Intellectual Guidance
Identifying the traits of an effective thought leader and ideas ripe for crystallization.
By Art Kleiner
Back in 1989, when Peter Senge was an MIT lecturer with a lengthy book in progress on a then-obscure subject called organizational learning, he invited me to his home to look at the outline. His editor had suggested he seek advice on reworking the manuscript. When I arrived, Peter took me to a long wall in his living room where we clustered hundreds of Post-it notes based on ideas in his book. When we were done, there were five basic clusters on the wall, relating to five main themes of an executive education course he had designed: systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision and team learning.
“What are those?” I asked.
“Why,” he said, looking them over, “They’re ongoing bodies of study and practice. They’re disciplines.”
That was the moment I learned about thought leadership. Peter had been teaching and helping to develop these five subjects for more than a dozen years, but only then did a frame emerge that allowed other people to make sense of that body of work. Since then, Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline, has gone on to be a bestseller and is the first of several books that he has written or co-written. But it was all made possible by that moment when the idea crystallized. And the same is true for every other management writer or “business pundit” I’ve known.
If you’re struggling to get your voice into the marketplace of ideas, your presence relies not just on having a big idea, but having it suddenly show up as sharp, focused and relevant to people around you. And if you’re charged with promoting people with big ideas, it will make a difference to understand why some ideas succeed in the marketplace and others, seemingly just as worthy, never really take hold.
These days, when there is so much competition in every business arena, the need to distinguish oneself as a thought leader is stronger than ever.
“I get queries all the time from students who want to build a career as a thought leader, or from managers who see this as a way to transition to a better, more prominent, higher-paying role,” said Sally Helgesen, a speaker and author of The Female Advantage and The Web of Inclusion.
Of course, “thinking better,” in itself, won’t get anyone an audience. But there are ways to build the skill of thought leadership and even institutionalize it in an organization. And those who are prepared to follow that course may find that the practice of thought leadership can help clarify and solidify all forms of business practice, even those forms closest to the bottom line.
The first use of the term “thought leader” is credited, as it happens, with the magazine I edit, strategy+business. Editing the magazine for the past few years has sharpened my own connoisseurship of business punditry; it’s given me a feel for why some ideas take off and others fade. And some of the thought leaders I know from around the world seem to agree that there appear to be five basic qualities at play in the ideas that stick.
Timely Originality
Some people seem to have the knack for putting forth the right idea at the right time. Stephen Covey introduced “the seven habits of highly effective people” just as companies began to employ knowledge workers en masse and hold them accountable for results. The “free agent nation” concept resonated brilliantly in the dotcom era, when it was easy to build a career as an independent contractor. That was supplanted by the “war for talent” in later years, when large financial institutions needed to recruit those free agents (and justify their immense salaries).
Now, in the extremely tight economy of 2009, the ideas of Sylvia Ann Hewlett, economist and founding president of the Center for Work-Life Policy, about alternative career paths are gaining currency—they suggest that high-performing people can be attracted by flexibility and community engagement instead of by more money. Authors C.K. Prahalad and Stuart Hart put forth their concept of “the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid” seemingly at just the right moment, when emerging markets were appearing in China and India, with hundreds of millions of underserved people ready to enter the middle class.
It might seem like these authors have impeccable timing, able to foresee, like chess players, what will occur two or three moves ahead. But in reality, the key attribute is staying power. Prahalad and Hart first posted their idea online in 1998, when no journal or publisher would accept it.
“It was easy to dismiss the idea; the new middle class in China and India was only a weak signal,” Prahalad recalled. “But we said, ‘How can you be a global company and not serve 80 percent of humanity?’”
Prahalad’s book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, didn’t see print until 2004, at which point the world was fully ready for it.
I’ve seen the value of staying with an idea myself. In 1996, I published a book called The Age of Heretics, a history of the countercultural movement within large corporations. It was critically acclaimed, but it didn’t really attract a following. One possible reason was that the “heretical” ideas I wrote about, such as group dynamics, diversity, corporate environmentalism and high-performance teams, were out of fashion in an era of budding “masters of the universe.” I recently revised the book, and I can now point to ways in which these ideas are newly influential. Business leaders happen to be looking for ways to revamp and rebuild, more solidly and with more engagement by people, and the “heretics” of 1996 are now more aligned with the mainstream.
Explanatory Power
A powerful idea reveals the hidden patterns that conventional wisdom has not yet fully explained. Booz & Co. partner Karim Sabbagh (with his colleagues Joe Saddi and Richard Shediac) saw one such pattern in the Middle East not long ago. To an outsider, the region had a series of qualities that didn’t seem to fit together: the visible political tensions existed just a few hundred miles from the boom towns of the United Arab Emirates, with man-made islands, research and technology centers sprouting up overnight and some of the fastest economic growth on the planet. Sabbagh and his colleagues gathered their observations, and in a series of meetings in late 2007 and 2008 boiled them down to one key concept, which they called the “paradoxes of the Middle East decision maker.” A new generation of political leaders had emerged, determined to build a new kind of economy that would neither squander the income from oil (as the region had often done in the past) or follow the secular example of the West. They would find their own paths, traditional but modern, rapid but constrained and newly open to the outside world in some ways (while continuing to be closed in others). A series of articles and speeches have followed, which helped many outsiders understand, for the first time, that the mysterious path of growth in the Middle East in recent years has not been mysterious after all, if one only knew how to interpret it.
Explanatory power starts with simplicity.
“When we start to research a topic, my colleagues are likely to show up with a list of 40 bullet points,” Sabbagh said. “But it’s unlikely that our audience will want to think about that many things. I generally ask them to think again, until we can come up with the one, two or three ideas that lead to an ‘ah ha’ that nobody has seen yet, because there hasn’t been a need to do so until now.”
Coming up with ideas of such simplicity can be extremely difficult, but they are best when they appear to have been developed easily.
“You agonize and finally you get it on paper and people say, ‘But it’s so obvious,’” Prahalad said. “When I was younger, that used to irritate me. Now I think it’s the highest compliment you can get.”
There are many methods of finding deep explanations for everyday phenomena. The system dynamics of Jay Forrester, the scenario planning approach pioneered by Pierre Wack and Ted Newland at the Royal Dutch/Shell Group (and more recently by Peter Schwartz and Napier Collyns at Global Business Network), the “wargaming” simulation techniques developed for the U.S. military by Mark Herman and others at Booz Allen Hamilton, the “design thinking” approach championed by breakthrough innovation houses such as IDEO and many other methods have all been used to help articulate the factors and forces beneath the surface. But the most important single methodology is the willingness to look freshly at real-world problems and seek analogies and explanations that others haven’t found.
Edward Tse, the head of Booz & Company’s offices in Greater China, used that form of analogy to explain how Chinese companies were increasingly investing in the rest of Asia and in Africa. They weren’t doing it through acquisitions or opening branch offices; rather, they were seeking alliances with existing companies there, much as global companies were encouraged to form alliances in China itself.
“We borrowed [political scientist] Joseph Nye’s idea of ‘soft power,’” Tse said. “It is very well-accepted now by Chinese executives as the framework for what they do.”
Similarly, Sally Helgesen often applies concepts from one field to another; she says that by doing so, she is simply following in the footsteps of business thought leader pioneers.
“I can be working with an institute for girls’ education in Melbourne, Australia,” she said, “and the next week I can be working with a police group that’s going through a re-org. And then I’ll meet with some CEOs in Omaha, Neb. I can see what the similarities are and where their common challenges are. And I think that’s very helpful information to give people; it broadens their context. That’s what thought leaders have always done.”
Pragmatic Value
Ideas that don’t get used have no impact. And ideas that can be put into practice can have tremendous impact. One great example is Keith Ferrazzi’s maxim for business success: “Never eat lunch alone.” It can change someone’s work prospects immediately. Lean production, similarly, is a wide-ranging conceptual body of work, but it takes hold in many companies because of the “low-hanging fruit:” the ability to put it into practice and realize gains almost immediately.
The trick, of course, is to get people to follow through. One master at this is Marshall Goldsmith, the pre-eminent executive coach and author of several best-selling books, including What Got You Here Won’t Get You There and Succession: Are You Ready? Goldsmith is known for focusing relentlessly on the pragmatic value of his lectures and his books.
“My focus is on whether this adds real value, as opposed to a thinly disguised effort to prove how smart I am,” he said.
He compares his work to diet books; they sell extraordinarily well in the U.S., while Americans get fatter and fatter. Helping people understand an idea won’t have much impact, he says, unless they can (and do) put it into action.
Goldsmith credits his success to his focus on results. He asks audiences to return to the workplace and ask for personal feedback from co-workers, and he tracks how many people follow through. To his knowledge (and mine), no other management thought leader does this, although many pay close attention to follow-up from the classes they teach in other ways. Even if you don’t follow through, the actionable value of your ideas is critically important and all too often overlooked.
A Robust Foundation
Can your idea be tested empirically? Can it survive a challenge or question? Its robustness probably depends on where it came from. For Prahalad, for instance, the strongest ideas start with an unanswered question. In the late 1980s, he and Gary Hamel began to doubt the conventional wisdom about relative market share—and specifically the argument that large dominant companies had unassailable positions.
“Theory said that Honda could not take on GM, CNN could not take on NBC and Wal-Mart could not take on Sears. But exactly the opposite was happening. Why was that?” he asked.
This led to the concept of core competencies, the idea that launched both of their reputations as management thinkers.
Substantiation of this sort doesn’t mean relying on corporate examples or case studies for proof. As Phil Rosenzweig documented in his recent book, The Halo Effect, it’s extremely difficult (and perhaps impossible) to prove that a company’s success is due to any particular factor or that it can be replicated. Ever since Enron was singled out as an example of stellar management in the late 1990s, the proof of an idea has had to come from other places—often from the logic of your explanation. You need to show why, reasonably, it would make sense for your idea to work, and you need to be transparent, revealing the sources of analysis that led to your insights. Prahalad, for this reason, creates a diagram of the logical underpinnings of his idea for every book he writes and bases his outline on that diagram.
Social network analysts, such as Karen Stephenson, have learned to do this, and in the process have illuminated aspects of organizational and community life that were impenetrable before. They enter organizations and track the patterns of communication—who speaks to whom, who communicates by e-mail and whether they talk about gossip, work procedures or career advice. After analyzing the results mathematically, they could show how different types of people played different roles in passing ideas. Writer Malcolm Gladwell’s first book, The Tipping Point, was credible, in large part, because of its basis in this research.
A Natural Constituency
Re-engineering became a popular management fad because it spoke to the frustrated executives who had invested millions in computer systems and wanted, in effect, a way to program the whole company. Organizational learning resonated with business unit leaders who knew they could get better results if they found a way to engage their people. And the emerging idea of marketing ROI has a natural constituency among chief marketing officers because it suggests that they deserve a seat on the CEO’s strategic team.
Every major successful idea succeeds because it has people who promote it, either because they believe it’s the right thing to do or because it serves their interests (or, most likely, both). Those are the people who fill the seats during seminars and who carry the message back to the office. And they may not be obvious to the thought leaders themselves at first. The “war for talent,” for example, was often pitched at human resources executives. But its natural constituency was the senior executives of companies with new global operations. They suddenly needed to recruit and deploy high-quality people around the world, and they didn’t always know how to do it.
Marshall Goldsmith deliberately tailors his messages to his target group, which in his case consists of CEOs and other senior executives.
“My clients probably have an average IQ of 150,” Goldsmith said. “But they have so many thousand things banging them around the head every minute, to get them to focus on anything is incredibly difficult. So if I come up with complex concepts, they don’t remember it and they don’t follow through. I have to say things that are memorable and simple enough to have them actually take action.”
For the same reason, Edward Tse makes sure to publish frequently, in print and online in both English and Chinese.
“We know that the people we want to reach will pay more attention if they see that others like them are paying attention too,” he said.
While with Procter & Gamble’s Middle East group, Karim Sabbagh says he learned “there is no such thing as a universal insight. Every insight applies only to its target group.” One Middle East soap campaign, for example, resonated with women in the region, including those who followed traditionally strict rules about dress and decorum. It promised that they could “be a new you every day.”
“This was an important idea for women emerging from a constrained society,” Sabbagh said. “They couldn’t change the way they dressed, but they could still renew themselves. It wouldn’t have resonated with a European or American woman the same way.”
Thought leaders similarly target their messages, listening to the way they sound through the ears of their constituents.
A Crystallizing Moment
An idea with all of these attributes (timely originality, explanatory power, pragmatic value, a robust foundation and a natural constituency) will stand out. There’s no guarantee that it will be successful, but the most compelling and powerful ideas seem to include these important elements. When I work with aspiring thought leaders, those are the qualities we aim to create. That doesn’t mean we create them by moving through the list. Most thought leaders, like Peter Senge thoughtfully staring at the notes on the wall of his house, develop those five attributes through intensive observation and synthesis. Then, one day, the insight crystallizes. The phrases emerge. And then begins the long and enjoyable task of introducing those ideas to the public at large and testing and refining them further. One+
ART KLEINER is editor-in-chief of strategy+business.