A conversational video in which Christopher Parsons and Robert Buday examine how knowledge management enables organisations to scale thought leadership. They argue thought leadership and knowledge management form a two-way loop: ideas (thought leadership) need documentation, training, communities of practice and processes (knowledge management) to be translated from individual experts into many practitioners who can deliver work. Buday frames thought leadership as having a demand side (marketing/visibility) and a supply side (scaling services to fulfil promises). The speakers contrast being ‘famous for ideas’ with being able to operationalise client work, noting examples where firms get credit for ideas but fail to capture delivery value because they lack KM to scale implementation.
Chapters
I think the thing that I took away from that talk and I think our community did, was the connection between thought leadership and knowledge management. And so the way that you kind of set this up is you were talking about knowledge management being a foundation for thought leadership, which I think is true, but I think it kind of, it's more of a loop and it's more of a two way relationship in that you told a story of your old firm who kind of pioneered business process reengineering re engineering the corporation. Right. So they won on the idea. They kind of got credit for the idea, but they didn't necessarily win in terms of the lion's share of the delivery of that work and changing in terms of the consulting on the back end. And someone like an Accenture would win that. And so what I think you and I teased out through discussion was one of the core reasons was the knowledge management wasn't there. Like they didn't figure out how to translate it from one key subject matter expert's head into dozens of people who could then take that out and run their own implementation. So training programs and documentation and best practices and communities of practice to share and learn from each other. So I think thought leadership is oftentimes like the tip of the spear, but if it doesn't get backed up and the processes and the knowledge doesn't get built to help translate that through the organization, it just has a minimal impact. You don't scale it. And so I think knowledge management is a key tool for scaling thought leadership as well as surfacing new ideas that can be developed in the thought leadership. So I think it's a very symbiotic kind of relationship between the two.
Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. You know, as I've said to, and I said in my book, you know, I look at thought leadership as the demand and the supply part of thought leadership. Most people, 99%, are focusing on the demand part, how to create content for marketing and selling and winning work. Very few people have been looking at the supply side of thought leadership, which is how to scale up services so that you can, you know, uphold the promises you're making to the marketplace with your Harvard Business Review article, your bestselling book, or, you know, whatever it is that clients think they're buying, right?
Like, do you want to be famous or do you want to change the world and have it, you know, have an impact through your organization? And, you know, it's like just like a scale of impact and what the priority level is. I agree with your assessment. It feels Like, a lot of the investment is on the. Let's just get our name out there and get known for this idea. But then people, then as soon as you scratch the surface with that, you know, it's like, well, how are you going to deliver this? Like, how does that happen inside our company? That's.
Yeah. And you put it well, what I thought you were going to say is, do you want to be famous for your ideas or do you want to be famous for the client work?
Yes. Or the client work. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yep.
So.
And I'm not judging. I mean, you know, there's a lot to be said for, like being an influencer. Like an Adam Grant doesn't have a 200 person firm behind him delivering his insights, but he's making an impact just on speaking. But that's not the same if you're an architecture firm or a software company or whoever it is. I don't think our job is to have a singular celebrity in the company who's known for their ideas. You want to deliver architecture, you want to deliver software that makes an impact, and that's where you need to operationalize the thought leadership.
