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Marketplace Master Suzanne Lowe on thoughtleading, including how this concept is "misunderstood"
Author of the recent book Marketplace Masters, Suzanne Lowe is a recognized expert in researching, formulating, and guiding competitively advantaged marketing and management strategies for professional service firms as an analyst, advisor, writer and speaker. Founder of Expertise Marketing (http://expertisemarketing.com/index.html), Marketing LLC, a consulting firm providing marketing and management analysis and guidance to the leaders of professional service firms, Suzanne draws upon twenty years of experience gained from in-house marketing leadership of top-tier management consulting and business-to-business organizations and her work with clients across diverse professional service sectors to uncover best practices and emerging marketing strategies.
Her views on thoughtleading are recounted here, including how this concept is frequently misunderstood (and therefore misused) and what authentic thoughtleading looks and feels like:
How has writing and publishing a book changed your business life?
It has increased my stature, something I find highly ironic because all a book has really done is allow me to capture and organize all the things I have been talking and writing about piecemeal (articles, presentations, one-on-one) for many years. It does have a ton of original work in it too but it seems it’s the fact that I could have enough substance for 243 pages of packaging that attracts a lot of attention.
People react with an “Omigosh!” look in their eye, as in “You’ve written a book?” There’s a catch in their voice. “It was published?” Yes, it was published! This impresses people.
What about reactions to the concept and content of the book?
That’s a second difference, related more to the book’s timing, in that I’ve been able to publish this book as the recession began to ease. There’s greater interest in the subject of differentiation now, increased interest in the question of how to compete more effectively. My book houses a topic I’ve been speaking about for years, but all of sudden at last year’s Global Marketing Conference, where I gave a talk, I was handing out a few copies as “party favors” when one attendee, amazed to encounter this sorely needed subject matter, stood up and said, “We’re going to buy truckload of your books!”
Maybe I successfully anticipated what people needed to read… so I should take some credit for it!
What has publishing your first book done for you personally?
It’s given me some confidence to challenge leading business people about the “nearsightedness” of their thinking. I seem now to have the ability to do that with more assurance. On the fourth day of that same Global Marketing Conference, a CEO of a large public company was speaking there, primarily to rally people in attendance to go out there and “do good things” as he put it.
But as he was describing what he was going to do at his own firm, and by inference what they should be doing at theirs, I couldn't help but see that he was telling them wrong things. He was simply misinformed. Clearly he should read my book!
As he ended his presentation, he asked for comments, but the people there, including (naturally) those attending who reported to him, sat mute. Many of those subordinates were as far as seven layers below him, working on business development teams around the globe. So I raised my hand and suggested he should stay for the next hour, for my presentation. In fact, I told him he SHOULD stay because he was about to fall into the “Be Better Trap.” He said, “What’s the Be Better Trap? I’m intrigued about this.”
I said, “It’s something I learned in my research for my book,” and I was able to say it in a well-grounded way. In the end, he actually thanked me for this new insight.
So writing my book has given me the intellectual capital to challenge such “big” CEOs in a way that is credible and delivers value to them too. By writing a book, I have been able to see how the methodology in my book can fit in with all the sub-methodologies out there in the business world to create an overarching framework that makes sense for companies and their strategic decision-makers… A book puts it all into a effective contextual framework…
So you’re feeling the benefits of becoming a thought leader?
I don’t actually like that term “thought leader,” it’s so widely misunderstood. To many people, it’s simply a way of becoming more visible but what we are really talking about is breaking the mold of what has been accepted up to now, shaping it into something new and innovative. … You break it and remake it, it’s much deeper than gaining more visibility and spreading your thoughts in broader circles. It’s actually about forcing yourself and others to push the envelope…
We could spend the afternoon talking about business terms that have been misinterpreted, like balanced scorecard, economic value added (EVA), re-engineering… It seems as soon as something has become slightly well-known, it ends up having a different meaning than it should….
Thought leadership is a term freely used in consulting firms. For example: “We are now going to adopt a thought leader strategy,” they say at their meetings… I think McKinsey has a Director of Thought Leadership, and though on some level there is this attempt to help people to crystallize their thoughts, it often starts out with the idea of PROMOTING the firm’s thoughts. I see this also with people who deliver the same speech year after year after year.
But real thought leadership requires considering a completely different approach: first understand where the school of thought in a subject area is right now, i.e., collectively. Where do people see this particular issue? Then there must be a willingness to anticipate what’s next, and then to create it and make it available to people.
Thoughtleading should be leading innovation in schools of thought, in professional services arena, not just repeating ideas. It’s about new points of view, giving people a framework to address the challenge. You become the inventor if you develop new ideas, not just come up with new insights. You take something and turn it into something else, something applicable in a new and effective way for people to use later on.
A lot of people would hear you and say, “That sounds like it takes a lot of time.” I just don’t have that kind of time with all I have to do day to day.
Thoughtleading takes too much time? It’s not about time. In fact it should NOT be time-consuming. It should be a constant process… small steps, great gains. What I think it’s more about is an approach to thinking critically. If you simply think within a framework of thought about wondering why or how did that challenge happen, then you will fix on the challenge, and ask critical questions. You’ll want to discover why this or that is. A thought leader possesses an investigator’s mind, thinking that way moment to moment. It does not have to take a “long time” or even any time at all, in that sense. … I thought up some of my ideas for the book in the shower or walking my dog! Thoughtleading is about employing a different thought process, not just talking about different thoughts.
It’s also about not accepting the status quo. It’s more about what people NEED than about what you know. Arguably we want them to have a “thought leader epiphany.” Though we must have a base on which to think about things, we want to use that base as a platform for jumping off… We have to know things, yes, but it’s about thinking critically ongoing, and it’s FUTURE-oriented.
That said, writing a book ends up being a significant thing to do once you have had an evolution of thoughts that are out there. It becomes timely to do so at that point since it has everything to do with where state of thinking happens to be right now, and where it can go next. By putting your thoughts in book form and promoting those thoughts (as you promote your book) you have created something beneficial to people. So you go out then and promulgate and distribute your thoughts.
So it does come back to promotion, visibility, spreading your developed thoughts out there?
Yes but I am suggesting the merit of your ideas should almost take on a life of their own. Mere promotion of something that is not true, i.e., not helpful, not useful, is hard, hard work! People can sense when a different idea is something really relevant and when it is NOT really relevant, so when you are promoting something that’s merely different but not really true, it does everybody a disservice…
There are so many books in my field. I see them all the time, all this hot air. There’s nothing valuable there, just well-crafted turns of the word, stylistically presented, or glibly presented. All it does is contribute to the clutter.
True thought leadership does not happen very often. For myself, I can only hope that I can keep thinking up cool things in my showers and dog walks. The great masters of art keep on creating new stuff but can they do it every day or every week? I doubt it. So by making a thought leadership your framework of thinking, you may not come up with new and different true ideas every day, but along the way you probably will and in that way contribute to what people really need…Read other Thought Blogs