ETL 32: Abbie Lundberg on the Science of Turning Ideas Into Top-Notch Thinking

Transcript

Alan Alper: Abbie, thanks for joining us today on Everything Thought Leadership.

Abbie Lundberg: Happy to be here. Nice to see you.

Alan: So why don’t we start with a little bit of your past. You started on the consumer side of publishing way back when, of course, before moving to the trades and academic journals. Can you maybe just give us a little perspective on what prompted that shift?

Abbie: Sure. I worked in New York on a couple of different couple different media companies. And I started out editing” Hints from Heloise” and “Dr. Joyce Brothers”, and a gossip column from LA was I was working for King Features Syndicate. And, you know, that was fun for a while but, you know, so only so many ways you can get ink stains out of clothes. One of the reasons I became a journalist was because I love learning new things and I figured that this would be a skill set that I could transfer from one domain to another.

And so that was my thinking when I joined CIO magazine at IDG. (I) thought, I’d be there maybe five years. But what happened in the technology leadership space was that every five years, something changed dramatically. And, so, it just kept being fresh and interesting and engaging for quite a while. And when I left there, I started my own business. And I had a bunch of different clients, including, as you mentioned, HBR Analytic Services. But I was also doing some communication consulting to CIOs for their internal communications and external communications.

I was very happy working for myself. I did that for 12 years. But when this job at MIT Sloan Management Review came along, it was just, I hadn’t really been thinking that I would take another full-time job, but it was such a perfect fit. I had done some editing for them on a contract basis and getting back to working with really smart people on their ideas and helping them develop their ideas for being able to put those into practice was really, I just, I loved the experience.

And then (the Editor in Chief) position opened up and it was a perfect fit for my experience and skills and the challenges of the job and what it had to offer. So that’s how I ended up at SMR.

Alan: It’s funny that you said I could relate to this because I was thinking back as you were explaining your career trajectory. I started my career as a journalist, of course, and I was writing about sports and politics and arts and entertainment. And I saw this opportunity that was listed, I think, in the New York Times classified section, which is where we all got our job leads in those days, for a reporter position at a publication called Electronic News, which was published by Fairchild Publications.

I didn’t really know much about electronics. I didn’t even know that much about business. And I went and did the interview. And I looked around the newsroom and I saw all these older men, all in white shirts with pocket savers (containing) their calculators and their pens. And I said, I don’t think I fit in this organization, but they gave me a writing test and wouldn’t you know it, they offered me the job. And I became smitten with technology and learned a lot about business along the way, from which I’ve profited both professionally and personally.

And as you noted, the technology cycles (change) every five years. And I had to reinvent myself every five to seven years as well to keep pace. It’s been a long run for me following technology and now being a consultant to help people establish their thinking and present their best and their brightest on a topic. And it’s been very rewarding, I have to say. I don’t really worry about bylines anymore. I’d much rather be more or less kind of a conduit for getting good stories told.

You’ve worked for a number of prestigious publications. You mentioned IDG and CIO Magazine and HBR, and now you’re at MIT Sloan Management Review. How do they differ? And how have you evolved as an editor to meet the ever-changing informational needs of your audience?

Prestigious Publications Are Not All the Same

Abbie: CIO was a unique place when I was there because the CIO position hadn’t really existed up to that point. There were probably a handful of people with that title. And our job was to champion those professionals and to help them establish themselves as business leaders, not just technology leaders. We really had an advocacy role. As the years went on, we shifted a little bit away from that advocacy role to be a little bit more hard hitting, especially around topics like the year 2000 (system challenge) and moving into the internet age.

There was so much at stake with the work that CIOs were responsible for. We saw our mission shifting a little bit then to be more one of saying … this is your job, you need to be accountable. We did some stories that we would not have done in the early days, in terms of just being a little bit more investigative and a little bit harder hitting, both within the CIO community, but also within the vendor community. And then the shift for me was really away from the CIO IT leadership into a broader leadership area … when I started working with HBR Analytics Services, and then at Sloan Management Review (SMR). … We have a very rigorous approach (at SMR) to making sure that the ideas that we’re presenting to the world are in fact novel and useful for managers trying to help their companies be successful.

SMR’s Mission: Advance the Conversation

Alan: Why don’t we talk a lot about Sloan Management Review and the editorial mission and your role as a thought leadership journal?  You’ve made it very clear in your mission statement that you want to lead the discourse among influential thought leaders in a world being transformed by technological, societal, and environmental change. And your focus, of course, is on leadership and management issues. The term thought leader, as you know quite well, is thrown around very loosely these days. Can you define what you guys mean by thought leader? And can you tell us what you think makes for a great thought leader?

Abbie: Absolutely. We really have very specific things that we’re looking for when we review submissions and talk to authors, potential authors about what they’re thinking. And the first one is, you know, what is new? And it could be in a really, obviously, we want it to be in a really important space, like, for example, AI right now. But how does this article advance the conversation and what is it building on? So that’s the first one — novelty or newness of the ideas. And then secondly, is it narrow enough to lead to very actionable results to be able to tell somebody what they can do next?

Obviously, it’s gotta be relevant to managers. What is the urgent problem that’s helping them to address? For us, we really want to see, and this is I think a differentiator for us is that (we are looking for) the evidence that these recommendations are based on. Is there new research? How did the authors make their case? And then finally, does the author have established credibility in the topic? That’s obviously something that we would want to see.

Fielding the Pitches

Alan: So, it comes down to the essential relevance of the idea, the topic, breakthrough thinking, how deep you go, making it narrow, making it actionable. Those are all great attributes of a good piece. Can you talk a little bit about how you really take stock of what a pitch is and try to distill and (then) project what that article could and should be. I mean, you get a lot of submissions, obviously. And, you know, some of them probably sound good on paper, but in reality, I know you’re looking at the credentials of the person submitting it and whether they’ve got a pedigree to back what want to write about. Can you just talk about that process and how you make sure that when the submission comes in, it’s really going to be what you need and what your audience requires to really advance their thinking?

Abbie: One thing on the pedigree point, what we do, one of the things that we pride ourselves on is that we look for new thinkers new sources of ideas. We’re not just going back to the well to the people who are well known in a particular space. Obviously, we want to publish those people who are really highly regarded in a particular area, but we also we value our big funnel. We go out and talk to lots of people in different spaces. It’s not just the two coasts, it’s not just North America. We really look around the globe for those sources.

Alan: Well, once you’ve determined that an individual has the right stuff, know, that they’ve got a breakthrough idea, that they have credentials, that they’ve thought through and have a breakthrough approach to conceptualizing it and then delivering something actionable. How then do you decide — because you’ve got probably many options on a topic, which authors you go forward with and which ones are going to deliver the goods that you need to serve your audience?

Abbie: You know, we do get we get over 550 submissions a year. And that’s in addition to the acquisition work that we get from our outreach to people that we know from being previously published with us or that we come across at the Academy of Management events or whatever. So, so we do have a lot of submissions to sort through; we accept either proposals or drafts of articles. So, you know, obviously the more detail we get in a submission, the easier it is for us to figure out whether or not that’s something we want to go forward with.

What happens sometimes is that, we get a pretty interesting pitch, but we’ve just published something on that topic. So, you know, that factors into it as well. In our process, the editorial team actually reviews submissions together. We get together once a week and go through all the submissions that have come in that week and anything that’s come in over the transom.

And then we kind of do a desk review where there are obviously going to be some proposals that just aren’t a good fit for us, and we weed them out. But then we take the rest of them, and we divide them up as a team for a deeper review. We’ll all take a couple of pieces each week to go deeper with. For example, I just had a proposal for a piece that was based on an academic article. They didn’t include that in their submission, but I went out and found that article because I had questions about how they conducted their research.

So we do a pretty thorough review at that point. And then, if we decide it was interesting and something we might want to pursue, we would connect with the authors and talk through some issues that might be there — whether it was like, you’re positioning this this way, but it seems like something else might be the most relevant piece. Would you think about reframing this, or whatever? And we still haven’t accepted it at that point. We’re still developing the piece and working with authors to get to a point where we can agree that this is right for us, and it’s in condition to move forward with real editing.

Watertight Research is Key

Alan: I have to say, and I think I told you this previously, that it’s nice that  when you  submit something into your portal, you get a response, and you get a response fairly quickly. I can’t say that about other publications that I’ve worked with. I know … you get a lot of requests and maybe you don’t get as many requests as some of these other publications that I’ve referred to in the past with you. But at the same time, the fact that you care enough to come back to the author…even if it’s a no, you’d rather know that it’s a no than just be left lingering and wondering as to what has happened.

So kudos to you and your team on that one. Another thing that became clear to me in working with some members from your team, and you mentioned this a little bit, is that you’re really looking not just for fresh thinking, but for evidence … whether it’s new research or research that helps to support development of a point of view, best-case examples, things of that nature. There’s a lot of research out there, of course, and you can probably find a factoid to support anything these days. … But how do you make sure that the fact basis is really there, that it’s watertight, that the evidence is going to help to tell a great story? And that’s really important. (The article) is not going to just be a recitation of data. It’s going to be a yarn that you’re weaving.

Abbie: We do look at what the research is it based on. If it’s a lit review, if the authors went and read a bunch of other pieces and drew insights from that, you know that sort of falls lower on the hierarchy for us. Did they conduct actual field research? What was the length of time that they were conducting that research? Another example from that piece that I read this week, there was really deep research, very good solid research on one aspect of what they were saying in their paper, but they drew conclusions from it that were not evidence-based. They speculated why this was happening. And so that ended up being a piece that we’re not moving forward with, or we’ll talk to the authors about that aspect.

The Magazine and Digital Publishing Tracks

Alan: That makes a lot of sense. So once an article is accepted for publication … you assign an editor to it and they help shepherd it through the process. Can you kind of discuss the mechanics of that and how long it takes to get something from acceptance into the publication?

Abbie: We have two separate, but interlinked, editorial tracks. There are the articles that we want to publish in the magazine. The magazine feature has research features, which are 4,000 word, deeply researched pieces. We also do other kinds of articles that aren’t quite so long or meaty. We have different sections of the publication. We just launched a new section called Radar, which are really short pieces, maybe data points, things that we’ve come across that aren’t going to become a full-fledged feature.

So that’s sort of the magazine process. But then we also have a digital track, so articles that are going to be digital only, and that includes a lot of our columnists, although some of our columns do end up getting into the magazine. And our digital pieces tend to be shorter, 1,200 to 2,000 words. They typically would focus on some practical takeaways: five tips for doing better one-on-ones was one that we did recently. So it’s a little bit different. The expectations are a little bit different, but the teams are integrated.

The members of the team do work on both … Laurieanne McLaughlin is the senior editor for digital. That’s her responsibility. Elizabeth Heichler is the editorial director for the magazine … But they both do sort of crossover as well.

Alan: So in a world where print has been de-emphasized by numbers of publications and whatnot, you guys are still print. You’re still publishing a print magazine. You do a lot of digital too. How do you figure out what goes where? Is the print more or less editorially driven by a calendar? Is digital more kind of happenstance or opportunistic? You’re taking interesting, relevant, topical things that you want to get into people’s minds quicker. How do you divide that?

Abbie: It’s really hard to do a calendar when you are publishing contributed articles, because we’re not going out and assigning articles, as we did at CIO. So, we can’t be assured that we will have articles on a particular topic. What we what typically do is we take what’s coming in (and) we’re in the process of building up a surplus of articles so that we can have more flexibility for planning around topics, around timing. But timing wise, it’s less about our schedule and more about the author’s schedule.

Elizabeth is wrapping up a piece that’s been in the works for two years, but that was because the authors were super busy and working on other things and it’s going to be great. Planning for the mix can be challenging. It’s getting a little easier. And then we do these things we call special reports in every issue. And that is … we look for themes (that fit a special issue). And sometimes the themes are a little loose, but the most recent one was on capturing opportunities, so (the themes were) innovation and new markets. We just happened to have three pieces come in that sort of fit into that space.

Hot Topics: AI, Culture, and Sustainability

Alan: It’s great when it works that way, huh? So you mentioned AI being really hot now, and you can’t go anywhere without reading about AI, good, bad, or ugly. What are the hot topics right now, and which ones in your mind are overpitched and are crying out for no mas, you know, we’ve seen this bad movie before kind of thing?

Abbie: AI is, you know, the one that we get the most demand for, that get the most traffic — not just gen AI, but AI broadly. But again, sort of the practical applications — what’s really happening out there and how are executives and leaders dealing with it. The second area for us right now is sort of culture in the workforce. We’ve done a series kind of on toxic culture with (author) John Saul and he’s done some tremendous research.

He mines glass door data. And then runs it through an AI to pull out themes and really, really good stuff. And so we’ve built a body of content around that. So AI, culture in the workforce, and our third area that we’re really focused on right now is sustainable business. And that’s not just about sustainability in the sort of climate sense. It’s really about supply chain resilience and cybersecurity, all of the things that make a business sustainable with, of course, core sustainability (being) very, very important.

Alan: Do you use (web) data analytics to inform your (article) selection process or how the themes evolve or what your readership is really looking for?

Abbie: Well, (we use) data analytics in terms of what’s happening on our website and social media. We look at those numbers all the time. And we’ve started producing a lot of video now, so we hired a multimedia editor this year. And we’ve got the YouTube metrics, the WordPress metrics, or Google Analytics, and our social media metrics. We look at those all the time. And when I said AI is the hottest topic, followed by culture in the workforce, that’s where we’re getting that information from.

Alan: So, gut instinct is important, but the facts are the facts, and you’d rather let them help to lead you to places where your readers need and want to go?

Abbie: Yeah, and I will say that the sustainability topic is one that is less rising to the surface from a reader demand perspective, but we’re going to do it anyway, because it’s important.

Drawing in Younger Readers

Alan: Let’s talk a little bit about the evolution of publishing. As I said earlier, things are shifting more to digital. I mean, print is still important. Those of us old ink-stained wretches really still love to crawl up and read a good book or a magazine. But I think reader habits are changing. I mean, at least what I see in the younger crowd. They just consume most of their content online. And they prefer shorter articles to longer articles, and they prefer to be stimulated with the data viz or concept viz.

These are expensive things to do. You said you just hired a multimedia editor, so you’ve obviously got that religion, but how are you guys managing that transition without blowing out your budget?

Abbie: Yeah, that’s  the key question, isn’t it? When I joined, one of my first priorities was to say, look, people want to consume content in different media. There’s not one or another. It’s not all video. It’s not all audio. It’s not all print. And we need to provide our audience with our content in whatever format they want to consume it in. So, it is an investment to be doing video for sure. We hope we can support that through sponsorship or advertising revenue. That’s something that we’re still early in this.

It’s only been about six months. So we’re defining what our types of videos are and looking, is this a series that somebody would want to sponsor? We’re in that process right now. We’re going to be rolling out audio versions of our articles because we know from reader feedback that some people want to listen to it in their car while they’re jogging. We do have a really, really successful podcast, “Me, Myself, and AI”, that’s been going on for a number of years now.

Alan: But these would be editorially driven. They would not be advertorials, correct?

Abbie: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And in fact, we’re, we’re closing out our custom publishing business right now.

Alan: Really?

Abbie: Don Sella is our new faculty advisor, and professor of the practice and strategy at Sloan. One of the things that he’s really encouraged us to do is to really focus on our target audience, who are our super fans, and what can we do more for them. So we’re making a little bit of a shift right now to producing different kinds of content that will extend the really terrific high-value content that we’re producing (and) how we can extend it further and make it even more actionable and practical.

SMR’s Policies on AI

Alan: That’s great. We’ve talked a lot about AI. I noticed that you recently added some guidelines around articles written with the assistance of generative AI and that you adapted them from the Committee on Publication Ethics. I looked and they are quite specific. In sum, they really require authors to disclose which generative AI tool they used and how they used it. How’s that going so far? Have you gotten any pushback? Have you seen any (authors)  try to circumvent the rules?

Abbie: What we really want is we want to know if somebody’s used Gen AI and how they’ve used it. I don’t really care about the tool. What we say in our guidelines is you can’t have AI as a co-author. You are the author, you are accountable for whatever’s in here. And so, you know, check your stuff. If you’re using AI, make sure that it’s solid. We did just add some new fields to our submissions form, which asked specifically, did you use AI in putting together this piece? And if so, in what ways did you use it? Was it brainstorming, headlines, was it helping with research, whatever.

Alan: Have you had any cases where people have tried to use AI and not disclosed it? I mean, there are tools out there, academic tools that are out there that can actually detect whether or not somebody has used generative AI to write a piece of content. And sometimes it’s just the sniff test. I’m sure you have come across content before and you say, this doesn’t sound like a human being. It sounds like a bot.

Abbie: Yeah, somebody told me recently … if a piece starts out “In a world where …” I don’t know if it’s AI generated, but that is something that AI tends to lead with.

… and we’ve heard mixed results on (generative AI detection) tools. In fact, I think some of those checker tools have been pulled from the market because they weren’t very reliable. It is between the editor and the author to work through the source of their research, how they came up with their ideas and how they’ve developed their thinking around a particular topic.

AI as a Productivity Tool

Alan: So how do you see the role of generative AI evolving over time? I see it as a productivity multiplier. It can help to assemble some core facts, test your hypothesis, offer some advice on keeping your writing succinct and tight, crisp, hopefully clear and coherent. But I think you made this point as well. Sometimes they generate fabrications and hallucinations. You can’t outsource good thinking, at least is my view on all of this. But these tools can be helpful to some degree. What’s your take?

Abbie: I just used (generative AI) yesterday. I’ve been playing around with different tools, but I hadn’t realized that with Anthropic’s (Claude) you can actually put a much larger volume of text into it. And I used it to synthesize (notes). We’ve been conducting calls with our editorial advisory board about new products that we want to roll out. And so I had 6,000-7,000 words of notes from people, and I ran it through Claude, and it did a beautiful job of pulling things out. I asked it a couple of different ways. I said, you know, what specific new revenue-generating ideas came out of this, or what were the things that were cited most frequently, and did a really nice job.

I did then go through all the notes myself to see if it missed anything, and it really actually hadn’t. It was amazing.

Alan Alper: Well, I mean, baseline, these tools are pretty good. They’re only bound to get better, right? But I just think we all have to be very careful in how we use them and not abuse them. Use them responsibly. Use them to the benefit of your audience. You’re giving them clearer, more coherent copy. And ultimately, you’re fact-checking. Humans need to be in the loop. There is no doubt about that.

Abbie: Yeah, and I can see some of our authors, especially those who are not native English speakers, who might look to an AI for help in sort of how they’re phrasing things.

Alan: That’s a great idea, yeah.

AI and the Ownership of Thought Leadership Insights

Alan: How do you see thought leadership publishing evolving over time, topically, presentation-wise? Is there anything that you see looking out over the horizon and you want to get there to keep your readership in the know and as well served as can be?

Abbie: I think AI is creating a lot of challenges on this front because if you can go out and query for what are the best five tips for doing better one-on-ones, you can get all that information’s out there somewhere. We have such a great deep body of management knowledge that we’ve developed over the decades. How can we use the tool to help our audience get what they want in terms of our content, because they know our content is trusted and valid and validated? We’re thinking about how to help our audience to mine our content better, versus going out to the big wide world.

Alan: Are you concerned at all that your content is used to train some of these large language models and sometimes what gets lost in translation is the original source of the idea or the supporting context and facts and figures?

Abbie: Yeah, I mean, we actually had a licensing opportunity to license our content to train another company’s LLM. That space is definitely evolving.

It’s hard to create that body of knowledge that is validated and is reliable and is high quality. I do worry a lot about our authors losing connection to their ideas. Those are their ideas. And I hope that the way things evolve in the future is that there will be attribution when LLMs pull up answers and ideas.

How To Get Published

Alan: Last question, any advice for budding thought leaders or ghost writers, editors, graphic artists, or anybody who wants to get on the thought leadership publishing fast track?

Abbie: Number one, obviously, is know your publication that you’re pitching to. Spend some time reading it. Think about how they position things. Think about what kinds of content they’re producing. I mean, I think that’s really sort of number one. I get pitches all the time that are like, I know, why do you think that might be an idea for us?

Alan: I can remember being an editor and getting pitched and just pulling my hair out. So why are they even thinking that I would be interested in this? And then years later, I would run into people from the PR community who would say, oh, I remember you. I used to pitch you all the time. I used to always have to ask them, “was I nice to you?”  I’m afraid of what I would say sometimes, because it was so crazy that they would think I have any interest in the idea.

Abbie: I actually went back to a PR person last week and said, “why do you think this is a good idea for us?” And they actually came back with five rationales that actually (made sense). You know, they at least are trying.

Alan: I think that’s often the exception rather than the rule, unfortunately. Well, why don’t we leave it there?

Thank you so much for joining us today. This has been a wonderful conversation, and I look forward to continuing it with you.

Abbie: Thanks, Alan, for having me.

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