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Thought Leadership at the Deep End of the Pool
For business thinkers, it’s never been so easy to publish… and never been so hard to write what people are truly looking to read.
By Art Kleiner
“I want to write a book,” said Alicia, “to build up my brand name.” A leadership development expert in her mid-40s, she’s one of those uncannily gifted facilitators who can walk into a room of squabbling top executives and, with just a few well-placed questions, shift the atmosphere from overwrought to kumbaya. But first she has to be invited in.
Since she’s a freelancer competing against the likes of McKinsey and Bain, she’s constantly worried about her ability to get noticed. Conventional wisdom increasingly says that if you want to get your foot in the door, you have to produce thought leadership. You have to show, in other words, that you are worthy of being recognized for your insight, and that you have the conceptual key to unlock other peoples’ problems, inside your enterprise and ideally in the world at large.
The term “thought leadership” may seem like a recently coined marketing phrase. But it dates back at least to 1876, when the influential Unitarian theologian Charles Henry Appleton Dall described Ralph Waldo Emerson as manifesting “the wizard-power of a thought leader.” In 1995, Joel Kurtzman, the founding editor-in-chief of the management magazine strategy+business, revived the phrase for a series of “thought leader interviews” with management luminaries. At the time, there were only a few such luminaries around: Clayton Christensen had only just published The Innovator’s Dilemma; C.K. Prahalad and Stuart Hart were still researching the theory that would eventually become The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.
It’s 25 years later, and the magazine (which, incidentally, I was editor-in-chief of from 2005 through 2019) is still using the name for its interview series. Kurtzman was on to something. Every business decision — indeed, just about every major decision people make — is a bet on some theory about the way the world works. Most of these theories are chosen unconsciously, and many of them have unrecognized, unintended consequences. The practice of thought leadership, when it’s authentic, energetic, and skillful, is thus a solution to one of the basic problems of our time. Humanity…
