Strategic Thought Leadership: How to Stand Out in the AI Age | Expert Guide to Business Innovation

Thought leadership. What does it really mean? Why does it matter to your business? With Chris McNeil, Chris is going to delve into that whole idea of what thought leadership really means and why it should make a difference to your business. Normally, on Biz Bites for thought leaders, we talk to thought leaders who are really talking about their expertise in their space.

Well, in this particular case, Chris’s space is on being a thought leader itself. And what it really takes and why. Particularly in an age of ai, it is more important than ever to exercise your creativity and what the impact it is on a business. He’s got plenty of examples, plenty of insights. This is truly an episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders that you cannot miss.

It is going to be defining for your business, so stay tuned.

Well, hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders and what a great episode we’ve got coming up because we’re gonna talk all things thought leadership. That’s what you should be talking on it. We’re gonna be talking about it with someone else who has his own podcast, but is also, uh, very much in the thought leadership space.

Uh, Chris, welcome to the program.

Great to be here. Anthony

and Chris, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to everyone just to kick things off.

Sure. Um, I’m Chris McNeil. I. And I am the developer of what’s called the Thought Process spelled funny, T-H-A-U-T, of Strategic Thought Leadership, which is a methodology for building a model of thought leadership designed to lead an audience or a market segment to a specific way of thinking that’s empowering for them.

And that cast the leader or the business or the client business in the best possible light at the same time. So it’s a method of what I call strategic thought leadership, doing it very consciously and intentionally with a method.

I really want to delve into lots of parts of that and to talk a lot about thought leadership.

And uh, I think in order to do that in a moment, I wanna delve a little bit into what’s led you to this position. But just to start things off, what do you define as thought leadership?

Well, when I first heard and saw the term Anthony, it was very intriguing to me because I took it literally. It’s about leading thought and I was thinking, well, that fits me perfectly.

Having a background in neurolinguistic programming or NLP, which is all about leading thought to specific places, uh, systems thinking, which is, um, often has to do with leading thought to new places, different perspectives. Um, so I was surprised to learn that the most common perception. Was a thought leader is someone who has a large social media presence and is known for their expertise.

So I went about bringing it more to the definition I thought it had as list lead thinking, and that means, um, it’s a little tricky because then we’re thinking about thinking. Which, which is a bit meta. Yeah. Um, but it becomes actually understandable and it lends a lot of power to the process when you realize that you are building blocks by which you can understand the thinking of an audience or market segment.

Um, both in terms of how a competitors position their. Competitive products or services and pitch ’em to the public. And in terms of how the public perceives that segment. And it’s interesting when those things don’t match up that provides opportunities.

Yeah, absolutely. It does, doesn’t it? It that’s the, that’s the, uh, intriguing thing about it is that, uh, without.

Thinking about the thinking, then you just keep going along as is standard and mm-hmm. Also, you don’t give an opportunity to yourself, to yourself to put it out there. I think that’s one of the critical things about being a thought leader, uh, to me, is that if you are, if you have the thoughts, but you don’t share them with anyone, then are you really a thought leader?

Absolutely. I mean, you have to share ’em and you have to know both, uh, what I call baseline audience thinking. What are the standard mental models or belief systems about your category that, that people tend to hold? And sometimes it’s so fundamental to the perception. It’s like asking a fish what’s slaughter like?

Hmm. People just live within their assumptions and when they become deep and widespread, they don’t even notice ’em anymore. This just how the world is. But when you learn to uproot and question the assumptions behind a field, you, in every case that I’ve found so far, they’re not fully functional. Just, it’s how human thinking works.

It’s how language works. You know, we connect things. And then maybe through generations, maybe through a few product cycles, we accept this is the way of doing things and we don’t question it anymore, but the world changes. So our models grow stale. So I see it as a necessary component of innovation. Yeah.

For, and, and you know, Peter Drucker said there’s only two things that create results in business marketing. I. And innovation. And to me, strategic thought leadership is where they meet because it’s innovation in marketing, it’s innovation in messaging, uh, and even if you have a really powerful innovation in a product or service category, something that delivers much more benefit, it’s easy to just anticipate that the public will automatically appreciate it.

But in almost every case, you need to bring the public up to speed and get them to embrace it by leading them to a better way of perceiving your category so they can fully appreciate your innovation. And it’s extremely effective when it is designed from the point of view of the recipient. That’s kind of the magic of it, and that’s what we miss in business.

You know, one of my. Um, favorite gurus in marketing’s Jay Abraham, and he said something that impacted me powerfully. I picked up many years ago, and I said, in almost every business, the business person falls in love with his or her product or service or business or company, when really you should fall in love with the customer in the market segment.

Uh, and I was influenced largely, um, by a methodology called the Vanguard Method out of the uk, and it’s a systems thinking based consulting program developed by gentleman I’ve become friends with named John Seton’s. Brilliant man. Written a number of books on it and, and they go into businesses and they create breakthroughs.

They will reduce expenses by 30 or 40% and increase profits by 30 or 40% in a matter of months, and it’s How do they do that? Well, one way they do it, one essential part of it is they take the leaders of the business to the point of contact with the customer. And study the transaction point. And John told me recently that almost every business person initially goes to the front lines and they wanna study their employee.

He’s like, no, we’re here to study the customer. I. What’s the purpose of your business in customer terms, not your lingo, and then how many ways does your business, your business’s mental models, your ways of doing things create friction for the customer getting what they want? And it changes minds because they see it.

And you know, my innovation in this was to take it to marketing and ask if we consider all of our media part of the business. What if we went and studied it from the customer point of view to remove friction as well, because then you’re asking the question, what do people want in their pre-purchase research?

What do they want to learn? What empowerment do they need to feel like they’re making a smart decision? Or how can we help them extract more of what’s important to them? More value in our category by leading them to better ways of using it, better ways of perceiving it, smarter ways of making decision, elevating it to new and higher purposes.

And what this does is it makes our content way more magnetic because it’s so empowering and it’s so customer focused. And it’s about giving, not giving, but you know, by giving. We earn their attention. By earning their attention. We earn their purchases when they’re ready.

It’s so powerful what you’ve just said, and it really speaks to the heart of marketing, because too often the businesses that you’re doing marketing for, and as someone who’s, you know, done a lot of marketing over the years, that too often the business leaders.

Fall back on what they want, what they like, rather than what actually suits the clients. And it is a big area where things go wrong. I mean, even I, I think I’ve used this example before, perhaps on the podcast, but you know, I recall doing a branding exercise with, uh, a particular organization and. This is just an example of where it goes astray.

And we did all of the research came up with the colors, everything that suited the audience. And one particular manager said, no, I like everything in fluorescent pink. And just went ahead and did everything in fluorescent pink because that was her favorite color. And it was like, but you are not the audience.

You know, it’s not about what you like, it is about what resonates with your audience and doesn’t mean matter whether it’s you’re talking about color or content or any number of other things. It is ha, your audience has to be first. I. And mm-hmm. Too often businesses I think lose sight of that very simple idea that that’s the reason they exist is because of their audience.

Not just because they thought this would be a good idea and want to thrust it on people. The audience has to think that it’s a great idea.

Absolutely. And you know, it’s our job in doing strategic thought leadership. If we’re offering something that truly benefits people better than the current choices, to help them perceive why and perceive how to get that benefit from it.

And you know, in almost every category there is value left on the table. That customers could extract and businesses could benefit from because customers aren’t getting as much value as they could with leadership. Here’s how you use it. Here’s something you didn’t think of. You know, here’s, here’s a ca, here’s a way it fits into your life you probably didn’t imagine before.

That can help you at a higher level. Uh, you were thinking it was for this purpose, but actually if you use it for this other purpose, it’ll solve problems you didn’t even consider connecting to this category. And those are the kind of eye-opening kind of statements when you back them up with fully built out models that are truly empowering.

It also solves a problem for us as business people because it gives a coherence and a sense of purpose and a sense of organization to the content that we create. It makes it much easier. We have a plan. It’s well organized around customer thinking and what I’ve seen that, that prevents that, um, we were talking about earlier about, you know, standard thinking.

This is how it’s always been done.

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and what I’ve seen that, that prevents that, um, we were talking about earlier about, you know, standard thinking. This is how it’s always been done, but there’s also social media, which has a lot of. Positive benefits. Absolutely. Um, but when you start following all the thought leaders in your category, everybody starts sounding alike.

And, and I encourage clients to step away enough to gather information from fresh sources and analyze it in different ways. We call it audience attunement, to discover unmet values in a category and stale mental models that are ripe for improvement. And we create these graphs like um, XY graphs of the market, landscape of value satisfaction and, and all the current offerings in the category.

And then visually you see a gap. Oh wow. Nobody has led them to connect it this way. There’s an opportunity for thought leadership. And to me that’s the beauty of this way of thinking is when you learn to see the world in terms of assumptions, mental models and values, marketplaces, that way there’s an abundance of opportunity everywhere you look.

I. Because human thinking is, uh, faulty by default because of the, um, problems with language. Language doesn’t capture reality fully, but it’s our way that our filters through which we see reality. We don’t operate on the world directly. We operate on our maps of the world or models of the world that we create largely with language, which is, you know, a problem in humankind.

And it’s a great opportunity for us as strategic thought leaders.

It’s so much to unpack in everything you’ve said, but I I, I want to pick you up on two things.

Okay.

The idea, and, and it goes back to the definition. The really interesting thing is, is you’ve, I. I talked quite a lot about being an original thinker.

Mm-hmm. And there’s two parts to thought leadership and the one part is, is having the courage to think differently. Yes. And put it out there, which goes hand in hand with the second part of the equation, which is your ability to actually lead. And to me there’s a bit of a, um. I, I, I guess it’s a, I don’t know whether it’s a peer pressure or it’s, there, there seems to be a, a, um, communal pressure to repress both of those ideas because people want to fall back to what’s always been done or what everybody else is doing.

So even those people, as you say, that are trying. To have, uh, new thoughts are often restricted by what they’ve already learned and seen and a need to, uh, fall back to somebody else and which p. Parks into that second idea of do they have the courage to actually lead, to actually put themselves out there and tell people about it and be seen as the new leader?

Because there’s always this whole idea of do we, um, are we worthwhile or not? And so I’m, I’m interested in what and what you and what your take on both of those concepts are and piecing it all together as a thought leader and what it truly means.

That’s a fantastic set of questions, and there’s a few questions in there, but let’s see if I can cover all that territory.

What you said is part of the reason that I use a coaching and consulting model. Training model as well as opposed to an agency model is what I found was doing marketing through an agency model worked extremely well for certain businesses, but a lot of business owners would see it is down the hierarchy, you know, and, and, uh, someone the just delegate to here’s some money, go get us some leads.

When to do strategic thought leadership. You have to engage the thinking of the leadership. ’cause really gotta come from them. And my job is to help pull it out of them. But that means it’s not just the external thought leadership of the campaign and the organization of the thinking and the components, the building blocks of it that we create, like the, the backstory report and defining thought leadership positions a certain way, understanding audience thinking a certain way.

Um. You know, creating what we call position papers, which are kind of the internal manifesta manifestos. There’s our position, here’s what people think, now here’s you wanna lead them to, here’s a library of talking points that undermines the old thinking and supports a new thinking. That’s external thought leadership.

Then all the media we create from that, and it might live in a form of a manifesto, in a themed podcast or a book or ebook. Um, and, and there’s lots of ways to do that. Then there’s internal strategic thought leadership, and I see it as an authentic path to self-mastery, because if you are going to commit to leadership, that requires stretching yourself, and that’s one thing I love about it, is it calls us to draw upon what I’ve heard called hidden human reserves, the unlimited capacity.

Within every human levels and levels we were, we’re not even aware of that we can tap into if we confidently call upon ourselves to draw resources, to cross the bridge to new territory for a strong enough reason. And that’s why I do a lot of work with values, because if you can elicit a leader’s values then and higher values to me are the ones that unify.

And they’re about service and contribution. And the good news is in entrepreneurship, service and contribution lead to profits ’cause you’re making a difference. When you act in alignment with your values, you’re happy. When your behavior matches your highest values, then you feel good. It’s when we don’t act in accordance with our values.

So to me, that’s a big piece of it. And I approach it like a sports psychologist with an athlete where it’s not like counseling psychology where we wanna relive a troubled childhood and analyze these things. Now this is about performance psychology. How do we model the characteristics of peak performers and integrate those?

Of being able to step into the zone automatically when we need to, to be able to call upon reserves of high level confidence, how to get into the zone of focus, a cocoon of concentration, and, and these are skills, mental skills that I think are all the more important in this day of distraction through devices and apps that are designed to consume our attention and keep us engaged.

So these. Companies can sell ads by keeping us on their app for longer and things like that. But it creates a, a real attention economy that if you can manage your attention and manage your focus and manage your state and step into that confident self, then you can use this as a path to self evolution as well as to making a difference in making a lot of profits in the marketplace.

Yeah. Does that answer

your question?

It it, it, it does, it definitely does. And I think, um, it, it, it’s, to me, the, one of the keys in thought leadership is that recognition of the fact that we all process things differently. We make sense of things differently. Mm-hmm. What tends to happen is. That people are afraid to speak up and to have those different thoughts.

I, I, I recall learning this many years ago when I was involved in, in, uh, with a company that does market research. Mm-hmm. And one of the first things I observed and, uh, of the, when you do market research in a group environment, is that they’ll always be a leader. Suddenly, and whatever anyone says, they’ll start nodding their head and saying, yes, that’s what I was going to say.

And, and you find that Uhhuh, any kind of, um, any kind of environment where you do that, I mean, you know, if, if anyone listening out there, if you think about it in a work environment, in a family environment, how often do you say something or someone says something and then you, you sort of notice around the room that people say, oh yes, that’s what I was going to say.

The question is, were they really going to say that? Were they really going to say that in that way? It’s very interesting in market research that before you actually get in a group environment, people to, uh, to discuss a particular topic, whatever it is they’re looking at, to get them to write it down on a bit of paper first and to find out what their original thoughts are.

Because we are so influenced by those people around us and our, and our desire to comply. And that’s what suppresses thought leadership. And you spoke about innovation earlier on. What fascinates me about innovation is most people attach innovation to, uh, technology. And that innovation mm-hmm. Has to be based on some new piece of tech that is doing something.

But in fact, innovation is very much about what is human nature. Mm-hmm. In the way that we have original ways that we think about things and make sense of anything that we observe. It’s not necessarily the same as the next person. And it’s not about being right or wrong, it’s about being different. That then allows you to have different original thoughts in other areas.

Absolutely. And thoughts worth sharing of others. You know, and I, I mentioned values and this, understanding the values of your audience and your market segment that the attach to your category. You know, it’s people like to go see a band play, you know, it’s fun. Would be a value. For instance, you know, people buy the latest technology, maybe competitiveness is a value.

People that are paying to learn a skill might be achievement. You know, everybody’s a little different in values, but usually there’s prominent values and when you can find, there’s areas that your segment doesn’t quite satisfy because. Of their, the outdated thinking of the segment. Well, there’s your opportunity.

I’m such a contrarian thinker. I’ve never had that issue because I’ve always been one to see the need for something different. Um, but I, I have seen it in others, um, where there’s a pull towards the familiar, strongest human desire according to gsam, um, is the pull to the familiar. So I relate this kind of, um, boldness in leadership, you know, both to managing your state, if you can get yourself in the right state of confident daringness, you know, and we’re not asking people to give up everything and start all over in a new field.

Not that kind of daringness, but the daringness in breaking patterns. It’s the most important human attribute in business is creativity. According to Success Magazine and Eat Magazine, they both had cover stories on that, especially in this day of artificial intelligence. I. Where repetitive things and things that depend on organizing past knowledge in this knowledge economy can be done now very effectively by ai, much faster than humans.

But what AI doesn’t have is the ability to access the creative state to make a break from the past. And that’s why I, um, sometimes describe creativity is how different your behavior is from what AI could predict. Even given all the data on your past behavior, how different is it? How creative is it? And then you run into the belief systems that inhibit creativity.

Oh, I’m not creative because my second grade music teacher told me I wasn’t creative. Because people think of creativity is just, if you’re a painter, a musician, then you’re a creative. Hmm, but doesn’t creativity apply to every human endeavor? It’s, it’s your ability to see outside of patterns and to access that creative state, and which means, um, and, and the work I do, I, I try to encourage clients to make things really efficient with ai, where they can, where it doesn’t inhibit creating fantastic products and services, but to free up time to reflect.

You know, people often access creativity when they’re moving, like walking a dog, like that’s when I get my ideas. So I use an app called Rev where I can wear decent quality earbuds and record my ideas on the fly. But then I’ll use AI to help me organize those ideas. I. They’re the creative ideas and use the AI for the organization.

So it’s creating these workflows where you had create space for creativity, but then you kind of create a production line where you then organize that creativity into models and chunk it into action steps and bring it to life. You know? So I see it like an assembly line, but, but I think when people remember that there’s been times in really everyone’s life where they’ve been.

A bold leader where they’ve had to act boldly in the moment, maybe to step in to save a child from walking in the road in front of a car, you know? Or, or maybe, um, when they came up with an idea out of the blue that worked and they just trusted that would work. But what we aren’t always good at is recognizing how many of these.

Uh, peak experiences of creativity and creative leadership we’ve got in our personal history that we can grab a hold of, grab a hold of that feeling and bring it more fully to life and apply it on a regular basis to make life better for ourselves and for our customers and our families and those around us.

You know, and to me that’s living life belongs to the creative. You know, it’s, if you’re creative, you’re close to life. Now musicians tend to be pretty happy people because they’re close to life. They’re always in the creative mode, you know? But we can bring that to business too, and we should,

it’s fascinating when you talk about, uh, musicians, uh, artists, and even comedians.

I. You hear them talking or see them demonstrating through music, through artworks, all of these things that have happened to them. And you think, why do all these things happen to these people? And nothing happens to us, but in fact it is happening to us. We are just not being observant of it and not providing an outlet to push it out there.

And I think that is a, a huge thing that increasingly we have to learn from. The creative arts field because if in an age where AI is being used more and more to stand out, you actually need to embrace that creative energy.

Absolutely. Uh, it’s a strategic asset the way I see it, and in, in teams and organizations.

It’s finding space for people to go into that creative mode, giving permission. I. To come up with outlandish ideas. The more outlandish, the better, because we don’t wanna put limits on that stage of the creative process. I think Walt Disney had it right? Not the company, the man he, he was famed for combining creativity and business acumen together.

Forget the starving artist, you know, archetype. You know, he was this very successful business person who’s also extremely creative. I. And his creative process that he ended up calling Imagineering involved three separate rooms. One was for the dreamer, where he’d go in and dream up futures with no limits visual process.

Uh, another one was the realist, where he’d take those dreams and break them down into steps. So that first step has a high probability of success, and his animators actually. In that room of the realist created storyboarding by taking the cartoons and breaking them into scenes and putting them on a wall so that you could see each chunk of the journey.

Mm-hmm. That’s where storyboarding came from, but that’s a kinesthetic piece where you take the visual dream or break it into action steps that you can do. And then the third room was the critic was, which is an auditory strategy where you’re thinking, what’s the criteria for this? Market category, what are the things we want in this and how does our product compare to that?

Does it match up here, here, here, and here? Um, and then in, in Disney’s model, it was somebody viewing the movie from a critic’s perspective and critiquing it. Whatever the critic came up with, then they would take that and bring it to the dream room. So Disney’s innovation was in separating these states so each could unfold completely without being contaminated by the other.

And that’s where people mess up as they try to do all the states at once. Instead of taking time to go as deeply into the creative state and not have it tied so tightly to the production state, for instance, and, and like Disney, create a workflow out of the different states that you bring your dreams to life.

It is, it’s so interesting because, uh, you know, I’ve worked with a number of businesses and organizations over the years, and when you go into them and you pull people out and you offer them a rare opportunity for them to be creative, and where you say nothing, there’s no such thing as a bad idea here.

Let’s throw them all out there and see mm-hmm. Where it goes. It’s such, um, it’s such a rare thing that happens in, in an organization and it’s amazing what can start getting into the flow and how rejuvenated people can feel. I. Then you have to take them through that, you know, that real exercise later on to say, well, what’s realistic?

What, what is going to work within the bounds of which, you know, it might be budget, it might be the structure of the organization. There are any number of things which bring it back down, which doesn’t mean that, that you can’t work towards that bigger idea because now you’ve got an idea of, of. Of where you could go.

And I think that is something that businesses very rarely do, take themselves out of it, allow that freedom to. Generate new ideas and to see where that could take the business. And yet that is exactly how businesses thrive in an environment where we all have competitors, where there’s always someone doing something very similar to what you are doing.

So you have to be out there and trying something new. Otherwise you just fall back into the. Into the main populace.

Absolutely. Even if you are competitive now, if you are not innovating in reinventing yourself or your company’s category in some way, shape or form, your competitor will do it or the marketplace will shift somewhere else.

So, so I see it as necessary. It’s competitive advantage and it’s competitive necessity in this kind of fast changing world to unleash the human spirit. And untether it. Um, not all the time, but enough to create a critical mass of fresh ideas that are untethered from the constrictions of limiting belief systems from limiting mental models, which is to be is also the beauty of strategic thought leadership.

We’re helping people loosen the hold of limiting mental models or limiting beliefs about a category and what is for. And your stories, you know, I’ve got stories of those. Um, I dunno how much time we have, but, uh, sometimes it helps to bring it to ground with the real life example because we’re talking a lot of concepts here, obviously.

Hmm.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, I think it is important to to bring that, to bring that back because you’re right, we have talked, we have talked very much to the thought space of all of this and encouraging people to lead and hence the thought leadership. But yes, there is a need to understand how does this actually play out.

For a business in, in reality because, um mm-hmm. You know, we, it, it, it’s it. I often use this example in the past where I said, it’s all right to have this idea that I’m going to fly to the moon and land on the moon. But if you have no ability to become an astronaut or build a rocket ship, what’s the point of, of talking about walking on the moon?

So you, you need to have a way of being able to work out that pathway because thought leadership isn’t just about the end concept, it’s about how you get there.

Absolutely. And, and you build bridges and, and again, it’s just so, so much could be done just by identifying and freeing people from limiting concepts.

And concepts are limiting by nature. You know, it’s the nature of language. If something’s this, it’s not that. So by definition it breaks things into two. There’s a company that does youth sports fundraising that I consulted for, and the created an app to help kids, sports teams raise money. And it was a very crowded field.

And, and here in the US there’s companies like high praise that have a lot of market share and you know, but millions and millions of dollars and, and funding kid sports teams. And the general mental model of this whole category was he used to do baked seals, used to have to do car washes to raise money for your soccer team, uh, or your hockey team or whatever team.

And now you have an app. So we did our market listening research and we found natural conversations where people speak openly online, thus places like Reddit or in the, um, comments threads of a polarizing block. ’cause you can find gold there. ’cause if a blog divides people around a topic, if someone feels like their beliefs and values are being stepped on, you can be sure they will tell you what they are.

If you know how to see between the lines. Well, what we found out with the coaches and parents, the people who made the decisions weren’t saying, oh, glory, these things make it easy. They’re saying, what the hell is that? Teaching the kids, we used to have to work to raise money. I walked uphill to and from school, and now we just give ’em an app to click a button and raise money.

Aren’t they entitled enough already? So I went to the owner and said, David, every competitor. Is preaching convenience. Your app is just as convenient as theirs, but the real unmet value is growth for the kids. So we created a model of partnering with nonprofits, with charities. So the kids’ sports team would co-promote a charity’s message and they would share a small percentage of the money they raised, maybe 5%, or do volunteer work if they couldn’t afford to do that.

And this elevated the whole business dramatically. He got front page sports section exposure in major newspapers. He got an exclusive deal with a large sporting goods chain to be the only provider he. Constantly according to him, getting regular emails and messages of sorts, saying things like, we’ve been looking to get the kids involved in the community.

We never thought about doing it through the sports fundraising. We’re only going to use you from here on out. That message cut through the clutter like a knife through warm butter. I wasn’t trying to make a rhyme, but I’ll take it this time. Sure. Um, and, and it was just a, but it just, when you, when you find that, it’s almost like, how did everyone miss that?

Because they’re looking through tunnel vision, you know, of technology entrance by technology, because sometimes technology brings benefits, but sometimes it doesn’t or has benefits, but has drawbacks. And if you can recognize a drawback and solve it, hey, you’ve got an innovation that’s gonna work. If you can convey it the right way.

Now, this is a beautiful model because it got the PR teams, the email campaigns, the social media campaigns, the PR campaigns of these nonprofits saying thank you to the teams. Raising awareness of the campaigns made it easier for the kids to ask for money. ’cause now it’s not just help me buy my, my football suit, it’s, oh, we’re also raising money.

For this nonprofit that helps, um, treat kids’ cancer or looking for a cure for this disease, that there’s no cure for that. We have somebody locally who’s very prominent, who has that, I mean, really powerful, you know, messages that, that bring people together. It’s about contribution and making a difference for those in need.

Uh, and so there’s an example of a simple thought leadership position. It’s not about the convenience. Ours is convenient too. It’s about the growth for the kids and talking points in support of that campaign became the basis of the marketing that took a startup and gave them prominence and a foothold in a marketplace that had been very difficult competing head on with large national competitors like that.

So there’s a for instance story of how powerful that can be. I.

Such a, such a great example and very powerful. Um, we could talk for many hours still on all of this topic, but I did want to ask you a couple of other questions. Mm-hmm. Um, one of them is just briefly because you and I spoke, uh, prior to the podcast and I wanted to give this across to the audience.

Just give me very quickly your backstory on how you came to be in this space.

Well, I was doing strategic thought leadership without having that name for it or knowing to call it anything. Um, by being a contrarian in the fitness business for a long time where I was 20 years old, I was managing several big box large health clubs, which I love the fitness part.

You know, it’s helping people, but I hated the business model. It was, sign up as many people as you can and hope half of ’em don’t show up. So we can sell more memberships that they have to pay, whether they show up or not. So I developed a model based around solving that problem and solving the problem of yo-yo dieting with a lifestyle management approach in structured exercise with a trainer in small studios.

So it’s more expensive than a traditional health club. It’s pretty reasonable ’cause we could organize the studios for effective 30 minute workouts. It’s 30 minutes of the trainer’s time. Also made it easier to stick with the workout because you’re not. Working hard for an hour at a time, and that grew to a chain of one-on-one fitness training studios.

I sold some years back and then I won some innovation awards for software I wrote to support all that. It turned it into a, a game of tracking progress visually and competing with others with a point system, uh, called Fit Point, um, that led to. Doing software for a very large food service company for wellness, for their employees.

At would point, I sold the studios because I’m a musician, I want time to play music. That kind of business didn’t give it to me.

Mm-hmm.

Um, but the software I wrote morphed into marketing software, like full panel integration of search engine optimization, website management, and email marketing and all the things we do.

Um, and I wrote custom software for that. And found a, a niche in five to 50 million a year companies, and that’s where I discovered the need for strategic thought leadership. So as I mentioned, certain companies would actually have breakthroughs and they would grow by, in one case, over a hundred percent a year, several years in a row.

Another case going from, uh, also ran 10 20% market share to over 50% market share in a, in a very competitive category, becoming the, the strong leader in it. Others, not so much. So I started using this, um, modeling methods from N LP or neurolinguistic programming, which is a way of modeling excellence to discover the difference.

And the difference was the companies that had breakthroughs, the leadership saw themselves. Is leading marketplace thinking, is teaching their marketplace how to perceive their category. And so that taught me two things. That’s the way to do it. Lead the marketplace to how to perceive your category.

Otherwise, you’re gonna be a commodity and just able to compete on price. But if you can set the game. If you can not just be a player in the game, but the game designer and create the game rules for the benefit of the customer, you can be the leader in market share in terms of sales, as well as thinking.

Um, the other thing it taught me was that I. The consulting and coaching role is necessary to do that because you have to have a relationship of equals with the leadership of the company. Because my role became working with them, help them extract that thinking and to study marketplace thinking and to work through models of here’s the marketplace thinking, here’s our innovative ideas.

How do we create a path? How do we turn our ideas into a model that is. Meaningful to our customer and can help them get more value or make smarter decisions or upgrade the use of what we sell to a whole other set of values. Uh, and that coach consulting, relationship communication flows the. Other type of relationship, more the agency relationship in, in many cases, not every case.

’cause obviously you’re companies that work really well with, but in many cases you would just see it as something to delegate down a hierarchy to. And the problem with hierarchical business relationships is that communication doesn’t flow up and down a hierarchy very well. You know, it’s like, oh, we know what we’re doing, just go sell the stuff, you know?

But I’m like, well, it’s your thinking that’s gonna lead the marketplace. We need to help organize it. This role is perfect for that because I work directly with leadership, um, and, you know, have designers and um, web people, writers. Uh, we can draw upon whatever resources are needed, but in a lot of cases I like to not have those as part of my organization, but really strong talent that I’ve cultivated I can draw upon because in a lot of cases, the organization will have the resources in their company that can do these things.

They just haven’t organized around that. And say you got people in your company that can do these things. And I think a lot of executives now are realizing that customers are expecting company leadership to be visible. And uh, there’s a guy named Carl Feldman who I met who was on my Thought Leadership Studio podcast promoting a book he co-authored called The Visible Expert Revolution.

I thought that said it well. And another guest said, um. Not doing that can be called hiding behind the logo. So they expect us to be out there for, for business leaders, you know, and communicating directly with our audience about why we’re in business, what we wanna do for them, what our vision for them is, our vision for the marketplace, and having a relationship with them as a result of that, you know?

So that I think has been a convergence of factors that has made this the time for strategic thought leadership.

You, you’re spot on there. Uh, it is absolutely the time. In fact, I think it, I personally, I think that whilst many people are talking about the AI revolution, I actually think the real revolution is around thought leadership and mm-hmm.

Um, the, the creative thinking and the opportunities that will present itself because the standard tasks can be done by. Automation and overseeing that automation and those things that will will exist there, but where we’ve got a real opportunity to really take the world to new and exciting places.

Excuse me, is by encouraging creative thought leadership and, um,

absolutely.

And, and, uh, just finally, um, I should tell everyone that as you’ve mentioned, you’ve got a podcast and we’ll include the links to the podcast, uh, there in the show notes. But also you have a book coming out, uh, that’s right.

Unthought Leadership for for Market, uh, for marketing. Um, so just, uh, just give us quickly on what that is, uh, all about.

The book is called Strategic Thought Leadership. And if you’re listening to this, um, it may or may not have come out by the time you’re listening to this, but you can, if not, get a free preview@strategicthoughtleadership.com.

And um, I have a free ebook that’s a much condensed version of that called The Marketer Guide to Strategic Thought Leadership. And if you just. Google Marketers guide strategic thought leadership. It’ll take you to it, and that’s a free ebook. Anyone can get instantly it. It’ll show you the building blocks, you know, because we talk about creativity, but I think you have to anchor that creativity to what’s real too.

And so working with the system where you’ve got building blocks to help organize your creativity around market, influence it, it grounds it in reality in a way we can use it to get traction and make a difference. In achieving our business goals more effectively and with less work.

Fantastic. And look, we, we will definitely include those, uh, links in the show notes as well for everyone.

And just to wrap things up, a question I like to ask, or my guests is, what is the at heart moment that people have when they come to work with you that you wish more people knew they were going to have?

What are the aha moments people have when they come to work with me? That people would want more of? Is that the question? Am I understanding it right?

Yes.

You know, the best aha moments to me that I see in clients are when they realize they are the creator of their experience and in large measure their creator of their category.

Even if they see themselves as a small player, they’re co-creating, you know? Um, Peter Drucker, great management writer and and theorist, said that a business is an organ of society and we’re all connected to each other and through our economy in how we, we trade products and services. So never underestimate how much influence you have and revere that.

And when I see people have that aha moment that. I am making a difference on this. It feels good to watch people waking up to more of their own potential.

I love that. Well, let’s hope we can. I’ve unlocked some of that in, uh, in this episode of the podcast. Uh, Chris, thank you so much for being an amazing guest.

We’ve delved deep into thought leadership and, and, uh, I would encourage anyone that is, uh, listening in and enjoyed this conversation to not only. Follow up on Krista’s, various links that we’ll include in the show notes, but also to give us some feedback because I think thought leadership is what you and I talk a lot about and, uh, why we have the things that we have out there.

Uh, we have different ways of encouraging people to, uh, to get their thought leadership out there. And, uh, I, I encourage people to be strong to follow, uh, the opportunities that you have. To think differently and to put it out there so you become a leader. So Chris, thank you for being part of the program.

Thank you so much, Anthony. I greatly appreciate you and your taking your time to interview me

and to everyone listening in. Of course, don’t forget to subscribe. And, uh, stay tuned for the next episode of Biz Bytes for Thought Leaders. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bytes. We hope you enjoyed the program.

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