowned as Alex, and that has turned that into a wonderful business.

Tendayi Viki Yeah. No, I mean set of diverse is, is an IP led business, right. So I would add Alex and Eve and therefore leadership around business model design. And just like the explosive success of the business model Canvas, you have a really powerful framework that low the large companies use when they’re doing their work right? So just the kind of the sheer force of that and then the insight from Alex to say, okay, maybe this is something I can build a business around and not just a business in like, you know, day to day consulting. Yeah, we’re just doing advisory and making love with life with the goal is to build kind of a software supportive sort of service. So we’re building a platform and the platform with what we use to design their business model and run their experiments, etc. And then we just provide like a supporting layer of content and training around that. So that’s really the business model that.

Peter Winick I want to push on a couple of things. So where I’ve seen this model work wonderfully and I’ve seen it fail miserably. So I want to talk about the things I’ve seen it fail and maybe you can counter with what you guys have done there. So one is oftentimes a thought leader creates a business and it’s really just an extension of their persona, right? They are the product. They are the thing. They are the energy. They are the charisma. And if you don’t have the IP, the frameworks, the models and the methodologies locked and loaded so that others can deliver and benefit from it, there’s only so much capacity they have. So tell us a little bit about sort of how Alex has done what he’s done to lock and load it so that it’s a consistent deliverable and experience for clients and for consultants like you that oversee a lot of that work.

Tendayi Viki Yeah. So the first thing is you cannot deny Alex of charisma, right?

Peter Winick Of course, really engaging.

Tendayi Viki And it does a really great, great work in terms of like engaging and bringing people along. So it’s almost like that’s the, you could call it the tip of the spear or like what you kind of lead with. But what Alex and Eve do so well is they have this way of going to the other side of complexity. You know what they say, like, I don’t care for simplicity before complexity, but simplicity after complexity. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. So think the need when they design their toolbox, the simplicity of the complexity which we all canvas is very well designed by population camp and very well designed. And now there’s new tools emerging the culture map, but the underlying them think these are all very well researched academically and then designed for usability type of tools. And what that allows you to do is you can go to various levels of depth with it depending on your level of interest. Like if you’re simply interested in designing with more complexity, you can do that. Okay? So you don’t need Alex or me or anybody, right?

Peter Winick So you can just read the book or get a tool or and it’s priced appropriately, right? If you just want a cursory, superficial understanding, great. But it’s almost Buddhist, if you will, that journey. And it could go deeper and deeper and deeper.

Tendayi Viki Exactly. And so you can go deeper and deeper and deeper. But it’s the kind of design because a lot of thought leaders write books, right? And then and they do keynotes and all this. But you have to figure it out in the density of their words. Like you have to go and profit for yourself. And then since make it for yourself or to become useful. And what Alex and Eve do is they lead with making it useful first and then they actually then put the words around it. I mean, I’ve asked this question before, like, what do you want to do first, design the visual or put the word visual first and then the words later. So the words, the state of the visual rather than the visual being in aid of the words, which is how a lot of thought leaders work. And so and what that does is it gives you this opportunity to get immediate value from using the tool.

Peter Winick And then I think that’s a key piece because a lot of people listen to someone’s work or read their book or whatever and shake their head and that’s awesome. That’s awesome. But that’s a theoretical and the applied is how is that awesome for me right now in my situation with my clients, in my business. And as soon as you can, even just a little taste, a little bit of success of how might you apply that in something you’re going to do in the next week in a real situation? That’s a whole that’s a game changer.

Tendayi Viki Yeah, that’s a complete game changer because, you know, the stuff is immediately, you know, you can use it straight away. You can you can play with it most, you know. I don’t know. You might get it 50% accurate, but with an accurate, it’s better than not doing it at all. And then over time, you can start to build your own capability to do that. But what that also does is it creates a platform that allows Alex to be able to onboard other thought leaders such as myself, that interested in the same content. And it allows people like me to then create plug ins that augment the usability of those tools. And then that’s an easier way to sort of work collaboratively, especially if you have a shared perspective and a shared language that you kind of right.

Peter Winick And if you have that shared perspective, you’re taking the burden off of Alex to create to be the only creator, right? Because you obviously have perspective, you have expertise, you’re smart, you can add to it. Now, you’re not going to come out there with stuff that’s totally outside of what one would expect from a firm like strategize. Right. It doesn’t make sense. You’re going into product design or something like that, right? So, you know, there’s a line and as long as you’re cool with that.

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Peter Winick And another thought. I have or I’d love your feedback on this. One of the other things I’ve seen where people struggle is so, you know, number one is it’s not qualified to enter that. Number two is I call it the cliff, right? So the rock star, the branded author on the book, The Face of the Firm, whatever. Everybody falls in love. And then it’s like, okay, great. We’re a firm of 100 people. That person’s resources are limited. You now have to work with and I, whoever, whoever and I call it the cliff because it’s also it’s almost an unfair burden, if not done properly, on you to say, okay, so they’re expecting this. I have my own style. I have my own way of doing things. I have whatever. And, you know, it’s almost like if you went to see Hamilton with Lin-Manuel and there was, you know, someone else playing the role of Hamilton that night, and that guy might be awesome, but you’re not. It’s not fair. So how do you deal with that as well? I call it the cliff problem where they’re like, you know, that’s getting off actually pointed.

Tendayi Viki And I’m the place where you land after you jump off that cliff. So, yeah.

Peter Winick I really pushed it or pushed off. Right.

Tendayi Viki That was an interesting process, right, In thinking about what my career might look like. If you want to if you want to call it in the shadow of another thought leader. Right. Goodbye. I’ve only been one shot a day for two years now. And in making the decision to partner up with another partner up, I had to kind of think about is Alex a shadow or is he a platform?

Peter Winick Interesting.

Tendayi Viki And so that was the that was the sort of the dance that you have to make. And so. One of the best ways for a for a thought leader to not represent a cliff is the extent to which they use themselves as a platform to save others.

Peter Winick Right.

Tendayi Viki Right. Or do they if they ego so large that they always have to be the main person in the main? And then even if they say you can work with this other person, you’ve never seen that person speak. Or. Sure.

Peter Winick Sure.

Tendayi Viki Or do anything collaborative. And Alex is extremely deliberate. About making sure that any single one of us might end up in a client facing situation in delivering every aspect of Martha Clark.

Peter Winick I think that’s a key point, too. So going back in time to Ken Blanchard has done something similar. Ken is now, I would imagine, mid-eighties or something like that. So started with situational leadership. But I know a lot of I know a lot of folks that organization, he was sort of co collaborating with others. He was looking for others with various domain expertise and co collaborating and literally putting their names on the books and literally putting their names on the program. And it was more of a, like you say, a platform and an umbrella where, yeah, if you’re looking for situational leadership, that’s Cairns. But then there’s 12 or 14 other lines that have his, you know, essence on it, but someone else is adding to it and they’ve added to the recipe in a distinct way where it’s not a replication of. So it’s very few people can manage. And I think most of that struggle, quite frankly, is ego. Yeah. And you know, I’ve met Alex and we’ve talked about him on the show, and if you’re wise enough to check the ego and or it just doesn’t. Not not every thought leader is a narcissistic egomaniac, contrary to popular belief. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know.

Tendayi Viki I don’t think it’s not. I don’t think it’s narcissistic egomaniac. I think it’s. It’s the reality that you actually are the best person to deliver that message. Teach that message. Show that.

Peter Winick Well, in in in the pre-COVID age, where you were getting paid, you know, $50,000 to show up on a stage for 45 minutes and your, you know, your day’s work, which is 45 minute long ends in a standing ovation. You know, the postal worker doesn’t get that right or doesn’t get the standing ovation at the end of the. Jolly good. Great. Excellent.

Tendayi Viki Exactly. Yeah. You know, if you’re a postal worker and you’re talking to a customer that most likely complaining about something like that. Right. Right. Wholly different experience. And so, so, so, in essence, that’s the challenge, right? The question that and I’ve seen loads of thought leaders, friends of mine, colleagues struggle with this, to what extent do you want to build a scalable business?

Peter Winick Exactly.

Tendayi Viki And to what extent is it just like a lifestyle business for you?

Peter Winick Yeah. So we talk about do you want to have a practice or business? And a practice is easy. There’s only three ways to monetize content. You either do more of what you’re doing. If not, that’s a marketing issue. You charge more for it. There’s things you need to do to do it. And ultimately it’s about the scale. And there’s plenty of people that have, I would even say, better than a lifestyle business, their seven figure businesses. But they are the product, the offering, the service. And, you know, one of the things that we saw in Covid is the breaks hit really hard. And a lot of those folks really, really hard, you know, speaking about what it was. So what have you guys seen organizationally? Good, bad and ugly, you know, in this almost, but not quite post-COVID world we’re living in.

Tendayi Viki From a business standpoint and a practice standpoint. Right. We the first thing we did was we panicked because all of the things that we did with exactly what you’re describing, conferences, well paid keynotes, workshops.

Peter Winick So let me write this down. Step one, pen down the method. Okay, so we’re like.

Tendayi Viki Do we have it done?

Peter Winick We have a business, right?

Tendayi Viki Yeah, yeah, yeah. Etc.. And then. And then we moved to. But hold on. Like, and this is. And this is the great thing, right? Like when it comes to like, client delivery, consulting, advisory building workshops, delivering and implementing all the tools, Alex doesn’t do that, right? We do that right. The rest of the folks that are work in the business. And that’s.

Peter Winick Right. He doesn’t he’s right. He’s not working on decks for the deliverable.

Tendayi Viki Yeah, exactly. But like, you know, coaching a team. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he, he does it if that business really, really wants him and is willing to pay the exorbitant prices of hanging out with Alex throughout the day, you know, every day of the week whatever. But that’s very rare. The majority of the time is us delivering the work. And what we noticed was that clients were very happy to transition that to virtual. So we didn’t lose business. And that’s what made us really settle down, like in terms of we’ll be okay. And so beyond that, the question then became, could we do some of the other offerings that we do virtually? So we do the master class and we do, you know, some of our bootcamps. And what we what we were able to transition successfully with the master class. And so we started running experiments in terms of price points, and we would offer people their money back, should’ve been canceled. Or we can, you know, you can sign up for the virtual math class and we and people would actually sign up. The price point remained the same, which was really profitable for us after running experiments where we found that we got more competition at the higher price point than.

Peter Winick What is to stay with the price point thing for a minute, because I think there’s. People are struggling with what I can deliver more value. Face to face, because that’s what I’ve always done and that’s what people will pay more for. And I think it’s a courageous move to say we’re going to try this masterclass. And by the way, the price is the same, because what we’re seeing a lot of whether it’s workshops, whether it’s speakers, whether it consultancies all do it digitally for $0.70 on the dollar, $0.50 on the dollar, $0.30 on the dollar. I’m always banging my fist on the desk going, No, no, no. If you’re delivering value, is shaking your hand worth 50 grand? Hell no. Is the bad sandwich you were going to serve in the whatever meeting room worth all that much money? It’s the value. What is the value of the problems that you’re helping your clients solve? And the fact that you’re able to do it in a way that’s better, you know. Burns Less resources, burns less time, whatever. Well, you know.

Tendayi Viki Exactly. Exactly. And so what’s interesting about that, right, is a strategy that we’re very deliberate about the customer experience. And so the question on deck was, could we replicate a similar experience virtually? Could we create activities, exercises, breakouts, all of this really high level engaging, you know, stuff. But while doing that virtually so we could really say you get the same value as if you were face to face. And so we deliberately worked on that. I mean, you know, we were pretty obsessive about that, running various versions of this. And in the end, we were able to do that, right, you know, three half days full for what was a two day workshop. And that sold out. And then.

Peter Winick Pulled out.

Tendayi Viki And then that sold out. And not only that. So you can you can imagine the margins. Now, we don’t have venue. We don’t have. So last year worked out for us really well, in a sense, Right? Although for me and Alex, it was a bit of a hit on our own personal wallet because we couldn’t do keynotes and all.

Peter Winick Sure, sure. Right, right.

Tendayi Viki And that’s the value of having a scalable business. We have an online digital platform already that we were working on, but we can use that when we’re delivering workshops, Right?

Peter Winick And I’m hearing people using the term instead of keynoting it’s free noting, which gets a lot of speakers to cringe. But the reality is, you know, if you go back in history 30, 40 years ago, the keynote is where the back of the room guys right. That would come around the John Maxwell I mean the people that started in the 70s and 80s they would it would be a nominal fee 20 bucks to go see them speak in a ballroom. But their money was back of the room. I think we’re sort of back to that where the premium isn’t the $30,000 speaking fee. That’s the place to get people to fall in love with you. The concepts, the ideas, the processes, the methodologies and the buy happens outside of the room, not literally in the back of the room, but it was good while it lasted. But I don’t see the keynote world coming back to where it was in the short term. I mean.

Tendayi Viki Yeah, maybe in the next 2 or 3 years. But here’s the question now. So if you’re saying that the business model is that the body that the back of the room and you don’t have a scalable business, what are people buying?

Peter Winick And that’s exactly right. Then it’s just entertainment.

Tendayi Viki Yeah, exactly. There’s just it’s the same like the keynote entertainment. And so if you don’t actually build a scalable business with other onboarding, other thought leaders, onboarding other practitioners when.

Peter Winick You’re done right Because I think the dirty secret and maybe it’s a secret on keynoting is I don’t care how good you are on the stage and I’ve seen the best and I’ve seen the worst in 45 minutes or an hour, you’re not going to change my world. It might be amazing. It might be engaging, it might be entertaining. But it doesn’t drive a change in behavior that is measurable compared to a business outcome. It just, you know, and every now and then you’ll hear the oddball story of the 1 in 1,000,000 of, I heard you talk. And I, you know, it changed my life. But those are such, such, such anomalies, you know.

Tendayi Viki That people that mean that I heard you talking to change my life. I have to go and do some action to pick up other tools, Bring in other people who know how to do what you were talking about before, that the life really changes and that and that’s what frustrates a lot of thought leaders, is when people then go and try and do the stuff that they learned from the keynote. They’re looking for other people because the thought leader and selves don’t have anything to give.

Peter Winick Right? No. And you hear that a lot where somebody says, I read your book. And all that person had was a book and a speech. So from that it got me thinking and I created a bunch of my own tools that we use in my own organization. Right. You know. That’s well, it’s a complement. It’s also IP theft. So am I am I a Paul Blake?

Tendayi Viki Exactly right. Or these other consultants that have built.

Peter Winick Yeah, yeah, yeah. They’re built. They’re building off.

Tendayi Viki Of your ideas and now they’re the ones that get hired to come in, you know?

Peter Winick Yeah, they’re a whole.

Tendayi Viki Whatever because you’re totally there and you don’t have availability, right?

Peter Winick So a little cottage industry of, like, blue ocean strategist consultants.

Tendayi Viki Right, Exactly. So if you don’t have your own business going, that is kind of for my independent from you sort of autonomous that can run itself. It’s really hard to sort of Leveraging Thought Leadership right.

Peter Winick Yeah. No, I agree. Well, this has been fantastic. I appreciate your time and it’s been fun getting to know you over the last year and change you and I’ve had a few conversations and thank you. Thank you for spending some time with us today.

Tendayi Viki Thank you, Peter. Really enjoyable.

Peter Winick Great To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at Thought Leadership Leverage dot 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.