Thought leadership should be fun, fast, and fearless. You tap into excitement about new ideas and advocate for something better. That’s the mindset behind The Idea Sled. Projects glide forward gracefully. It’s the momentum of commitment. This newsletter shows you how.
Something unexpected happened to me this week. I posted a strong statement on LinkedIn that companies hiring writers should expect those writers to prepare. I said that writers should do the job of simplifying complex ideas rather than asking their paying clients to do it for them.
It seemed uncontroversial, even if I said it boldly by making fun of lazy questions and writing clichés. But several people piled into my comments with outraged reactions—some so toxic that I chose to delete their comments and block them. What could have caused such negativity?
I noticed many people participating in the pile-on were former journalists now working freelance for the corporate world. The pattern made me think of a common situation in our current world. It’s when disciplines collide
Many people train for specialization within specific disciplines. Journalism degrees lead to journalism careers, marketing degrees lead to marketing careers, etc. Even when people go to school for something else, career paths tend to create tracks.
They also create identities. “I’m a journalist at heart,” someone might think. I’m a marketer. I’m an operations leader. I’m an engineer. And so forth.
But collaboration is inherently interdisciplinary. People have to come together to get things done.
Along my own career path, I’ve seen some common points of friction.
Journalism Colliding With Corporate
Marketing and comms teams are full of ex-journalists. It’s not always a voluntary transition. As newsrooms shrink, journalists need somewhere to go. They package their transferrable skills, like reporting and storytelling, and apply them to serve a business.
The transfer can create friction, however. A good journalist serves the public, asks questions to get sources to provide input, and then packages it all up as a story intended to serve the media public. Like it or not, a corporate writer serves their employer or client. They share their thinking, then the writer listens and does the work to translate it into something their audience needs.
When writing thought leadership, that difference in intent means it’s not enough to be a scribe and report what an expert said. Unlike a journalist, a thought leadership writer helps shape the answers. An excellent writer even acts as a thinking partner by helping add nuance and depth, then simplifying the complexity for their clients.
What happens is that ex-journalists sometimes try to bring journalistic principles like independence, objective reporting, and impartiality to a thought leadership project. It doesn’t quite work. A thought leadership writer is accountable to their employer or client’s ideas and messages, not to journalistic abstractions.
Marketing Colliding with the Rest of the Business
Great marketers excel at marketing. But in many financial institutions and fintechs, marketing struggles with credibility. Marketing speaks an entirely different language and thinks with fundamentally different tools.
But in areas like institutional finance or similar deeply technical industries, other stakeholders in the business, such as product leaders, focus on aspects such as market structures, risk, asset classes, and regulation, to name a few. Their topics and language are complex. So are client needs.
These different languages and thinking styles also create friction. Thought leadership projects are especially apt to reveal disconnects because marketers want to distribute subject-matter expertise but struggle to understand it from internal thought leaders. Internal thought leaders struggle to participate because they don’t know what marketers need to know.
In such projects, the team includes either an internal or freelance writer. But that writer is often a generalist (or a journalist) who asks elementary questions, doesn’t know how to get beyond the basics or under the surface, and can’t differentiate insight from common knowledge.
Thought leaders often then feel burned by expending effort on projects that don’t result in substantive material that changes how people in the industry think. They don’t even get a bare minimum of value. It creates a climate of broken dialogue.
Academic Collisions, Part One
I suppose I am especially attuned to these collisions between disciplines because of my own background. I didn’t join the corporate world from journalism but from academia.
Writing a doctoral thesis in the humanities includes understanding as much about a given topic as possible and then adding to existing scholarship. Those aspects are highly transferrable to assimilating the details of a complex asset class or market and helping an expert advance thinking in their niche.
The disciplinary collision occurs because I can also feel too comfortable being open-ended and exploratory. I don’t shy away from theorizing. It’s taken many years of adaptation to use those tendencies with discretion and put them aside when they are no longer helpful. What I don’t do is fly into a rage when anyone suggests that over-theorizing is maladaptive.
Academic Collisions, Part Two
The other source of my attunement to the interdisciplinary comes from the work I did in academia.
I completed a doctorate in French literature. The study of literature already crosses many lines into domains such as history, sociology, politics, and philosophy. Moreover, I did my doctoral research and wrote my thesis on the intersections between nineteenth-century literary works and scientific discourses, especially the natural sciences and medicine.
In practical terms, crossing lines between literature and the sciences meant spending time in dusty corners of multiple libraries and special collections. It also spawned tricky conversations trying to show how different patterns of metaphor, description, and plot replicated the same logic as thinking about microbes and theories about generation before Pasteur.
It was fun stuff. I still find myself reading in multiple genres and areas of study today. I also still find myself crossing lines between corporate functions and switching from topic to topic as I work with various Ideas-Led Growth clients on a broad range of institutional finance topics.
Even within something so specialized, there are many layers and niches. It takes collaboration between different talents to achieve meaningful results.
By the way, I still think the writer owes it to their client 1) to do enough prep to be conversant in the subject matter and 2) to do the work of translating expertise into clear messages and a good story. However others choose to do it, full engagement is my method, and it always will be.
Three Grace Notes
“Capitalism is marked by a contradiction between ideological individualism (the interpellation of individuals as subjects free to follow their unique desires) and the leveling pressures of the market, imposing standardized modes of enjoyment as a condition of the commodification of mass consumption” — Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
“If, of course, one wants to be a publicist for something; if you believe you are a philosopher first and Nietzsche second; if you think the gift of prophesy has been given you; then, by all means, write your bad poems, your insufferable fictions, enjoy the fame that easy ideas often offer, ride the flatulent winds of change, fly like the latest fad to the nearest dead tree; but do not try to count the seasons of your oblivion.” — William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts
“For the first time, we have to defy our own history as a species and create a new, more interdependent civilization that consumes less rather than more energy, but in a way that allows empathy to continue to mature and global consciousness to expand until we have filled the Earth with our compassion and grace rather than our spent energy.” — Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis
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