Key Thought Leadership Questions for a Strong 2024

Here we are. It’s just three weeks into 2024. And you may already be falling behind on thought leadership for the year. Here are five core questions to answer now and regain your momentum: Do you have trusted relationships with your high-visibility and high-potential thought leaders? Start building them. Do you have people and processes […]

Nine Personas for Thought Leaders

Who are you as a thought leader? Choosing a persona can be a useful technique for creating consistency in your work. Adopting them can shape both individual pieces of thought leadership and an overarching brand. In this week’s issue of The Graceful Thought Leader, I wrote about nine archetypal personas for how to approach a […]

Conversations Over Clicks

Are you bold enough to rethink the way you measure thought leadership outcomes? You can do it! Stop chasing numbers. Say no to metrics like views, clicks, likes, and leads. Stop worrying about SEO. Instead, start having conversations. Ask your sales team, “Did you use this in a meeting? How did it help you? What […]

Marketing That Matters

Marketers often get a bad rap, especially in complex B2B. Their peers in other areas of the business tend to think marketing just doesn’t get it. They overcompensate by trying to demonstrate results with data that is divorced from outcomes anyone actually wants or needs. It creates a disconnect between marketers who are experts in […]

The Importance of Sharing Your Vision

Aaaaand, we’re back… Spend time this year looking deeply at what you think and what you are choosing to commit to. And then tell people about it! Doing so benefits individuals, teams, and entire companies. Moreover, it directs those benefits outwards so that you are actively working on making a world better. That world doesn’t […]

A Recipe for LinkedIn Overload

One reason you receive incessant messages from lead generation services is that there are seemingly uncountable numbers of lead generation agencies with processes and automation that allow them to send nearly infinite pitches. AI will make it worse by raising the potential supply to another level of near infinity while lowering demand to near zero. […]

Start 2024 with Purpose

Do “New Year’s resolutions” fill you with dread? Or even just annoyance? There’s a better way—choosing an annual theme. It’s a practice that fuels thought leadership as well as personal growth. This year, I’m choosing the theme of “light” for 2024, with all its many implications. You can read more about the concept, the rationale, […]

The Bittersweet Allure of Aspiration

Aspiration is sad. Not because people shouldn’t strive or seek to build, but because so often it comes from: It’s easy to become infected by the idea that you should want something when all the aspiration sellers barrage you endlessly with ways to “get” this or that. You buy the thing because you think it’s […]

What Matters and What Doesn’t

I love the idea of a short, simple “care about list” — both do and don’t. – I don’t care about doing things I find crass or graceless just for the sake of empty digital rewards or in pursuit of illusory hustle.– I don’t care about what I refer to in my own mind as […]

The Leader’s Dilemma

The art of getting out of the way should be topic number one for any leader. Or rather, the art of making the way possible and then getting out of it. What’s the point of building a road if you’re only planning to block it? Before initiating anything, a leader should ask, “What have I […]

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