When Ideas Disrupt the Status Quo | Trevor Merriden

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How thought leadership can tell the compelling stories found in raw data.

An interview with Trevor Merriden about moving from content-based to strategic thought leadership.

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How do great thought leaders successfully connect their content to their business objectives in a way that causes real impact? It’s all about strategy.

Strategy is the most overlooked piece of thought leadership. Even with compelling stories, brilliant insights, and a drive to share with their audience, some thought leaders fail simply because they didn’t know how to craft a winning strategy to deploy their content.

Our guest today is Trevor Merriden, Founder and CEO of Merriborn Media Ltd, a company that puts businesses on the fast track to content competency.

Trevor started his thought leadership journey as an economist, finding the stories in numerical data. He took those insights and became a business journalist, helping Human Resources (or, in UK terms, the Personnel Department) find more strategic approaches to telling those stories – and delivering them with impact. After taking the role of editor as far as he could, Trevor started his own company. Now, he helps business clients deploy their thought leadership content with comprehensive, successful strategies.

Trevor discusses the future of thought leadership, and how the field might grow and change as it evolves. Trevor also shares the three C’s: Curiosity, Clarity, and Collaboration; when used effectively as a strategy, these can give your insights the impact and reach necessary for success. In addition, we discuss how the pandemic has had an impact on thought leadership, encouraging people to make better use of time and technology and allowing ideas to move faster than ever before. We also discuss the pitfalls of the virtual world, and how quiet voices can be lost amid the noise – unless they possess a strategy to help draw attention to their insights.

Our conversation covers how a thought leader can grow from any role where a passion for curiosity and storytelling exists.

Three Key Takeaways:

• If you have a driving curiosity to find answers and share insights, you need to be part of an organization that will support your creation of thought leadership content.
• Organizational thought leadership content needs to keep the strategic goals of the company in mind.
• Thought Leadership doesn’t have to be a solo mission. The world’s largest problems will require collaborative efforts.

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Join the Organizational Thought Leadership Newsletter to learn more about expanding thought leadership within your organization! This monthly newsletter is full of practical information, advice, and ideas to help you reach your organization’s thought leadership goals.

And if you need help scaling organizational thought leadership, contact Thought Leadership Leverage!

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Transcript

Bill Sherman Not every organization wants to rock the world with its ideas. Some organizations want to stay the course. So how do you elevate ideas and take them to scale within a profession? Today I speak with Trevor Meriden. He began his career working as an economist at the Bank of England, and he has worked as an editor with the Economist Intelligence Unit, as well as our magazine. He’s now the managing director of Mirabaud Media. He and I have had fantastic conversations around disruptive ideas within organizations. And we’re going to dig deeper today. What happens when an organization doesn’t want a disruptive idea? What happens when a whole field is being disrupted and transformed? And how do you guide an idea to scale during disruption? I’m Bill Sherman and you’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Trevor.

Trevor Merriden It’s great. It’s great to be here, Bill.

Bill Sherman So I want to talk about data driven thought leadership. And you had the opportunity early in your career to be working with the Bank of England and working with numbers and telling stories through numbers. And let’s start there about storytelling. How did that come about in terms of the stories you were telling?

Trevor Merriden Well, I mean, you know, obviously this is a podcast all around thought leadership. But originally before I was ever a words nerd, I was a numbers nerd and I trained university as an economist. And I was thinking about what sorts of places to apply to. And one of the places was the Bank of England. And so I was actually, for the first four years my career, I was in economy attrition, which is a cross between an economist and a magician. I think they sort of make things they make things up a lot of the time from numbers. But I found that I was quite good at telling stories. So around the numbers. So I started my writing there and that’s when I started to embrace words. And I enjoyed that whole craft and art. But what I didn’t enjoy was the sort of 13 or so layers of bureaucracy that were above me in the Bank of England between me and the and the government. And the aim of a lot of the Bank of England’s material at that time is there as the fulcrum of stability in the financial system, was to say precisely nothing. And so I would come out with interesting radical articles to write, and they would get toned down through all these layers of bureaucracy. And I remember once I, I said to my boss what I’ve written, it just means precisely nothing now. And my boss smiled and nodded wisely and said, Yes, that’s precisely what we meant to achieve, because where you have stability, you have safety. And so in that context, my work with numbers kind of was a blunt was a blunt weapon, if you like, you know, but that was through bureaucracy. But then I went on to sort of find sort of joy in thought leadership through numbers in other ways as well, sort of beyond that.

Bill Sherman So I want to stay on the story at the Bank of England for a moment. You had said that you were looking through the data, looking for the story. And I think there are a lot of people who are intrigued at how to use data to be more convincing, clear and compelling. How do you use data effectively to tell the story?

Trevor Merriden Well, I mean, I’ll start by saying that I think it’s within the gift of anyone with patience or even with They might not regard themselves as particularly numerate, but a lot of it is like an act of wonder and curiosity. It’s like looking at stars in the sky and you see a star over there and you see a star over there. And then, you know, and in the past, we might have joined those up in our mind and formed sort of constellations. And essentially what I’m doing is I’m looking at load that points of data, you know, something, you know, 53.7% of people believe this and 47%. And what I’m doing is I’m effectively drawing the constellations, you know, So that could be Orion’s belt or that could be another constellation. And by doing that, I start to draw a picture, you know, and I start sort of imagining. So it’s a half of half data, but it’s also half curiosity. And I have in my mind, and I think this is within the gift of almost anybody really is to have that sense of curiosity, you know, around what you’re looking at, not just a number, but to actually think, well, what does this mean? What is this trying to tell me? And only sort of effectively spend my time joining the dots or forming constellations.

Bill Sherman Well, and that curiosity, which is something that can be nurtured through your life at any point also then has to exist within an organizational structure. Right? The ability to ask a question, find an answer, and share the answer. And so the story that you tell is sometimes the organization doesn’t want to. Investigate or put out insights in the same way.

Trevor Merriden Yeah, they know perfectly well that there is a story there, but in that particular case, you know, that wasn’t the purpose of the organization as they saw it at the time. I think things have loosened up a bit now. The bank, you know, that they feel they can say things like that. But this is this is back in the 1980s. I mean, it was a reason why I then went on to sort of pursue, you know, other areas in sort of thinking and developing and the curiosity which led onto thought leadership. But it was also another reason why I left the bank within a couple of a couple of years.

Bill Sherman Right? So with that, the curiosity plus being in the right environment that supports the curiosity. And so if you’re a leader and you can have an entire organization that has curiosity, but if they don’t feel that they’re supported to tell those stories, those stories won’t turn into thought leadership that goes across the organization or out to your audience.

Trevor Merriden Yeah, I think that’s a really crucial point, though, because I have seen a lot of curious in the good sense, individuals sort of in organizations who have often felt they are sort of plowing a lonely furrow, you know, sort of in terms of doing things. And those are the people that other people and businesses refer to as well, whether they’re the odd one out or they don’t really fit in here or they’re not our kind of people, actually, they probably should be your kind of people because these rough diamonds or lonely sort of followers are the people who very often have the greatest sort of imagination. Things can spark up. And I think I think organizations need to and I think they’re getting a bit better now, you know, to tolerate those people who do ask the why question several times, you know, we expect of our five year olds to continually ask why sometimes to the point of distraction. But nevertheless it’s a good question and I guess I and it never really got out of the habit of asking that question. Thank goodness.

Bill Sherman Well, and let’s pivot there, because the why question leads to your next step in your career, which was a journalistic one. And that curiosity continued as you started and as you described it, the personnel world of corporate Britain at the time. But as it was in an inflection point, moving from personnel to H.R. So talk about your work in journalism and how that expectation shift came about.

Trevor Merriden Yeah. Well, originally i, I moved from the bank into what was first economic journalist to the economist group and then I moved into sort of mainstream business journalism and then Applied Securities route. You know, I ended up on this magazine called H.R. Magazine, you know, where I it was a profession at the time that was still finding its feet in this country. In the UK it was called the personnel department. In some places in the UK it still is called the personnel department and but personnel was very much seen as an administrative where you go to when things break down, you know, in relations between employees, it was very tactical for a mini and the magazine itself that I was suddenly found myself in charge of. They said, Trevor, you’ll enjoy this. You’ll meet lots of lots of people, you know, also people, people and H.R. Professionals. They’re lovely. They love to talk. And so I found that that was the case. But what I found was that they were searching for this sense of strategy in what they were doing. They were wanting to move from a tactical profession to a strategic profession. So I decided to make it my mission to use whatever tools and means available to kind of give them confidence in themselves and to realize that they could raise their sights and whether within their organization, push their sphere of influence or if they couldn’t do that within their organization, much in the same way that I couldn’t use the numbers effectively back at the bank then I felt strongly that they should probably go somewhere else, go to an organization that was more enlightened. I didn’t become a recruitment agent in that sense. I was still an editor, but just trying to raise the aspirations of a professional. So we did that with some success, you know, And in terms of raising the sights of of the profession, of course, that was happening all over the place. You know, it wasn’t just happening in the UK but in the in the US. And so and there’s still a long way to go for the profession. And, but, but, but that’s what we were trying to do in terms of raising those aspirations. You’re not personnel. Your H.R. You’re not just H.R. You’re strategic H.R. And you’re not just strategic H.R. You are serving the needs of the business in doing so.

Bill Sherman There’s a parallel here that I want to pause on in the world of H.R. And thought leadership, right. So thought leadership as a function sometimes in some organizations as coming out of a content group. Right. Or content marketing. And all of a sudden they’re told, you’re doing thought leadership now. Let’s talk a little bit about that evolution from content to thought leadership to strategic thought leadership that aligns the business. And maybe there are some lessons that you sort of learned and saw as the profession was going through that transformation.

Trevor Merriden Yeah, it’s a really it’s a really important transition. I mean, in any profession, I founded it in my own profession and I found it in the profession I was looking at. And you’re right, they did sort of feed off each other in my mind at least. And, you know, just as the journey of H.R. Was that sort of aspirational journey, I found that myself, you know, that I was I because I was kind of reasonably numerous. I was starting to look into H.R. Started to produce a lot more data around it. And so I was able to talk in a more strategic way and when I was able to talk in a more strategic way to the H.R. community, it raised my own sort of aspirations about what I could do with content and what I could do with that thought leadership and then thought leadership being used to serve the needs of businesses. You know, at that point, my business was I was an internal person. I was working as an editor on a magazine. But I, I started to become a bit restless myself that the magazine was a narrow construct. And actually I thought, well, I could go and help lots of businesses. I could move beyond the magazine environment and do this beyond sort of what many people regard as journalism. I could provide content, provide thought leadership, help the strategy that served businesses, lots of businesses, you know, sort of beyond that.

Bill Sherman So we’ve talked about you as an economist. We’ve talked about you as a journalist and an editor. When did you start becoming self aware that you were doing thought leadership?

Trevor Merriden Well, I moved from the magazine eventually for various sort of family reasons. I had three kids under the age of five at the time. And I and I realized that one of the PR businesses that was pitching in to me, there’s not many that pitch in well to magazines. But one business that did, I found I happened to be sort of on my doorstep and literally ten minute walk away. And I, I joined the thing and I joined it because it was a very strategic communications consultancy. And they were really into thought leadership. They served their clients by, you know, writing, thought leadership and so on. And so I was a director of this business. We grew that business quite a lot, and I was getting people in to help me at that point in terms of the writing. But I realized that the skill that I had picked up in journalism, plus the consultative skill that you pick up and work in, you know, professional services, you know, in consulting actually served me very well to actually write that thought leadership myself. So that was the first awakening, if you like, 3 or 4 years later. I’d done everything we could with that business. I decided to start my own business purely in that area around sort of content and thought leadership. And I for the first, if I’m honest with you, Bill, for the first two years, I, I was all about survival. You know, it was about, you know, it’s about you set up your own business and you as my wife, as my wife said, I’ll try and avoid the crudity says she said, I love you. I support you. You’ve got two years and don’t f it up. And so I got to two years and I realized I hadn’t and that things were going well. At that point, I was kind of taking almost any piece of content work. But at that point I thought, well, now I in keeping with some of the early compensation, I can raise my sons, if you like. I can I can develop my own sense of and I and I what I really want to do is I want to I want to focus in very clearly on thought leadership. And so that was probably the short answer to your question, was about sort of 7 or 8 years ago now, I would say. And I’ve been I’ve been doing that ever since.

Bill Sherman If you are enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about the podcast, please leave a five-star review and share it with your friends. We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all major platforms as well as at LeveragingThoughtLeadership.com. So in terms of understanding thought leadership, it sounds like it was an evolutionary process for you, right? Where like many people who have become practitioners, an accidental valve leadership practitioner rather than a planned one. I want to ask you, how do you define thought leadership today?

Trevor Merriden Well, you know, it’s been obviously, you know more about the sort of the history and origin of thought leadership. You know, I’ve seen various accounts in terms of in terms of how it is defined. To me, thought leadership is as good as the master that it serves, if you like. You know, the business strategy. I make this very strong connection, just like I did on the magazine and just like I did in terms of helping clients, you know, when I was working in the PR business. And just as I do now, the really thought leadership is good when you are literally putting on the shoes of the customer or client or membership organization that you are serving and, you know, be that. Really, what I see about is that it is really acting as the clarion call, the voice of the senior business community within a business, the messages that they want to get out, a genuine message that would resonate not just externally in terms of elevating the brand, but also internally in terms of providing clarity for everybody within the business for understanding the purpose of what they do. If you got those two things, if you’re if you’re showing a genuine profile for external sort of thought, leadership is showing what your brand is all about and you’re combining it right deep down, right the way through with an internal president so that the people at all levels of the organization understand why they’re doing it and thought leadership is a fantastic vehicle for that.

Bill Sherman You talk about the importance of strategy, and I would say over my almost 20 years now in the field, I think strategy and thought leadership is the piece that’s often most overlooked. People know they need ideas. They know they need some sort of execution to get the idea out into the world, but they don’t connect the thought leadership to the business objectives and goals. And they just hope by putting smart ideas out there, magic happens. Yeah, And I’ve seen that breakdown again and again. Have you?

Trevor Merriden Yes. So it’s is the very short answer to the question. But to expand on it, I mean, you must have had this bill that somebody phone you up or e-mail you or you have a conversations and they always say, you know, we feel we should be making more of our content, you know. Trevor And I was going, really? What makes you what makes you think that? And. Well, you know, I think we’ve got some ideas. You know, I think we just to say, well, tell me what your ideas are. And so tell me what their ideas are. And they’re looking it’s like them looking through a telescope the wrong way round, as far as I’m concerned. They and the question I then sort of gets to the point where they might be floundering around and so on. And I and I say, look, let’s ask a simple question. What are you trying to tell me about your business? Tell me what you’re trying to achieve. Tell me what you know, what are the things that are most important to you over the next three months, six months, a year? And what are you trying to achieve through that? How do the thoughts in your business sort of fit into that? How does your thought, how is your thinking, your strategy, supporting that? And then and only then can we ask the question of how does the content that we’re talking about actually work to support that? Just in the same way, earlier in the conversation we talked about how those H.R. support the the business, the business strategy. So probably the biggest lesson I ever learned was back in the editing days was, was when somebody I was writing an editorial and I showed it to my editor in chief at the time, and he said he said, If you were the reader reading this, what would you think? And I and I so then started to articulate, you know, how actually I would look at that paragraph and think, this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about or this guy doesn’t really understand my world. And I answer my own questions. And he just smiled, didn’t say anything else to me, but just walked off. And I then rewrote the editorial exactly the same. Now, you know, in thought leadership. Is that is that what, dear business leader, would your customer think if they read this piece of thought leadership? Does that raise the issues and help to answer the issues that you are thinking of that maybe are at the kind of fuzzy edge of your thinking at the moment? You don’t know exactly that you it’s articulating a problem that you think that you may have, but you haven’t had time to deal with it and bring it from that fuzzy edge right into the center in the front of your mind. We must do something about this now.

Bill Sherman One of the reasons that I love your story about the Bank of England is because it brings these principles to life so clearly, and that’s why it sticks with me. One, you had the idea and the insight and you said, Hey, I can tell this. Sorry. Yeah. Your manager looked at it and said, No, but that’s not the story we’re trying to tell. And you’re out of alignment with what we’ve articulated as our objectives for the organization. Yeah. And then the expectations of the readers beyond the organization. And so what I guess I would ask is if you were going back and had the opportunity to talk to yourself in the Bank of England days, what advice on practicing thought leadership might you give to a younger Trevor?

Trevor Merriden Crikey. That’s a great question. God, I would love the opportunity to go back. But if I say, okay, let’s imagine here we are so old, Trevor. So younger, Trevor. So that says, you know, I’m writing these pieces. I’ve got some great stories here. Every time Mike Draft comes back, it’s got big red lines through it and they’re taking out all the fun out of out of my article and my older Trevor will say, well you know don’t look at these just at these red lines You can understand the reasons why they have done that in a technical sense that they say that their organization’s purpose is to not to make waves, not to create controversy and so on. But maybe you could get some more things through if you appealed to your bosses. And the boss’s boss is about the reader instinct as well. You know, what would people reading the Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin or other similar austere publications, you know, what are they going to get, What they’re going to get? If you dig into what they want is some clarity to go away and easily know that the bank stands for something. I would try and argue this. I think within that environment I was on a bit of a losing wicket, as we say in this in this country. So I am I don’t know if I would have got very far, but I would have felt myself feeling more at peace myself, and I probably would have made my decision quicker with older Trevor talking to younger Trevor to move on and to work in a freer environment. You know, I probably stayed there a year or two too long as there for years and all. And then I realized there was a world where there weren’t 13 layers of bureaucracy and actually you could get your, your message across. You could go and talk directly to your readers if you wanted to. And I found that a tremendously liberating experience. Wonderful place, Bank of England. But it wasn’t it wasn’t my long term career.

Bill Sherman So we’ve taken a trip into the past with advice, and I think that is a good piece of. Figure out and understand the goals of the organizations from where you sit. You may need to ask questions and understand what are your boss and your boss’s boss trying to achieve and then align. And as you said, you can drop pieces into that. We’ve looked in the past. Let’s look in the future now. Where do you see thought leadership going? What are or what are the things we need to work on to make it more effective?

Trevor Merriden Right. Okay. We’ve mentioned one of them already that I found, and I’m not just saying it because I think it’s innately within myself, the curiosity side of things. I think organizations cannot afford to not be curious anymore. The pandemic has shown us two things. One is how terrible the pandemic is. Number two is that in that adversity, all sorts of magnificent things actually did happen within organizations where people were able to achieve things, things that previously been in the too difficult path that I think has sort of raised some people’s level of consciousness around curiosity about what if we did it this way? What if we had to do this? What it, you know, the world was about to end and we and we had no choice but to do so. We face an existential crisis. Curiosity is one of those things. I think a focus in the future on clarity that you will know, Bill, through many thought leadership projects that the very often, you know, you may get people within an organization who have competing view about what they are there to do and the business that the business objectives, what they’re doing. The real future of thought leadership, I think, is about achieving this, this sense of clarity you can distill and distill to still lots of different ideas. You have to distill it in a way that is a clear but not bland. As a result, in the way that my Bank of England articles turned out to be. And then finally, I’d say there is this a thing around collaborative thought leadership. You know, we have a lot of you know, we talk about gurus, you know, we talk about experts and we think about and we think about thought leadership. Perhaps some people might think of thought leadership. It’s a slightly painful experience where the a kind of guru or an isolated figure sits in a room for hours on end and then has a little spark of genius. Right? Settle down. Everybody says all hail the genius. You know, this is thought leadership. Of course it’s not like that. And increasingly, the best thought leadership for the increasingly knotty problems in the world, you know, are formed through collaborations of all sorts. It’s not new to say that people are collaborating to get answers, but I think it’s an accelerating trend and and something that we’re going to see a lot more of. And I think that’s fantastic. So I hope that those three CS of curiosity, clarity and collaboration sort of are part of the future. Very fortunately for thought leadership, right? They will be given the legacy. So that makes life easy, doesn’t it?

Bill Sherman I was appreciating the mnemonic as you are creating it. I went land a third C and you sure? Yeah. So I want to stay on this collaborative piece for just a moment and underscore one of the things that I’ve watched over the last year or two is this accelerating flow of ideas across the world. It used to be you had to get on a plane or be on calls, and ideas seemed to travel more slowly. And one of the things that I think because of the adoption of Zoom and social media, that for good or for ill ideas can travel faster. And so one of the things that I look at is how do we use thought leadership more effectively so that good ideas are traveling faster and that our problems are solved and solutions implemented more quickly?

Trevor Merriden Yeah. Yeah. I, I mean, certainly there is an accelerated pace in that. And part of it is that, you know, despite the fact that we’ve all for years said, you know, it’s better to meet face to face, isn’t it? You know, the truth of the matter is that it’s a big timesaver. And we you know, and you think about the pluses of us, you know, talking like this at the moment. We’re talking you know, we’re talking sort of virtually and we’re sharing ideas and so on. I could have got on a plane and traveled over to Vegas to see you. You know, I mean.

Bill Sherman That’s a nine hour flight minimum.

Trevor Merriden Yeah, I’d be knackered, I’d be tired, my brain would be addled, you know, and I and I would have jet lag for 2 or 3 days. And the quality of any ideas I might have had when I left Heathrow, you know, my might have disappeared by the time I turned up at your house. So I think. There is clearly an improvement in in that sense. I think there’s lots of pros here in terms of thought leadership and the ability and the tools and the technology for sharing ideas and the ease of sharing projects and working on things. I mean, there’s a whole bunch of people I now work who I’ve never actually met. And, you know, it’s astonishing, you know. But I just going to get on with it, if you don’t mind. I don’t mind. And we just do that. I do think we’ve got to have a voice of caution, though, that just in the same way that if I if I get on a plane tomorrow and come and meet you, Bill, and then I see you and I think, he’s a bit taller than I thought or, you know, he’s not it looks different, you know. So if you meet him so face to face or you get a different impression or you see some of these wider perspective of their life in the same way, I think that the flat screen thought leadership world, if you like, does risk losing some voices as well. You know, if you are in a meeting where, you know, there’s a mixture of sort of senior and junior people, for example, you know, or a big one of those big Zoom meetings that, you know, some people are trying to turn their screens off and, you know, and they and I sometimes think the quietest voice in the room, that’s the room used to be when we met up around a table, you know, a good chairman or CEO or whoever sort of would say. And what do you say to the person? Very often that person with the quietest voice has the most interesting point of view. And I think some of that risks getting lost. I think in in the virtual world, where they where it’s probably a bit too easy to not make a contribution in a meeting, even if your view is of value. It’s something I worry about. I haven’t got any evidence to back that up, Bill. But it’s something I’m I wonder. I do worry about the flat screen thought leadership world.

Bill Sherman So a couple of thoughts on that to build as we wrap up here. One, I think that as you look at thought leadership, it is easy to go to the usual suspects again and again. Right. And I think that’s always been true, but it’s been made more visible. And let me articulate that. Right. So if you were to go back in the business world. Right, look at who was practicing thought leadership 20, 30 years ago, whether thought leadership was defined as a business book or a publication of prestige publications, such is HPR that had its own gatekeeping limitation, either through publishers and editors. And now, because of the accelerated pace, we can be on a zoom together with 40 people. We can be at least aware and see a box on the screen where someone is silent, where that person wouldn’t have been even visible in the room before. Yeah, yeah.

Trevor Merriden I think that’s true. I that, that, that there is a case that I think the question is as within any vehicle or medium that you use, I think it’s all about awareness and making sure that everybody has the chance to communicate their ideas. And I’ve seen good gym meetings and I’ve seen fancy meetings, you know, sort of where I felt that some people were effectively shut out because people had been sort of on a on a bit of a monologue about something. But I’ve also seen conducted very well and I’ve seen good meetings about meetings. So what happens is you have to change the parameters and just make it as easy as possible for people to feel that they can contribute without fear or favor.

Bill Sherman Well, and to build on that, I would say thought leadership is about taking ideas to scale. And so if you have responsibility within your organization, you can either go back to your usual suspects again and again and help take their ideas to scale. Or you can cast a wider net and ask that person, like you said earlier, the chair who says or what you think, right and truly listen. And sometimes you have to be persistent and proactive within the organization and encourage people to share because they may demur the first time or the second time, even though they’ve got a great idea that they’ve been sort of noodling on constantly. Right?

Trevor Merriden Yeah, I And you’ve just made me think of a really good example of that. An organization that I work with in the UK, UK, MBNA, which is part of the Bank of America. And we had a long story short, we, we, I became I was put in charge of this sort of content management platform about developing a community within that. We did that in the organization and increase that from about a dozen to 2000 people. One of those people, those 2000 was a kind of a guy who was quite low down an organization that when there were some big floods in this in this kind. A few years back. He had a brilliant idea about notifying all the people who are affected by the flooding areas that their credit terms would be eased. You know, for the four for the period of duration of the six months afterwards, that they wouldn’t have to pay back any of their loans or anything during that time. And he suggested that as an idea. And the joy of technology. You know, pre-pandemic days. But it’s still a joy was that it was picked up by the CEO, the finance director of the H r director within about an hour. We said come and present this at your at the board meeting. His first reaction was, my God. His second his second reaction was, I’m going to source ideas and. Through exactly the same medium. So we asked people over at the Bank of America for advice on how they dealt with various floods in situations before. And then he was there at a board meeting, This guy who’d never been expected to be in that kind of environment, presented ideas. They said, we love it. We’ve got. We’ll have somebody to work with you on this project, support you. And they implemented it within a few weeks. Whereas in most organizations in the past, that sort of that kind of that leadership from below, if you like, would not have registered, What would it be? Never percolated up within the organization. Great idea. Sort of that was that was then seized upon and used for competitive advantage.

Bill Sherman Well an ideas can get trapped in organizational paralysis and bureaucracy. And so finding a way, if you think about the organization as a creator of ideas and that if you’re hiring smart people, skilled people, regardless of what level in the organization. If you think of one of the outputs of the organization is better ideas. You need to be looking deep in the organization and encouraging those people because maybe they don’t crack the code and have that winning sort of game winning idea today. But they’re in your future.

Trevor Merriden Absolutely. And there are future of any organization that wants to survive, I think. Right. And, you know, survive and then thrive in in the period ahead. I think the days are long gone where, you know, anybody could afford to lead a largely inert workforce who just kind of went in and did the same thing day in, day out. You got to be restless. You’ve got to be curious. You’ve got to be clear and you’ve got to be collaborative.

Bill Sherman Well, there’s a lot more we could talk about, but let’s leave it on those three C’s. I want to thank you, Trevor, for joining us in the conversation today.

Trevor Merriden Thank you so much for the opportunity to talk about.

Bill Sherman If you’re interested in organizational thought leadership, then I invite you to subscribe to the OrgTL newsletter. Each month we talk about the people who create, curate and deploy thought leadership on behalf of their organizations. Go to the website. OrgTLcom and choose join our newsletter. I’ll leave a link to the website as well as my LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Thanks for listening and I look forward to hearing what you thought of the show.