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So What Is “Thoughtleading” Anyway?
Q & A with Ken Lizotte
To many companies and consulting firms, thought leadership is a vague marketing strategy that most firms don’t know too much about. Even if they do know a lot about it they generally don’t implement it because they are either busy with day-to-day operations or they don’t know how to make it happen. In this interview with Ken Lizotte, CIO (Chief Imaginative Officer) at emerson consulting group inc., the concept of “thoughtleading” is fleshed out and its implications as a business development strategy explained.
Interviewer is Curtis Bingham, President, The Predictive Consulting Group (www.predictiveconsulting.com), a thought leader who has conducted extensive research into the concept of executive-level customer champions.
Curtis
For many people, “thought leadership” as a term is somewhat of a mystery. They haven’t heard the term before or they have but they don’t know what it means. Are there other terms they might know it by?
Ken
Simply thinking of someone as a guru or world-renowned expert is probably the most recognizable way. Probably the generic terms for the activities, like getting published, doing speaking engagements, conducting original research, would be familiar too. In terms of what thought leaders do, it’s mainly those three “pillars” that make a thought leader: publishing, speaking, new research.
But publishing and speaking above all will definitely make you a thought leader, even without any special research. One can always draw upon one’s business experiences and interactions with customers and clients for that. That’s experiential research, and that counts too.
A lot of people think of Peter Drucker and Tom Peters as two well-known examples of thought leaders, and they are. But mega-thought leaders like Drucker and Peters seem so removed from everybody else that it’s tough for most professionals to see themselves in the same league. So they give up even the speculation that they too could be viewed as thought leaders. As a result, maybe they put out a newsletter, occasionally take a call from the media, do a speaking engagement when it comes their way, but that’s about it. Otherwise, it’s networking, a few cold calls now and then, and asking contacts for a referral. Thought leadership isn’t given a chance to take hold and show what it can do.
Curtis
What’s your “textbook definition” of the term thoughtleading?
Ken
I define thoughtleading as putting your professional experience and wisdom out into the marketplace so that this developed knowledge can be useful to a greater business public.
You become a true thought leader when you “advertise” your ideas not thru traditional advertising but by publishing books and articles and presenting your concepts and insights to live audiences. These activities in particular separate you from the pack.
Curtis
So basically someone who publishes articles and/or books and speaks to audiences makes a thought leader. What you didn’t say was that a thought leader is measured by the degree to which the outside community respects or admires, or listens to what the person has to say.
Ken
You could suppose that the more readers or listeners a thought leader has, the greater the impact of his/her thought leadership. That would be one way to measure it.
Then there’s the extent to which a thought leader’s followers go out and follow recommendations or advice. If a blogger has only a few hundred readers but it’s clear that these readers are attempting to actualize the blogger’s ideas—maybe the blogger advises readers how to implement security precautions, for example—you might rate that TL (thought leader) higher than even a Tom Peters whose message is more high-blown and controversial than day-to-day concrete and pragmatic. Depends how you want to gauge it.
The point is that if you put yourself out there in a thought leadership position, one way or the other you will begin to create followers, maybe a little here and a little there but it will happen. If you stay out on a regular basis, one year, two years, three years or more, you will absolutely create your followers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom I named my firm after, in addition to being a well known writer in his time was a public speaker too. In fact, that’s how he made most of his income, training it out to towns in Ohio and Pennsylvania and Illinois to speak in lyceums and pass the hat for his fee.
Everyone in the town would come to listen, farmers and merchants and blacksmiths and cowboys. No TV, DVDs, Internet, radio or even movies back then, remember. Very often he would irritate the crowd with his ideas, or they would think he was out of his mind, too radical, blasphemous, etc. He didn’t necessarily walk out at the end of the night with everyone on his side. But he was a thought leader nonetheless, even while provoking the crowd, and perhaps because of it. Your followers do not even have to particularly believe what you have to say, but if you are out there and getting them to think, raising discussions, causing grand thoughts to fly about in the air, then I you are engaging in what I call “thoughtleading.”
Curtis
But thoughtleading is primarily to get ideas out and to provoke, isn’t that a disconnect from the way many consulting firms and companies determine their marketing goals? If a marketing goal is to book more business, they are probably going to try to do so in such a way that they speak to what people want to hear, not what they think they should hear. But using this thoughtleading strategy, the way Emerson did, they’d be provoking prospects and not just parroting their beliefs, so they might be scaring their prospects away.
Ken
Ralph Waldo Emerson did create followers even as he provoked people. He wasn’t pandering, he was putting ideas out, come what may. There were people even on those nights when the crowd got totally riled who ended up agreeing with him. Others got to thinking about what he said and came around to his thinking later.
That’s why this is such a powerful marketing strategy. Because you don’t need EVERYONE to follow you, or everyone to become a client. If you just say the same old thing that appeals to the widest audience, you become bland and indistinguishable from your competitors. You end up saying nothing of import to anyone.
Curtis
How is publishing valuable as a marketing tool?
Ken
Publishing is not so valuable for reasons many people think, since it’s a myth that you’ll publish something and then hordes of prospects will call you right afterward and flood you with lots of new business. Instead, the reality is that when you publish something, the silence following publication can be deafening. So publishing is not important as a cause-and-direct-effect strategy but for another reason:
It’s critical for one’s credibility to have a third party affirm your ideas, and finding someone willing to actually publish your ideas establishes that credibility. Later, at a speaking engagement or when visiting a prospect or client, having an article to hand them bolsters your credibility with them, setting you apart from your competitors who (you can generally bank on this) will NOT have an article of their own to show. In this way, publishing makes you something special.
Curtis
How does public speaking set you apart?
Ken
I did a speaking gig at Bentley College one night a few years ago, and only went to do it because a client thought leader of mine was a member of this small faculty group and asked me to do it. Given it was mostly a bunch of academics in the room (or so I thought), I did not expect any business from it, so I actually did it because it’s good practice to speak whenever you can. Also, “ya never know.”
Well how true that turned out to be! A very successful benefits planning consultant was a part of that group, and in fact he was walking in from the parking lot at the same time I was. I didn’t know what room to go to, so he led me there, and he turned out to be the one guy in an audience of about 35 who truly got my message. Within a couple of weeks, Dan Cassidy of Cassidy Retirement Group (www.cassidyretirement.com) had become my newest client thought leader, and now years later he is one of my stars! Plus he regularly refers other business to me and even set me up recently with a speaking engagement at his professional association.
Actually being there, conveying the message of thoughtleading, creating that interpersonal connection with real people in an audience allows that sort of business development to happen. On that evening, no one else was there to compete with me. If what you have to say is attractive to someone listening to you, your relationship with that person has begun, and that gives you both the chance to do some business together.
Curtis
Let’s talk about sales. Can thoughtleading be injected into the sales process to make it more effective?
Ken
Your publishing efforts can be leveraged as very useful sales tools. One of my client firms, a mid-sized consulting firm, has its sales reps integrate published articles by taking them out to sales meetings. This is especially helpful if an article is tailored to a particular industry. If they are approaching a pharmaceutical company, for example, they bring along an article displaying their expertise published in a pharmaceutical industry journal. If they’re going out to a retail company, they bring one published in a retail trade publication.
This doesn’t mean of course that they win the sale because of the article alone. But you don’t win a sale just because of your web site or your brochure or your marketing kit either. An article becomes a part of your overall package, and a powerful part at that, because, again, it ramps up your credibility, given it exists because a third party has endorsed you, and because very few of your competitors will have published articles of their own.
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