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There’s a map for that: What is Thought Leadership? (Part 3)

Posted on by John R. Thompson, Ph.D.

What if you and your team were lost in the Alps. It’s cold, snowing and disorienting. You know that if you don’t do something to get these people moving forward, you’re going to die out here.

You rummage around in your backpack for something – anything – to spark action. You find a map. On closer inspection, you see that it’s a map of…the Pyrenees Mountains on the other side of Europe. 

What do you do?

Companies big and small – even entire industries, like retail – can feel a bit lost in the mountains today. Change comes from numerous directions at a dizzying pace. Uncertainty is high on a number of political and social fronts. Businesses would love a map, but might settle for an arrow scuffed into the snow.

Photo by Claire Nolan on Unsplash

Enter thought leadership. Giving someone an idea to chew on, to consider with their staffs, to test in their businesses moves people forward, helps them find some direction in a chaotic environment.

This is the third in a series of blogs on the nature of thought leadership. We’ve been musing on the basic question, “What is thought leadership?” This deep dive into the nature of the basic words derives from Geoffrey Moore’s notion in “Crossing the Chasm” that the “first step toward enlightenment is to get a firm grasp on the obvious.”

The “obvious” in this case is deciphering an ambiguous term that produces everything from tweets to blogs to keynote speeches. The first part focused on the word “thought,” and the second on the word “leadership.” Put together, we can see that thought leadership has something to do with the idea of analyzing complexity on behalf of an audience’s needs and aspirations. That’s a good start to settling some of the term’s ambiguity.

My goal in this post is to turn these observations into a working definition of thought leadership that can drive action. My own working definition borrows another concept from leadership studies: sensemaking. 

Start making sense, making sense (apologies to Talking Heads)

Organizational researcher Karl Weick gave us the concept of “sensemaking in organizations.”

Leaders help their followers make sense of confusing circumstances through coordinated explorations and an ongoing dialogue that creates a map of where you are and where you’re going. 

But, the map itself is not the point. Weick would flummox people telling them that even a wildly inaccurate map (such as using a chart of the Pyrenees to navigate while lost in the Alps) was useful to the organization. The map is a story-building tool, a catalyst for communication. To extend the analogy, having a map gives your explorers the confidence to go talk to people in the local village and learn more about the surroundings. You could pencil into the map any accumulated information to make it more accurate as you learned more. Once you have some progress and confidence builds, the team can start drawing on past experiences in similar circumstances to see if those lessons apply to the current situation.

In short, the leader’s job amid confusion isn’t to wave a magic wand and make it all right. The leader offers tools to help followers make sense of the situation. It’s not necessary that each of those tools is 100 percent accurate if the collective narrative drives people to constructive action – because standing still and dying in the Alps is not an option.

A complex world creates a lot of need for sensemaking and the idea can provide a mission for program and content development.

Thought leadership: the working definition

Thought leadership, then, is the process of providing others with tools they can use to make sense of a changing world and their own situations. That’s our working definition that we apply to our clients. We can fine tune this further to define thought leadership programs for a given client or individual pieces of content.

Thought leadership, then, is the process of providing others with tools they can use to make sense of a changing world and their own situations.

The key to developing the program – or any specific piece of content – is to avoid the arrogance that you have the complete answer. Convincing people you have the answer sounds a lot like “marketing” and that’s not what people are looking for when they take to the Internet or come to the plenary session for your keynote. They are looking for some tools they can use to make sense of the industry or their own situation. They want an argument they can make for more funding, or for taking a calculated risk. 

A program, then, aims to make sense of situations A, B and C for target audiences X and Y. A given piece of content provides Tool A to audience segment B to make sense of Situation C. Frequency matters because, remember, it’s ideally an ongoing dialogue. You need to target the issues in the audience’s lives that create needs. This could be figuring out a new technology or getting budget approved for a major project.

But, isn’t this marketing? Of course. The call to action is either an implied or explicit “contact us to talk about how we can help.” No one needs to apologize for that if your first goal is to give your explorer the confidence to go talk to people in that village over the hill – whether we call it an Alp or the Pyrenees.

Leading with ideas: What is thought leadership? (Part 2)

Posted on by John R. Thompson, Ph.D.

The phone rings. The panicked voice of a client asks how I am and – before I can answer – wonders if I have some time over the next couple days. You see, the number two person in the company will be on a stage in four days (it’s always four days; go figure). Maybe it’s an industry event or it might be an internal strategy session with all the global vice presidents in town. They started with the most recent field marketing deck (“there’s good stuff in there”) but the speech just isn’t coming together. Can I help?

This is the second blog in a series of musings on just what thought leadership is and how it can be practiced. At the moment, we’re dealing with the basic problem of ambiguity in the concept. That ambiguity causes problems like this one when you’re trying to execute. This scenario and others like it happen often so if you see yourself in it, you’re in good company. That field deck no doubt has some good stuff in it. But, the marketing director or chief of staff on the other end of the line knows that thought leadership requires a higher reach than just a competent rendition of the details.

To understand the nature of thought leadership and ways to execute, we’re breaking down the term. In the last post, I discussed the word “thought” and its complexity. That leads us to the word “leadership” and my contention in this post is that much of the ambiguity (the “know it when you see it” aspect) of thought leadership stems from this term.

Take me to your leader…if you know who that is

I teach a class in leadership at a nationally ranked liberal arts university, one of those places that makes the “schools that change lives” lists. One of the things we talk about early in the semester is the ambiguity of the term leadership and its “know it when you see it” nature.

“Leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on Earth,” according to James MacGregor Burns, one of the founding thinkers of modern leadership studies. Over the course of the 20thcentury, academic literature proffered more than 200 definitions of leadership, according to researchers Michael Hackman and Craig Johnson. 

Even people studying leadership can’t agree what it is.

But, one of the commonalities that has emerged as various theories of leadership have evolved over the decades is the importance of followers. In fact, our ideas of leadership have drifted out of assessing the DNA of the leader (what I call the hunt for the leadership gene) and become much more rooted in the relationship and interactions between leaders and followers. To oversimplify, you cannot lead unless someone is following. And as a practical matter, we’re actually talking about many people following. In the most contemporary versions of leadership theory, leaders activate and satisfy followers’ needs in various ways with various feedback mechanisms that discipline both parties.

So, where does that leave us when we contemplate thought leadership programs? And how can all this help that poor client on the phone?

Follow my lead here

If leadership is a less useful concept without followership, then the equivalent dynamic for thought leadership is getting wrapped up in our thoughts before considering the needs of the audience. The audience is central to content development because you are trying to activate and satisfy the needs of potential followers. And they don’t have a need to buy your product or listen to your strategy. Their needs lay elsewhere.

So, I tell the nervous client to send me the Powerpoint they have, but in the meantime let’s talk about who is out there in the audience. Depending on the situation, you might actually have a lot of information about them. If it’s an internal strategy session, you know who the VPs are and what they’ve gone through. If it’s an executive blog series in question, let’s get someone on the phone who is talking to customers regularly to find out what’s really on their minds.

This runs counter to our natural tendency to focus on our own thoughts first in crafting communications. Last quarter’s marketing deck might have good stuff in it, but it’s a resource only – not the starting point. And starting with the audience rather than the content or the speaker is even harder when you’re talking about a powerful executive you’re putting in harm’s way. You are, after all, more in control of the thoughts in that Powerpoint deck than you are of audience expectations and that control can feel comforting.

And then, what do we want them to do? What action, perhaps action loosely defined, do we want them to take? Maybe they need to understand something differently or approach a problem with a different mindset. Maybe they need to get out of strategy setting around big ideas like digital transformation and start executing. What do they need to hear from us to move in that direction? And why will they follow our lead?

Once you understand the audience, then you can consider the thought you have to convey and design the content so it translates into their situation and drives the change in them that you need. Said another way, too much of what passes for thought leadership is an abundance of thoughts and not enough leadership.

So, how do we take these separate concepts – “thought” and “leadership” – and put them back together in a definition that can drive programs? That’s the next blog post.

Thinking about Thought Leadership: What is it (Part 1)?

Posted on by John R. Thompson, Ph.D.

US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said that he could not define obscenity, but he knew it when he saw it. For good or ill, thought leadership – for all the attention it gets in the marketing industry – seems to fall into the same “know it when you see it category.”

What is thought leadership? Is it a blog? Well, certainly not all of them. Is it a keynote speech on a big stage like the Consumer Electronics Show (CES)? Maybe, but if it’s a transparent sales pitch you could have gotten the same info at the booth. Is it just a fancy term for churning out social media? This is one of the harshest criticisms of the term. Is it a big idea that provides the hook for a marcom campaign? Closer. Yes, definitely closer. But, show me the campaign before I commit; I need to see it first.

This “know it when you see it” ambiguity doesn’t seem to slow down the blogging and tweeting of content marketing. But, it’s a problem if you hope to rise above the din. It’s a problem if you want your audience to pay attention to the second installment of your account based marketing program. And it’s certainly a problem if you want to rally support doing things differently in a market, industry or even in society writ large. If you prioritize volume over quality in content marketing or executive communications you could be reducing your own brand to clickbait. If everything (any blog, tweet or post) is thought leadership, then nothing is thought leadership.

Yet, we all have experiences of seeing something that is compelling, that stands out from the noise of thousands of companies trying to get your attention and move you through their marketing funnel. In other words, we knew it when we saw it. But, it’s hard to build a program on that basis.

As 2019 unfolds, I’m going to seek some clarity around thought leadership as a concept, practice and program. Let’s start with the very words “thought leadership.” Words do the heavy lifting to convey the concept when you advocate for marketing programs and executive time for content development. Here, we’ll focus on “thought” and my next post will focus on “leadership.”

It’s the thought that counts…sort of

neurons firing in brain generating thoughts, ideas
Neurons firing in the brain spark the physical process of generating thoughts and ideas.

This piece from MIT Engineering offers a quick, relatively easy primer on the firing of neurons in the brain when we think. I’m a strategic communicator, not a neuroscientist. Yet, it’s clear that thinking at the physical level of the brain is dependent on a large number of complex interactions among various structures. What is a “thought?” Well, whatever it is, it is bound up with the process of thinking. Thoughts are stand-ins for more complex arguments or problem-solving heuristics, and they are also part of the inputs into those processes.

So, what makes a thought stand out in that “know it when you see it” way? Our experience is that it’s one where you also share the underlying interactions (data, logic etc.) that produced the thought, and you connect it to your audience’s situation well enough that it can trigger their own thought processes. For instance, Andy Grove’s concept of the Strategic Inflection Point, the moment when management strategies and practices stop working, is a useful concept. But, it rests atop an analysis of radical shifts in internal and external forces that change the conditions a firm faces. It is an enduring strategic concept because it’s presented with those underlying analytic processes. If you’re a senior manager who wakes up one morning and things just aren’t working well anymore, the Strategic Inflection Point construct can drive action in your own organization by applying the underlying analysis.

So, don’t fear complexity in contemplating thought leadership programs. Embrace it.

It’s the thought…and the thinking

We use this notion of parsing thoughts and thought processes when we work with new clients. Often, we’re warned by a marketing VP or director that a senior exec has too many ideas and needs help sorting them out. Sometimes a very thoughtful leader (not ready to deal with the term “leadership” yet) will have a stream of consciousness thought process where one idea really is connected to the next, which is connected to the next and so on. Nothing wrong with that. The challenge is establishing some boundaries to isolate the umbrella “thought” from the underlying thought processes.

The concept of rational and irrational thinking of two people. Heads of two people with colourful shapes of abstract brain for concept of idea and teamwork. Two people with different thinking
Thought leadership requires organizing all the pieces of a Big Idea into a cohesive campaign.

One tool we use is what we call an “issue tree.” It’s a white board exercise we usually do after the initial conversation with the brilliant exec. Essentially, we trace out Big Ideas and Little Ideas that support them. Sometimes there is already a Big Idea with a name and we need to break down what it’s composed of.  Sometimes, we have to isolate a pattern of thinking and build it up to a Big Idea. The entire process provides the framework for a thought leadership campaign.

Thoughts are the grist for thought leadership. But not all thoughts rise to the level of leadership. We will tackle that idea in the next post.

Jumpstart 2019 Thought Leadership Campaigns: 6 Ideas to Brainstorm

Posted on by John R. Thompson, Ph.D.

It’s January 2019 and your CMO or that high-profile VP with lots of ideas wants to know what the thought leadership campaign looks like for the year. Do you have one? Here are six ideas to start your brainstorm.

What follows is not really a pronouncement on individual technologies, people or events. My goal here is to demonstrate how seemingly concrete events and trends actually create a much larger context in which thought leadership is not only possible but needed.

Artificial Intelligence: The Untold Story

Artificial Intelligence will be very much in the headlines in 2019, much like 2018. The technology is already in our lives and notions of it being a cure-all for what ails us or a dire threat to humanity, or the core of a new nationalist competition in geopolitics will be inescapable. 

Your customers are seeing all these headlines and wondering what it means for them. Your competitors are also gaining access to AI. While it might already seem like a long time ago, Amazon Web Services announced a broad portfolio of AI and machine learning services in November for companies who use their cloud. Google and Microsoft are also building out AI as a service. Even if your customers don’t know exactly how they might use AI at the moment, they will increasingly want to know what their vendors and platform providers are thinking. How might AI affect your space? What could your customers automate? If you need some grist for the brainstorm preparation, check out this video from technologist, anthropologist and all-around incredible person Genevieve Bell.

Human hand robot hand connecting at computer control panel
Artificial Intelligence will continue to dominate the headlines in 2019.

Moore’s Law: The letter and the spirit

Moore’s Law, the engine of the technology industry, has died a thousand deaths over the years, but now seems legitimately on life support. The amount of new science, capital investment and sheer trial and error required to continue doubling transistor density on chips simply can’t be done in two years anymore. We’ve been so successful shrinking things that engineers grow concerned whether we have enough available atoms to hold a charge in a logic gate or memory cell. We’re hearing more about quantum computing and its QuBits as an alternative and it sometimes sounds like AI (see above) is supposed to rescue us from the end of technological history.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that the global economy is not going back to carrier pigeons and an abacus. Companies like Applied Materials have been creating new magic with unique manufacturing processes and novel materials from the periodic table of elements to keep this juggernaut moving forward without direct transistor shrinkage. New structures and architectures like neuromorphic computing are progressing. And there are new chip startups dedicated to AI accelerators bringing a refreshingly new hardware component to our AI fascination. With all that said, things need to change in light of the letter of Moore’s Law no longer applying. The spirit of Moore’s Law – things get better over time if you understand how it all works – offers ample space for thought leadership that will be needed in 2019 and beyond. What has Moore’s Law meant in your industry? Where does improvement come from going forward?

Dear, we need to talk about Mark…

…and Sundar. Maybe Jeff.  But, definitely Mark. It takes no insight to predict that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and other tech executives will be grilled by some governmental panel sometime in 2019 because raking Wall Street execs over the coals is just soooo 2010. Hopefully, the questions will be more useful than those asked in 2018 that often sounded like: “What happened to the cupholder that used to pop out of my granddaughter’s computer?” Tech fear over privacy erosion, political manipulations (real and imagined) and a growing discomfort of life-by-algorithm will continue in 2019.

As Facebook, Google and others face this scrutiny the opportunity grows for others to strike a thought leadership position reclaiming some of the positives of an earlier view of technology. Apple’s Tim Cook is already opening this space with Microsoft’s Satya Nadella making forays as well. The field is wide open and will paradoxically expand as the giants take heat. One crucial factor is that your claims must possess what I call “the added advantage of truth.” When you make a claim that you’re protecting privacy or enhancing security with a program or innovation, be sure you are not setting yourself up for a future mea culpa like a certain social media giant seems to do frequently.

Map of San Francisco Bay Area with Silicon Valley flag pin
In San Francisco and Silicon Valley, a six-figure salary is considered low income.

New tech centers beyond the valley

News flash: A family of four living in San Francisco making a six-figure salary can still be classed as low income. Yup, Silicon Valley is an expensive place to live, a fact that was noticed by the media in 2018. So digital innovation is setting down roots elsewhere. Apple is investing a billion or so dollars in my backyard here in Austin. Other, smaller players are shifting out of Silicon Valley to new places with available talent, quality of life, and a mortgage that doesn’t require an IPO to pay off. Seattle has its own problems as Amazon’s hunt for a new headquarters exposed.

But, you knew all that. The storytelling here has been largely driven by math: population density, housing prices, etc. What we haven’t talked enough about yet is what it means as this digital diaspora spreads around the country and the world. Let’s be clear that Silicon Valley will continue being Silicon Valley. But, companies are planting their flags elsewhere. We could use a public conversation about what it means when a similar innovation clustering effect enters third or fourth tier cities. What does it mean for local communities or the education system? What cascading effects happen: Do travel patterns change? Does the food industry have to respond in some fashion? As a society we need thought leaders to cultivate these conversations. 

Just be-cause

One of the most profound changes in business – that is still not fully appreciated in many boardrooms or business schools – is that society is now a stakeholder with a seat at the table. And members of that society make up your customer base, your prospect list, your employees, your investors – and any other audience you possess. Researchers suggest that you won’t be able to attract millennial generation workers if you don’t act on your values. To put it bluntly, we increasingly expect companies to wade into controversial topics and take stands on the issues of the day. This goes beyond Corporate Social Responsibility or cause marketing. Call it social accountability.  Is this fraught with peril? Absolutely. Let’s stipulate this is not for the faint of heart. But, it can be a source of differentiation via thought leadership.

How might you go about selling this as a strategy?  The truth is your organization can be pulled into an issue if you aren’t paying attention. Are you following Netflix’s canceling of a show in Saudi Arabia? Who knew Netflix was supposed to conduct foreign policy, but apparently they are accountable for it. Ditto Google and government work or Chinese cooperation. Picking an issue or arena where you will establish a thought leadership platform gives you as much control as you’re likely to get in these crazy times. Remember, the NFL woke up one morning and found itself part of the culture war. Conversely, did you see Nike’s Colin Kaepernick ad? Controversial? You bet. Did you see the numbers Nike put up afterward?

Leonardo Da Vinci engineering drawing from 1503 on textured background.
Leonardo Da Vinci engineering drawing from 1503.

History as prologue

With so much news drowning us every week it’s difficult to find meaning in things before the next headline knocks you off kilter. Your audience might well appreciate a chance to see the past as a point of departure for considering the future and 2019 provides some historical anniversaries to build meaning around. 

For instance, Leonardo Da Vinci died 500 years ago. It’s easy to get lost in Mona Lisa’s smile, but Da Vinci was also a thinker and inventor. Art and science were not mutually exclusive topics in his day (nor should they be today). He worked in medical science and postulated things like helicopters proving that innovation comes in many forms and from many places. If the renaissance isn’t your thing, consider that many thinkers are talking about AI as a 4th Industrial Revolution. That means there are three others that we might look to for guidance or models we can adapt to something happening today. Looking to tap into populist waves without the current baggage associated with them? This year Mahatma Gandhi turns 150. Get out of your 21stcentury mindset for a bit to find something in the past that provides a new lens through which to view something happening today.

Let’s Talk: Spectre, Meltdown signs of Andy Grove’s Strategic Inflection Point

Posted on by John R. Thompson, Ph.D.

It’s been a month or so since Spectre and Meltdown first entered the public conversation. It seems we can’t stop talking about these potential security issues baked into the major microprocessor architectures that run, well, everything. Understandably, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich and Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su have both had to address the problems in their earnings reports. The ARM army has been less visible in recent days though ARM’s CEO Simon Segars answered to Spectre at CES.

I hope this conversation continues both in public and private. As The Economist wrote, the tech industry in general has some “soul searching” to do. My claim here is that this is not just a bug that needs to be fixed, like the infamous Intel Pentium math flaw in the 1990s. To fully appreciate this story, you need to apply legendary Intel CEO Andy Grove’s concept of the Strategic Inflection Point (SIP), a tool articulated in the book he wrote after the Pentium crisis, “Only the Paranoid Survive.” In short, we are discovering the degree to which our 21st century world sits atop 20th century thinking about the nature of technology.

The issues of the moment are not “bugs” like the Pentium flaw, in which the chip was not performing to its actual design. These current chips are apparently operating according to their designs. Journalist Don Clark, himself a veteran of covering the original Pentium flaw, recently did a decent job of untangling these issues in the New York Times. These are not “bugs” in the technical sense of the term. These are more accurately thought of as legacy design techniques that were innovations when they debuted 20 or so years ago. But, they are now artifacts of a very different technology environment before the threat landscape became so sophisticated as it is today.

That environmental change creates a SIP by Grove’s logic. Drawing on Michael Porter, Grove argued that a 10x change in any one of five strategic forces could drive a SIP – and could be overlooked if the other four forces were relatively stable. Those five forces include new delivery methods for the product or service, plus four measures of the “power, vigor and competence” of: existing competitors, suppliers, customers, and potential competitors.

This last category is relevant to understanding the 20th century legacy in processor architectures. According to Grove, potential competitors include those that aren’t in the market yet but if they entered would pose a new kind of threat because they could be “bigger, more competent, better funded and more aggressive than the existing competitors.” When techniques like speculative execution, one of the culprits in the current round of issues, debuted to accelerate performance, security threats were very different and security was largely viewed as a software problem; thus, making faster chips enhanced security by accelerating virus detectors and the like. As the threat landscape evolved, additional security hooks got bolted onto the core, but the core techniques remained.

However, if the security and integrity of computing writ large is at issue, then we need to expand the range of “potential competitors” to include what we now know to be state-sanctioned actors and globally organized crime. These actors can certainly be “bigger, more competent, better funded and more aggressive” than the basement hackers of the 20th century. To say it differently, does anyone doubt that we have witnessed a 10x change relative to the 1990s in the “power, vigor and competence” of those attempting to subvert our reliance on digital technology? And if these issues are really about the foundations of the computing environment we all rely on, then this SIP is not just about chip companies but every cloud provider, device maker and would-be Internet of Things service provider.

So, many more people need to be party to this conversation than Intel, AMD or ARM suppliers. Grove advocated a period of experimentation to see what really works in this new environment. For chip companies, perhaps that means security-first design approaches. But, this 10x change in new forms of competition affects more than these chip companies no matter how important their architectures might be.

This SIP is affecting lots of players and, well, only the paranoid survive.

Thought leadership trends 2018

Posted on by John R. Thompson, Ph.D.

Are you tired of 2018 Trend posts yet? Hope not.

This blog will differ from some of the other trend forecasts in meaningful ways, however. This post is about what 2018 might sound like when we listen to visionaries, read thoughtful blogs or experience the best of content marketing. Forecasting thought leadership trends is not the same as proclaiming that specific events will happen; though you can extrapolate various events from what follows. Various technologies provide the foundations of several items below, but the point to glean here is not really about those technologies per se. Whether any one of the technologies mentioned below hits concrete milestones in 2018, the ideas they represent hold the power to shape how we talk about the world.

These will be ideas such as:

The “Era” Era

When your visionary CEO is on a big stage somewhere, a common template frames that speech by tracing different “eras” through which a company/industry/discipline has passed on the way to the speech’s big reveal – “The New Era in the Title of this Speech.” The classic model for this is in the technology industry where the progression from “mainframe to PC to mobile” eras is well documented and possesses the added advantage of truth. As artificial intelligence (AI) broadens its footprint and headlines breathlessly foretell its impact, this new-era template will receive a steroid injection across industries and disciplines.

Everyone will have an argument to make that AI changes their game to such a degree that a new era is upon them.

AI’s theoretical ability to find patterns in voluminous data, automate tasks for which we previously thought humans were needed and – more importantly for our purposes here – provide a compelling ghost in the machine will empower thought leaders to proclaim new eras for just about anything. Everyone will have an argument to make that AI changes their game to such a degree that a new era is upon them.

The crucial thing for thought leaders to remember in this era of era proliferation is to maintain the intellectual integrity of that historical view and the “added advantage of truth” that will differentiate their claim of a new era.

Generational change – hunting the post-millennial

On a tangentially related note, the new year might also be the starting gun in proclaiming the advent of a new generation’s influence (and could be part of identifying a new “era” if you have a speech coming up). In 2018, those born first in the 21st century will reach the age of majority (and yes, I’m ignoring the argument over whether the first official year of a century ends in “0” or “1”). The BBC has gone so far as to suggest that we drop the term “millennial” because, well, focusing on that group just seems sooooo 2015. You can already find this cohort referred to as Generation Z. Giving them a better name is low hanging fruit for thought leadership; but to be sustainable as a thought leadership pillar, that new name will have to draw on identifiable characteristics of those graduating high school in 2018 and make some larger meaning out of those traits. It’s a rich landscape given that this group effectively doesn’t remember a time before smartphones or Netflix and is unlikely to find the term “artificial intelligence” to be exotic by any means.

Brother, can you spare 5Gs?

5G wireless technology will hit its visionary stride in 2018 as early pilots of the device-side radio spec get going. The full deployment of 5G’s promise is still a few years away. But, that promise – ranging from higher data rates for users to connecting the Internet of Things and autonomous cars and more all at a reasonable cost – is quite compelling. So compelling that these initial moves from concept to reality will license a lot of discussion across industries about new business models made possible by 5G. A high public profile for the technology itself is assured by the sex appeal of higher data rates for mobile phones. But, that public awareness, coupled with all the upgrades of wireless technology that creates the 5G reality, hammers a nail into the wall onto which a great many hats can be hung.

Tech Tonics for the Tech Backlash

2017 was a troubling year for Big Tech. There was that Russia thing ensnaring Facebook, Google and other digital dynamos after their leaders scoffed at the idea. There were the Silicon Valley cultural exposes on sexual harassment, gender issues generally, and the politics of the tech world more broadly.

Forecasting that Big Tech will work to put a kinder, gentler face on their businesses is a slam dunk.

This all comes on top of a growing discomfort with the influence these digital platforms have on society and business (though it might be noted we still seem to happily give up our data in exchange for mobile games and same-day delivery). In fact, the owners of these platforms are now referred to as the “Frightful Five” in some corners of the punditocracy. Forecasting that Big Tech, therefore, will work to put a kinder, gentler face on their businesses is a slam dunk. But, from a thought leadership perspective, the real opportunity is for those outside the top tier to differentiate themselves by making an argument as to how they really are empowering people, putting missions above profits and securing the future. Some will argue this is just “marketing,” but no one should make these claims without the will to give them the added advantage of truth.

Closing the gap between thought leadership and content marketing

For the past few years, the Content Marketing Institute has surveyed large content marketers about numerous things, including their goals for the coming year. Invariably, the number one goal for the new year was some version of “more engaging content.” In the most recent survey (that you can find here), those content marketers who report the greatest increased success, attribute the change to a focus on higher quality content. Content is still king. But, the shift in emphasis from quantity to quality gathered momentum in 2017 and will continue in 2018. The focus on quantity fed the Internet’s gaping maw and the rise of increasingly sophisticated tools for click counting. Audiences are now inundated with content and they are sophisticated enough to recognize clickbait even when it comes dressed up in marketing buzzwords. Audience development and engagement are now the strategic needs and require a higher level of intellectual capital embodied in any blog or white paper and a commitment to what the audience wants to hear, rather than what the content marketer wants to say.

Of course, the sound and fury of thought leadership spread over an entire year will go beyond this list. What are your ideas?

This post is not about Uber…Really

Posted on by John R. Thompson, Ph.D.

The Internet does not need another post describing Travis Kalanick, a toxic Uber culture, an investor revolt, or even a thoughtful version of all of those issues.

So, if that’s what you want…move along, these are not the droids you’re looking for.

we need to separate harassment and ethical abuses in all forms from the concept of ambition as a core element of leadership

This post is about the paradox of ambition. Specifically, my thesis here is that whatever happened to Travis Kalanick and a hard-charging Uber culture, we need to separate harassment and ethical abuses in all forms from the concept of ambition as a core element of leadership. The paradox is that we can be rightly wary of ambition as a potentially corrupting influence – but we also require it of our leaders.

A quick Google of “Uber” and “ambition” demonstrates the perceived intersection of an aggressive culture, expansive desires and an eventual downfall.

The two words animate headlines across the mainstream press for the past few years. Flying cars? That’s an Uber ambition. Are they mega ambitions? Yup. Are they driverless car ambitions? NPR thinks so. Will those ambitions keep on trucking? Apparently so. Are they insane ambitions? Well, I guess it’s a question at least.

The word “Ambition” in these headlines – and there are many more – acts as a note of suspicion when it comes to Uber. But, this is not a post about Uber. It is, rather, a post about ambition and the leadership quality of…Integrity.

Did I mention there’s a paradox here?

In a series of works, leadership researchers Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas argue that leadership involves four competencies: Adaptive capacity, creating shared meaning, establishing a personal voice, and Integrity. I’m going to save the other three characteristics for other posts and focus here on Integrity.

Integrity, according to Bennis and Thomas, is built on a tripod of concepts: competence, moral compass, and…ambition. The best leaders have the strength of character to keep the three in balance. Lesser leaders – to the point they don’t deserve the label “leader” – let one of the three motive forces overshadow the other two.

To understand the effects of that imbalance, consider the experience from the followers’ perspective. Ambition without competence or moral compass results in demagoguery. Competence without ambition or moral compass, in our technology driven world, can create technical managers with no beneficial vision beyond their mastery of ones and zeros. Moral compass without competence or ambition might articulate a vision – but with no ability to inspire followers that it is achievable.

Powerfully, Bennis and Thomas use Mother Theresa as an example of someone with a balance among the three components of Integrity. It’s easy to see her moral compass as she ministered to the lepers and underclasses. Her competence in organizing followers and advocating for others is clear. According to the researchers, we should also credit her ambition to make a change in the lives of many people as an engine that powered her leadership and her ability to gather followers and influence others.

Ambition can grow out of proportion and put the three-legged stool out of kilter. But, that stool is just as wobbly if ambition is less solid than the other two factors.

While sainthood may not await other ambitious leaders, we do not need to look far for the upside of ambition as a marker of beneficial leadership. Bill Gates not only built Microsoft with his ambitions, he and his wife are now curing disease, building infrastructure and changing the way global institutions deal with problems through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And it appears the CEO of Ford was fired for not being as ambitious as Elon Musk at Tesla.

So, consider this post a defense of ambition in a world racing toward the future. Book yourself a flying car and go change the world.

A Little TLC: Thought Leadership Critique

Posted on by John R. Thompson, Ph.D.

For years, Microsoft suffered from a unique indignity: absolutely a cornerstone of the present, but somehow missing from the conversation about the future. Things have changed more recently and since thought leadership in the technology industry is almost always about connecting the present to the future, I thought it worth giving a little TLC to Satya Nadella’s breakout speech at the recent Microsoft developer conference.

When viewed through the lens of thought leadership, what’s really going on here?

I say “breakout” speech because Nadella was well reviewed in the media (look here and here for instance) and did an effective job of stepping out of the shadow of those who occupied his office before him. And as I will argue below, he connected Microsoft’s present to the future through both a compelling story and a subtle argument.

And let me be clear that I had nothing to do with this speech.

Stories have characters and conflict. Nadella’s headlines focused on a call to action for developers to help us all avoid a dystopian future of surveillance and servitude. Developers, according to the Microsoft CEO, must accept accountability for the algorithms created and design choices taken to shape what’s possible in the future computing environment – and one way or another that’s the environment we will all exist within. This fear of dystopia drew on current fears about technology’s impact on society (killer robots, mass unemployment, lack of privacy – oh my!) and cast his audience as the potential heroes.

Conscious decisions made by the people in the room will determine whether the future computing environment serves us – or we serve it.

The notion that a major tech CEO would acknowledge this potential resonated with the media as news. The speech was not focused on fear, however. Through certain programming rules (that Microsoft will tell you more about here), today’s developers can call a better future into being. It’s a story that casts the assembled developers (and their peers elsewhere) as creators of the future, not just its programmers.

Stories also have morals, and Nadella paraphrased Spiderman’s Uncle Ben in saying that “enormous opportunity” must come with “enormous responsibility” for the good and evil available in that future environment. Conscious decisions made by the people in the room will determine whether the future computing environment serves us – or we serve it.

That’s the story framework. The subtle argument involves the path these would-be heroes take to that valorized future. It goes through Microsoft.

Ubiquity has long been Microsoft’s greatest strength (and, of course, one of its weaknesses but I will sidestep that here because it makes me WannaCry). Under Nadella’s leadership, the company has updated that strength through massive investments in cloud computing, reorienting the Office franchise to a SaaS model, continuing investments in Windows, a big bet on LinkedIn and I’m sure this list could go on. And the net of this footprint, in the logic of the speech, is not just the sum total of Windows 10 devices (though it’s 500 million if you’re interested), or the number of Office 365 users (100 million if you’re counting). No, today, it’s worth noting the 12 million “organizational entities” active in Azure and the fact that “90 percent of the Fortune 500” are using Microsoft Cloud on top of those Windows devices and Office applications.

Ubiquity, then, is still a Microsoft strength with its roots in the recent industry past. But, ubiquity in this speech is now measured in scope of influence on the future. And the implied message is that developers who see themselves as the architects of a humanity-friendly future should see that the Microsoft landscape – by its nature today – gives them the greatest scope of influence on creating the future. You can start on the future today by leveraging Microsoft’s ubiquity as measured by the number of entities Microsoft influences every day – entities building their own segments of the future.

And ubiquity, measured in this way, becomes the foundation (along with AI, UX design and a few other components) of the corporate vision Nadella ultimately shares of intelligent cloud and intelligent edge (which Microsoft will tell you more about here).

Reasonable people can disagree with him on several points and this is no cheerleading shout from the sidelines. For instance, Microsoft needs to redefine ubiquity so that people aren’t just counting the number of Windows phones versus iPhones. It’s also fair to point out that Nadella still needs to count those Windows PCs to out-flank those who would compare his cloud business with Amazon Web Services as the sole definition of ubiquity.

But, Nadella’s argument is plausible. And the story framing that argument has a compelling resonance to it and is focused on a specific audience while containing goodies for secondary and tertiary audiences.

And it makes Microsoft’s contemporary business part of the conversation about the future. If you’re Microsoft, it’s an argument worth developing beyond this one speech.

Andy Grove, the tour of duty, and leadership in a time of change

Posted on by John R. Thompson, Ph.D.

Andy Grove, the legendary CEO of Intel, passed away a couple months ago and this post is not intended as a news flash or a delayed eulogy.

More recently, though, many people with a connection to Andy gathered at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley to hold a memorial in his honor. My topic here is how that event embodied LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman’s idea of the “tour of duty” as the model for the employee-employer covenant. Creating this conceptual connection is a post of which I hope Andy would approve. It says something about his leadership and what might be required of others who hope to lead in a time of tremendous change.

Several generations of Intel were represented and reconnected at this memorial event. Amid the catching up were the reminiscences of shared experiences. They ranged from product launches to problems and what Andy called “strategic inflection points,” when the world changed and you found yourself in a different business from one day to the next. Colleagues from the legal team and I reflected on an amazing time when we addressed questions of intellectual property that still shape the technology industry. Dennis Carter, the father of “Intel Inside,” not only shared his memories of Andy but he heard about some lessons he teaches my students without ever stepping into my classrooms. And all around, people who built intense relationships – yet moved on to other challenges outside of Intel – relived the things they learned together in the crucible of the world’s indispensable chip company.

In this sense, Intel under Grove was ahead of its time on Reid Hoffman’s calendar. The LinkedIn founder has put forth the idea of the “tour of duty” to describe the modern employer-employee relationship. The “tour of duty” idea attempts to intervene between those who would bemoan the death of long, stable, retire-at-the-same-place careers and those who would turn the world into winner-take-all mercenary dynamics.

“You can’t have an agile company if you give employees lifetime contracts—and the best people don’t want one employer for life anyway,” Hoffman wrote in HBR. “But you can build a better compact than ‘every man for himself.’”

The HBR piece and the larger philosophy encourage companies to rethink their ideas of loyalty and what constitutes employee contributions as well as the investments they make in employees during a time when good people are constantly exposed to new opportunities. The tour of duty concept is more than a metaphor and it resonates strongly with students attempting to conceive of a career in a world where some of the jobs they will have don’t exist yet. You can read more about Hoffman’s idea here, but the basic template is that organizations and people voluntarily embrace each other for periods of time. The relationship is rock solid and mission driven. You invest in the organization and the organization invests in you. You make intense relationships. You do great things.

When the mission is accomplished, both sides get a chance to reassess the next phase. You and the organization can both move on. But, the connection persists and both sides continue to benefit from that connection.

Andy didn’t use the term “tour of duty” but Hoffman would recognize the idea in Grove’s management practices. Andy kept a fluid organization that could easily channel people from one division to another or cross group lines to form teams to take on new initiatives. He maintained connections to people once they left and played a major role in setting up the Intel Alumni Network, hosted here on LinkedIn. Hoffman’s HBR piece placed a high premium on establishing alumni networks as a way of keeping the crucial connections necessary in an ever-changing world.

Gathered at the Andy Grove memorial were bands of brothers and sisters who all served at least one tour of duty at Intel. Yet, the number of companies actually represented in that room was legion. Those tours of duty gave many attendees the experience to go on and found other companies, build other juggernauts and create the valley’s incredible venture capital infrastructure. And many stayed to continue building Intel as a never-ending work in progress – the way Andy always saw the company. Yet, a place like Intel, with so many phases of growth and reconfiguring, still offered those people different tours of duty with different players on the team.

And on that night, many people saluted the commander who guided their tours of duty at Intel. For those leaders hoping to create this same kind of relationship that transcends the tour of duty, it is going to take a rethink of what you have to offer. Stock options and unicorn status won’t be enough.