Cindy Anderson of IBM and Lucia Rahilly of McKinsey are advisers to a new organization to advance the thought leadership profession and create a community for its practitioners.
The term “thought leadership” has been around for decades, but today people have different perceptions of what it means and how it fits within their organizations. And like project managers in the 1960s, thought leadership professionals don’t have an organization to establish best practices for their work or provide a way for them to network and learn from one another.
That is about to change, with the new Global Thought Leadership Institute, established in June 2024 by the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC). The GTLI aims to develop standards for the profession, help practitioners quantify thought leadership’s impact for their organizations’ leadership, and give those professionals a place to meet one another and share what has worked.
In this interview with Bob Buday, two of the GTLI’s advisers, Cindy Anderson of the IBM Institute for Business Value and Lucia Rahilly of McKinsey, talk about the goals of the new organization and how they hope it will elevate the profession and its growing number of practitioners, both from the usual places — management and tech consulting firms — and from unexpected corners of the business world.
Transcript: Bob Buday with Cindy Anderson and Lucia Rahilly
Bob Buday: Great to have you both on our “Everything Thought Leadership” video podcast. We are going to talk about the Global Thought Leadership Institute out of the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC), which you’ve been involved in since the very beginning. Tell us about the genesis of this organization: Who was involved, and how did it happen?
Cindy Anderson: My colleague Anthony Marshall and I work in the IBM Institute for Business Value. We had done some research on thought leadership, and we kind of turned that research lens on our own practice. We realized many organizations don’t realize the immense value in thought leadership. The ROI is extremely high. Thought leadership serves as the foundation for any really effective marketing program.
We also realized that many don’t understand what thought leadership is. There’s no standardized definition, there’s no practice standards, there are no certifications. We saw an opportunity to look at how we could bring all of those things together and help advance the practice of thought leadership, standardize the practice and justify the production of thought leadership in a way that was meaningful, both to those of us who produce it as well as to the organizations that consume it.
So we approached APQC, with whom IBM has had a relationship for many years, and their board was supportive. We worked through the details and launched the GTLI in June [2024] with a real powerhouse board of advisers. One of those members is Lucia from McKinsey. And we have others — from EY, from KPMG, from Accenture, and a representative from academia. We’re in the process of building.
Bob: Excellent. Lucia, what did you see in this?
Lucia Rahilly: I approach this from a slightly more personal angle. When Cindy and Anthony approached me about joining the GTLI board, I thought a lot about that topic that I know is a pet peeve of yours, Bob, and that you’ve helped us all to address, which is that there is so much mediocre content in the world. We expect to see even more of that as AI becomes more integrated into the development of content at enormous scale.
It feels like the world has become a cacophony of content. It’s deafeningly noisy. And as Cindy said: In terms of determining what is quality thought leadership, what does that look like? What are the standards? What are the benefits of investing in pushing thought leadership to a minimum bar of quality so that it will really deliver on the attention that our audiences invest? If we could help folks make better research-driven content, very simply we’d be doing ourselves and everyone else a service, in my view. So that was a big point for me in joining the board.
Bob: It also seems like this is a profession that’s just starting to become a profession, like project management was in the 1960s. And it’s become a very big profession, as shown by the Project Management Institute, which Cindy knows well.
Cindy: That’s right, Bob. I was there for almost 13 years, and was the chief marketing officer for the last seven. It is the model that we’re trying to follow. You know what was done to professionalize the practice of project management. We think it has a lot of application to thought leadership — the niche that you know, and which serves as part of the whole marketing mix.
Bob: What are the keys to the resounding success of the Project Management Institute that you think are going to be keys to GTLI’s success?
Cindy: I think community is really important and getting like-minded people — practitioners – together. These are people who do what we do, and who love to do what we do, and who are really looking forward to making the practice better.
I think that’s probably the number one key: to get that corpus of people who are really passionate about making it happen. When I was at PMI, I had the opportunity to spend quite a lot of time with the founder. He said he never expected it to turn into anything. He thought maybe there’d be 1,000 people, and they might have a conference or two, and that they might professionalize some of the scheduling aspects they had.
Today, there are 4 million certified project management professionals. It’s just huge. I don’t know what the scale of thought leadership will be. But I do know that as a CMO, with the proof that thought leadership is as valuable as it is, every CMO should be interested in having folks who produce quality thought leadership, to Lucia’s point, on their team. It’s an important foundation at the top end of the marketing funnel.
As Lucia pointed out, there’s a scarcity of compelling thought leadership content. GTLI is there to to raise the bar of quality.
Lucia: To Cindy’s point about professional community: Bob, you’ve been in this business for decades, and McKinsey has had a long tradition of thought leadership. We’re celebrating the 60th birthday of the McKinsey Quarterly. With 20 years at McKinsey, I had a generation of editors ahead of me who had done this work for a long time before I came onto this scene.
But not everyone has this benefit. As you said, it’s a relatively new profession in most contexts. The value of it is still being realized and recognized in many contexts. It’s difficult to do without folks who have done it for a long time. I learned so much from people whom you and I both know, these editors who did this for so many years in a difficult context, when there wasn’t a broad framework for what good thought leadership looks like and what it can achieve for business.
Today other folks might be trying to start up a thought leadership shop within a smaller organization, or are within a larger organization that’s heavily matrixed and trying to determine how to pull thought leadership in from all different regions and practices and centralize it and take the best it. There’s tremendous meaning to think that these folks might be able, through GTLI, to have this opportunity that I just stumbled into by accident of serendipity. With the benefits of mentors in place, it’s a tremendous value to have this community of folks to talk shop with.
Bob: I agree. When Jason Mlicki and I launched a conference for thought leadership in 2016, I said, “I don’t know how many people are going to show up.” We do know this is a lonely hearts club, but we don’t know how big it is. Something like 20 to 25 showed up, and then it grew. It was the beginning of trying to get these people together at a conference.
A Big Tent for Large and Small Organizations
Bob: Tell me about the target audience for GTLI.
Cindy: The GTLI is really starting. As we’ve been saying, Bob, it’s a way to get individuals together to advance the practice, to build standards for the practice, and then provide certifications and all that. But eventually the target will be heads of thought leadership, heads of marketing, and CMOs who have thought leadership practices or who really want to advance their thought leadership practice. We believe that eventually, organizations with thought leadership practices will also have an interest in having certified practitioners on their staff, to ensure that the level of thought leadership that’s produced in the organization meets a certain set of quality standards. It shortcuts the learning curve process that Lucia just mentioned.
Bob: In part, this is about creating more supply of people who can do this work — not just the content development people, writers, editors, ghost writers, idea developers, researchers, but also the marketing and other people, right?
Cindy: It’s certainly better trained folks who do this to a set of standards. To answer the second part of your question, it’s a very broad look at thought leadership production.
Lucia and I come from large organizations that have been doing this for a while. But there are many small organizations that are just getting started. We’re seeing a lot of interest in thought leadership in the legal profession, for example. We’re seeing a number of construction companies that are interested in building thought leadership practices. So there will be something for everyone.
In the GTLI, there will be opportunities to participate in building standards, certifications, and communities. That’s the fun part about starting an organization. It’s completely wide open. Whatever people need, whatever people want to get involved in, the opportunity is there.
Lucia: Building on what Cindy said, we’re all coming from different starting points in available resources. McKinsey has a data visualization team, a visual storytelling team, a team of editors and audience development team and so forth. It’s a long-standing publishing group.
Some of these I know because my husband directs thought leadership at a law firm. He has to be much more entrepreneurial about how to access resources, how to lean in on data viz, how to use AI as AI is becoming table stakes. He often needs to use AI just to get as much as he needs to get done during the day, let alone to experiment and push the boundaries, and to try to use AI to identify new white spaces or to test your ideas.
These are some of the basics within the thought leadership infrastructure. These smaller shops need to figure out how to get that done. We’re all approaching this with different levels of investment, different resources available, different stages of maturity in the process.
But I think we all are aspiring for a certain standard. We don’t want the attention of executives who read thought leadership to be diluted because the content isn’t delivering. That’s the quickest way to undermine the credibility of your program and dilute things across the board. If folks start associating thought leadership with marketing pitches and so forth, it will diminish the appetite of our core audiences to read this research-driven content.
Bob: Our content has to be good because our audience has finite attention, and they’re very sophisticated. You can’t fool them with BS.
A Confederacy of Competitors
Bob: If GTLI is hugely successful, you’re going to have competitors in the same room: McKinsey competitors, law firm competitors, IT tech services company competitors, software company competitors, architecture firm competitors. Have you thought about that? How do you get competitors to reveal best practices?
Lucia: Charm. [laughs] To me, competition is good. The ideal situation is that the level rises across the board, and we all have to produce more and more differentiated thought leadership. That’s the ideal outcome of this — whether or not these best practices are shared.
We can’t expect our counterparts in other organizations to share the specifics of their research pipeline, or what they’re actually going to say. But we’re all being disrupted. This would not be 2024 if we didn’t have AI, where every conversation anchors on how it’s disrupting the X, Y or Z industry. The same is true in our industry. So we’re all figuring these problems out, and I think at that kind of level of methodology, problem-solving challenges and opportunities, it’s pretty easy to get people to talk about what they’re encountering and the ways that they’re approaching their job.
Cindy: I agree, Lucia. I would add that even if you think about the research we’ve all been doing relative to business challenges and solutions and actions, all we’re seeing is the advent of being much more open and creating ecosystems that would have never been created in the past.
I think AI is pushing organizations that were previously completely competitive to cooperate in ways that they probably didn’t even imagine 2-3-4 years ago. Look at the GTLI board. There’s Accenture and IBM and McKinsey. We all do the same things in essentially similar space. And yet we’ve all agreed to come together for the benefit of the people who do what we do and love what we do to make it better. So I think leading by example would be the first aspect of the charm offensive.
Lucia: Bob, GTLI has a monthly webinar series. We’ve interviewed folks from these different organizations, and I’ve moderated a bunch of these. It’s so easy to make the conversation rich and interesting and valuable and novel without getting into the details of state secrets like, “What’s in your research pipeline? What are you coming up with?” I’m not going to write down that your big report on “X” is going to come January 22 so I’m going to get mine out January 20.
Nobody’s approaching it that way. It’s been pretty easy and rewarding to get folks to open up and talk about what’s going on inside their organizations in the way they navigate the challenges and opportunities of the current thought leadership industry.
Bob: I don’t see this as a big issue, but some companies might. Whoever has to sign off on membership might say, “Wait a second. Who else is there? Don’t we compete against them? Well, why do we want to reveal our secrets to them? We’re pretty good at thought leadership. Why would we help somebody else?” I could see some decision makers arriving at that conclusion, which to me should not be a reason to decline membership.
Cindy: I’ll tell you, Bob, we didn’t see a lot of that at PMI. Maybe an initial sort of, “I wonder about that.” But I think associations, by their very nature, are designed to be very collaborative and not competitive. So our hope is, of course, that we’ll get past that conversation quickly.
An Engaged Community
Bob: Very good. What do you hope to be the size of the group, the number of members, say, by end of 2025 and ’26?
Cindy: Going back to what I said about the founder of PMI, who thought success would be 1,000 project managers after 10 years or so, it sounds pretty good. Lucia, I think we have about 450 people signing up for these webinars on a pretty regular basis? There’s a lot of interest, even without a lot of promotion so far, because this just launched in June. There’s been a lot of word of mouth and people who have heard the webinar. I’ve seen something on LinkedIn. I think once we activate on all cylinders, we could grow pretty fast.
What’s most important is that the community is relatively engaged, and that we can learn from each other and that we can offer each other best practices and counsel about how to approach specific kinds of challenges. We can share what has worked for us in our individual context, and how that might translate into a slightly different context. To me, part of it is the size element. Engagement is always going to be a percentage of the total size, so bigger organizations will have a greater number of engaged people. It’s really the engagement that makes it worthwhile.
Bob: Do you see membership as being both by individual, like a professional society like PMI, or by organization, like a traditional trade association?
Cindy: The board and a series of committees of the board will work on this over the next several months: to suss out what the membership model looks like. I anticipate there might be membership at the individual and the enterprise level. We’ll see what the community thinks as we start engaging them and get feedback to determine what’s going to be of most value to the community. Then we’ll build the membership model that way.
Next Month’s Conference
Bob: Let’s talk about the February conference. It looks like a good lineup of people. What are your expectations for that conference? Or is it too early to tell?
Cindy: We expect absolutely fabulous, stellar things from the conference. The symposium is shaping up with a really fantastic lineup, including a conversation with a number of executives at organizations who will talk about the value of thought leadership as consumers of it. That, I think, is an interesting perspective that producers of thought leadership content don’t often think about. What is the value that the consumers — the people we’re writing for and producing for — get out of the thought leadership? To hear from them directly is going to be interesting and unique for the attendees.
We’ll be talking about where we go with the definition of thought leadership, with the standardization of the work that we do. We’ll have a few focus groups on what those standards might look like.
There will be presentations on AI, and on the research that Anthony and I did on the ROI of thought leadership. We’ll offer a lot of variety both for large organizations like McKinsey and IBM and others that have been doing this for a long time, and for those smaller organizations that are really looking to to build their practice and their program,
Lucia: Our agenda really offers something for all of us, because it’s pulling through the value chain. Forgive the corporate jargon, but it’s end to end, right through that value chain for thought leadership. We’re going to talk about “why.” What’s the why of thought leadership? What’s the value proposition? Why is it a vital investment. As Cindy said, how do you maximize ROI on the content you develop? How do you sell it to leadership? How do you get that leadership perspective?
Cindy mentioned the leadership panel. What is the leadership perspective on thought leadership? What is the front-line perspective on what’s most valuable as you’re bringing thought leadership to market and the kind of resonance and engagement that it activates?
We’re also going to talk about the “what” of thought leadership. How do you develop quality, research-driven content at a juncture when scale is pivotal for many organizations? Everybody’s focusing, rightly or wrongly, on scale. In many cases, such as McKinsey, we’re actually having to pull back and take a fewer, bigger, better approach. So how do you juggle what might appear to be competing demands for quality on the one hand and for agility and scale on the other?
Then we’re going to talk about the “how.” This includes AI — the hot, Taylor Swift of topics. How is AI transforming the way that thought leadership is conceived, the way it’s developed, the way it’s disseminated, and so forth? So we’re really going to pull straight through and address these fundamental topics that are relevant for stakeholders in all different contexts for developing thought leadership.
Bob: Do you expect to see somewhat uneven GTLI membership and representation at the event at first – maybe over-representation from management consulting and tech services firms, and under-representation by other sectors? And would you like to see that change over time?
Cindy: That’s an interesting question. If I look at the registrations for the webinar series that Lucia has been hosting over the last several months, many are not from management consulting and tech services firms. They’re smaller organizations. They’re thought leadership consulting folks. They’re people who are hungry for the kind of community that we’ve been talking about.
So I don’t think we will see an over-representation. I think it’s going to be a little bit more broadly representative of people who do thought leadership across types of organizations and functions.
Lucia: I agree. I think part of that question speaks to the maturity [of the profession]. Consulting firms primarily traffic in ideas. They tend to be far more advanced in maturity on the thought leadership journey.
Banks, law firms are part of professional services, but because they’re selling very practical services they are less focused on ideas. It’s less their currency than it is for a management consultancy. The consulting industry was an early adopter of thought leadership. We know a lot of folks in those businesses who have spread out to other professional services organizations: the amazing Jeff Pundyk at Deloitte and Josselyn Simpson at Heidrick. The need for thought leadership has just spread out over all these different sectors. Banks, construction firms, private equity…everybody’s doing it now.
I would expect our stakeholders will need different things. The professional services folks may be far more advanced along their journey, and they want to find out what McKinsey is doing, what BCG is doing, what Accenture is doing, what IBM is doing, and so forth. Others want to get something rolling and really understand the best practices. What resourcing do I need to set up best practices? How do I sell thought leadership to my company’s leadership? Because it’s a cost center, how do you get leadership to see the value of developing this material and getting it into the marketplace?
I’m not sure we will have an over-representation from professional services, except that everyone we know will ask to go. I do think it will sprawl out over different sectors.
Thought Leadership Where You’d Least Expect It
Bob: So if certain folks showed up that are not on anybody’s radar screen in terms of thought leadership, which ones would they be to make you realize “we’ve arrived”?
Lucia: I’ve been to a large industry conference the past couple of years, and I’ve had many conversations with energetic, lovely, intelligent, curious people who are trying to make thought leadership work for their organizations. And I’ll ask, so where do you actually work? And they’ll say, “Bob Buday’s Flower Shop in Erie, Pa.” I’m just absolutely flabbergasted because it speaks so powerfully to the evolution of thought leadership in the marketplace when folks from these small business to consumer organizations are engaging in this work.
Bob, what organizations do you have in mind that show thought leadership has arrived?
Bob: I have four. And these are not tiny companies. These are not Bob’s Flower Shop in Erie, Pa., although I lived in Pennsylvania for many years, but not near Erie.
The four are Walmart, which recently advertised for a head of thought leadership for their e-commerce, advertising business. Andreessen Horowitz, the big venture capital firm, does a lot of thought leadership stuff. Spotify had a head of thought leadership. I think she recently went to Netflix in the last year or so. And the fourth is Amazon Web Services.
They’re looking for thought leadership people, so if you can get those four companies at your event, we will all know that thought leadership has fully arrived. And why those four? Because they’re not consulting and not tech services, and they’re household brands. They’re companies that you wouldn’t figure to have thought leadership professionals. But once you begin to understand their challenges in communicating to other businesses why they should do business with them, and why they need to be seen as leading experts in their domains, then it begins to make sense.
I want to thank you too for getting on our show, and I look forward to seeing you both in February in Houston!