Chapter 3: Who Are Thought Leaders?

[A thought leader] ... could have weak interpersonal skills and an indifferent character. They could be loners or eccentrics. All that counts is the credibility of their new idea. This is why we can buy innovations offered by odd creative types who we would not entrust to manage any part of an organisation. Leaders Direct12

If thought leadership is the process of putting forward ideas to solve problems and realise opportunities, thought leaders are the people who do it. However, most of the people doing it don’t call themselves thought leaders — either because it’s never occurred to them that that’s what they are, or because they don’t like the term. This can make it hard to readily identify thought leaders, but once you start to look you’ll find them all around you.

The easiest thought leaders to spot are public intellectuals such as columnists, academics, current and former politicians, religious leaders and others with a professional role that involves expressing ideas — or simply the time, interest and independent resources to do so. An example from Australian journalism is the late Paddy McGuinness, who wrote widely about Australian social and political issues for almost 40 years until his death aged 69 in 2008. McGuiness wrote beautifully and told it as he saw it, often to the chagrin of the rich and powerful. To the former Australian prime minister Paul Keating, McGuinness was ‘prejudiced, capricious and intellectually corrupt ... a vitriolic liar with the morals of an alley cat’.13 But in the eyes of his daughter, Parnell McGuinness, the journalist was a champion for the truth and free thinking. ‘Dad used to love playing devil’s advocate. He believed that ideas were all about finding the best possible outcomes, and that it was ideologies that kept you in corners.’14

The other easy-to-spot group are the authors who explicitly call themselves thought leaders and earn their primary income through thought leadership activities such as selling books or charging to speak at events. Globally successful thought leaders in this category include the likes of marketing commentator Seth Godin, chef Jamie Oliver and business expert Jack Welch. There are of course many thousands of others operating successfully within specific sectors.

But what about thought leaders who also hold commercial roles and face more constraints than public intellectuals like journalists and academics, or who make a primary living from selling their ideas? These thought leaders might be accountants, analysts, architects, bankers, engineers, entrepreneurs, financial planners, lawyers or scientists. They could be the leaders of businesses or unknown figures with exceptional expertise in a specialist area.

What all these thought leaders have in common is that they are regarded as leaders within their fields and are known for the quality of their ideas. Viewed this way, many people can be regarded as thought leaders — including you. A thought leader might be a shop owner with a brilliant blog, a manager who sends inspiring ideas to her team, a sports coach with breakthrough techniques or an interior designer who writes a column for a renovation magazine. There is no barrier to entry so the differences between thought leaders are often just questions of topic, scale and originality.

One sector where thought leaders are prized and well supported by their organisations is the IT industry. There are numerous full-time or near full-time thought leaders in IT. Many of these are technical figures such as chief software architects who guide a company’s development activities and play a critical role in explaining product direction to customers. At the upper end of this tree are icons like Vinton Cerf, who invented the TCP/IP protocol that powers the internet and has since held numerous roles, including becoming Google’s chief internet evangelist in 2005.

There are also individuals in IT whose job is to excite customers and partners about their company’s strategy. Like Cerf, they are often explicitly called ‘evangelists’ and their job is to talk to prospects and media, publish articles and engage in other thought leadership activities such as speaking at industry forums. They have the time and resources to research issues, go to conferences, meet customers and other experts, and come up with new ideas and material to keep their companies ahead of competitors.

There are also strong thought leaders in the public sector. An example is Tim Harcourt, the economist who has become a spokesman for Australia’s export promotion organisation, the Australian Trade Commission (Austrade). Harcourt is Austrade’s chief economist, charged with analysing the global economy for Australian exporters, and helping Austrade devise its business strategies. Harcourt has made this role a very public one through his exceptional research, public speaking and skill in writing books and articles. At the time of writing, his latest book, The Airport Economist, was a top 10 seller among Australian business books.

As you can see, the term thought leader covers a wide range of people and roles. However, as outlined below, successful thought leaders tend to share some common characteristics.

Common characteristics

This section details attributes I have observed among the thought leaders I’ve worked with or learnt about. These characteristics provide an insight into who thought leaders are and how they operate. Not every thought leader will have every characteristic, but they are likely to share a number of these traits.

Intelligent

Thought leaders are, by definition, intelligent people. This intelligence may not always be conventional but they’ll usually have the sort of strong memory and analytical mind required to absorb a lot of information, process it and come up with breakthrough ideas.

Let me introduce the first of a number of thought leaders who embody many of the characteristics discussed in this section, and who were kind enough to share their insights for this book. Sir Gustav Nossal is an immunologist who worked at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne as a researcher then as director from 1965 to 1996. Among his many achievements was work confirming a key theory of how antibodies are formed in the human body, which was a global watershed in scientific understanding of the immune system. He worked with the World Health Organization (WHO) for many years to improve global health and was chairman of WHO’s Global Programme for Vaccines and Immunization. Sir Gustav was named Australian of the Year in 2000 and has an extraordinary 115 letters after his name. He has also published five books and an estimated 530 papers, and has delivered innumerable lectures and speeches.

As a thought leader and communicator, Sir Gustav has in recent years focused on the challenge of vaccinating the world’s poor against disease. I asked Sir Gustav whether he regarded himself as a thought leader.15 He didn’t reply directly, but did offer the following insight into his strengths and weaknesses as a thinker: ‘I can tell you exactly what I’m good at and exactly what I’m not good at. I’m very good at analysis. I am very quick at identifying what is the actual core of a problem and getting to grips with what are the main issues. What I’m not good at is lateral thinking. I’m not good at that imaginative leap, although of course in a lifetime there will be three or four Eureka! moments, but that’s not my forte. And I’m very good at sticking to the task: I’m very, very disciplined. You know the old-fashioned saying about 99 per cent perspiration, 1 per cent inspiration? There’s a lot of truth in that in life.’

See appendix 1 for a sample of Sir Gustav’s writing — a speech on the importance of vaccination which illustrates many of the writing and rhetorical techniques discussed throughout this book.

Novel

The best thought leaders see things in new ways. They think for themselves and in doing so come up with unconventional and challenging ideas. This stems from a critical mindset that refuses to accept things at face value, combined with healthy doses of imagination and creativity. An expert’s ability to come up with a novel and — importantly — correct view on an issue will set him or her apart in their field.

These insights might be based on direct experience or research work. Think of Lance Armstrong commenting on cycling and cancer, an architect commenting on the urban planning rules she follows daily, or a research study based on interviews. Alternatively, you might deliver a novel view about new information that has been generated by others, or the actions of others. This might involve using your expertise to write an opinion article about the findings of a research study or a government policy. This is the realm of experts such as Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, who wrote the book Freakonomics16 and used economic analyses to unearth interesting trends from available data about society and everyday life.

Credible

Leaders need credibility. There are always exceptions like the brilliant 20 year old who bursts into view with extraordinary insights or a new invention, but thought leaders generally have a deep base of expertise and a proven track record. They need to know enough to be interesting, and be respected enough to be listened to. Indeed, most experts will not emerge as thought leaders per se until quite late in their careers.

I asked Sir Gustav Nossal about how his credibility related to his ability to act as a thought leader on the topic of vaccination. He said that despite being an immunologist for more than 40 years, he hadn’t spent much time considering vaccines. He explained how he moved into this related area by quoting an analogy offered to him by a fellow scientist: ‘He said leadership is a little bit like a “T”. The vertical bar of the T has to be deeply rooted in the ground, and that is your fundamental discipline: the discipline that you’re good at — whether it’s immunology, whether it’s journalism, whether it’s teaching, or whatever it is — that gives you your legitimacy, that gives you your authenticity as a human being. And once that’s firmly established and planted in the ground, the horizontal bar of the T is you reaching out further to more general areas of concern. Your own speciality is, by the very definition of the word, specialised, but if that’s deeply rooted, the T can branch out quite a long way toward other areas of concern and thought.’

Passionate

Thought leaders are passionate about their field of expertise. They live and breathe their topics and they are motivated and self-directed, with high energy levels. They exude enthusiasm, which, even if their field is dry and technical, can be infectious. This passion also makes them ideal for spearheading new business initiatives.

Take Anthony Hobley, for instance. Hobley is a banking lawyer and partner who leads the global Climate Change and Carbon Finance practice within the multinational law firm Norton Rose. An Englishman who was based in Australia at the time of writing, he joined the firm in 2007 and has since built its climate change practice to include about 45 lawyers working from Norton Rose offices worldwide. The practice took off like a rocket in its first two years, growing billings to around US$5 million a year amid the then-surging European carbon trading market.

With the market’s subsequent malaise due to the international community’s failure to reach an agreement on carbon trading, Hobley and his group have shifted to offering broader services aimed at helping corporate and government clients understand or develop climate change policy, manage related risks and pursue opportunities as new rules emerge. His group also advises on clean energy and environmental law.

Despite its breadth and the importance of the field, Hobley’s climate change group in particular remains a niche startup within the Norton Rose global empire, which spans 1 800 lawyers across 29 offices. He believes it shows vision and maturity for Norton Rose to be investing in the growth of his practice despite the lack of certainty around climate change policy. This is part of what attracted Hobley to join the firm but also makes his role challenging.

‘I had a business plan in my head to build a leading global practice around climate change. I could see what clients wanted, and how you could build a global platform at a law firm, and Norton Rose was the most entrepreneurial I spoke to. Law firms by their very nature are not very entrepreneurial; they don’t generally have that idea of investing over five or six years to build something.’17

For its part, the firm was attracted by Hobley’s multidisciplinary background and profile as a leader on climate change law and finance. Hobley holds advanced degrees in chemistry, physics and environmental law. Before Norton Rose he worked as legal counsel within a merchant banking group that invested in greenhouse gas reduction projects in locations including China and India. He also helped build an early climate change practice at the law firm Baker & McKenzie.

During these roles and at Norton Rose, Hobley has operated at the centre of the global community involved in climate change-related law, finance and policy. This has included founding and contributing to professional networks; publishing articles and columns in journals, magazines and newspapers; and being interviewed on television and in The Economist, The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal. In 2010, the European Commission invited him to speak at events in Bangkok and New Delhi, and he has spoken on panels with Britain’s Prince Andrew.

A key reason Hobley has been so vocal is his genuine concern about the issue of climate change. He believes this passion, and his public role in seeking to progress climate change policy and helping to create a global carbon trading market, has been important to the growth of his practice and its positive impact on the Norton Rose brand. ‘I think clients see that I — and the firm — are very active in thought leadership in the space and trying to make the market happen. By doing that you’re seen as a peer rather than just as a player in the market, and rather than just an opportunistic adviser.’

With the Australian Government announcing plans to introduce one of the world’s most significant carbon tax regimes from 2012, Norton Rose’s investment in Hobley and his group looks set to be rewarded. Being in the right place at the right time in complex fields like law doesn’t happen quickly or by accident.

Writing sample

The following excerpt is a blog entry Anthony Hobley and his team posted from the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. This post is from Day 1, when the team was fresh and there was still hope in the crisp Danish air. Never let it be said that lawyers can’t deliver sharp, humorous and metaphorically rich copy.

Hopenhagen?

So today was the day we have all been waiting for. Copenhagen opened, almost literally, with great fanfare. There was a trumpeter, and the Danish Girls Choir (there is clearly an understanding in Denmark that the UK contingents, travelling over the weekend, are in need of a tune, having missed out on X-Factor).

The ‘yes we can’ phraseology of Obama was seized upon by Connie Hedegaard (the EU’s new Climate Change Commissioner and Chair of COP15) as she delivered a rousing speech at the opening of the COP15. She vehemently delivered a ‘let’s get it done’ message to back up Yvo de Boer’s timetable of 8 days to deliver (6 days of traditional negotiations, 2 days of ministerial negotiations) before the leaders arrive.

For Yvo, the time has come to deliver, and if Father Christmas is listening, Yvo would like a three tiered Christmas cake: (i) a layer which contains an agreement on action, mitigation, adaptation, finance and technology; (ii) a layer which sets out commitments and targets and (iii) the icing on the cake which will document long term action and a long term goal. Yvo pleaded for significant and immediate action that starts today!

We are also counting on the arrival of London’s own Mayor Boris ‘the flag waver’ Johnson later during the negotiations. A mayoral meeting being held in Copenhagen’s City Hall will bring together mayors from 70 global cities to ensure that cities are suitably placed to tackle carbon emissions, with the mayor of Copenhagen, Mrs Ritt Bjerregaard, pledging that Copenhagen (which she has renamed Hopenhagen) is set to be the first carbon neutral capital city by 2025.

Honest

Thought leaders have the courage to look at a situation objectively and ask fundamental questions. They also describe things as they see them. This is rare in professional life, where most people keep their heads down and regularly perform acts of intellectual contortion to stick to the company line. The benefit is that thought leaders are more likely to be right because that’s their goal: to be right, as opposed to popular. It is also the only option if they want to earn the trust and respect of their audience and remain a genuine thought leader over a long period.

Kevin Bloch is the chief technology officer (CTO) of Cisco Systems Australia and New Zealand. Cisco is one of the world’s largest technology companies and Bloch’s job, according to his biography, is to provide ‘leadership of technology vision and leadership of people within Cisco to communicate and execute on that vision’. As opposed to a CTO in a bank, who might worry about the bank’s IT operations, Bloch’s job is to focus on Cisco’s direction as a technology manufacturer; to discuss that direction and wider trends with customers, partners and staff; and to drive business activities related to that direction. ‘My role is predominantly about thought leadership in terms of technology,’ he says. ‘By that I mean: where do our technology, skills and leaders need to be in the next three to five years?’18

I introduce Bloch here because one of his strongest traits is his intellectual honesty, and willingness to provide candid advice. He says: ‘One of the things that I know strikes a chord with customers is I don’t always tell them what they want to hear. I’d rather tell people what I think will help them — what I believe is right for them. I find it very difficult to conceal my real thoughts.’

In practice, Bloch presents at events; writes articles, blogs and tweets; and meets with customers, partners and staff. A typical week might involve discussing the best technology approach with the IT leaders of an airline, presenting to hundreds of marketing people from a global consumer goods company and appearing as a technology industry commentator in a web conference. He’s part of Cisco’s Australia and New Zealand leadership team, contributing to day-to-day operating decisions at the company and holds other roles in the Asia-Pacific region and globally within the company.

Bloch’s positioning is somewhere between an adviser on today’s technology, and a futurist. He is central to the sales process because large technology buyers need to feel confident that their vendors — the companies making the equipment and software on which they spend their money — have a clear long-term strategy. They don’t want to find themselves losing ground to competitors who use superior technology, or worse, get stuck with the multi-million equivalent of a Beta video player. Yet what makes Bloch a thought leader rather than a salesperson is his deep technical expertise, the fact he doesn’t charge customers for his advisory time and his aforementioned tendency to tell the truth as he sees it. In addition to his association with the Cisco brand name, these are key reasons that Cisco, its staff and the market’s top technology buyers seek his insights and direction.

‘I typically talk to people about what their future business problems may be and how we can solve them. Along the way I pick up gaps in what we’re able to achieve. Then I bring that back to the company. It could be technical gaps or organisational gaps. It could be we’re not seeing the gap. Most workers have their defined product area, geography or whatever. I’m sort of the ‘gap person’ — identifying what we’re not doing but perhaps should be.’

A key step in Bloch’s emergence as a thought leader was the publication of six books about telecommunications technologies, written between 1994 and 1999 while he was working as executive director of technology and strategy at JNA Telecommunications. The first book was a guide to ISDN, the first major digital technology for carrying phone calls and other data. Despite being an engineer by training and someone who had spent his career programming, developing and implementing communications systems, Bloch realised he was well placed to create a guide on the emerging topic of ISDN. The result was a tightly written, 300-page, A4-sized book, self-published (with advertising) with the help of his wife, Michele Bloch.

The ISDN book became an instant success within the telecommunications industry and raised Bloch’s profile as a leading expert on the topic, which led to media interviews, conference speaking invitations, sales leads and other business benefits. Bloch’s subsequent books built on this success, deepening his expertise, increasing his profile and enabling him to win more senior strategy and thought leadership roles in the IT industry.

Writing sample

The following excerpt is from the 1996 edition of Kevin Bloch’s The Australian ISDN Guide. Telecommunications is inherently complicated yet he conveys concepts in conversational English, and finds a story amid a field of acronyms.

For many years the public switched telephone network (PSTN) served most people’s needs to speak to one another. However, with the development of the computer and other digital devices, the PSTN began to be used for purposes other than plain telephone calls. The PSTN offered a significant advantage – it provided ubiquitous connectivity from almost anywhere to anywhere else on earth. This opened up enormous opportunities for applications other than voice and many organisations took advantage.

Non-voice traffic soon started to have serious effects on the major PSTNs around the world. A typical voice telephone call lasts for about two or three minutes. However, a file transfer between two computers can take several hours, thereby blocking that circuit from other use for that period. In some cases, these data calls were left up all day, all year. Given that the PSTN was not designed for this type of traffic pattern, the Public Telephone and Telegraph (PTT) organisations (or carriers) realised that something had to be done.

Carriers and international standards organisations set out to define a worldwide public switched network that would be fully digital and would accommodate not only the vastly increased traffic that was projected, but also the growing diversity and sophistication of voice, data, video and other communications applications.

Extroverted

It is not enough to have great ideas. To lead others, it’s vital to speak out. This means thought leaders are active and capable communicators — as writers, speakers and commentators — whether in the public domain or internally within their organisations. On a personality scale, most would be regarded as extroverts.

One thought leader who has learned to speak out — and reaped the rewards — is Nancy Duarte, principal and CEO of Duarte Design in Silicon Valley, California. After being a successful graphic designer for over 20 years, by the mid-2000s Duarte found herself nervous about the looming economic downturn in the United States and frustrated that clients didn’t recognise her agency’s lead in its field. Her response was to collate everything she knew about her specialist field of designing presentation slides in a beautifully produced, 275-page guide called Slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations, which was published by O’Reilly in 2008.

‘I actually wrote the book in anticipation of the downturn. Having lived through the dot-com bust, I could see the signs of it coming,’ she says. ‘For two years I had what I describe as a fire in my belly knowing that I would only go with a publisher that could get the book on the shelves by September 2008.

‘On the client side, just before the book came out, I got a call from my largest client (this is a client for which we have 12 full-time people working on just that account). A creative director called from there and said, “Hi Nancy, can you tell me who the world-class company is in presentation design? I have a question for them.” That was just the fire I needed to tip the scale toward getting our thought leadership out there.’19

Duarte’s book is full of insights and technical information from the work she and her 50-strong team have carried out for top clients and corporations such as Cisco, Al Gore (including the slideshow seen in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth), HP, Microsoft and Patagonia. It is also a plea for better slide design and public communication, to save us all from the dreaded ‘death by PowerPoint’. She has since published a ‘prequel’ called Resonate, a book on how to develop content for presentations with a particular focus on the importance of storytelling.

Publishing the books has made Duarte a thought leader in her field. This has led to a strong growth in her business despite the recession in the United States. She has also garnered extensive media coverage in publications including The New York Times and Wired; received hundreds of speaking invitations; and added a training arm to her business. With over 50 000 copies of Slide:ology sold to date, the books are also a substantial source of revenue and Duarte has even come to enjoy writing. ‘If you’d told me three years ago that I would enjoy spending every spare minute researching and writing I would have laughed out loud,’ she says. ‘Now I’m hooked.’

Writing sample

In this excerpt from Slide:ology, Nancy Duarte explains why companies should invest more resources in slide presentations.

Corporations spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising, marketing and PR to attract and retain consumers. They run TV ads, place banner ads, erect billboards, write articles, and dispatch massive amounts of annoying junk mail, all to persuade customers of the superiority of their products and services. Sometimes this is enough; consumers are convinced and accounts are won. But other times, these expensive means are merely a prelude to a personal engagement – one that will depend on the effectiveness of the presentation to seal the deal.

Now consider the disparity between the content, design, and production values of that $100 million campaign and the slide show residing on your laptop. Consider also that this slide show may be the last engagement you have with your customers before they make a purchase decision. From an experiential standpoint, few things could be more anticlimactic than a massive campaign followed by an unorganized, unmoving presentation that might not be relevant to what the audience needs from you or the organization.

How is it that companies can become so focused on a grandiose approach to marketing yet so reluctant to spend even a fraction of the time needed to create a great presentation?

Constructive

Despite often being seen as critical, thought leaders are constructive figures. They think and make their views known because they want to see change and improvement. They believe there’s a better way of doing things and they’re prepared to argue for it. However, this doesn’t always make them popular.

Lobbying for change is part of Kevin Bloch’s role as a thought leader, but he says it has taken him many years to find the right balance between being critical and working with others to find solutions. ‘When I am being critical, it’s constructively critical and I think senior management like that because they don’t always get that advice. They appreciate my candour, and as I said, it’s not bad; I don’t go around telling people what a bad business they run. A lot of people have good businesses but there’s always room for improvement and if I can show them how they can improve their business, generate more revenue, profit, whatever, why wouldn’t they take it? I do that a lot.

‘It is not easy to act as a thought leader and advise on change. You’ve got to know how far to rock the boat. There’s a number of aspects to consider. Firstly, is your idea worth thinking about? Secondly, is it so way out of whack that it’s impractical? Thirdly, do you have a means by which you can make the change?

‘In other words, it’s not just about criticising what’s going on now, it’s “do you have a better alternative?”Also, it’s about your own credibility — do you have the runs on the board?’

For Bloch, it’s the constructive nature of his role that provides the most personal satisfaction. ‘It’s very rewarding if you can feel that you’ve contributed to constructive, positive change — you’re growing revenues, you’re hiring more people and the people that are working for you are happy and challenged and stimulated.’

Courageous

Thought leaders are courageous, which is usually intertwined with being honest, outspoken and constructive. It takes courage and self-confidence to advance your views in public, especially if those views are new, unusual or being presented to a potentially critical audience. ‘It’s not easy, getting up in front of a room of doctors or professors and talking about IT in healthcare, for instance,’ Bloch says. ‘Although I’m an engineer and I’ve been around for a long time, it’s very difficult. The first time the feedback might not be positive. You’ve got to brace yourself for that, but if you listen to the feedback and you learn along the way, you can pick it up pretty quickly.’

By being contrarian and sharing their ideas, thought leaders take risks. Usually, these risks involve taking an unconventional position that, even if correct, could damage an expert’s career or business. They also stand their ground in the face of criticism. This daring behaviour becomes most apparent when challenging ideas clash with convention or entrenched interests. An example is Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Princeton University professor and columnist for The New York Times and Fortune. Krugman shot to fame by opposing the Iraq War and his criticism on a wide range of issues has since proved a thorn in the side to both sides of US politics and other powerful interests.

According to his wife, fellow Princeton economist Robin Wells, Krugman has always been pugilistic: ‘Even as an academic, he did not pull punches, and he seemed to relish the chance to rattle people’s cages.’20 Krugman himself has learnt to take criticism in his stride: ‘I’ve given up reading what other people write about me. It’s overwhelming, ranging from adulation to rabid hatred.’21

Solitary

Thought leaders often work by themselves or as the leaders of small groups. The research-heavy nature of their work, their intellectual independence and sometimes their sheer eccentricity can mean they don’t manage large teams. Think of a brilliant academic or author surrounded by piles of books and papers or today’s less cumbersome screens and USB sticks. This can be true even if they hold a senior position within a large organisation.

Bloch, for instance, is a director of Cisco Australia and New Zealand, a company of almost 1 000 people, yet has no direct reports. As he explains, ‘The authority I have is purely on the basis of my reputation. I don’t manage anyone directly. In some ways, this makes my role even more difficult because how do I get people to do stuff? It would be easy if I had 100 people; I could say “just do it!” I have the opposite of that and yet I probably have more people working on things that I’m trying to get done than anybody. It is a completely different way of thinking.’

Exposed

The final and perhaps least appreciated characteristic of thought leaders is that they are exposed. They are vulnerable. You can see this when a person stands — alone — at the front of a conference hall; or when an expert puts his name to a controversial article.

Less apparent is the exposure of the person who seeks to propose new and potentially unpopular ideas within a large corporation or government department. More subtle again is the way thought leaders can be seen as failing to meet conventional measures of performance such as achievable billing hours or sales targets, which can lead to colleagues questioning their value to the organisation. This point was raised by both Bloch and Anthony Hobley.

‘If I gave other people my job I think they’d learn pretty quickly that you’re very much under the microscope,’ says Bloch. ‘Many may ask “Why are we paying you for your job?” The flipside of that is if you can be really clear about what you’re doing for the company and you can make a constructive and rewarding change or transformation, then it’s a lot of fun and I think it gathers momentum. Once you show people that it’s actually valuable then it becomes a bit easier.’

Hobley argues that it’s important for organisations to acknowledge the value thought leaders provide, especially in terms of establishing new revenue streams and branding. ‘[As a thought leader] you can quite often feel a bit like, “Oh well, I’m not doing what those other 10 people are doing so therefore I’m not as important or valued”. I think firms need thought leaders and the benefits they bring, but they’ve got to understand what those are and value the people who bring them those benefits.’

Summary

Thought leaders come in many shapes and sizes, but whether they’re on the international conference circuit or leading a business, they typically share common characteristics. They’re intelligent, they look at issues in new and interesting ways, and they challenge the status quo to drive positive change. They are credible, honest, courageous and passionate about their fields. But their unconventional approach to creating value and their outspokenness can leave them vulnerable to criticism.