Thought Leadership
Spoiler Alert
Thought leadership is a necessary evil. Today, it’s less about critical thinking and leadership, and more about marketing, visibility, and signaling to your colleagues, competitors, and investors that you’re willing to play the game. This is an example of that ethos.
The second-best piece of career advice I’ve ever received is you should always be looking for a job. To this day, I make a point to check job listings on LinkedIn every month to see who’s hiring, for what roles, and where.
Over the years, this exercise has proven to be surprisingly useful. The regular audits have kept my finger on the pulse of marketing and communications trends: What titles are hot right now? How are organizations differentiating themselves from one another? What types of content and language are trending? And most recently – and perhaps most interestingly - what does compensation look like for top talent?
It was on one of these LinkedIn excursions that I was struck by how often “thought leadership” was listed as either a necessary skill or key responsibility. I popped the term in the job search and sure enough, it returned more than 23,000 open positions.
We know thought leadership is not new. We know it’s one of those terms people love to hate. We could even go so far as to say that based on communications norms today, thought leadership is a necessary evil. But it got me thinking: what does real thought leadership look like? Does it still hold value as a communications tactic? And if so, where does it fit with other marketing and communications priorities?
The Most Googled Questions
When we don’t know something, we turn to Google. In addition to providing answers, this collective habit has created a dynamic, real time, and ready-made pulse check on pretty much any topic you can think of. It’s not perfect, but tapping into it and looking at the most searched questions give us a sense of how people are thinking about thought leadership more broadly, and insights into where it fits in the larger marketing conversation.
And yes, the irony of this approach is not lost on me. Intuitively we all know what good thought leadership is (hint: it’s in the term), but like all things, there is the right way to do something, and there is the easy way. Why think about something when you can have someone else do the thinking or writing for you? And suddenly it’s easier to see why the quality of thought leadership is on the decline.
Here are the most searched terms on thought leadership:
Is thought leadership legit?
A topic for another time: The overlap between thought leaders and organizational leaders
Would you look at that. The fact that this is one of the most searched questions tells you everything you need to know about the current state of thought leadership. Interestingly, the snippet Google pulls out is “the most important thing that distinguishes a true thought leader is credibility”. I don’t disagree with this, but what makes you credible? Is it your current position? Your accomplishments? The size of your bank account?
At the risk of opening up a can of worms around why people are successful, and not wanting to get into a conversation about what country you were born in, your race, or your gender, I will leave it as this: We have all worked with people that have left us scratching our heads on how they got where they are. So, I’d argue that credibility is more about accomplishments than position.
To put it another way: Just because you are CEO, doesn’t mean you get to be a thought leader. And just because you are a thought leader, doesn’t mean you get to be CEO.
Can anybody be a thought leader?
Technically, yes. But to me, it’s a lot like telling a kid they can be anything when they grow up. Just because it’s possible, doesn’t mean it is likely to happen or even should happen. Let’s really consider what we are telling our kids: Is it OK to grow up to be a dictator? Or a serial killer? Hyperbole aside, latent desire or general interest doesn't mean you're qualified or the best person for the job.
Effective thought leadership is not just about having a novel or insightful idea – it’s about connecting that idea with a specific audience. Understanding who you are trying to reach, what action you want them to take, and the impression you want to leave them with is just as important as believing – or wanting - to have something interesting to say.
Here’s a better question: Should you work hard at becoming a thought leader, or should your hard work naturally lend itself to thought leadership? Let’s also add that to our list of topics for another time.
Is thought leadership a skill?
Yes. At its core, thought leadership is storytelling, and – according to Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, a phenomenal book condensing the whole of human history into 400-ish pages – storytelling is our superpower. Harari explains how we possess a unique capacity for cooperation, through our singular ability to use language to both describe what we see, taste, and touch, and also invent stories about things that don’t exist. It is this cooperation that sets us apart.
Apply these principles to society some 70,000 years later, and it still holds up. The most crucial step for anyone wanting to solve a problem or complete a task is establishing a narrative that inspires, rallies, and compels others to the cause.
One of my favorite communication-isms is that sometimes the messenger matters more than the message. Think about that. We are literally saying that the skill of a storyteller, be it their connections to an audience, position in society, or natural storytelling ability - and NOT their expertise – is more important than the message itself. It begs the question that if you have the best idea in the world, but nobody hears it, is it really the best idea?
So yes, thought leadership is a skill, though I would say it’s not just about learning to be a visionary who challenges norms and seeks out novel solutions. And it’s not just about being a skilled storyteller for your audience. It’s both.
The Thought Leadership Matrix
Thought leadership does not fall on a linear scale of good to bad. It’s more complicated than that. When you start mixing thought leaders with people leaders, and sprinkling in the idiosyncrasies of certain, often niche, audiences with wildly different desired outcomes, it’s less about being good or bad, and more about being effective for your audience.
I am a visual learner, so let’s map this out with two conceptual anchors of thought leadership: insightfulness and novelty. Putting “insightful” on one axis, and “novel” on the other, we have a simple 2x2 matrix that we can use to plot the current and future states of thought leadership as it relates to credibility and effectiveness.
Top Right: Novel & Insightful (Pasteur’s Quadrant)
This is the holy grail of thought leadership. Ideas are novel, applications are insightful, and authors possess storytelling powers that easily coax ideas into beliefs. For me, I immediately go to reputable organizations like universities and national laboratories, or gurus whose credibility on a topic is beyond reproach.
The perfect example of this is Louis Pasteur and the pasteurization process; you know, the food preservation process where things like milk are treated with mild heat to kill pathogens and extend shelf life. This idea was so new (read: novel) and so immediately applicable to society (read: insightful), that not only did they name the process after him, but they also classified scientific research projects that achieved similar results as falling into “Pasteur’s Quadrant” - the upper right quadrant of a simple two-by-two matrix that looks at a project’s ability to seek fundamental understanding, while also having immediate use for society.
Unsurprisingly, even this proposed thought leadership matrix idea lacks novelty.
Top Left: Insightful, but not Novel (this article)
A good example is this article. Writing on the current state (read: decline) of thought leadership is not new. Using the internet’s most asked questions as a hook, is not new. Reinforcing communications 101 concepts and -ism’s, is not new. Yet, pulling together these components to show how thought leadership today has nothing to do with thought leadership, while simultaneously using the concept to reevaluate what thought leadership can be, is (hopefully) insightful.
For me, this is where the majority of corporate and business “thought leadership” should aim to be. Especially with the rapid adoption of generative AI. You are going to get fewer and fewer new ideas, but just because it is not novel, does not mean you have to relegate yourself to the bottom left corner by also failing to be insightful.
Bottom Right: Novel, but not Insightful (the mighty spork)
Thinking about the thought leadership that falls into this quadrant makes me chuckle. For some reason, my mind goes to the spork. At the time, the idea of combining the fork and the spoon into a single, more efficient utensil was certainly novel. But when it came to showing a deep or accurate understanding of societal and cultural norms, it missed the mark.
Now don’t get me wrong, in certain instances and applications – hiking, camping, doomsday prepping, the military, company picnics - the spork is the undisputed champion. I think this reinforces how important it is to know your audience. For me, I’d like to give “novel, but not insightful" thought leadership the benefit of the doubt and assume it is just ahead of its time, still searching for the right audience.
Heck, there might even be value in intentionally writing pieces for this quadrant. If for no other reason than to shake things up and force readers to think outside of the box and challenge their own assumptions.
Bottom Left: Neither Insightful nor Novel
Which brings us to the bottom left corner - thought leadership that is neither insightful nor novel. If we were to map every thought leadership piece published in the last 50 years, I think few would be surprised to see that the majority of what is out there, falls in this bucket.
So why do we keep doing this? Because thought leadership today has shifted from educational tool to marketing tactic. It is less about critical thinking or leadership and more about visibility and self-validation through likes and clicks. On Reddit, there is a term for this: “karma farming”. It’s where ideas, content, and stories are rehashed over, and over, and over, for the simple truth that it continues to generate attention.
There is a fine line between thought leadership that falls in this category and entertainment.
Let’s be clear: there is absolutely nothing wrong with writing or creating content for entertainment. I even believe strongly in the power of entertainment to help educate, making this argument even more difficult to make. But what sets these two worlds apart is intent. Writing or creating content to entertain and writing or creating content that tries to pass off unoriginal ideas and ordinary experiences as novel or insightful are not the same thing.
Final Thoughts
I will leave you with this. If we are being honest about the current state – and role - thought leadership plays today, it feels like the TV show “Whose Line is it Anyway”, which had the tagline “The rules are made up and the points don’t matter”. To understand why this is, it’s important to look at how the demands on marketing and communications teams are evolving.
Today, teams are tasked with everything from getting clicks and driving traffic, to managing company reputation and building trust and credibility for its executives. Given this range, it’s easy to see the appeal in adopting an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink strategy. However, the tradeoff for convenience is quality, as tools lumped together are easily reduced to lowest common denominator thinking.
For example, you are standing up a campaign to sell more of product X. It is not a new product, but with some snazzy new copy and a quick brand refresh, your team is making a new push. Campaign assets include social media, case studies, internal and external blogs - and oh, wouldn’t it be great if we have our executive write a thought leadership piece on the value our company brings to the table.
Sound familiar? This whole construct is destined for the bottom left quadrant.
Years ago, I was on an online antique Jeep forum trying to track down an issue I was having with my 1984 CJ7. As I was reading through a thread, one user made the comment “If you can’t fix it with a hammer, you have an electrical problem”. The phrase has stuck with me ever since for two reasons: 1) It is amazing how many things you can actually fix with a hammer, and 2) No matter how hard you try, sometimes you just need the right tool for the job.
For thought leadership, the same dynamic is true. Thought leadership should not be a hammer. It is a specific tool that should be used deliberately and intentionally to persuade, inspire, and rally audiences to your cause. So, the next time you think about writing a thought leadership piece, ask yourself: What quadrant does my story fall in? Is it novel? Is it insightful? Can I use a hammer? Or do I have an electrical problem?