Tag: Strategic Inflection Point

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.

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.