Think Write Grow

How to Become a Thought Leader and Build Your Business by Creating Exceptional Articles, Blogs, Speeches, Books and More

Grant Butler

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118219034
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Small Business
• Index: Business

In a competitive age, thought leadership has emerged as a subtle but powerful way to grow your business, establish credibility and demonstrate expertise, build your profile and forge relationships with prospects and customers. Thought leadership material can take many forms, including public speaking, websites, the media, advertising, writing books, online forums, webinars and blogging. This book will show you how to take your great ideas and craft them into a clear point of view which can influence others.

The book is organised into three parts:

1. Think: Defines thought leadership and how to transform your great ideas into effective thought leadership material.

2. Write: Shows you how to articulate your ideas into effective communication.

3. Grow: Demonstrates how thought leadership can be marketed to grow your business and profile.

Key features:

• Shows you how to go from expert to influential thought leader
• Written by Grant Butler, former Australian Financial Review journalist and now managing director of Australia's largest corporate writing firm.
• Explains techniques used by politicians, public figures and the CEOs of our biggest companies.

Think Write Grow studies the techniques of the great communicators of recent times, from Barack Obama and Boris Johnson to Tim Flannery and Malcolm Turnbull.

Part 1: Think

Chapter 1: What is Thought Leadership?

Thought leaders inspire leadership. They ignite imaginations, explode old myths, and illuminate paths to the future that others may follow. Jan Phillips3

Dr Naren Chitty walks with a limp from a childhood bout of polio. He once also had a leopard cub as a family pet. ‘I recall that Lumpi had a very rough tongue,’ he says. ‘Rather like gritty sandpaper.’ His cousins had a lion in their garden and baby crocodiles in a patio pool. All of this was possible in his homeland of Sri Lanka. He later studied communications in London and documentary film making in Berlin, and was instrumental in setting government policy for the introduction of television to Sri Lanka in the late 1970s. In the 1980s he served as a counsellor at his country’s embassy in Washington D.C. and simultaneously completed a PhD in international relations at the American University, worked with non-governmental groups, was involved in satellite communications (including helping to establish the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation in the United States), and met the likes of Ronald Reagan, Katharine Graham and Bob Hope. With Sri Lanka in political turmoil in the late 1980s, he settled his family in Australia and began teaching communications at Macquarie University in Sydney. Intelligent and productive and yet seemingly always available to others, he has since built up an internationally recognised International Communications faculty within the university, and an associated journal.

Dr Chitty’s move to Australia gave me the opportunity to study under him. While the other lecturers teaching my mass communications degree were studying the social commentary underlying Doctor Who or shaking their weary heads at the postmodern pastiche that modern media had become, here was a teacher from the real world where politics mattered and nations were being built. Better still, Dr Chitty had interesting theories about how the world worked. The main theory he taught us — and which continues to shape my world view — was that it is meaningless to divide the globe only in terms of nation states. Instead, it is more accurate to view it as being managed by a number of elite groups, many of which are transnational. You only have to look at the guest list for Davos or a G20 meeting to realise the truth of this observation. The top CEOs and politicians attending these events have far more in common with each other than most of the people in their home countries.

Dr Chitty’s take on this phenomenon was to look at the way these geographically dispersed elite groups were being connected by satellites, other communications technology and the birth of global media and communications systems such as CNN. He did this work in the 1970s and 1980s, well before the web was born and even before fax machines were widespread.

To me, Dr Chitty is a thought leader. He has, quite literally, led my thoughts. This is a profound idea if you stop to think about it. Who would you say has led your thoughts, either personally or in your work? If you’re like me, you probably came up with a very short list. There are your parents and family, and maybe someone whose job it was to guide your thinking such as a school teacher or a professor at university. But what about in your professional or business life? How many people have really changed the way you think in any substantial way? Where did you come across them? And how did they do it? Was it something they wrote, a comment they made or a thing they did?

The funny thing for me is that I’ve never met most of the people who have profoundly impacted my thoughts about, for instance, business. I’ve usually encountered them through books or journalism, which convinces me of the power of writing.

This view was recently reinforced when I picked up a book called The World’s Greatest Idea: The Fifty Greatest Ideas That Have Changed Humanity by John Farndon4. I found the book fascinating for two reasons: the power of the big idea and the way it highlighted the close relationships between the act of invention or insight, writing and winning the credit for ideas in future years.

Farndon focuses on big events like the invention of arable farming, democracy, fire, the laws of motion, contraception, electricity grids, hope, monotheism, the steam engine, wine, capitalism, the scientific method, natural selection, the wheel, Marxism and even qi (the Chinese concept of life force). While some of these are directly associated with individuals who wrote their ideas in books, such as Darwin on natural selection, Newton on the laws of motion and Karl Marx on Marxism, you might assume the others developed so slowly there would be no particular ‘author’ of the idea. You’d be wrong. For most of the breakthroughs, there is one or a small group of seminal authors. Moreover, it was often their ability to clearly express ideas — their thought leadership at the time — in writing that won them support and has ensured they are still acknowledged today.

The ancient Greeks get the credit for a number of the biggest ideas, including democracy, logic and even romance. Then there are some physical inventions that were well described by their creators, including the curved aerofoil which was progressed and written about in an influential way by the British engineer Sir George Cayley. According to Farndon, it was Cayley who coined the terms ‘lift’, ‘drag’ and ‘thrust’ that remain in use even now. The idea of capitalism is attributed to Adam Smith because he captured it so well in The Wealth of Nations; the British politician William Beverage gets the recognition for the notion of the welfare state thanks to his visionary report on the topic that led to it becoming a reality in post-war England; and Confucius, Mo Zi and Laozi are seen to have really nailed the idea of qi in their writings between the sixth and fourth centuries BC. Even some truly universal concepts such as the idea of the self can be attributed to the experts who first described them in a meaningful and memorable way. Here, Farndon cites Plato, Laozi and the more recent philosopher René Descartes. Showing how a deft turn of phrase can be just as important as a big idea, especially as topics become intangible, he quotes Laozi’s ‘Knowing others is wisdom. Knowing the self is enlightenment.’ and Descartes’s famous line, Cogito ergo sum, ‘I think therefore I am’.

What Farndon’s book shows is that ideas really can change the world and that the act of writing your ideas down is critical to having them heard and to earning your place in history.

***

The meaning of the term ‘thought leader’ is pretty clear from those two words. These are people who lead with ideas, rather than being in a structured leadership position such as CEO.

What sets thought leaders apart is they don’t just think; they go out of their way to share their thoughts with others. They may do this by publishing their views in books or journals, speaking at events, appearing in the media and taking up industry leadership roles such as serving on boards and standards-setting bodies. Most importantly, thought leaders are focused on what’s likely to happen in the future. In turn, they acquire followers — people who listen to their views and use them to make decisions about their own directions and activities.

Thought leaders are recognised as having innovative ideas, and demonstrate the confidence to promote or share those ideas as insights that others can act on. They might even be called futurists. As a term, ‘thought leader’ was first used in 1994 by Joel Kurtzman, editor-in-chief of strategy+business magazine. I find it hard to believe that no one had ever put those two words together before, but Kurtzman wanted a term to describe a group of interview subjects who had contributed new ideas to business. Those subjects included British management thinker Charles Handy; Stanford economist Paul Romer; Mitsubishi president Minoru Makihara; University of Michigan strategist C.K. Prahalad; and Gary Hamel, a professor at the London Business School.

The notion of thought leadership has since expanded to encompass individuals and organisations that progress thinking within a field. Monash University in Melbourne offers a practical definition that covers most business-related thought leaders:

What differentiates a thought leader from any other knowledgeable company is the recognition as being at the forefront of innovation and cutting-edge thinking, and having the confidence to promote or share those ideas as actionable distilled insights for business improvement.5

The idea of thought leadership — and particularly the notion of ‘gurus’ — also has detractors. American management writer Peter Drucker once famously said, ‘The reason reporters call these people gurus is that they’re not sure how to spell “charlatan”.’6 Critics are often particularly harsh about individuals who promote themselves as thought leaders but lack real-world experience in the fields they discuss. This can be valid; most of us want to learn from people with direct experience. But keep in mind that many of the most famous thought leaders are primarily commentators and analysts rather than ‘doers’. An example might be Malcolm Gladwell, who is a very insightful author and is widely regarded as someone who can offer direction to others. Yet Gladwell has done very little except observe, think and write as a journalist and author of books such as The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers.

To me, thought leadership can be broken down into three parts: having enough knowledge to guide others, being credible and having the ability to convey ideas. The latter two points are critical when it comes to becoming the person who is asked to submit articles to publications or speak at events or who is sought out for comment by the media. You may be the foremost expert in your field but unless others believe you are a leader — unless you are recognised — then your opportunities to communicate your views will be limited. There is a certain injustice to this, but don’t get indignant; just understand there is competition for audiences, so to win you will need great content, good communication skills and an effective promotional strategy.

Summary

Thought leaders are experts who operate at the forefront of their fields. They are leaders because of their knowledge, the value of their ideas and their ability to influence others. The most successful thought leaders are strong in all three areas: they have a deep technical understanding of their field and credibility; offer breakthrough thinking that others can act on; and have the confidence and capacity to communicate their views.

Chapter 2: What is Thought Leadership Marketing?

Thought leaders earn trust by delivering valuable information with no strings attached. Steven Van Yoder7

Thought leadership, and being a thought leader, can be very good for business. When you are exceptional at something — like programming computers, building ships or winning court cases — you are sought out by others who want to buy your expertise. The more you can demonstrate your knowledge through your work and through activities such as publishing articles, the more likely you are to be found by buyers and the more your business will grow. You will also build your reputation and, in turn, your personal brand and that of your organisation.

This phenomenon has been noticed by marketers and given rise to what is known as ‘thought leadership marketing’ — the process of using thought leadership material to help generate sales, and producing thought leadership material with the direct intent of using it as a marketing tool. Thought leadership marketing is particularly popular with organisations that sell products and services built around the intelligence of individuals, such as professional service firms and high-technology companies.

Showing how widespread this phenomenon has become, a recent study found the world’s top 40 business consulting firms collectively listed almost 3 500 articles and reports on their websites that were explicitly positioned as thought leadership material.8

A key attraction of thought leadership marketing is that it enables organisations to ‘sell without selling’. An example of a firm that has built its success through this approach is McKinsey & Company. As a high-end management consulting firm, McKinsey avoids directly selling its services through techniques such as cold calls and mass mailouts. However, it does rely heavily on thought leadership marketing. According to the former McKinsey consultants Ethan Rasiel and Paul Friga, who wrote The McKinsey Mind, the firm instead builds its reputation and relationships with decision makers by publishing books and articles, sponsoring topical events and helping community organisations where it can both demonstrate its skills and work alongside business leaders who may later become clients.9

Thought leadership material captures attention because it is new, interesting and helpful, and in turn, valuable to the recipient. It is good content that is credible and relevant to readers. It cuts through to elusive senior executives in particular, because it helps them set strategy and make decisions, tasks that rely on making educated guesses about the future. However, it shouldn’t seek to explicitly sell a product or service or close a deal. This is what sets thought leadership marketing material apart from items such as brochures, websites and sales pitches. It should promote new ideas with a view to changing something in the future. It should be advice backed by expertise. It should also be altruistic. At its best, it is a valuable and honest gift to the reader or audience.

An area for possible confusion here is where you are seeking to sell your thought leadership material, for example by publishing books or charging to deliver webinars or give keynote presentations at industry events. High-quality thought leadership material can be sold in this way while still acting as a marketing tool for your other goods or services. Especially where a reader receives a lot of value and you as the author genuinely offer your best and most objective views, then even a commercial product can be a gift to recipients and can generate similar marketing benefits as ‘free’ material.

So, what’s in and out when it comes to identifying thought leadership marketing material? Here are four rules to help keep you on the straight and narrow.

Rule 1: Advocate an idea

Thought leadership material needs to promote ideas. It should take others in new directions by advocating ideas for the future. This means that journalism and other material that simply reports the details of something that has happened, such as you might see in a company’s newsletter to its customers, are ‘out’.

Thought leadership material might contain extensive facts, figures, quotes and other proof points, but it should ultimately also offer your opinion as an expert.

Rule 2: Solve a problem or reveal an opportunity

The ideas contained in thought leadership material should help other people to solve problems or discover opportunities. Given that solving the hardest problems and identifying the most valuable opportunities tends to involve making educated guesses about the future, audiences will be keen to hear any insights that you — as an expert in your field — can offer.

For example, investors regularly turn to advice from economists when trying to decide which stocks might perform. Or an executive might ask her accountant for a view...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Foreword
• Part 1: Think
• Part 2: Write
• Part 3: Grow
• Appendices
• Notes