On Types of Thought Leadership

I’m working on a theory (theories?) for The Ineffable Concept of Thought Leadership™ (that phrase coming to a T-shirt near you…)

There are different… levels of it.

In reverse order of usefulness:

✅ PERFORMATIVE: This is content that doesn’t provide any actual value. Rather, it’s intended to accumulate followers or attention. The person who generates this content (I refuse to use the word “creates”) is not interested in changing anyone’s mind (much less changing the industry or the world), they just want to be perceived as someone who could. They post lots of pithy bromides about business and life that they often copied from somewhere else. This is personal brand building.

✅ THEORETICAL: This is content that examines topics from a unique angle, expands a frame of reference, or links together some practices or disciplines. The person who produces this has significant depth of knowledge and experience in their industry. This is filtering, analyzing, and synthesizing an aggregate body of work done over a long period of time.

✅ EXPERIENTIAL: This is content about things someone actually did. These are tutorials, case studies, experiments, post-mortems – some of which were successes, and some of which were not. It’s lived experience, and often involves mistakes and dead-ends. This is actual data and lessons from a specific, bounded unit of work.

Clearly, I’m pretty dismissive of that first category. I know a lot of these people (so do you). They have not done the work.

As for me, I’m hoping I straddle the second two categories. I’m more heavily weighted on the second, but so are most people, because these three levels really correlate to how hard the content is to generate –

To make some pithy, inspiration quote (Level 1) takes zero effort. Copy and paste. For longer “life lesson” posts, there are PR firms (and AI) that will write them for you. Anyone can do this – buy a premium LinkedIn membership, hire a PR company, and call yourself a “thought leader,” I guess.

(Consider: if you have to tell people you’re a “thought leader,” then… are you?)

To create something deeper and more theoretical (Level 2) requires expansive knowledge and experience of your industry, and the perspective to thread disparate bits of information and theory together. Fewer people can do this.

To write something experiential (Level 3), you have to actually DO THE WORK. And you have to do it enough that you observe something most other people don’t. This involves some amount of professional rigor. Even fewer people can do this.

In professional circles – and on LinkedIn especially – I feel like not enough people want to actually do the work. They just want to talk about it.

So, is that the key to thought leadership? …uniqueness? …scarcity? True thought leadership is scare. It’s rare.

And it’s rare because you have to have a body of work from which it naturally springs forth.

There’s no way to fake that body of work. You just have to do it.