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.
Conventional wisdoms are insidious. Almost everything that we accept as a conventional wisdom ultimately originates in a brutal lie. Someone, somewhere, made it up as self-serving justification. These justifications are endemic to marketing.
Some Context
People who know me well won’t be particularly surprised by my bleak cynicism. They’ll also see it for the sardonic humor that it is.
If you’re not one of those people, I encourage you to consider these grim ironies to be as funny as they are serious. Use them to shed light on the darknesses that make up the human condition as we live it now. It’s a light—harsh as it is—meant to cut through the darkness.
A Familiar Example
Before getting to marketing and thought leadership, a familiar example might help illustrate the point.
Conventional wisdom says that employees need oversight and pressure to deliver desired results. Where’s the lie? Autonomy and empowerment allow people to have much more impact. The lie underneath the conventional wisdom has what I would call a mythical origin.
One day, a sadistic bully with poor emotional control used a self-serving story about how to extract output from humans to convince others that all they needed to lead was the whip. Once they got away with the lie, conventional wisdom retroactively justified it.
The norm became the truth of the brutal lie. But telling the story illuminates the falsity of the lie. And it creates space for an alternate version of the story.
Thinking Mythically
Of course, this origin story probably didn’t happen in the same way that day-to-day events occur. It’s a myth. But like all myths, it has explanatory value. And also like myths, countless stories and individuals incarnate the myth. It repeats itself time after time. That’s what makes it powerful.
Demand Generation
One conventional wisdom says that the purpose of marketing content is to generate demand and, more specifically, to generate leads. That’s a brutal lie that distorts the purpose of marketing engagement—building trust and, in high-stakes B2B, enabling decision making.
The value of an asset isn’t making someone fill out a form to get it. The value is that it inflects the reader’s decision-making process in a way that strengthens a conversation. It affects a decision maker’s worldview in a way that prepares the ground for a better conversation about buying.
A demand generation view is self-serving to the extent that it excuses marketers from a deep understanding of the decision-making and buying process. One day, a marketer didn’t do the fundamental deep work of understanding how and why decisions occur specifically within their category and among their buyers. To justify themselves, they told the lie that they could “generate demand.” It’s a view of how people buy that is predicated on disrespect.
Long-Format Text
A second conventional wisdom says that “people don’t read.” The inference is that marketing assets should be simplified or only exist in other media. While many studies show changes in overall reading trends, they have nothing to do with high-stakes B2B decision making.
Although there is nothing wrong with having assets of varying degrees of sophistication in multiple media, the lie is in the deception. One day, a team justified failing to produce insightful long-form content in order to disguise the inability to do so effectively. It became a justification never to try again.
In reality, you can be sure that people making high-stakes decisions have every incentive to read. And to do so extensively. In the world of institutional financial services, for example, a potential buyer may be putting the safety of billions of dollars in assets at risk by choosing a particular platform or service provider. The negligence of “not reading” in that scenario would be extraordinary.
Journalistic Approaches
A third conventional wisdom positions journalism as a privileged model for blogs, articles, research, or other types of thought leadership. The source of the underlying lie is easy to trace. As the media industry contracts, ex-journalists make their way into corporate marketing and communications departments.
While brand journalism is a specific exception, when it comes to thought leadership, the tools and tricks of journalism are only a loose analogy for what happens in thought leadership creation. It’s a classic case of the law of the instrument, a cognitive bias where everything looks like a nail when you have a hammer. One day, a journalist transitioned into the corporate world and struggled to adapt their skills to a new context. To justify themselves, they hoodwinked everyone around them into believing that “real” content creation is journalism.
That view is self-serving on several fronts. It justifies failing to re-skill oneself. It also excuses an ex-journalist now writing thought leadership from needing to learn enough about a topic to help push a thought leader forward. The interaction becomes passive transcription rather than active engagement and thought partnership.
Breaking Down the Lies
Breaking down these lies matters because they impede the creation of legitimate thought leadership that advocates for innovation and changes minds. The implied interaction between a brand and its buyers becomes trivialized. Thought leaders get frustrated and resist participating in the process because the lies serve to override what they believe to be meaningful and relevant.
Getting rid of these lies, however, is a mix of simple and complex. At the level of simplicity, it just takes a bit of light. At the level of complexity, it takes overcoming the resistance of self-interest. It’s ultimately about decoding the myths to dispel them.
Three Grace Notes
“To these Encroachments, Time and Ignorance, the two great Supporters of Imposture, gave Authority; and thus, many Rules for good Writing have been established, which have not the least Foundation in Truth or Nature; and which serve no other Purpose than to curb and restrain Genius.” —Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
“We will seldom be wrong if we trace extreme actions back to vanity, middling ones to habit, and petty ones to fear.” —Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
“If to be good is not to harm others, then I live within a system that has made goodness impossible.” —Clare Pollard, Delphi: A Novel
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