Chapter 4: Finding Your Sweet Spot

One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding to master anything in particular. Tony Robbins22

Most successful thought leaders focus on a narrow area of expertise. They also confine their thought leadership activities to areas that are aligned to their business goals, that they are passionate about, where risks are manageable and where they can be distinctive. This is their sweet spot.

For instance, Nancy Duarte (introduced in the previous chapter) didn’t attempt to become a thought leader on graphic design in general. America, and the world, is too big to make an impact with such a broad position. Instead, she has been successful by focusing on the narrow and under-populated field of designing presentation slides. Even in a small market like Australia, top engineers, for example, aren’t known for being engineers. They’re known for a particular area of expertise such as building over water or making offices more energy efficient. Such specialisations are likely to arise from their work. If you’re strategic, you will shape your career so you can work on projects and for clients that let you further deepen your expertise in your chosen field.

The following questions should help you refine your positioning and find the best topics for you to focus on as a thought leader:

• What is your professional or business field (for example, engineering, law, accounting, IT)?

• Within that field, where do you specialise?

• What market-leading expertise or ideas do you hold?

• Are there well-established thought leaders within the specialty area you have identified? What is their thought leadership line and what makes them prominent?

• If you were to become a more well-known thought leader within your specialist area, what ideas, professional characteristics, connections or attributes would make you stand out?

How did you go? If you are well positioned to become a thought leader, you should be able to list a fairly precise set of answers to these questions. For example, an accountant might be able to come up with a statement along these lines:

• I’m an accountant.

• I specialise in corporate financing.

• Within this area, I’m a leader in financing electricity networks in developing countries in South East Asia.

• I’ve gained this expertise through 15 years of working with leading energy companies in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

• The other top accountants and financiers in my field are Michelle Smith and Peter Jones. Smith is my equal but she has a higher profile because she’s regularly interviewed by the media.

• To grow as a thought leader, I believe I need to better focus and communicate my ideas about the nexus of energy and national development, potentially in partnership with the World Bank, with which I have a strong relationship.

Once you’ve identified your niche, the trick is to use all the writing and communication ammunition you can muster to make your material interesting and compelling to others.

What are you passionate about?

The above questions are all about what you know. However, it is equally important to investigate what you care about. What is your passion? Passion often trumps expertise because it gives thought leaders the energy they need to build and promote their message, and to excite and influence others. Becoming a thought leader is an endurance sport that involves extensive research, writing and talking on a very narrow topic, potentially over many years. Just think how many times Edward de Bono must have spoken on lateral thinking.

As business and marketing thought leader Dr Martha Rogers has said: ‘You can’t put the cart before the horse ... you don’t sit down and decide to become well known for something. What happens is that you have this ‘something’ that drives you so hard, that if you have the energy behind it and any communication capabilities, you end up becoming known for it.’23

When people communicate on issues they are truly passionate about, audiences respond to their sincerity. Whether they believe the argument or not, they do believe in the speaker’s commitment to his or her message. Where thought leadership fails, it’s often because it is delivered with a lack of passion and commitment.

Assess risk

Avoiding precedents does not mean nothing should ever be done. It only means that nothing should ever be done for the first time. Yes Minister24

Given that the best thought leadership material is original and often courageous, it can be risky. These risks tend to be more pronounced or complicated when you are seeking to write on behalf of an organisation. But what could go wrong?

The first risk is that the material advocates a position that is at odds with the stance taken by your colleagues or organisation. Likewise, the statements in your thought leadership material might be true, accurate and timely, but not in line with the position of an important client, business partner or government regulator.

An example is the delicate line companies and consultancies need to tread when advocating approaches that will save their customers money and increase productivity but lead to job losses. The idea might be innovative and sound but there is a danger of provoking negative reactions from unions and politicians, not to mention the staff themselves.

If you’re a professional, you may have an additional dilemma: client confidentiality. Accountants, doctors, lawyers, consultants, merchant bankers and other professionals are entrusted with sensitive information that would certainly be of interest to others and could form the basis of superb thought leadership material. However, it would irresponsible, unethical and even commercially disastrous to release it. There is also the fact that many clients simply don’t like seeing their advisers’ names in the newspaper. It makes them nervous, particularly at the big end of town.

Even so, you shouldn’t use these or other obstacles as an excuse to avoid thought leadership marketing altogether. It just means you need to come up with creative approaches to deliver the benefits while skirting the risks.

What’s your shtick?

There are almost 7 billion people in the world so if you plan to become a recognised thought leader, even within a fairly narrow professional field or industry, you need a shtick. This is your ‘thing’: the expertise you become known for and potentially some aspect of your presentation that helps you stand apart from your competitors. An example is James Strong, the Qantas director and former CEO who is well known for his business leadership skills and penchant for wearing bow ties. There are plenty of respected business leaders, but few of them wear bow ties. That makes him memorable.

Find your voice

In addition to visual hallmarks such as bow ties, Steve Jobs’s black shirts and jeans or Malcolm Gladwell’s crazy hair, it’s vital to find your voice — in writing and in speech. Voice is one of the greatest assets held by Barack Obama, for instance. From his preacher-inspired cadences and mellifluous delivery to his metaphorical vocabulary, he has a distinctive style. Obama’s thought leadership area is governance of the American state and his voice is almost always calm and considered yet engaged.

Your voice should be the one that comes most naturally to you. You might refine it by accentuating turns of phrase and reducing problems such as waffling or saying ‘um’ and ‘ah’ during speeches, but it should be authentic, easy to sustain and distinctively yours.

If you’re working within an organisation, you may need to moderate your natural delivery style to fit in with the company’s culture and brand. It may be hard to wear pink suits if you’re working for an investment bank, for example. Some brilliant people also need guidance on their public appearance. The people who look after Bill Gates at Microsoft, for instance, spent years struggling with the fact that he never noticed his glasses were dirty and had a habit of rocking his chair back and forth even when sitting on a stage or giving a television interview.

Describe yourself

The challenge of deciding how to position yourself in the thought leadersphere, to coin a term, becomes concrete when you need to write your biography. This is the description of yourself that you will use in material such as your website, conference brochures, a book cover or at the end of an article.

To write such a description, you need to boil down the key points about you as a person, your credibility, your field of expertise and your message or ideas into a succinct statement. This could be as short as 20 words when used with an article through to a full page on your website. Even if you don’t need this immediately, it is a good exercise to write a short and long version of your biography. This will help make you crystal clear about your strengths and positioning. Focus on your strengths and don’t be bashful. As a model, here is part of a self-description Seth Godin publishes on his website.

Seth Godin is the author of thirteen books that have been bestsellers around the world and changed the way people think about marketing, change and work. His books have been translated into more than 33 languages, and his ebooks are among the most popular ever published. He is responsible for many words in the marketer’s vocabulary, including permission marketing, ideaviruses, purple cows, the dip and sneezers. His irrepressible speaking style and no-holds-barred blog have helped him create a large following around the world.25

The thin red line between passion and anger

One dilemma you may find as a thought leadership author is how to convey your passion and punch home your ideas without sounding angry, humourless or overly critical. There is something in human nature that means most of us don’t like listening to angry people. This is partly emotional — we shut out things that might upset us — but also reflects the sensible view that if someone is angry they may not be thinking rationally. Further, audiences don’t respond well when obstacles are made to seem insurmountable.

Some of the crankiest phrases in thought leadership writing are those that are both critical and loaded with an author’s emotions or personal judgments. An opinion article I read recently from a business leader was full of phrases such as ‘it defies belief’ and ‘a source of shame’. She came across as angry and subjective, making the piece a chore to read and raising doubts about the veracity of her points. The alternative is to position difficult issues in positive terms, such as talking about ‘challenges’ rather than ‘problems’. It can also be good to make any solutions seem achievable with lines such as ‘this issue can be overcome by taking a number of small steps’ rather than arguing that ‘a radical rethink is required’.

Any photo or video of yourself accompanying your material will also influence the way your words are received. If you’re smiling, people are more likely to assume you mean things positively. If you look tense, upset or unpleasant, they may interpret the same content as critical and vexatious.

Taking a negative or critical line in debates may win you headlines or speaking opportunities, but it can backfire when it comes to winning new business. While audiences might find highly critical material thought provoking and entertaining, it won’t necessarily follow that they will want to engage your services or buy your products. Even if your message is critical, it is vital audiences don’t form the impression that you are an inherently negative or difficult person. The trick is to balance attention-grabbing negatives with constructive solutions — and don’t forget to smile!

Summary

To succeed as a thought leader, you need to find your sweet spot. This will involve working out what you know, what you’re passionate about, what risks you can manage and how you can stand out in a crowded marketplace. Capturing this information in words by writing a description of yourself will give you an essential promotional tool while helping you to articulate and refine your positioning.