ETL 52: Richard Murphy on What’s Next After Building ServiceNow’s Thought Leadership Group

Transcript: Richard Murphy and Bob Buday

Bob Buday: Richard, great to have you on our podcast. Since 2015, you’ve been head of editorial and thought leadership at two large B2B tech companies: first HPE and, more recently, ServiceNow. From my experience with tech companies and the people who have worked in them, including SAP going back to 1998, tech companies often view thought leadership as something of a foreign entity in the organization.

The thought leadership function often attracts a different breed of people than the product marketers and brand marketers whose jobs these companies understand well. So my first question is this: Do you agree with that? And if so, looking back on your years at HPE and ServiceNow, what were the three biggest challenges in getting leaders at both companies, particularly ServiceNow, to embrace thought leadership in the way you wanted them to?

Richard Murphy: First of all, Bob, thanks for having me on the podcast. I’m a fan, and I’m looking forward to this conversation.

Great question. I’ve been at this long enough to have seen a lot of changes in how tech companies approach thought leadership. When I joined HPE [Hewlett Packard Enterprise] back in 2015, I was hired as editor-in-chief on the global brand team. Back then, I may have been one of the first people with that title at a major tech company. The organization I joined was in total flux, which created a lot of interesting opportunities.

I joined the global brand team just after HP had spun out from HPE. It was essentially the data-center hardware and software half of Hewlett-Packard. So suddenly you had this new company with $50 billion in revenue and no brand except its legacy association with HP. We had to build everything: a website, a logo, a voice and a tone, and a story to tell the world.

That experience taught me a bunch of lessons. One big lesson is that thought leadership is a bit of a foreign entity [inside tech companies]. We can quibble about just how foreign it is. IBM is a tech company, and for my money IBM pioneered modern tech thought leadership back in the Great Depression when it launched Think magazine.

So there is a long history here: Tech companies wanting to establish themselves as expert authorities — not just on the products they sell, but on the business challenges those products help address, and on how those challenges affect business and society more broadly.

What I found in big tech companies—and I definitely found this at HPE and at ServiceNow—is that the context can be very different. HPE was a giant legacy company that was rebranding. ServiceNow was an extremely fast-growing, mid-sized tech company with rapidly accelerating revenue, lots of customers, and not much brand awareness. That is not unusual in Silicon Valley.

ServiceNow had grown mainly on the back of engineering, sales and product marketing. When I got there, the company was at a really interesting pivot point. What had gotten it to about $1.9 billion in revenue in 2017 was not going to get it to the next level.

ServiceNow had always had the vision of becoming the workflow platform for the modern enterprise—any workflow, any function, any company, any industry, anywhere. That was Fred Luddy’s original vision. But like a lot of SaaS companies, ServiceNow discovered early on that customers were not especially interested in buying an everything platform. They were interested in buying applications that ran on that platform. The application that took ServiceNow from zero to $1 billion was essentially a ticketing system for IT help desks—the category known as IT service management.

When I joined, ServiceNow was starting to make real strides toward the founder’s original vision. The company was building solutions — not just for the IT help desk, but for customer service, process management, HR service management, procurement, finance, and other functions across the enterprise. But in the market, it was still widely known as a ticketing system for the help desk, and that framing really constricted its growth potential. Analysts, customers, and the press were putting the company in a smaller box than it deserved.

There was also some interesting business math behind what was happening. When I joined, annual growth was north of 30 percent. Eight years later, it was still around 20 percent off a $13 billion [revenue] base. But that growth comes from a relatively limited number of the world’s biggest organizations. To keep growing at those rates, you cannot just sell into [the] IT [function].

You have to sell into all the other functions. And as you sell into those other functions, your buyers get more senior. As they get more senior, they become less interested in the speeds and feeds of the technology, and more interested in the business value and strategic impact of the technology.

So you move from selling to an IT director or senior director to selling into the C-suite, often with board participation. At that point, thought leadership becomes super important, because you have to frame your go-to-market in terms of business value and strategic impact, not just in terms of the merits of a particular technical solution.

Branding and Thought Leadership

Bob: Did somebody on the leadership team of ServiceNow come to you in 2017 and, in so many words, say, ‘We need a thought leadership group. Richard, can you start and run one?’

Richard: Yeah, pretty much. It was 2017. The then-CEO, John Donahoe, had run Bain & Company and eBay before ServiceNow. He had come to the conclusion — not so much that ‘We need Richard to do thought leadership’ — but that ‘We need a brand, and that brand needs to be supported by thought leadership.’ That’s how I came to ServiceNow.

One of the biggest challenges in joining giant companies like HPE, and even mid-sized companies like ServiceNow, is that there isn’t really a recognized box to put you in. I joined HPE as an individual contributor with a fancy title, no team, and no budget on the brand team. It was exactly the same story at ServiceNow, except that I started on the communications team.

ServiceNow grew much faster than HPE, so there was a lot more organizational change. I started on the Comms team, then moved to Marketing, and then I persuaded the company to stand up a centralized content center of excellence to house thought leadership, the corporate blog, and our content distribution channels. That lasted about 11 months, and then we all moved into the global brand team. There were other shifts too, but I won’t bore you with them.

What that tells you is, first, that growth companies are constantly morphing, and second, that thought leadership—although more established and more recognized than when I started doing this work—still doesn’t fit neatly into a typical marketing and communications structure inside most companies. We can talk about ideal structures for thought leadership, but for now I’d just say that those structures typically do not already exist inside most companies.

Bob: My experience is that thought leadership at tech companies doesn’t neatly fit under brand marketing or product marketing. It complements both, but it’s not exactly what either of those functions does.

Richard: Yes, and it’s obviously an easier sell [a thought leadership group] at a consulting firm like McKinsey, where what they’re selling is human expertise. Every McKinsey partner has an interest in being seen as a thought leader in his or her area. That’s less true in tech companies. It is why you get the attitude—fairly common, in my experience—that “Thought leadership is nice to have, but what we really need is lead generation.”

To make thought leadership work inside a [tech] company, I found you have to convince Marketing and Communications leadership that what you’re doing complements their core responsibility of creating leads for sales. Thought leadership provides air cover for that whole motion.

That means doing work that is not only useful and interesting in the abstract, but also tightly related to the area the company is trying to own. In HPE’s case, [it was] advanced computing and the future of the data center; in ServiceNow’s case, [it is] how AI is changing the enterprise. That became the core of what I tried to build.

Bob: I saw you quoted a couple of years ago in a Content Marketing Institute article about what you had done at ServiceNow up to that point. You said, ‘Everybody was willing to give me a chance, but I wouldn’t say my job security was super awesome in the first couple of years.’ What do you think led the leaders of ServiceNow—your boss and maybe that person’s boss—to give you what was apparently a fairly long rope?

Richard: Look, I wouldn’t say anybody’s job security is ever especially strong at a growth company, simply because things change so fast. You have to be nimble to stick around.

What proved the value of what I did to Marketing leadership was that they could see it contributing both to awareness and to lead generation, and we could measure that. One stat I was proud of at both HPE and ServiceNow was that visitors to our thought leadership sites—Enterprise.nxt at HPE and Workflow at ServiceNow—were five to eight times more likely to visit the corporate website, give up an email address, download a white paper, and become a sales lead.

Metrics like that got the attention of product marketing more broadly. The big awareness-focused research projects I did also became the core of big, company-wide integrated marketing efforts. One example was a research franchise I launched called the Enterprise AI Maturity Index. It was designed to track how organizations were progressing in adopting AI at scale.

Bob: When you look back at your career at ServiceNow, what do you see as your biggest successes—the things you’re taking forward with you into your new firm?

Richard: I got the company to see the strategic value of thought leadership, as we just discussed, as a tool that can elevate the entire go-to-market. It’s not just a nice-to-have or a bit of brand gilding. It’s an actual brand builder.

In terms of the work itself, I’m very proud of having launched Workflow by ServiceNow. It was an editorial publication. I came up with the idea in late 2017, we launched it in 2018, and I think it won more industry awards than any other enterprise-tech publication. It reached a large audience—into the millions—and served as a platform from which we could project the expertise of our executives and showcase our own research.

My background coming into this was as a social scientist and a business journalist, especially someone who edited business magazines. My first answer to almost any thought leadership challenge is to start a magazine. That’s not always the right answer. But in this case, it worked very well.

Bob: When you talk about thought leadership research inside a tech firm—and I suspect the principles also apply outside tech, to management consulting, architecture and engineering, and other industries—did you ever run into people who said, ‘Well, we already have a big R&D function. We have people in the product organization experimenting with new features and functions and working in the open-source community. So what is this thought leadership research, and how does it fit with software product research?’

Did you run into people who were confused about the distinction?

Richard: Yes and no. At ServiceNow, we built a robust thought leadership function within Communications and Marketing. At the same time, ServiceNow, like other big tech companies, had a pretty robust product and UX research capability.

Because ServiceNow has become an AI company, it has hired a lot of PhD researchers who are essentially in the business of building new AI models, testing them, and presenting their work in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. It’s a kind of para-academic function that the company invests in because it ultimately wants that work to inform the products.

I think we made some headway in integrating thought leadership with that deeper technical research. We featured a lot of researchers from the product research team on Workflow. We interviewed them, did bylines with them, shot videos with them, and so on. We could have done more of that. A company I’d point to as doing that sort of work really well is IBM.

Bob: Let’s talk about artificial intelligence, including generative AI and LLMs, but also other forms of AI. How you see those technologies changing the field of thought leadership, both for the better and possibly for the worse.

Richard: It’s a mixed picture, for sure. Let’s start with the bad news and then give people something to look forward to. The bad news is that there has always been a slop problem in corporate communications and marketing — especially in [the] technology [industry] — where everybody is more or less regurgitating conventional wisdom.

Bob: You’re saying the “slop” problem predates generative AI …

Richard: Absolutely. I would call it the original sin of marketing, especially in technology: Historically, everybody has tended to sound the same, look the same, and come across the same.

Here I’ll reveal my bias as a journalist. Marketers are generally trained to come up with creative executions for business strategies they are given. They are not necessarily trained to have the bird-dog curiosity required to sniff out a genuinely fresh story, advance it and explain how it differs from everybody else’s story. Journalists have to do that to succeed.

What that yields in enterprise tech—the field I know best—is a lot of generic messaging where everybody sounds like everybody else. Then along comes AI, which makes the problem much worse, because suddenly any marketer can fire up ChatGPT or Claude and generate a superficially intelligent, plausible blog post that doesn’t really advance the story at all. Those systems are basically scanning the internet and remixing it in response to what they think you want to hear.

Bob: In other words, the ideas may be well-written or well-edited, but they’re not original.

Richard: It’s slop, yeah. That problem has always been there, and AI makes it much worse.

The answer has always been the same: You [must] come up with an original perspective by having original data, first-party research, and executives or technologists who create genuinely differentiated products. That’s the raw material for differentiated product marketing and differentiated thought leadership.

As a business journalist, I would sum it up this way: You always have to advance the story with fresh data, fresh reporting or some other original input. If you have that fresh data, AI becomes your best friend, because it can greatly accelerate the process of moving from reporting, research, product roadmaps and industry debate to a messaging architecture, story ideas, research franchise and published insights.

As I put it in my new business, that is how you ultimately “claim the frame” – get the market to adopt your perspective on whatever the business challenge is.

Bob: So, you’re saying that AI can scale those proprietary insights. It can help scale them far faster than human journalists and other writers who are writing from scratch or editing material written by humans.

Richard: Exactly. I’d break the use of AI into two buckets. One is content creation. If you have your data, you’ve done interviews, and you have raw material that is unique to you, AI can help you create the blog post, white paper, or research product much faster.

AI can also increasingly do work on its own terms. The term for that is ‘agentic.’ That’s where the field is going. Where I see thought leadership, insight creation and publishing going is that more and more of what human researchers, editors, and journalists have done in the past can be automated.

You can turn an AI agent loose on your company’s product documentation, for example, or on everything your executives have ever said or written. It can scan and synthesize that material very quickly and bring back recommendations on how to turn it into content. Then the back-end publishing can also be automated.

Very few people are doing that successfully at scale right now. But that’s definitely the future.

Bob: Do you think that AI is changing, or will change, how companies conduct thought leadership research?

Richard: Yes. I’ll give you a couple of examples. One we already talked about: You can use AI to crawl both internal and external data sets at global scale and enormous speed.

That [ServiceNow] Workforce Skills Forecast I mentioned was based on AI algorithms built by our research partner, Pearson. Those algorithms crawled Bureau of Labor Statistics data, U.S. Census Bureau data, and similar labor-market data in a number of countries. Based on all that raw public economic data, the AI synthesized, for roughly 5,000 job roles, the 20 skills needed to do each job. It then projected, five years out, which of those skills AI would likely take over and which would remain with humans but be augmented by AI.

That kind of research is a place where AI can be super helpful. I’ll give another example. Last year, before I left ServiceNow, I worked on a research project about Gen Z attitudes toward AI. We convened a number of Gen Z workers in corporate and consulting environments and asked them about how AI was changing their jobs. Then we used AI to help analyze the qualitative input. That’s another place where it can make a real difference.

Bob: How many Gen Z people were surveyed or interviewed?

Richard: The survey sample was somewhere around 1,000, and the conversation sample was not huge—maybe around 100 or so. But it could easily have been in the hundreds of thousands. It’s a type of work that scales very easily.

Bob: What I’m hearing is that one of the things generative AI did was speed up something that would have taken humans much longer: going through those transcripts and identifying the major themes—for example, the concern among Gen Z that AI is going to ‘eat their brains’ or do their thinking for them. In other words, AI is doing something that would have been very difficult and time-consuming to do manually: combing through all those transcripts and figuring out the threads running through them.

Richard: Exactly. Back in the day, marketers used to convene focus groups to do that kind of thing, and it was expensive, laborious, and manual.

I’ll mention another aspect of my background. Before I got into tech, I trained as a social anthropologist. I was an ethnographer. To earn my PhD in anthropology, I spent two solid years living in Lahore, Pakistan, trying to understand how the local class system worked. I sat with hundreds of people, interviewed them, took notes, made recordings, and then had to transcribe all of it manually. It took a long time to turn that into a dissertation.

AI can do that kind of work much faster and at global scale.

Bob: Any other ways you think AI will change thought leadership research? It seems to me we’re still in the early innings with generative AI.

Richard: Yes. What we’ve talked about so far is AI-powered research methodologies—using AI to collect and process data in new ways. But even before you go out into the field and gather data, you need an idea. You need a hypothesis to test.

I’ve found that AI is becoming an increasingly valuable thought partner at that early ideation stage. That was true when I was framing research ideas at ServiceNow, and it’s very true now with my new consulting business, Walled City. I use AI all the time to pressure-test ideas I’m developing and pitching to clients, and to help frame my own value proposition as a business.

I’d put all of that in the bucket of AI for ideation. It’s definitely helped me move faster as a startup entrepreneur.

Bob: That’s a real benefit. When you’re independent—either solo or running a small firm—and your colleagues or partners are busy, you don’t always have a thought partner available at the exact moment you need one to do a reality-check on an idea.

Let’s talk about your new venture, Walled City. The way you describe the firm’s focus suggests to me that you see a bigger role for thought leadership than simply creating and marketing content. You talk about market definition and strategy, executive narrative, and positioning, which I love. Tell me about that broader positioning.

Richard: Walled City is in the business of helping growth companies define and, crucially, claim and own their category.

When I say “growth companies,” I usually mean technology companies, because that’s where the growth is: tech, biotech, software, hardware. It ranges from founder-led startups at a very early stage all the way up to established midsized tech companies. That’s where I’ve seen the early traction in my business.

What I’ve found, Bob, is that all companies have a strong interest in getting the market to adopt their view of the business challenge they are solving. That’s always been true in business. It’s especially true now, under the influence of AI. Thanks to AI everyone can sound superficially intelligent—and everyone can sound the same. It’s become much harder to win trust, credibility, and authority, because everybody sounds authoritative.

Authority talk is no longer scarce. Intelligence is not just cheap; at this point, it’s basically free.

So how does a fast-growing tech company—whether it’s a startup, a company raising capital, a company launching a new product, a company pivoting because the original business model didn’t quite work, or a company being acquired—get the market to think about it in the right way? Those are the moments when category definition, fueled by thought leadership, can really change how the market thinks about you.

A couple of practical examples from companies where I’ve worked help explain the logic. ServiceNow started out being viewed by the market as an IT ticketing system. Twenty years later, it is viewed as an AI platform for global business, and its [market capitalization] has grown enormously. HPE, when it was spun out from HP, was seen mainly as a data-center hardware and software business—a server vendor. We reframed it as a hybrid-cloud and advanced-computing platform company, which expanded the frame and increased its value.

Before I joined HPE, I did a lot of work with McKinsey’s social-sector practice. I helped them launch a magazine called Voices on Society. It aggregated the expertise of McKinsey consultants and outside authorities such as [former UK prime minister] Tony Blair and the head of the World Bank on big questions in international development. McKinsey was not especially well known for its work in the social sector at the time, so reframing that practice—not just as selling management consulting services, but as convening a global conversation about the future of development—changed the way the market looked at it.

All those experiences informed what I’m doing with Walled City. It’s not just about coming up with a new label for your category. Startups especially often think that once they label the category, the job is done and they just have to sell the product. But category framing really means competing successfully in a marketplace of ideas—getting analysts, journalists, competitors, and customers to start using your framework, your concepts, and your language.

Honestly, Bob, if there’s one insight behind all of this, it comes from my whole career in corporate America: You can tell when you’ve won the meeting when people around the table start using your language. The same is true of category definition for growth companies.

Bob: That’s what we found more than 35 years ago with the whole business reengineering concept and movement: We defined the terms, and the marketplace adopted them.

What are your growth objectives for Walled City? Do you want to keep it small—just you and some contractors, perhaps—or make it big, with partners or lots of employees, or something in between? And why, whatever your objective is?

Richard: I want to scale. Right now, it’s me, plus contractors, plus AI, all coming together to provide solutions for clients.

I think that model can scale significantly, but it scales within an agency framework, where you’re basically selling services. I also think Walled City has the potential to create its own tech category. I have a label for it, though as I said, but the label is only the beginning: “authority infrastructure.”

I think AI can take over a lot of what I currently do manually—mining a company’s internal corpus of documents, figuring out the messaging architecture, building content on top of that, distributing the content, and measuring the extent to which the market is adopting your frame. A lot of that can be automated and turned into technology sold by subscription, which is a very different and much more scalable model than selling services the way I do now.

So that’s broadly how I think about the growth strategy.

Bob: What kinds of companies would you most like to serve—generative AI companies, LLM companies, or other categories?

Richard: So far it has ranged from founder-led startups to established midsized tech companies—typically AI companies that want to play bigger. That’s where I’ve seen the early traction.

Look, it’s still early days. The business has only been around for a quarter [of a year]. But I’m proud to say I’ve already signed up a handful of clients, and I’m excited about helping them. They’re a mix of founders and midsized tech companies.

Bob: That’s terrific. Congratulations. In growing your company, when will you know whether it’s big enough? Or is there no point at which you would say, ‘We want to stop growing’?

Richard: I have no idea. All I know is that I love this work and I want to keep doing it as long as I can.

For me, scaling means taking the Walled City approach and applying it to lots of different business challenges at lots of different companies. That’s the challenge that excites me right now, in contrast to what I’ve been doing for the past 10 or 11 years, which was helping one company at a time.

I loved my work at ServiceNow and HPE, and I’m proud of what I did there. There is something special about being on the inside of a company and helping it grow. But now I’m doing that for myself, with my own company. I’m taking all the thinking and approaches I developed everywhere I’ve worked in my career and building a business model where I can apply that thinking to help lots of different companies.

The more I scale, the more companies I can serve. That’s where I see the broader impact happening.

Bob: Very exciting, Richard. Thanks for giving us a peek into your new venture, and I wish you the greatest success.