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Invention, Not Convention: Thought Leadership Research That Spawns Big Ideas

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?” — Albert Einstein “Basic research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.” — Wernher von Braun Primary research is at the center of novel and substantiated ideas that get managers to act differently. With …

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What Is and Isn’t Changing About Thought Leadership

What makes for a persuasive argument will never change. But online technology has changed how to build, communicate and engage an audience in an argument. Last month, I resisted the temptation to write the traditional year-end column that looks back on the year and predicts what’s ahead in the new one. On the topic of …

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Organizing Brilliance: Creating a Thought Leadership Content Machine (Part 1)

Creating a department of people who produce compelling content that demonstrates their firm’s expertise is no easy task, even for the biggest consulting firms, In just the last two years, we’ve been asked the same question by six very large B2B firms (two consulting, two IT services, one financial services and one software company): how …

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Thought Leadership Success Factor No. 4: A POV Champion

When you place your bets on fewer but deeper points of view, you will soon need someone who’s responsible for the end-to-end process of developing and selling a big idea. In my last post I said that developing fewer but more substantive points of view (sometimes even just one) is much more likely to make …

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Thought Leadership Success Factor No. 1: A Big Appetite for the Best Expertise

Successful thought leadership marketing — a great book, Harvard Business Review article, seminar series or other marketing tool — paints a firm as a leading expert on a certain issue. In my last post, I cited five factors that determine how proficient a company will be at thought leadership marketing – whether it becomes the …

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Thought Leadership Success Factor No. 2: Patience

There are no short cuts to thought leadership. None. Anyone who tells you otherwise probably sold a get-rich-quick scheme in a previous career. In my last post, I laid out the first factor behind companies that excel at thought leadership marketing: a big appetite for differentiating their product/service offering on the basis of possessing truly …

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