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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
In a competitive age, thought leadership has emerged as a subtle but powerful way to grow your business, establish credibility and demonstrate expertise, build your profile and forge relationships with prospects and customers. Thought leadership material can take many forms, including public speaking, websites, the media, advertising, writing books, online forums, webinars and blogging. This book will show you how to take your great ideas and craft them into a clear point of view which can influence others. The book is organised into three parts: 1. Think: Defines thought leadership and how to transform your great ideas into effective thought leadership material. 2. Write: Shows you how to articulate your ideas into effective communication. 3. Grow: Demonstrates how thought leadership can be marketed to grow your business and profile. Key features: * Shows you how to go from expert to influential thought leader * Written by Grant Butler, former Australian Financial Review journalist and now managing director of Australia's largest corporate writing firm. * Explains techniques used by politicians, public figures and the CEOs of our biggest companies. Think Write Grow studies the techniques of the great communicators of recent times, from Barack Obama and Boris Johnson to Tim Flannery and Malcolm Turnbull.
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Seitenzahl: 258
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011
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Think Write Grow: How To Become A Thought Leader And Build Your Business By Creating Exceptional Articles, Blogs, Speeches, Books And More
Table of Contents
‘If you want to become a thought leader, and you want specifics on how to get it done, it’s essential you read Think Write Grow.’
— Mike Schultz
President of RAIN Group and co-author of the best-selling Rainmaking Conversations
‘This is a really useful guide from a well-respected practitioner. It will certainly help anyone who needs to write blogs, white papers, presentations or other material to convey complex ideas.’
— Pip Arthur
A/NZ External Relations Leader, IBM
‘Highly entertaining — an easy read full of practical ideas, references to resources and sound advice. In today’s crowded reading market, it is short, fresh, value-packed, fun to read and fantastic value-for-time.’
— Sean Larkan
Partner, Edge International
‘A little gem. It will particularly help accountants, lawyers or consultants being urged to use thought leadership to grow their practice by marketing people or their managing partners.’
— Laurie Young
Author of The Marketer’s Handbook and Marketing the Professional Services Firm
‘This book deserves a very wide readership.’
— Sir Gustav Nossal Professor Emeritus, University of Melbourne and former Australian of the Year
‘Grant Butler offers practical ways to increase your value as an expert by getting your knowledge out there.’
— Debra Woodman
Director, Business Development, Middletons
‘Think Write Grow is valuable to every business – and the marketing agencies that serve them – because it teaches companies how to write and deliver content that differentiates the customer experience and makes selling channels more effective.’
— Stephen Diorio
Partner, Profitable Channels LLC
Think
Write
Grow
How to become a thought leader and build your business by
creating exceptional articles, blogs, speeches, books and more
Grant Butler
First published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
42 McDougall Street, Milton Qld 4064
Office also in Melbourne
Typeset in Bembo 12pt
© Grant Butler 2012
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Author: Butler, Grant.
Title: Think write grow : how to become a thought leader and build your business by creating exceptional articles, blogs, speeches, books and more / Grant Butler.
ISBN: 9781118208199 (pbk.)
Notes: Includes index.
Subjects: Communication in management. Communication in science. Communication of technical information.
Dewey Number: 658.45
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (for example, a fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review), no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, communicated or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. All enquiries should be made to the publisher at the address above.
Typesetting by Anthony Vandenberg
Author image: © Honeydew Photography
Printed in China by Printplus Limited
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Disclaimer
The material in this publication is of the nature of general comment only, and does not represent professional advice. It is not intended to provide specific guidance for particular circumstances and it should not be relied on as the basis for any decision to take action or not take action on any matter which it covers. Readers should obtain professional advice, where appropriate, before making any such decision. To the maximum extent permitted by law, the author and publisher disclaim all responsibility and liability to any person, arising directly or indirectly from any person taking or not taking action based on the information in this publication. The views and information provided in this book are those of the authors solely and do not necessarily represent the views of the businesses identified in this book.
About the author
Grant Butler is managing director of Editor Group, Australia’s leading corporate writing firm. Before founding Editor Group, Grant was a senior journalist with The Australian Financial Review and held PR and lobbying roles in Australia and the United Kingdom.
Over two decades, Grant has worked closely with and reported on senior executives and experts from the world’s largest companies and professional service firms, and from the government sector. This has included writing and editing speeches, opinion articles, research reports, media statements, books, websites and other thought leadership material. He has also delivered extensive training in writing and media skills.
Grant’s clients include leading accounting, engineering and law firms; information technology and telecommunications companies; financial institutions; government departments and regulators. His work has been featured in major media outlets and used at events including CeBIT, Davos and the World Economic Forum.
Grant is the founding editor of PSF Journal, a magazine for partners and marketing and business development teams at professional service firms, and author of Where’s the Loot (Allen & Unwin, 2000), a book about the dot-com boom and entrepreneurial success.
He lives in Sydney with his wife and three children.
For Callan, Finlay and Eloise.
Acknowledgements
A sincere thank you to all the people who helped in the production of this book, particularly Scott Butler, Sally Chadwick, Angela Damis, Stephen Diorio, Olivia McDowell, Matthew Rodgers, Peter Sheridan, Charmaine Teoh and Cat Wirth who provided invaluable editing advice, research and design support. I’m also grateful to Lucy Raymond, the commissioning editor at John Wiley & Sons and those who agreed to be interviewed including Kevin Bloch, Nancy Duarte, Andrew Hobley, Andrew Lumsden, Sir Gustav Nossal and Tom Switzer. Finally, thank you to Cassandra, my wife, and all the staff at Editor Group for their assistance and giving me time to write.
Introduction
With our thoughts we make the world. GAUTAMA BUDDHA
In 1998 I had the good fortune to be invited on a media tour of Lucent Technologies’ headquarters at Murray Hill, New Jersey, in the United States. You might not be familiar with the name Lucent (now known as Alcatel-Lucent) but at the time it had just been spun out of American long-distance carrier AT&T as a new company with revenue of more than US$20 billion and around 137 000 employees. The operation included Bell Labs, one of the largest and oldest technology research facilities in the world, and the place that invented inter-city data networking (late 1940s), the transistor (1947), solar cells (1954), the laser (1958), communications satellites (1962), touch-tone phones (1962) and mobile -phone networks (proposed in 1947 then launched in the 1970s), among many other inventions we continue to use today. 1
I was a reporter at The Australian Financial Review newspaper at the time so the trip presented a great opportunity to learn about the company, meet its top executives and see Bell Labs firsthand. Part of the trip was a series of presentations from Lucent’s technologists and salespeople about its products and trends for the future. Journalists were there from around the world and the speakers were some of the top engineers in the field, talking about the coolest new technologies at the height of the telecommunications boom. This should have been an event akin to Steve Jobs launching the first iPhone or Bill Gates announcing Windows. Instead, much of the event was long, slow and overly technical, even by information technology (IT) industry standards.
What was the problem? Maybe it was just jet lag, but it seemed the brilliant minds put forward to present hadn’t simplified their material enough to communicate effectively with their audience — a ragbag of about 50 journalists with differing levels of technical knowledge and English language skills. We just weren’t connecting. After 20 minutes of some slides promoting a product that I gathered was new and had a ‘gigabit backplane’, I risked the ridicule of my peers by launching my hand into the air. Proceedings ground to a halt and the speaker turned to me. I asked: ‘Thank you for that but can you please tell me what it actually is?’ The speaker, let’s call him Bob Smith, looked at me blankly so I rephrased. ‘Sorry, I’m sure it’s just me, but can you maybe tell me what it looks like, for instance? Is it shaped like a box? Are we talking a shoe box or a packing crate? And how much does it cost?’
If you know anything about telecommunications switches — the things that sit at the centre of phone networks and redirect your phone calls or emails — you might realise there isn’t actually a simple answer to these questions. You’d also know that having a gigabit backplane — the ability to move a billion bits of data a second — was quite revolutionary and that back then switches did sort of come in boxes (or ‘racks’) about the size of a fridge. But everything else depended on what you wanted to do with it. Even so, it was bemusing that Bob couldn’t grasp the question, let alone describe his complex toy in concrete, everyday terms that an arts degree graduate like me and my general business readers might understand.
Fortunately, my next meeting was just the opposite: an interview with Carleton ‘Carly’ Fiorina, the charming and articulate senior Lucent executive who had driven the company’s split with AT&T and subsequent IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, and who had just been named America’s most powerful businesswoman by Forbes magazine. She would go on to become global CEO of Hewlett-Packard the following year. Fiorina locked her steely gaze on me, worked out the level at which to pitch her answers (low), and then proceeded to deliver her key messages in the sort of flawless and engaging way you might associate with a figure like Barack Obama. It was a tour de force performance, and I was just one of presumably 10 interviews she would give that day. Reading her autobiography years later I realised that at that time she was under enormous pressure in the business and had a gravely ill mother, which made her engagement and poise all the more remarkable. As she writes, ‘The fall of 1998 was terrible. I became a celebrity and my mother died.’2
Figures like Fiorina are exceptional and have such star appeal that it’s hard for them not to dominate news reporting about companies and, in turn, become seen as the thought leaders in their industries. Some are even tagged as visionaries. The tragedy is that guys like Bob Smith are often gifted thinkers who fail to gain the recognition they deserve because their subject-matter expertise isn’t matched by their ability to communicate. Not only are they outshone by megawatt CEOs, they are eclipsed by colleagues and competitors who may know less but are sought out by the media or to speak at industry events.
This book is designed to help those who know a lot but would like to improve the way they communicate about knowledge-intensive fields such as accounting, economics, engineering, finance, IT, law, medicine, science or the equally demanding field of general management. In particular, it is written for those who want to use communications to build their business, drive policies or promote a cause. Whatever your goal, the ability to use words to clearly articulate your ideas and persuade others will have a huge bearing on your future. And while this book is directed to you as a thought leader who writes — or wants to — it should be equally useful to any management and marketing teams that support you and depend on your results.
The insights in this book are based on my work with thought leaders from varied fields and the communications professionals who assist them. Writing thought leadership material can be an exciting process as smart, interesting people throw around ideas and develop great ways to express them. But I have also observed some common issues that seem to hobble the process. Given thought leaders are by definition intelligent, well-educated experts, these problems rarely relate to basic spelling or grammar. Instead, they tend to stem from ambiguity about purpose, insufficient or unrealistic resourcing, organisational politics or a misunderstanding of how thought leadership can be used as part of a sales and marketing strategy.
The book discusses these issues and outlines the techniques effective communicators use to write and promote thought leadership material. At its heart, great thought leadership should deliver strong ideas for solving other people’s problems or helping them discover opportunities. The first part of the challenge is to identify those issues that really concern or excite your audience then come up with new and compelling solutions and ideas. The next parts are ensuring those thoughts are heard, then converting your audience’s interest into results — whether that’s sales of your products and services or achieving a non-commercial goal.
If there is a warning in this book, it is that thought leadership is challenging. It takes hard work and moments of brilliance to come up with new and valuable ideas. But when you do, and can communicate those ideas in a way that inspires others, the results will be electric. There is also a plea, which is to respect the role of thought leadership material. People find thought leadership valuable because it delivers on a group of expectations. Those expectations include that the author will offer advice that genuinely helps the reader solve problems or realise opportunities; that the information will be factually accurate or clearly flagged as opinion; and that the author is presenting views they personally believe in.
If your thought leadership fails to meet these expectations, it may disappoint readers and make it hard for you to reach your audience. Worse, it will undermine people’s faith in the thought leadership genre you have used, making it less useful to the next author.
So, why do it at all? What will you gain from becoming a well-known thought leader in your field? Plenty. As we’ll explore, effective thought leadership material enables you to demonstrate your expertise to potential customers in a way that opens doors, builds trust and reshapes agendas. It is essential to raising your profile, differentiating your products and services in crowded markets, expanding your networks and attracting other talented people to work with you or provide other support. You may also enjoy personal rewards, such as travel and spending more time with other interesting experts, and you can certainly make money directly by selling your ideas in books, speeches and other ways.
The world of thought leadership isn’t exclusive either. In this book, I focus on a number of exceptional and high-profile writers, researchers, professionals and executives because they are great models to learn from. They also illustrate different aspects of the thought leadership challenge and provide valuable insights that I hope you can apply to your own situation. However, thought leadership is open to anyone. All it requires is that you can develop and communicate ideas that are of value to an audience you care about — your followers. Whether you’re a top stock market commentator reaching millions on TV or a small business owner sending out a newsletter to your customers, the idea is the same: you are building your business by passing on your expert knowledge to customers and prospects to help them create a better future. Within reason, the more freely and generously you offer that advice — the more value you give others — the more rewards you are likely to gain.
Perhaps the most enticing and rewarding aspect of becoming a better writer, in particular, is that it will make you a better thinker. The act of writing plays an enormous role in crystallising your thoughts and helping you organise them into powerful, effective and memorable arguments that will propel you and your readers into new cycles of innovation, reflection and discussion. If there is one overriding message I hope you will take from this book it is this: writing isn’t just something you do once you have become a thought leader; it will help to make you one.
Grant Butler
Sydney, 2012
Part 1: Think
Chapter 1: What is Thought Leadership?
Thought leaders inspire leadership. They ignite imaginations, explode old myths, and illuminate paths to the future that others may follow. Jan Phillips3
Dr Naren Chitty walks with a limp from a childhood bout of polio. He once also had a leopard cub as a family pet. ‘I recall that Lumpi had a very rough tongue,’ he says. ‘Rather like gritty sandpaper.’ His cousins had a lion in their garden and baby crocodiles in a patio pool. All of this was possible in his homeland of Sri Lanka. He later studied communications in London and documentary film making in Berlin, and was instrumental in setting government policy for the introduction of television to Sri Lanka in the late 1970s. In the 1980s he served as a counsellor at his country’s embassy in Washington D.C. and simultaneously completed a PhD in international relations at the American University, worked with non-governmental groups, was involved in satellite communications (including helping to establish the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation in the United States), and met the likes of Ronald Reagan, Katharine Graham and Bob Hope. With Sri Lanka in political turmoil in the late 1980s, he settled his family in Australia and began teaching communications at Macquarie University in Sydney. Intelligent and productive and yet seemingly always available to others, he has since built up an internationally recognised International Communications faculty within the university, and an associated journal.
Dr Chitty’s move to Australia gave me the opportunity to study under him. While the other lecturers teaching my mass communications degree were studying the social commentary underlying Doctor Who or shaking their weary heads at the postmodern pastiche that modern media had become, here was a teacher from the real world where politics mattered and nations were being built. Better still, Dr Chitty had interesting theories about how the world worked. The main theory he taught us — and which continues to shape my world view — was that it is meaningless to divide the globe only in terms of nation states. Instead, it is more accurate to view it as being managed by a number of elite groups, many of which are transnational. You only have to look at the guest list for Davos or a G20 meeting to realise the truth of this observation. The top CEOs and politicians attending these events have far more in common with each other than most of the people in their home countries.
Dr Chitty’s take on this phenomenon was to look at the way these geographically dispersed elite groups were being connected by satellites, other communications technology and the birth of global media and communications systems such as CNN. He did this work in the 1970s and 1980s, well before the web was born and even before fax machines were widespread.
To me, Dr Chitty is a thought leader. He has, quite literally, led my thoughts. This is a profound idea if you stop to think about it. Who would you say has led your thoughts, either personally or in your work? If you’re like me, you probably came up with a very short list. There are your parents and family, and maybe someone whose job it was to guide your thinking such as a school teacher or a professor at university. But what about in your professional or business life? How many people have really changed the way you think in any substantial way? Where did you come across them? And how did they do it? Was it something they wrote, a comment they made or a thing they did?
The funny thing for me is that I’ve never met most of the people who have profoundly impacted my thoughts about, for instance, business. I’ve usually encountered them through books or journalism, which convinces me of the power of writing.
This view was recently reinforced when I picked up a book called The World’s Greatest Idea: The Fifty Greatest Ideas That Have Changed Humanity by John Farndon4. I found the book fascinating for two reasons: the power of the big idea and the way it highlighted the close relationships between the act of invention or insight, writing and winning the credit for ideas in future years.
Farndon focuses on big events like the invention of arable farming, democracy, fire, the laws of motion, contraception, electricity grids, hope, monotheism, the steam engine, wine, capitalism, the scientific method, natural selection, the wheel, Marxism and even qi (the Chinese concept of life force). While some of these are directly associated with individuals who wrote their ideas in books, such as Darwin on natural selection, Newton on the laws of motion and Karl Marx on Marxism, you might assume the others developed so slowly there would be no particular ‘author’ of the idea. You’d be wrong. For most of the breakthroughs, there is one or a small group of seminal authors. Moreover, it was often their ability to clearly express ideas — their thought leadership at the time — in writing that won them support and has ensured they are still acknowledged today.
The ancient Greeks get the credit for a number of the biggest ideas, including democracy, logic and even romance. Then there are some physical inventions that were well described by their creators, including the curved aerofoil which was progressed and written about in an influential way by the British engineer Sir George Cayley. According to Farndon, it was Cayley who coined the terms ‘lift’, ‘drag’ and ‘thrust’ that remain in use even now. The idea of capitalism is attributed to Adam Smith because he captured it so well in The Wealth of Nations; the British politician William Beverage gets the recognition for the notion of the welfare state thanks to his visionary report on the topic that led to it becoming a reality in post-war England; and Confucius, Mo Zi and Laozi are seen to have really nailed the idea of qi in their writings between the sixth and fourth centuries BC. Even some truly universal concepts such as the idea of the self can be attributed to the experts who first described them in a meaningful and memorable way. Here, Farndon cites Plato, Laozi and the more recent philosopher René Descartes. Showing how a deft turn of phrase can be just as important as a big idea, especially as topics become intangible, he quotes Laozi’s ‘Knowing others is wisdom. Knowing the self is enlightenment.’ and Descartes’s famous line, Cogito ergo sum, ‘I think therefore I am’.
What Farndon’s book shows is that ideas really can change the world and that the act of writing your ideas down is critical to having them heard and to earning your place in history.
***
The meaning of the term ‘thought leader’ is pretty clear from those two words. These are people who lead with ideas, rather than being in a structured leadership position such as CEO.
What sets thought leaders apart is they don’t just think; they go out of their way to share their thoughts with others. They may do this by publishing their views in books or journals, speaking at events, appearing in the media and taking up industry leadership roles such as serving on boards and standards-setting bodies. Most importantly, thought leaders are focused on what’s likely to happen in the future. In turn, they acquire followers — people who listen to their views and use them to make decisions about their own directions and activities.
Thought leaders are recognised as having innovative ideas, and demonstrate the confidence to promote or share those ideas as insights that others can act on. They might even be called futurists. As a term, ‘thought leader’ was first used in 1994 by Joel Kurtzman, editor-in-chief of strategy+business magazine. I find it hard to believe that no one had ever put those two words together before, but Kurtzman wanted a term to describe a group of interview subjects who had contributed new ideas to business. Those subjects included British management thinker Charles Handy; Stanford economist Paul Romer; Mitsubishi president Minoru Makihara; University of Michigan strategist C.K. Prahalad; and Gary Hamel, a professor at the London Business School.
The notion of thought leadership has since expanded to encompass individuals and organisations that progress thinking within a field. Monash University in Melbourne offers a practical definition that covers most business-related thought leaders:
What differentiates a thought leader from any other knowledgeable company is the recognition as being at the forefront of innovation and cutting-edge thinking, and having the confidence to promote or share those ideas as actionable distilled insights for business improvement.5
The idea of thought leadership — and particularly the notion of ‘gurus’ — also has detractors. American management writer Peter Drucker once famously said, ‘The reason reporters call these people gurus is that they’re not sure how to spell “charlatan”.’6 Critics are often particularly harsh about individuals who promote themselves as thought leaders but lack real-world experience in the fields they discuss. This can be valid; most of us want to learn from people with direct experience. But keep in mind that many of the most famous thought leaders are primarily commentators and analysts rather than ‘doers’. An example might be Malcolm Gladwell, who is a very insightful author and is widely regarded as someone who can offer direction to others. Yet Gladwell has done very little except observe, think and write as a journalist and author of books such as The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers.
To me, thought leadership can be broken down into three parts: having enough knowledge to guide others, being credible and having the ability to convey ideas. The latter two points are critical when it comes to becoming the person who is asked to submit articles to publications or speak at events or who is sought out for comment by the media. You may be the foremost expert in your field but unless others believe you are a leader — unless you are recognised — then your opportunities to communicate your views will be limited. There is a certain injustice to this, but don’t get indignant; just understand there is competition for audiences, so to win you will need great content, good communication skills and an effective promotional strategy.
Summary
Thought leaders are experts who operate at the forefront of their fields. They are leaders because of their knowledge, the value of their ideas and their ability to influence others. The most successful thought leaders are strong in all three areas: they have a deep technical understanding of their field and credibility; offer breakthrough thinking that others can act on; and have the confidence and capacity to communicate their views.
Chapter 2: What is Thought Leadership Marketing?
Thought leaders earn trust by delivering valuable information with no strings attached. Steven Van Yoder7
Thought leadership, and being a thought leader, can be very good for business. When you are exceptional at something — like programming computers, building ships or winning court cases — you are sought out by others who want to buy your expertise. The more you can demonstrate your knowledge through your work and through activities such as publishing articles, the more likely you are to be found by buyers and the more your business will grow. You will also build your reputation and, in turn, your personal brand and that of your organisation.
This phenomenon has been noticed by marketers and given rise to what is known as ‘thought leadership marketing’ — the process of using thought leadership material to help generate sales, and producing thought leadership material with the direct intent of using it as a marketing tool. Thought leadership marketing is particularly popular with organisations that sell products and services built around the intelligence of individuals, such as professional service firms and high-technology companies.
Showing how widespread this phenomenon has become, a recent study found the world’s top 40 business consulting firms collectively listed almost 3 500 articles and reports on their websites that were explicitly positioned as thought leadership material.8
A key attraction of thought leadership marketing is that it enables organisations to ‘sell without selling’. An example of a firm that has built its success through this approach is McKinsey & Company. As a high-end management consulting firm, McKinsey avoids directly selling its services through techniques such as cold calls and mass mailouts. However, it does rely heavily on thought leadership marketing. According to the former McKinsey consultants Ethan Rasiel and Paul Friga, who wrote The McKinsey Mind, the firm instead builds its reputation and relationships with decision makers by publishing books and articles, sponsoring topical events and helping community organisations where it can both demonstrate its skills and work alongside business leaders who may later become clients.9
Thought leadership material captures attention because it is new, interesting and helpful, and in turn, valuable to the recipient. It is good content that is credible and relevant to readers. It cuts through to elusive senior executives in particular, because it helps them set strategy and make decisions, tasks that rely on making educated guesses about the future. However, it shouldn’t seek to explicitly sell a product or service or close a deal. This is what sets thought leadership marketing material apart from items such as brochures, websites and sales pitches. It should promote new ideas with a view to changing something in the future. It should be advice backed by expertise. It should also be altruistic. At its best, it is a valuable and honest gift to the reader or audience.
