Stress test for thought leadership: Are you ready?

Consider the following scenario: After a few weeks of back and forth with a prominent business journal, your PR person gets the go-ahead to submit a 400 word contribution to an ongoing forum on a critical issue for the senior executives in your target market. 

For example, Sloan Management Review is currently running an Executive Roundtable on "Capturing the Green Advantage," with short pieces by top executives from Interface, Boston Consulting Group, Intel, EMC, and others.

You think sustainability is a big opportunity, and you'd love the chance to show off your vision and work in this area to such a great audience. Sloan Management Review is going to reach a lot more C-level executives than your own publications ever could.

Are you ready? Would you know what to say?

No doubt you can dash off something interesting in 400 words. But would it reflect your firm's point of view? Would it stand out as interesting, different, engaging, credible? Would it advance your firm's reputation and suggest that you really do have the expertise to help clients address the issue at hand?

Lots of firms are trying to present themselves as thought leaders in their markets. Too often, however, they produce a disconnected set of white papers, articles, presentations, and perhaps blogs, podcasts, and videos that are, to be blunt, neither very thoughtful nor really leading anything. Faced with an opportunity like the one above, they have to scramble to figure out what angle to take, and it won't necessarily line up with most of the other materials sitting on their site.

On the other hand, firms with a well developed point of view on strategic issues like sustainability (or whatever your customers' priorities may be) would have little trouble with the opportunity above -- they have a solid foundation upon which to build. It probably took them longer to build that foundation than it took others to just crank out a set of disconnected white papers, but the hardest work is up front. Once the point of view is in place, it's much easier to produce a steady stream of articles, reports, blog posts, videos, presentations, briefings, and external commentaries that reflect and reinforce that core perspective. 

Developing a strong and differentiated point of view on core issues for your clients is hard work, and easy to forgo, especially in today's economy when short term lead and revenue generation dominate all marketing conversation. For high value services and solutions, though, it's awfully hard to generate leads and revenue without standing out from the crowd.

What do you think? 

Photo credit: House of Sims

Comments

[Paul Dunay]

Rob

You touch on a really great point which is "So how does all this thought leadership map back to a single key message or your overarching purpose?"

This is something often overlooked by many firms as they produce as much thought leadership as they can

Sometimes it is better to have one message (since that is about all the market can really bear from you) and wire all your thought leadership to keep driving that message home with different aspects you wish to showcase

Great post Rob!

[Paul Gladen]

Rob

Excellent post! Firms producing thought leadership need to realize they are in the media business, they need to have compelling content that will engage their executive audience.

Too many firms are producing the business content equivalent of cable TV "paid programming" rather than a blockbuster HBO show or Discovery channel documentary.

[Rob Leavitt]

Thanks to Paul and Paul - kudos always appreciated! I certainly agree with both of you, although the HBO blockbuster may be a bit high to shoot for with many firms (I say that as a big fan of The Sopranos and Entourage, among other great HBO shows).

I like the idea of the documentary as well. The "right" approach is probably a combination of a strong central point of view, a la Paul Dunay, and a small portfolio of "shows" that reinforce it with hopes that one might hit it really big but investing enough in each that they are all solid performers.

[Art Hutchinson]

The communications readiness gap is one aspect of the problem, yes.

An even more important issue that I've seen, almost universally in big organizations is a perception, on the part of management, that they can Ouija-board their way into a 'leading' point-of-view. The result is usually politically correct, trend-surfing mush that sounds like it was written by a committee (because it was). It's often so obviously slanted towards pitching what the company has to sell that no one reads past the first paragraph or two.

It's been my experience that only a small handful of individuals in such organizations are actually in tune with what the leading edge *is* in their industry and are thinking at, or out ahead of it, even, in some cases, shaping it already without management's awareness.

Those 'wild duck' individuals aren't always in management positions, much less roles that feed official processes for strategy development. Sometimes they're doing a great deal of thought-leadership on their own time in technical groups, on blogs and within their social and professional networks.

Finding those individuals and bringing them into the strategy conversation is like hunting quail. It requires careful tracking, plus the right approach to flush them out in an orderly way at just the right time. Most importantly, though, it requires restraint by management: not shooting down what are, by definition, paradigm-changing, even radical ideas.

[Rob Leavitt]

Thanks Art -- re: the quality of much alleged thought leadership content, I certainly can't argue. Very good point re: the wild ducks. I think some companies (still the exception) are beginning to support their efforts in social media and otherwise, but integrating them into a more strategic approach to thought leadership, as you suggest, is still a major challenge.

One possible solution, which is something I think more companies need to do anyway, is taking a more journalistic approach to thought leadership and content marketing in general. And literally hiring good journalists (many of whom obviously need new career paths these days), is potentially a great way to go. Let them find the wild ducks and other sources of new thinking, new ideas, and new content within the organization (and all around it) to bring to the market some more useful, innovative, and educational content.

[Tim Parker]

Great stuff; I couldn't agree more, particularly with with Rob and Art. Too many times I have seen people tell me they can represent their company's thought leadership and draft out a point of view in an afternoon (one in the last month, which failed). This never reveals anything the market would be interested in because no one person, or group, on the basis of their day job(s) alone, has insights that are deep, broad or novel enough to be interesting to the market. Any meaningful thought leadership takes research too. Think of a few household name thought leaders - Warren Buffet, Michael Porter, Peter Drucker etc; these people aren't just clever, they spend - or spent - half their lives doing research. But when someone even as brilliant and with as much exposure to business and technology at the highest levels as Bill Gates writes out his point of view - Competing at the Speed of Light - without any research, it's dull and obvious (and about 76,000th on Amazon's sales rankings).

I agree with Art that there are people in the organization that have good insights and you need to get them into formulating the point of view - and I haven't yet seen a case where they don't also have to spend time in the field, with customers, validating or refining the POV, and collecting examples that demonstrate it conclusively. In B2B professional services our customers are sophisticated buyers; they expect a well formed and substantiated argument if they are to be convinced. To Art's point, a Ouija-boarded POV does more harm than good.

[Jason Vaughan]

I think that much of what passes for thought leadership is nothing of the sort and is just the in-house expert expressing his/her views on a topic . That is not thought leadership.

Thought leadership is about producing a new perspective on an issue based on original research. A good example of 'real' thought leadership was a report produced by Whitehead Mann entitled 'What makes a great non-exec director'. They interviewed senior execs in FTSE companies and used the findings from their research to produce the report which also included commentary from Whitehead Mann's own experts on the issues raised. This was no doubt a time consuming project but it produced a true thought leadership paper that enhanced the firm's credibility in this area. What many firm's would have done would have been to ask one of their senior people for his/her opinions and then written this up as thought leadership. The contrast between the two approaches is stark and clients would find one of the reports to be thought provoking and worth retaining whilst the other one would be quickly consigned to the bin as another piece of 'marketing rubbish'.

Sadly, as a profession marketing suffers greatly when we are sometimes compelled to engage in activities which flatter the ego of senior management but do little to add value to the business we represent.