Should Everyone Be a Thought Leader?

Twenty years ago when Thought Leaders Intl. started working full time helping business leaders get published successfully, the notion of thought leadership as a competitive advantage was just getting going. People who were identified as thought leaders, at that time, were considered to be the best and the brightest, and were recognized as people who actually were ahead of the game in whatever professional arena they called their own.

Today the notion of thought leadership has been considerably broadened out to include any firm of any size that stakes a claim to thought leadership. Accounting firms that have for decades carefully followed the best practices of their profession and who are inherently conservative, clinging doggedly to GAAP standards, are now being encouraged to market themselves as “thought leaders.” Can they without risking their status as caution leaders? Do you want your accountants to be at the leading, bleeding edge of new accounting creativity, with the IRS logging their every move?

Thought leadership always has an appropriate place in organizations, especially when it implies state-of-the-art. We want the best and most current advice from our professionals. We want advice that comes from experience with the long view, from a collective wisdom that has seen it all, understands that unintended consequences inevitably accompany the most careful of innovations, and that the necessity of unintended consequences should, nevertheless, not deter us from valuable innovation.

I don’t believe every firm can or ought to be thought leaders. Many fine organizations should be appropriately differentiated through characteristics other than being the smartest whiz kids on the block. Many clients want caution from their professional services firms, good service, and sometimes even prefer low price. Many clients are simply too busy with their own work to be disturbed by your firm’s brilliant innovation of the month. If the head of your client firm holds as a basic cultural belief ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ it might be twenty years before they want your thought leadership tearing up the place.

So, no. Not everyone wants their professional services supplier to be a thought leader.

Can Everyone Be A Thought Leader?

Thought leadership is often promoted as something a firm can acquire. Invest in research projects, and report the results of your survey to your present and future clients. Shazam! Instant thought leadership. Not a bad idea, and certainly a safe means of staying abreast of current best practice. But as some wise heads have observed, catching up with your competition’s best practices usually means you’re navigating by staring at your rear-view mirror. By the time you catch up, they will have moved on.

There are professions where using the standards of best practices works well, especially in the practice of medicine. It is safe and sane, and serves clients well. Best practices are the most conservative of thought leadership options.

But one might also observe that current state-of-the-art best practices are almost the opposite of genuine thought leadership. Thought leaders are truly out ahead because their imaginative, thinking, creative responses not only to existing challenges but anticipated challenges makes them masters of future scenarios.

Bottom line, thought leaders are distinguished by one simple characteristic: they think. And yes, you can develop a firm that earns over time a reputation for constant and valuable innovation. That’s real thought leadership.

And as long as we’re talking about it, what is thought, anyway?

There are many kinds of human activities we call thinking. A few years ago I purchased, with great anticipation, a book called The Thinker’s Toolkit by an ex-CIA researcher, hoping it would provide the methodology for intellectual property development I could use in working with my clients. In it the author offered a number of methods for “thinking.” I studied the book closely, from beginning to end and back to the beginning again. But something was missing, and it took a long time for me to put my finger on it. The book wasn’t really about “thinking” at all. It was about problem-solving. Considered afresh, I re-examined the book, and found that was exactly what it was: how to solve complex problems, how to make the best choice when confronted with a lot of facts and options.

Valuable. But not really thinking. I continued to search for that magic book that would provide a method for really thinking through something new, for developing new ideas. After a number of years my clients pointed out to me that my methodology was the one that had been so useful in developing their intellectual property. It was a system unique to Thought Leaders Intl. Ultimately, I ended up creating the book that we were looking for – The Endleofon, How to Think Like A Genius, which will be published by New World Library this coming winter (2008-2009.)

How do genuine thought leaders think? And are these skills and traits of mind teachable? Can firms really develop thought leadership? The answer is, yes. We teach it everyday, and our clients quickly develop important methodologies, new innovations, and new books, and often establish themselves at the top of their professions.

Is this going to hurt?

What if you really want your firm to be a thought leader? What if you decide that your thoughtleading competitor is eating your lunch with their new ideas and new systems. Can you turn your organization into a thought leader?

First off, let’s look at what you will be getting yourself into. Becoming a thought leadership organization will probably mean undertaking a culture change. The best minds in implementation management will tell you that a culture change is the most difficult kind of change an organization can undertake, and that it takes a good five years to achieve. Most organizations that undertake any kind of change fail to achieve their goals on time and on budget some 80% of the time. So be forewarned.

If you’re still bound and determined to get to thought leadership, you need to know what kind of people you will be developing.

Thought leaders think. They take nothing for granted and are comfortable with constant change. Thought leaders are curious about everything that might directly or indirectly affect them, their world, and their clients’ world. They are not afraid to look at radical new technologies when they arise, and are often early adopters, but they have a good sixth sense about sorting out valuable new technology from the glitter and the chaff.

You haven’t talked me out of it. Who do I call?

There is a methodology which greatly accelerates individual and group innovative thinking. It is the process I have refined over the course of many decades of helping my clients to think through what they know, to complete their systems, to understand the implications of what they are developing. My process creates a different kind of mind, a mind that is both open and yet highly strategic. It creates a way of thinking that solves complex problems with the best reasonable new solution, comfortable that nothing is ever perfect, but that a pretty good solution developed swiftly is always better than perfection that remains just over the horizon.

There are eleven specific skills essential to the mind of the thought leader and the thought leading culture. A middle English name for eleven is Endleofon, and I have chosen that name for my system.

1) Distinction. An Endleofon Thinker is trained to identify that which is genuinely new, to make new and valuable distinctions, to look at what everyone else is also looking at and seeing what no one else notices. All thought requires making distinctions and being able to articulate them so that others can also see those distinctions

2) Identity. An Endleofon Thinker comes from an orientation of knowing who they are at their core and what is immutable about themselves. From that knowledge they know what their full capacities and potential are as individuals and as members of a team and an organization. This knowing provides the only reliable test for authenticity from the beginning to the end of every project. An Endleofon Thinker always knows “Who we are.”

3) Implications. An Endleofon Thinker thinks through ideas to their logical extreme and looks at the consequences, comfortable in knowing that there will always be unintended consequences, and that by being highly aware of them, is often the first to spot them and, if possible, even take advantage of them.

4) Testing. An Endleofon Thinker knows how to find or create the tests that will find fatal flaws, if they exist, and discover execution flaws as part of a process of continual improvement. As Endleofon Thinker understands and can design in feedback systems that provide self-regulation, improvement, and warnings.

5.) Precedent. An Endleofon Thinker has developed the appropriate modesty that comes from an understanding that very little is new and that almost all of our best thinking is really about our joining a conversation that has been going on for years, decades, or even centuries. An Endleofon Thinker knows upon whose shoulders they are standing.

6.) Need. An Endleofon Thinker rarely works in a vacuum, but is instead highly aware of the needs of immediate users, and of a wide spectrum of possible other users. Strategic requirements of thought leadership thinking means always asking, “If this works well for my primary intended user, who else would benefit from this work?” Should we develop our work for those others, and how should we make it available to them?

7.) Foundation. An Endleofon Thinker is constantly trying to understand the context of their innovations, to discover what assumptions they might be taking for granted, but actually might be important new concepts. The Endleofon Thinker looks for the underlying governing body of law, and recognizes whether they are creating a new addition, a contradiction, or even a new edifice altogether.

8.) Completion. The Endleofon Thinker is a complete systems thinker, filling out the work to be a self-sustaining whole. Thought leadership requires that genuine innovation is complete, works, and has stand-alone intellectual integrity. Thought leadership is generally not a minor refinement of another’s best practices. It is a body unto itself.

9.) Connection. The Endleofon Thinker can shift from his own needs to that of the intended user, and make changes that assure the innovations can be quickly grasped because they are being offered, to the greatest extent possible, in the user’s frame of reference.

10.) Impact. Having come this far, the Endleofon Thinker steps back and compares the full possible foreseeable impact of the new work and holds it up to the test of whether, if the innovation is successfully diffused, will it take its creators in the direction they want to go?

11.) Advocacy. An Endleofon Thinker doesn’t delegate to others the need to provide the language, stories, illustrations and bottom-line data that will be required for others to accurately perceive, value and assess whether adoption of the new work will be worth the effort. The Endleofon Thinker knows that discovering this advocacy content is an essential part of the innovation itself, and began at Step One, Distinction.

Thought Leaders Intl. We build geniuses, one mind at a time.™