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.
I resist many things, not for the sake of contrarianism but in order to carry out my values. I see resistance as inherent to exercising love and compassion in a compromised world.
In the context of my work, I resist what I see as the “content-industrial complex,” a factory-farming approach to writing and meaning that exists to harvest and exploit attention. I do this because I value the exchange of meaning and human dignity. I love words and I love people. I love ideas.
So, why practice any of those values within the field of marketing? Why promote “thought leadership”? It’s because I believe the tension of resistance energizes a more robust writing practice. Resisting the exploitative nature of content marketing can lead to more genuine thought leadership and trust-building. Resistance is fertile.
Resistance and Respect
Here’s what resistance means in my day-to-day work supporting financial institutions and fintechs. My fundamental belief in human dignity means that I have both intellectual and emotional empathy for what it means to make a high-stakes decision.
In institutional finance, prospects and clients are decision-makers who will ultimately take action by buying a service. The stakes are billions or, in some cases, trillions of dollars in assets. People put their careers and reputations on the line. The implications can affect investors, disrupt projects, or even damage economies.
Providing insights that explain or reframe industry challenges supports such high-stakes decisions because these decisions are inherently information-intensive. Clarifying issues, exploring root causes, and proposing innovations helps decision-makers make sense of complex financial, technical, and human interdependencies.
At the same time, thought leaders benefit by providing such insights to prospects. Providing essential insights to clarify complex issues rather than overwhelm or manipulate recognizes the weight of these decisions. Unlike the extractive approach to attention that many people associate with marketing, thought leadership builds brands by creating trust. The trust is predicated on respecting the seriousness of decisions that the intended audience needs to make. Unlike tricks aimed at short-term attention, thought leadership built on trust leads to deeper relationships with lasting results.
Influence with Trust
What’s the difference between trick and trust, and why does it matter? A few client examples may help clarify.
One client became the go-to source for almost any journalism covering growth and trends in her industry as a result of the consistent quality of her thought leadership. New research releases are now considered newsworthy events, covered in feature stories by major global financial news outlets. She is also at the top of the guest list for industry events and input to internal strategy sessions for top industry players.
One client published a series of articles on critical financial, technology, and regulatory trends. The team received an invitation from regulators to participate in an industry working group for consultation on the potential impacts of planned regulations and the balance between various stakeholder needs in a safe and controlled financial environment.
One client changed the tenor of prospect conversations held at industry events by sharing thought leadership on relevant topics. Prospects came to meetings primed with insightful questions and a higher likelihood of progressing or closing new business. They also perceived the client as a provider of meaningful and relevant solutions to long-standing industry challenges.
One client transformed its reputation from sleepy to leading-edge as a result of a thought leadership strategy designed to publish perspectives on emerging asset classes and transactional trends. They evolved from being a reliable service provider in traditional finance to driving industry change and transformation by mainstreaming activity seen as risky and edgy.
Think Like an Ecologist
Industries are ecosystems of direct and indirect stakeholders. Targeting them as individuals doesn’t work—not as well as thinking and acting as a thought leader and carrying our holistic thought leadership programs. Part of the discipline of thought leadership entails understanding and working within those ecosystems. Thought leaders participate inside those ecosystems rather than coming at them from the outside.
There is another ecological dimension as well. Marketers have a choice between extractive and sustainable approaches to human attention. Marketing is more than a set of tactics. It’s an ethos. That’s why I resist.
It matters in a more existential sense as well. Most of us (working in knowledge work, living online to some degree, participating in advanced capitalist economies) live in a world always inflected by the media surrounding us. Marketing fuels and funds most media.
Because of the ubiquity of marketing—some researchers believe we see thousands of marketing messages daily—we live in a pervasive stream of media and mediatized moments. We have a choice between complicitly embracing the factory-farming mindset by feeding people extractive junk and waste or adopting a resistant mindset and committing to something better.
The Path of Increased Resistance
Adopting a resistant mindset requires consciously breaking away from established norms.
Fertile resistance begins with reluctance, noticing something that feels wrong. It creates an ethical hesitation. Then, we increase resistance on the path to recovery by doing better. We work outside the norms and imperatives of the content-industrial complex and push back on empty concepts such as “content.”
From there, we enter a mode of relationships that build reciprocity. We think of our audience as a “you,” not an “it.” And never as a target.
As we engage, we grow together, supporting high-stakes decisions, resolving long-standing challenges or inefficiencies, and driving innovation.
Three Grace Notes
“I began to wonder if my culture’s assumptions regarding the lack of awareness in other animals, and in the land itself, was less a product of careful and judicious reasoning than of a strange inability to clearly perceive other animals—a real inability to clearly see or focus upon anything outside the realm of human technology, or to hear as meaningful anything other than human speech. The sad results of our interactions with the rest of nature were being reported in every newspaper—from the depletion of topsoil due to industrial farming techniques to the fouling of groundwater by industrial wastes, from the rapid destruction of ancient forests to, worst of all, the ever-accelerating extinction of our fellow species—and these were markable and disturbing occurrences, all readily traceable to the ongoing activity of ‘civilized’ humankind, did indeed suggest the possibility that there was a perceptual problem in my culture, that modern ‘civilized’ humanity simply did not perceive surrounding nature in a clear manner, if we have even been perceiving it at all.” —David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
“True community does not come into being because people have feelings for each other (though that is required, too), but rather on two accounts: all of them have to stand in a living, reciprocal relationship to a single living center, and they have to stand in a living, reciprocal relationship to one another. The second event has its source in the first but is not immediately given.” —Martin Buber, I and Thou
“Complexity comforts us, revealing, unequivocally, unavoidably, that however separate and alone we might feel, each one of us is—in each and every single moment—a pure expression of the entire living, conscious universe. Nothing separate, nothing left out, but true, pure, and complete, just as we are.” —Neil Theise, Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being
Note: The links above are affiliate links. I’m using them in lieu of paid subscription tiers or digital tip jars. Seems like a much more graceful way to generate financial support while sharing more thinking and writing that can guide thought leadership.
