New post(220) : Thought Leadership – a new flirtation?
Before indulging in a flirtation with institutionalizing a thought leadership program in your company, remember---------that---------
"Most smart people in the world don't work for your company".
Thought leader ship is more about thought than about leadership.
No game changer thoughts, no leadership.
If you get your thought leadership strategy right, customers will sniff you out as a fountain head of expertise.
Your new products or incremental improvements will find easier acceptance.
Then, you'll [also] stand a good chance of attracting talent more readily.
Mistakenly so - content strategy is a relatively new flirtation for companies that want to improve their visibility and connections online in ways that prompt sales leads to come to them.
But thought leadership is, much more than content strategy.
Assuming that a regular supply of content is a leadership strategy is a blunder in thought leadership strategy.
Thought leadership is not all about - press releases, interviews, whitepapers, blogs.
A core attribute of thought leadership is that it must feed into product strategy. Successfully so.
Your thought leadership and your product innovations must be genuinely iterative.
Thought leadership has to lead in some tangible way, and it has to relate closely to what your company sells.
Thought leadership has to do with what you are changing or how you are pioneering a critical element of change.
Without this, you will eventually find [even] yourself asking the question - What exactly is it that your strategy “actually” leads?
Thought leadership is first and foremost about - path breaking “doing”. The “communication” of what you are doing can only then follow. Not the other way around.
Ironically your consumers can tell the difference.
Charlie Brown
