I have a confession to make. I’m partly to blame for the state of your LinkedIn feed.
No, I didn’t develop the LLMs that now seem to dominate what’s left of “content creation,” and I had no role in creating a world where personal branding now matters to everyone from the C suite on down. But I did spend the last decade-plus helping true thought leaders – entrepreneurs, scientists, policymakers, and more – make sense of their thoughts and build real messaging campaigns around what they’re working on. My pitch was simple: Everyone out there in the digital world looks the same. You need to raise your hand if you want to be noticed.
Oops.
You’ve seen what this looks like today.
The LinkedIn “Broetry” that starts with a declarative sentence and then devolves into…
Excessive…
Line…
Breaks (to game the algorithm).
Or the overly personal anecdote that’s awkwardly tied back to some sort of business topic. “I couldn’t stop crying when rewatching My Girl. Here’s what that taught me about bringing emotion into B2B sales conversations.”
Or even the “most founders” hook. “Most founders think sleeping at the office is a flex. It’s not.”
Or the hyperbolic take, which I did at the start of this issue.
(And if you ever wonder why Claude writes the way it does, just take a look at your feed. That’s what it’s imitating.)
But the real problem is that today everyone and their brother is suddenly a thought leader. All it takes is an idea, a few minutes with your AI tool of choice, and suddenly you have something you can foist upon the world. AI is making it easier than ever to produce something that looks, reads, and sounds like thought leadership, but at the same time says absolutely nothing. That’s why the very idea of thought leadership has lost all of its meaning. Everyone is using it to describe everything. A LinkedIn post that just restates a headline? That’s thought leadership. A listicle with five slides on any topic? Thought leadership. Anything short of shouting into the void is today generally lumped in with the broader category of thought leadership. But most of it is just random thoughts and opinions from someone in a leadership position, offered just because they can, not because anyone asked for it.
(One recent example that I think actually hits the mark, even though no one asked for it, is Bill Gates’ essay on how we should deal with whatever’s coming next from AI.)
All of this is raising the bar for what counts as real. The generic version was always mediocre, now it’s mediocre and instantly recognizable as AI. That makes a genuine, specific point of view worth more than ever before.
Restoring Thought Leadership’s Good Name
I, for one, have had enough.
Content (another word that I’m slowly coming around to) that actually earns the thought leadership name is still out there, and still being created. It’s just being drowned out by boring, commodity noise.
By definition thought leadership is “content published under an individual’s or organization’s name that stakes out an original point of view on a subject, based on genuine expertise or experience, with the goal of shaping how an audience thinks about a problem rather than just informing them about it.”
With that in mind, true impactful thought leadership:
- Takes a stand: Real thought leadership has to take a position and stand behind it. It can’t be wishy-washy or noncommittal. It needs to have a potential cost. It says this popular strategy is wrong, or this metric everyone tracks is the wrong one, or here’s the thing our own industry doesn’t want to admit. If the reader can’t disagree with it, it isn’t thought leadership. Otherwise you’re just agreeing with the crowd and adding nothing to the conversation.
- Is based on real experience: I know, these days everyone is an expert on everything. We all know what’s best or can look up the answer in seconds. That’s great, but it doesn’t make for thought leadership. Pattern recognition is a key part of what most people would refer to as expertise, and it’s developed not with a prompt but with real work over time. Leveraging things like proprietary data, industry insights, and specific insights in content make clear that the writer has a take that couldn’t be created by anyone else.
- Remains consistent over time: One great essay doesn’t make you an authority on anything. But, returning over and over again to the same core ideas over months and years not only demonstrates your commitment to your topic but also allows you room to dig into and expand on what truly interests you. It’s because trust compounds and authority builds slowly over time.
And it has to have an audience. The best thought leadership is written for one type of reader with one type of problem, not for a general audience. Because vague doesn’t equal relevance. For example, this newsletter goes out to more than 100k subscribers across financial services. Not healthcare providers. Not software developers. Not real estate speculators. Financial services, because that’s who I work with and whose problems I best understand. That’s why I’m able to directly target what matters to that audience and turn it into content.
The Test
All that said, how can you be sure that what you’re about to hit “publish” on will actually accomplish what you want it to as thought leadership? Try my three-question gut check:
Would someone in my field push back on this or have a reaction to it?
Could a competitor have published this exact piece with their name on it instead of mine?
Am I saying this because I really believe it, or just because it’s safe to say?
If the answers to all three feel too comfortable, it’s not thought leadership yet.
Hopefully, all of this taken together can convince a few people that there is still value in thought leadership and it’s worth doing right. Because most of us out there don’t have a shortage of expertise. What we do face is a shortage of the willingness to take a stand and put a real opinion out into the world. And that’s making it all more boring for the rest of us.