Thought leadership is what you call it when you have opinions and want a crowd.
That is the whole thing. "I have opinions and I would like an audience for them" sounds like exactly what it is, so somebody built a phrase that sounds like a line item on a budget instead, and now there are conferences about it.
What is actually being produced
A carousel. Five insights. A call to action.
The insights are things the audience already knew, delivered with enough conviction that it lands as confirmation instead of as a man telling you water is wet.
The post where somebody cried in a parking lot and turned it into a leadership lesson. That is thought leadership.
Fifteen slides about what every founder needs to know, written by a guy whose company has four employees and one of them is his cousin. Thought leadership.
The talk that opens with a provocative question and answers it with a framework the speaker invented and named after himself. Thought leadership.
None of it is leading a thought. It is content produced in the hope that strangers hand back the credential of taking you seriously.
The loop
To do thought leadership you have to be recognized as a thought leader. To be recognized as a thought leader you have to do thought leadership.
The credential and the content generate each other and at no point does anybody stop and check whether the thoughts are any good.
The guy with the most followers is not the guy with the best ideas. He is the guy who got best at producing something that sounds authoritative to people who are shopping for something that sounds authoritative. It is a market. Both sides know.
Nobody says it out loud
Here is the tell. No human being has ever stood in a room, in front of another human being, and said the words "I am a thought leader."
It only survives in writing. In a bio. Where nobody can react to it in real time and where he does not have to watch a face change.
What actual authority looks like
Know something. Say it plainly. Be right enough times that people come find you when they need to be right about the same thing.
That is the entire mechanism and it has worked for every expert in history without a single carousel.
It just requires being useful to specific people, which is harder than making content and roughly a thousand times rarer.
How to become a thought leader today
- Name a framework after yourself. Take something everybody already does, give it four steps, put your last name in front of it. Nobody will check. There is no registry.
- Post about a failure that made you better. It has to be a failure that reflects well on you. A deal you lost because you cared too much. A team you overinvested in. Never an actual mistake.
-
Break every sentence into its own paragraph.
Like this.
Because that is how depth is signaled.
On this platform. - Say the obvious thing slowly. "Most companies don't have a strategy problem. They have a clarity problem." That means nothing. It will do four thousand impressions.
- Announce that you are going to start posting more. This is itself content. You have now produced thought leadership about your intention to produce thought leadership, and the loop is closed.
Frequently asked questions
Is thought leadership real?
No.
But some of those people are genuinely smart.
Yes. That is what makes it worse.
I have been asked to do thought leadership at my job. What do I do?
Write something true and specific and do not call it that.
Isn't this post thought leadership?
Yes.
Doesn't that undercut everything you just said?
It does.
Are you going to fix that?
No.
A note on safety
None of this is advice. Number one has been done sincerely by roughly nine hundred thousand people and several of them are doing better than we are. We sell merch. We are not qualified to advise you on your personal brand, your posting cadence, or the man from your last job who now describes himself as a category creator. Do what you want. You were going to.
