Everyone wants the thought leadership, not the thinking

Everyone wants to be a thought leader. Few people want to do the uncomfortable part: actually having a thought.

Scroll through LinkedIn any day and you will find no shortage of them. Every executive has a perspective on AI. Every technology company has an opinion on digital transformation. Every founder and their PA is talking about innovation, disruption and the future of work.

Much of it is perfectly sensible, but it is also very interchangeable.

That is the problem with corporate thought leadership today. We have become very good at producing content about important subjects, but much less interested in saying something that might actually change how people think.

Thought leadership is not a vanity project. It is not simply having a senior executive's name at the top of an article. It is not a company announcement rewritten in paragraphs, and it certainly is not adding a few predictions to a press release.

A thought leader needs to take a position.

Start with an argument, not a topic

The easiest way to spot weak thought leadership is to look at the headline.

"Five trends shaping the future of AI."

"Why businesses need to embrace digital transformation."

"How technology is changing the workplace."

There is nothing wrong with these topics but the problem is that they are topics, not arguments.

A stronger piece starts with something that can be challenged.

"AI will not eliminate most jobs, but it may eliminate the way many companies currently organise work."

"The biggest obstacle to digital transformation is not technology. It is management's unwillingness to change how decisions are made."

"Companies do not have an AI adoption problem. They have an employee trust problem."

Now there is something to debate.

That is the difference between commentary and thought leadership. The former describes what is happening. The latter proposes what it means.

Stop trying to sound right

Corporate communications often rewards safety. There is a good reason for that. Companies have reputations to protect, executives have multiple stakeholders to consider, and few organisations want their CEO's latest LinkedIn post to become a crisis-management exercise.

But excessive caution produces a strange outcome: the more carefully an opinion is sanitised, the less likely anyone is to remember it.

A useful thought leadership piece should make a reader pause and think, "I'm not sure I agree."

That is not a failure but evidence that the piece has done its job.

The objective is not to be provocative for its own sake (and we know who the culprits are). A contrarian opinion without substance is simply noise. The point is to be specific enough that someone could reasonably disagree, while having enough evidence and experience to defend the position.

If everyone agrees with an article before they have read it, there may not be much of an argument there in the first place.

The best ideas usually come from somewhere

There is another reason corporate thought leadership has become repetitive: too much of it starts with a blank page.

A communications team asks an executive what they would like to write about. Someone suggests AI. Someone else suggests sustainability. So they feed the prompt into ChatGPT, add a few statistics, give it a few rounds of edits and produce a polished 900-word article.

The result may be accurate and even well written, but it rarely contains anything that could only have come from that particular executive or company.

The strongest ideas often begin elsewhere: a pattern observed across customers, an unexpected finding in company data, a recurring question from clients, a failed experiment or a change in behaviour that does not fit the conventional narrative.

Those experiences are valuable because they provide something generic internet research cannot: a reason for this person to have this opinion.

The entire C-Suite department is a treasure trove of knowledge, you just need to know where to find it.

Give the expert a voice, not a script

This is where communications teams have an important role (very shameless plug for us comms people).

Executives are often asked to become thought leaders without being given permission to sound like themselves.

Their ideas are put through SO MANY layers of review until an opinion becomes a statement, a statement becomes a corporate position and the corporate position becomes something that could have been written by almost anyone.

A good communications team should do the opposite.

It should help an expert identify the most interesting thing they actually believe, pressure-test it, find the evidence behind it and then give them the confidence to say it clearly. The expert should sound like an expert, not like a brand.

There is a simple test

Before publishing a thought leadership article, ask three questions.

1. What is the argument?

If the answer is simply "AI is important" or "businesses need to innovate", start again.

2. Why does this person have the right to say it?

If the answer is only their job title, there is probably not enough substance.

3. What would make someone disagree?

If the answer is "nothing", you may have written an explainer rather than an opinion.

There is one more question worth asking:

Could we replace the author's name with another executive in the same industry and publish it unchanged?

If the answer is yes, it is probably not thought leadership.

I think the irony is that genuine thought leadership may actually require less content, not more.

As technology makes it easier to produce polished articles, posts and commentary at scale, audiences have less reason to pay attention to content that simply repeats what everyone already knows.

What becomes valuable is the thing that cannot be mass-produced as easily: a considered opinion, grounded in experience and expressed with enough conviction to stand behind it.

Everyone wants to be a thought leader.

The better ambition is simpler.

Have a thought worth leading with.