And then there is the question of what type of hire should be made: should it be someone skilled in business development? Someone with technical skills? A subject matter expert? Or maybe admin or operational support? The question of timing – and role – is a challenge for every organization, [More]
Two key lessons he learned were directly from the sales playbook, and are ones that we so often forget when we are doing our own business development activities: If you don't ask, you don't get, and small greed succeeds. After his second interview, the company sprang it on him: they'll [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]
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]
Just about every Friday for the last eight years and four months, I went to school - but no more. I was a consultant to the Schulich School of business, where I gave 288 presentations, coached over 2100 students, and mentored 128 of them at 7am almost every week. I [More]
Who doesn't have a LinkedIn profile? And who doesn't understand the importance that relationships play in building a business, making a sale, or getting the job? Yet why do most people seem mystified about using Social Media (and LinkedIn in particular) pro-actively for their professional success? Of course, there are [More]
Look around, and you are surrounded by advertisements: which ones catch your eye? Likely, the ones that are the loudest. Unfortunately, the race to the loudest is making it hard for anything to get through. One of the key reasons for corporate interest in digital is that it is a [More]
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