How do you present thought leadership content in interactive ways to stand out? Tom Fleming, global thought leadership director at PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers), has joined Bob Buday to discuss the key factors in publishing great thought leadership content and how the profession has changed over time.
PwC is the $53 billion global advisory and accounting firm recognized as a LinkedIn Top Company and an EcoVadis sustainability powerhouse. It is also the company behind the hit management journal “strategy+business.”
In this interview, Tom talks with Bob about his responsibilities and activities at PwC, key factors to publishing great thought leadership content, the biggest changes he has seen in his career and the changes yet to come, and his advice to new thought leadership professionals.
Transcript: PWC’s Tom Fleming and Bob Buday
Bob Buday: Tom, great to have you on our show because you’ve had a long and illustrious career in thought leadership. Let’s start with where you exist in this giant firm known as PwC.
Tom Fleming: That’s a great question. I’m not even sure I know the answer to that. The place is gigantic. I’ve been at PwC for a couple years now. And PwC is an extraordinary [organization], like all the Big Four [accounting/consulting firms]. It’s a territory-led place. All the different country offices are independent companies that are part of the big network.
The bigger territories, like the U.S. or the UK, have their own marketing units, content people, distribution people, web people. I’m in this thing called the GMO, which is the global marketing organization, which has been around a few years now, to try to bring the whole thing together to be a voice for lots of territories that don’t have resources. We put out content and do things that have a global feel, and from which lots of territories can benefit. We’re in that central office sort of role, which is an interesting and odd place to be sometimes.
Bob: You’re heavily involved in strategy + business, the publication. That was started, of course, from the old Booz & Company, which PwC acquired about 10 years ago.
Tom: Right. The core of the GMO — like the GMO editors — were folks who were here when I started. They came through the acquisition [of Booz] or they joined afterwards, and they kept the fire burning. And [the print edition] was around for about 25 years. We took it digital [only] about 18 months ago.
The Power of a Flagship Publication
Bob: Prior to PwC, you were at McKinsey and you were involved in McKinsey Quarterly. From those two experiences, how important do you think it is to have well-known flagship publications?
Tom: It doesn’t hurt. It’s a good thing to be known for something. We are no longer on the newsstand. That’s a change that we made a couple of years ago, [along with ending] the advertising model. It was just time to try something else.
We’ve gone all digital, and we can talk more about what we replaced it with. But there’s something nice in a big professional services organization, if you’ve got some brand value to this thing you’re doing internally. It helps because people recognize and respect what you do. You don’t have to as much describe what you’re doing from scratch in every single conversation, although you sometimes do. And it’s great to be around people who share a legacy of trying to do something thoughtful and in a regular fashion.
And then people do see it from the outside. There’s a value [because] it takes a long time to build these things up.
Bob: Do you get many more people who want to publish articles in strategy + business than articles you actually publish?
Tom: Yes. It’s great to be in a place where you have some decision rights over what you publish. You can help shape things and get things where you want. But absolutely, we have more people reaching out to us who want to get things on the site and in the digital edition than we usually have room for. Although with the web, you know, you can’t say (as you did with a print publication), “We just don’t have space.”
Tom’s Pre- and Early McKinsey Career
Bob: Let’s go back to your career before you joined McKinsey in 1995. What did you do?
Tom: In 1995, I was finishing up an MFA [masters of fine arts] in fiction writing. I was working as a process server and investigator in Tucson, Arizona. I’m from Arizona originally. I was far away from this kind of stuff [thought leadership] as you could imagine. After grad school, I moved to Chicago with my wife.
McKinsey was hiring. I didn’t even know who they were. I got yelled at by my father-in-law for not understanding how cool it was to have an interview with these guys. At the time, they wanted people to create client presentations. There was this really brief window – for me, a magical period of time when they didn’t want crack designers – when they wanted editorial people who could call BS on a bad chart or bad data. Or have a dialogue with the consultants but also blast out charts quickly and be flexible.
They did that for a little while. Then they realized they wanted really good designers, but by then I was already there.
That was how I started at McKinsey. I did that for five years. Suddenly, I got the attention of a new publisher [of McKinsey Quarterly], Stuart Flack, who had taken it over and was based in Chicago. They were looking for someone to edit their charts. They hadn’t anybody who did that before. So here I was, and I got the got the gig. That was how I started out.
Data Viz: The Early Stages
Bob: Would it be fair to say that you were in the field of data visualization before there was a field called “data visualization?”
Tom: Yes. We called it “infographics.” We didn’t know what to call it. It was data visualization. Some people were calling it that a little bit. But my first title was infographics editor because that’s the closest we could come up with.
Bob: It wasn’t digitally interactive graphics, or was it?
Tom: We did a couple of simple interactives, like a Spruce Goose flight. This was in 2001 or so. We’d do whatever the technology allowed us to do just because it was fun. We could see that there’d be a lot of opportunity there. But it was very limited.
Bob: How did you jump over to the wall, so to say, to edit articles?
Tom: Accidentally. It’s the way these things work. We were talking about format innovations, different things we might do. One of the things you’d always get these in professional services firms is these massive reports or PowerPoint presentations from a practice or a field office. In this case, it was the India office. They had this big study on India’s economic prospects. They said, “We should make a simple print document with a chart and a couple hundred words. While everyone was talking about what should that be, I just did it.
Then [the consultant] looked at and said, “Yeah, this is what I want.” Then he called me and said, “Do you like the work part of this?” I said, “Sure.” I went from there to working closer with him as a mentor. And the rest is history, I guess.
Bob: That enabled you to get to the heart of somebody’s thinking, and not just with some visuals, some chart or whatever, to help that person or a bunch of authors with some piece of their thinking, right?
Tom: Yes. Even when you’re making charts for consultants, you’re trying to break through with time-starved people and give them a message that’s clear and useful and as sophisticated as it needs to be. Then it has to be a story, if you can.
We’re human beings. We crave storytelling. So it was marrying those two things together. But that even sounds more highfalutin’ than it is. It’s just a killer chart and a couple of sensible paragraphs that explain it. That’s what the audience wanted at that time.
Bob: Now, when you joined McKinsey in 1995, McKinsey Quarterly had been around for 31 years. Had they done as much on the website with McKinsey Quarterly at that time?
Tom: They were just starting it. The whole website was on a server in a closet, a floor above me. It was an amazing time to be with this team. It was a really small team. We were kind of putting all the content on the site from the archives. Then we started the distribution mechanism, which was alert-based: “Tell us when you want to read about x.” That was a big innovation at the time because over time those lists grew to be massive.
Bob: I remember at that time that the only way to get the McKinsey Quarterly was to get the print version. And somebody from McKinsey had to say you could get it. When McKinsey Quarterly went online, it was open to anybody, of course.
When you look back at your 19 years at McKinsey, what were the biggest changes of moving from print to a print plus online?
Tom: We had a time when we sold the print issue and provided premium access to the online version. We did that for several years.
It’s funny because the two channels are so different and have different audiences. That was the era in which we started blasting out our material for free. The print version [of McKinsey Quarterly] had a lot of exclusivity; it was in very high demand. [The online edition] didn’t cannibalize it. It didn’t devalue print; if anything, it made it made it arguably more powerful for a little while. And getting the material out to people online, and having it be this sort of alert-based approach, broadened the audience hugely. Lots of people who have never heard of it suddenly had access to it, and we’re getting some benefit from it. There was a period in between all that where we actually had a paywall and premium content in there; we were selling the print issue as a perk.
At some point there was a strategic decision that it should be free. [We decided] we’ll get more power out of this if we if we if we make it freely available to everybody. There had been this big push to charge money for it and show people it’s got a real value to it. And all the while it’s still generating client conversations, which is really what it’s for. And then then the move online and making it free just felt like an extension of that to get it to more people.
Bob: So then you left McKinsey, and you went to Heidrick & Struggles for about three and a half years. Did they practice thought leadership in content much differently than McKinsey?
Tom: So I got tempted away. And the temptation was to try to build something. They weren’t doing thought leadership terribly, but it was kind of kind of hit or miss and they hadn’t really put a lot of investment into it. There was almost like a little startup inside of a company that was doing smart things, and that had a lot of good people and a lot of good but unpublished and unexplored content streams. The thrill was, “let’s see what we can do and build it up.” And that was really good fun, and it still is. A good friend of mine is still running it: Jocelyn Simpson, who took it over after I left and got tempted back to McKinsey again.
Thought Leadership at PwC
Bob: And they have a new CEO at Heidrick as you might know — Tom Monahan, who ran Corporate Executive Board for many years and helped make it into the billion-dollar organization that it became before Gartner bought it. Then he went back to McKinsey in 2018. You joined PwC in early 2022, as director of global thought leadership. So what did those responsibilities involve?
Tom: That’s a good question too. Because again, like, like most of these roles, these things change a lot. That’s not true in every professional services environment, I’ve been in three of them, and the roles change every few years. I followed a mentor over to PWC, where they have this sort of limited thematic portfolio. And we’re trying to do content at a really high level, and there’s some change elements going on as well, I think it’s fair to say.
Bob: At McKinsey, the Global Institute has its own editors, and then you have the editors working for the quarterly and those editors embedded in the various practices. Does PwC have a research Think Tank, like the Global Institute? Or is it more like ex-journalists talking to the PwC consultants?
Tom: One of the things that I thought was always really great about McKinsey was the incentives: you don’t get elected partner unless you’re contributing to the firm’s knowledge. So when you have that kind of mojo going on, it creates a foundation where things like think tanks can get spun up, and then stay. PwC, to my knowledge, doesn’t have that sort of incentive in place, so it’s a little more challenging. But that said, we do have a couple big groups out there. And because the place is so territory specific, there’s a global thought leadership accelerator that we work really closely with. It’s a very small group inside a PWC advisory that does some great research.
Lang Davison, who was also a colleague of mine at McKinsey, runs that. And we work closely with them, because they’ve got really good insights and we’ve got the editorial capacity, the distribution channels, and all that good stuff. We also have the Katzenbach Center, which is (a center for) organizational excellence, kind of a hub inside of PwC that does good work — also leftover from the Booz days. There is also a trust Institute, which is quite interesting. And we will dip into some of these. But there isn’t one group that is above the rest of them.
Bob: So let’s turn to strategy + business and the digital metamorphosis that it’s been undergoing for the last couple years. Tell us about that. Why was it done? And what were the big goals?
Tom: The move to digital was just a necessity. The model is not only just more economical and efficient, but we can extend our reach. We can bring the Strategy & Business brand closer to the PwC brand in a way that might make sense to readers externally — and internally too. This is important because we have these massive companies and when they make an acquisition it helps bring the brands closer together. And it lets us get out to market a little more quickly, and in formats that are just more engaging. It’s meant to be super approachable, super engaging, not terribly long, very clickable and data rich. You get a message and you get some good thinking out of it.
It also provides on-ramps to other stuff. It’s not entirely just a tease; you get a full story there. And it’s got digital elements — bells and whistles, videos, quizzes, and fun things. When you’re doing this work, it’s easy to kind of get in your own little world and think about the importance of your work. But our audience is not getting paid to read our stuff, so we try to find ways to make it fun. Why not? Plus, it’s more fun to work on. So that was really the big push to get the whole team together to re-imagine what we might do to make things more approachable or more bite sized, and really interactive.
Bob: And what’s been the impact since then, in terms of use or however you measure it?
Tom: In this environment, it’s hard for anything to get attention right now, no matter how good it is. Our numbers are good, everything’s growing, and we’ve got good reader engagement. And it’s helping contribute to client conversations, and starting client conversations is what this is all about. At the same time, internally, it’s probably helped to raise the profile of the work that we’re doing as a group. These issues are collections of content that bring together several pieces on a theme, and each tells a different story. It lets us give love to lots of content, not just one thing. And that that’s a powerful thing internally.
Exploring ‘Sludge’ in Depth
Tom: PwC’s annual CEO survey is probably the biggest CEO survey out there, and it comes out in January. And one of the findings was on “sludge” — organizational gunk that slows down everything we do. We had a bunch of data from CEOs on what they thought the state of play was, and we connected that to our colleagues’ thinking on how to address it. What are the upsides — because not all sludge is bad, right? It’s actually a good thing to have some friction when stupid decisions are about to get made. Basically, what you have is a digital snapshot of some findings; what people are seeing out there in terms of the problem itself.
You’ve got different kinds of clickable ways to get some simple prescriptions that you’ll get more of later, then an in-depth section, and there’s findings and charts and data. One of the really fun things came from one our data researchers, a brilliant guy in Australia. They did all this research with a couple of questions in the survey were specifically for CEOs, about how much of their time is inefficient on these different tasks. And then he and his team kind of figured out a way to convert that to money and time based on a whole bunch of assumptions, and from that you can then extrapolate and reverse engineer to make a quiz out of it. The result was this little “sludge tax calculator,” [based on questions like] “in the typical week, what time do you spend on work meetings that’s inefficient?”.
Depending on how you’re doing it, you could be creating a lot of sludge, and as it fills up is the poor executive is drowned. But then the opportunity cost part is the fun part that one of our editors came up with. That’s 250 yoga classes. It’s massive guitar lessons. 500 mindfulness sessions, and nearly 15,000 pages of good reading you could have done.
Bob: I love this. It makes it personal.
Tom: This stuff doesn’t have to be boring, right? It’s a fun way to give people an engaging way through content. But then there’s some thinking included, about how to deal with all this. We link to the Bob Sutton book where he talks about a whole mess of things around friction, including the good kind, and how you deal with that, and in his typically colorful way. And it brings together insights from PWC, along with external thinking to round it out.
Bob: What percent of your articles get this kind of treatment?
Tom: It’s a smaller group. We’re trying to be focused on certain core thematic areas, and we can’t just do anything that we want to do. The pieces that are behind something like that digital issue are premium things that you’re trying to really put a lot of effort against. But, might bring a little something in from somewhere else that wouldn’t warrant that kind of treatment normally, and give it a little bit of love, because it’s a compilation of sorts.
We’ve used other formats to dial up big traditional reports and make them more digitally friendly. We have a leadership agenda site that an editor colleague of mine runs that take snapshots of things, with a little bit of advice that tries to kind of make things digitally friendly. [We focus on] what does the firm want to be known for, and what do we think executives need to know?
Cultivating True Believers
Bob: Let’s take a step back and look at your career in thought leadership. What were the biggest challenges you’ve seen over time in those three companies – McKinsey, PwC, Heidrick — in consistently publishing high quality content?
Tom: This because it shouldn’t be hard, but it is. And I think I think part of the reason is because in these professional services environments, the tide goes in and out: you have new people coming in all the time. Those new people are brilliant, and they’re really motivated, and they don’t know what the hell you’re doing. You have to kind of start from scratch, and you’re having conversations with people who are incredibly busy, and you’ve only got a couple of minutes. You end up having to kind of reinforce things again and again. So the environment is constantly changing. And the quality stuff is hard. It takes more work and engagement from the authors; they’ve got to really roll up their sleeves.
We have this social contract with them: It’s will feel a little painful, but it’s going to be really worth it. Because someday you’re going to get a call from someone that you weren’t expecting, who invites you to speak at a conference, or who just wants to talk to you about the thing you did because they want to do the same thing at their company. Then you’ve got a convert for life, because the authors see that it works, and that the pain was worth it.
The people whom I was working with early on were all ex-journalists. There was this sanctity of the smart thinking and good ideas. But this little voice told us, don’t forget, we’re all marketers. All we’re trying to do is start client conversations. That’s the beginning and the end of this.
Bob: What I’ve told people is until you see it personally work, until you see thought leadership actually produce a conversation that you never expected would happen, you won’t understand how valuable it is.
Tom: You want to be able to scale it and convince somebody who’s never experienced it that it’s a smart thing to invest in. But when somebody sees it work personally, they are they’re a believer for life.
How Content Delivery Has Evolved
Bob: What are the most consequential changes you’ve seen in how content or leadership content is presented online? Is the new incarnation of Strategy+Business an example of one of the biggest changes you’ve seen? And where do you see this going in terms of content creation over the rest of this decade?
Tom: I’m actually surprised at how little things have changed. Behind all of these really smart presentations of digitally friendly, approachable material are lots of teams that want to write really long articles. Everything ends up being a 3000-word article if you’re lucky, and it can be much longer. So I’m kind of struck by how little change there’s been in some ways, or how the forces against content format innovation have always been there. Then again, there’s always these little pockets around the edges or some places that are doing really good work. And they just raise the bar for everybody. And so in terms of specific innovations, I focus on the content: Do you find it interesting? Do you want to click on it? Do you want to read further?
Bob: Where would you like to see it go over the rest of this decade?
Tom: I’m kind of a caveman about the purpose of this. In our organization, we focus on starting a conversation. I’m intrigued by the promise of all this personalization that that we always talk about, but I still have never seen work. If we could, that would be amazing. There are people who can really benefit from this stuff. And there can be topics that are incredibly narrow, which you’d never want to do in a broad way, but that could be super useful and worth the effort if you could figure out a way to get to people. And then there’s AI…that’s going to change everything.
A Mentor’s Advice
Bob: What’s your advice to people who are maybe just entering the thought leadership profession, or thinking about it? What would you do now, if you were getting started, given what you know about this profession?
Tom: I think it’s important to understand everything about AI and see how it’s going to develop. I think that’s there’s going to be a lot of changes in how we distribute content. But at heart, this stuff is still about storytelling. It’s trying to make something complicated into something that’s simpler and more easy to understand, and fun and engaging where you can. Business chops are also really important. You can learn to be a better writer, but you’re not going to learn to be a better thinker unless you really focus on it.
Years ago, my manager and mentor gave me some great advice. I wrote it down on a Post-it and I’ve still got it, and it’s got coffee stains and everything. The first thing is that your power is your integrity. I’ve learned over time that it’s easy to cave, to let something slide, but if you have that integrity to be able to back up and really push for quality work over time, it’s going to help you a lot. If all you do is cave and all you do is polish up whatever they tell you, you’re on a really bad path. Your life might be easier in some ways, but if it’s not a good career.
The second bit of advice was about how you prioritize your time: pick high impact things and help get wins. When you start doing this work, and people start to see that it helps and it works, you get a little bit of a fan base. Then people start asking you to do articles, and demand is suddenly there. It’s easy to kind of get spread too thin and do things that aren’t impactful. And so you have to figure out how to focus on things that are going to get wins, and meaningful wins that are going to be better for the author, the firm and your practice.
Bob: How how does a young person make that decision to focus on one team, rather than that team that’s been hitting me harder? How do you how do you figure out which horse to bet on again?
Tom: Try not to be the person who is deciding which horses win and lose. Try to find a way to spread that decision-making to a group that can help you make those calls together. Maybe that’s creating an editorial board within a practice. Don’t just wave your magic thought leadership wand, kind of saying what’s good and not, because you’re not going to make any friends that way. You’re going to alienate people.
You don’t make any friends calling the baby ugly. It’s a tricky balance, because you need that integrity to know what’s good and what’s not, and be able to steer it in the right direction. But you don’t want to look like you’re imperiously making these decisions, because you don’t always have all the information. There’s something you didn’t know, a way to make that piece way better when you’re engaging with a practice or bigger group.
You might see something that looks like a great idea…but there’s no evidence at all; it’s just a bunch of air. But someone else may have actually done some work in this area. And then suddenly, you bring that person in as a co-author, and now you have a smarter article. And now it’s actually going to work. [This process] drives some people crazy. And if you if you’ve got a temperament where you want to do it all yourself, you won’t want to do this work, at least in a professional services environment.
Bob: Let’s get back to the other things your mentor advised.
Tom: The third piece of advice is related to what we’ve just been just been talking about. In these environments, it’s always a good idea to syndicate things and get it seen by bigger groups. If you’re trying to get a group to make a content decision, it’s more effective if they have skin in the game. If they have to think about it, then suddenly they’re going to be more excited and supportive of the final product.
Bob: You seem to be saying that somebody who’s a team player is going to function much better in these roles than somebody who’s very talented but doesn’t plan well with others.
Tom: You’ve just described the failure mode of amazingly talented journalists who come into this kind of work and just burn out, like a comet across the sky. I’ve seen situations where these incredible people who are really smart and excellent writers and thinkers just can’t deal with it, because of the whole consensus-driven thing, and all these different groups that want to make decisions. All that sludge drives them crazy. You can take that lack of collaboration to an extreme, and even if you have every other skill that would make you brilliant at the job, you can’t work there.
Bob: Being a former journalist, I know it’s not a team sport in most cases.
Tom: Most of my mentors were these amazing grizzled business journalists who had great stories and great experience, but they all figured out a way to make it work in a in a professional services environment. And I remember talking to one of them, and he was just kind of marveling about how you work on a story, and when you’re done, you’re done. You submit it and you go have a drink. But here, you submit your story, you have a drink, and you look up and there it is again the next day, and it keeps coming back. One of the coolest things we did at Heidrick took over a year but ended up being awesome. Other things are not ready to come out of the oven.
Bob: Tom, thanks for a great interview.