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If you publish thought leadership in the woods and nobody hears it, does it make an impact?
This variation on a common thought experiment highlights a common problem with most financial thought leadership. It isn’t leading anyone because it isn’t being read attentively.
Put yourself in the shoes of a Chief Investment Officer of an alternatives fund, for example. People come across yet another “Trends in Private Credit” report. It includes macro risk commentary, survey data, and a few broad predictions. It’s well-researched and well-written. But who cares? It’s ultimately useless, so they skim past it.
The problem is that broad content doesn’t sharpen any decisions people want to make. They’re looking for more, such as the considerations for increasing exposure to direct lending or the risk-adjusted case for mezzanine debt over unitranche. It also doesn’t connect the dots between those portfolio moves and the offerings of the publisher of the thought leadership, such as a market data supplier or platform provider.
The problem is a failure of relevance. Real influence in capital markets doesn’t come from publishing. It comes from positioning. Content thinking comes with limiting beliefs and blind spots. Thought leaders need to balance typical thought leadership (what I want to say) and thought readership (what my reader needs to decide).
Mindsets and Worldviews
Capital markets professionals engage with ideas differently than casual readers. Their attention is scarce, their filters are ruthless, and their trust is earned through precision. Anything vague, redundant, or lacking a clear point of view is ignored. They expect precision and relevance, and they read with the intent to sharpen decisions, not just absorb information. Don’t make the mistake of writing for them as “content consumers.”
Instead, respect how they think and what moves them to act. Writing for capital markets decision-makers requires a different psychological strategy to shift their perspective. Predictions are less valuable than synthesis, and framing matters more than speculation. They also operate in environments where persuasion is as important as analysis, whether convincing an investment committee, negotiating terms, or justifying a position to LPs.
The same rigor applies when choosing technology platforms, data providers, or service partners. A capital allocator weighing exposure to direct lending is also deciding which credit analytics platform to trust. A CFO restructuring capital isn’t just evaluating debt options but assessing treasury management systems.
Thought leadership influencing these choices has to transcend industry shifts they can read by following the news or asking an AI chat platform. Because thought readers want input to make a better call on the solutions they use or the decisions they make, thought leaders have to articulate clear risks, provide compelling, even contrarian insights, or offer a framework readers hadn’t considered.
Patterns of Failure
Most thought leadership failures occur because they don’t connect with how financial decision-makers engage with ideas. Generic writers and sometimes even marketers lack a deep model of how readers think. They aren’t in the room when decisions get made, so they don’t have a solid understanding of how thought readers process information, what level of clarity they require, and how they translate insight into an actual decision.
Three patterns illustrate how thought leadership misses the mark by failing into traps of classic content thinking:
- Smart but Useless Syndrome: Well-researched but impractical, this content sounds impressive yet offers no clear takeaway. It lacks the specificity decision-makers need to act.
- Echo Chamber Effects: Written to show that the writer has done their homework or to impress industry peers rather than serve actual decision-makers. This content reinforces conventional wisdom instead of challenging it, offering validation instead of an edge.
- Marketing Traps: Thinly disguised lead generation. Readers can immediately tell when content is steering them toward a sales pitch rather than a sharper perspective. When they sense it, they disengage.
What these failures share is a misunderstanding of what senior decision-makers need because they emphasize writing and content marketing criteria instead of addressing thought readers. Content, by definition, stays superficial. It’s useful for brand visibility, perhaps, but irrelevant to those making the real calls.
The missing piece is cognitive empathy. Don’t think about “content” at all. It takes industry depth to know what matters and psychological acuity to deliver it in a way that commands attention, builds trust, and sharpens decisions.
Cognitive Empathy: The ability to integrate how another person thinks (their assumptions, biases, constraints, and decision-making processes) into advocating for one’s own perspective. It begins with knowing what a reader cares about while factoring in how they interpret information, weigh risks, and move from insight to action. Profound cognitive empathy requires both epistemic rigor (the ability to model another’s knowledge structure) and hermeneutic precision (the skill of framing ideas in a way that resonates within their worldview).
The “One Reader” Approach
If cognitive empathy sounds challenging to maintain for an entire audience segment, you can achieve it quickly with a simple mental framework. Instead of writing for an audience in general, write for one single decision-maker, making one real choice with real stakes.
Let’s take up that “trends in private credit” piece again to see how the “one reader” principle applies. You don’t have to consider every private credit investor. You can imagine yourself writing for a specific CIO of a $20B alternatives fund, deciding whether to increase exposure to direct lending and how to factor that into their overall portfolio strategy.
You could then help them understand the implications of those positions and the workflows for managing risk within them. Or you could help give them a better framework for market data and entering orders. Such an approach to framing thought leadership for one real-world reader forces sharper thinking.
A few common questions can help create this empathy. A strong writer who acts as a thinking partner and knows the industry well will carry this focus into the writing process:
- What does your one reader already know?
- What is obvious, and what needs reinforcement?
- Which obvious pieces of their conventional wisdom can you challenge?
- What is your one reader likely debating right now?
- How does their decision process work?
Writing for that one reader allows you to create for many because the situation in which that reader must decide will resonate more widely than a generic industry take. Your empathy and your readers’ understanding often come from recognizing patterns. The paradox of thought readership is that the more precisely you write, the more broadly it influences.
Perspective Taking
The difference between content and compelling thought leadership lies in equipping and challenging thought readers within the horizon of their perspectives instead of those of the thought leader. It’s how you get from point A to point B. The ultimate measure of success is to influence decisions.
Taking the perspective of the thought reader involves helping them achieve sharper judgment, better frameworks, and a more refined way to see risk and opportunity from within their own cognitive starting point. Achieving that outcome is where real influence begins.
Three Grace Notes
“Our ape brains got too big, too big for our heads, too big for our mothers to birth them. So we started keeping all our extra knowing in language, in art, in stories and books and songs. Art was a way of storing our brains in each other’s.” —Kaveh Akbar, Martyr
“Modern man is a voracious reader who has never learned to read well. Part of the trouble is that he is taught to read drivel that is hardly worth reading well.” —Martin Buber, I and Thou
“Every word we speak is million-faced or convertible to an indefinite number of applications. If it were not so we could read no book. Your remark would only fit your case, not mine.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson, as cited in Robert D. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire
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