Benefits of community leadership include: It implies a third-party endorsement — after all, someone must have vetted you for the role. Others can observe you as someone in a position of authority and respect. Your involvement will widen your network with completely different people. It is incredibly powerful when people see you [More]
Not sure of the weather? Check Google. Need directions? Check Google. Currency exchange rates. Ditto. Definition of an unfamiliar word? Google. The credibility of a particular person? Yes, Google. When someone wants to understand more about you, Google can provide an interesting, and supposedly unbiased perspective. Unpacking the Google test [More]
I was talking to someone at a conference who had seen a presentation I had done on digital strategy, when he said that he, too, was a digital strategy thought leader. I was looking forward to finding out his background, so asked what he'd done before: he said that he [More]
One of today's mistaken beliefs is that traditional media (e.g. TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines) have no value. While it is true that they have lost readers and viewers, and that without their audiences, that ad revenues have also continued to slide. For most people, traditional media still has both [More]
How you answer that question is a function of your age. If you asked your parents or grandparents, it would likely be 20-50 people, which would include their family, friends, and work colleagues. If you grew up in the 1970s to 1990s, it would be much larger -- maybe 500. [More]
While it is true that writing and speaking are both individual skills, this test isn't really a question of evaluating those skills. After all, sadly, "everyone" writes and speaks. The value of the test comes from two separate sources: 1) Third-party validation: To get a book published by a traditional [More]
The activity level test is simple: how "busy" is the thought leader? The more they are creating new intellectual property (books, blogs, podcasts, research, etc.), speaking at events, and engaged in conversations on social media, the higher they rank on this dimension. Sadly, one of the things that would-be thought [More]
Your title is an important signal to the marketplace. It describes your responsibilities as well as your scope of authority. But what is the connection to thought leadership? Unless the title is directly tied to your expertise ("Chief Science Officer", for example), there is absolutely no connection to thought leadership, [More]
This question is too often buried under vendors' promises of nirvana if only a new piece of software was installed. Or buried under consultants' promises of better efficiency or higher ROI. Instead, before the actual transformation exercise is even defined, this fundamental question must be answered: Where is the opportunity? [More]
While this is a perhaps too-basic question, and one that is clearly a set-up, there is one area of branding that is too often overlooked: human nature. On a recent cross-country road trip, I had the opportunity to stop in many small towns. And as I did, I felt I [More]
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