Peter WinickFounder and CEO @ Thought Leadership Leverage

Academics and Thought Leadership - Helping Thought Leaders-Dropping Bombs Ep 217-Peter Winick

12 Dec 2019 · 2 min

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1:31

In this conversational excerpt, the speakers discuss a recurring pattern among highly credentialed academics from institutions such as Yale, Wharton, Dartmouth, and the London School of Business. These scholars achieve recognition within niche fields, and a catalyst—often a TED Talk, a Davos appearance, media coverage, or a book—propels them into a flood of public demand. Their traditional revenue model relies on time‑based engagements: teaching, research, occasional speaking, consulting, and board advisory work, which translates expertise into dollars per hour or per day. The sudden surge in demand creates a scalability problem: they cannot meet the volume of requests without either raising prices dramatically or sacrificing the depth of their insight. The speakers argue that the core challenge is how to codify 20‑30 years of accumulated knowledge into formats that are digestible, repeatable, and distributable beyond one‑on‑one or in‑room interactions, thereby unlocking scalable impact and revenue streams.

Chapters

So, so all the bigwigs and the academics coming out of Yale, Wharton, Dartmouth, the London School of Business, they come to you and say, hey, I want to create a better or, or, or even the invention of a platform.
I wouldn't say the invention. So the academics that we deal with are incredibly elite. So they're at places that never would have taken me and certainly would have taken you into school, right? Like we wouldn't have gotten there. These are really, really smart people, and typically what's happened is they're acknowledged in their field, which might be fairly small, it might be some level of popularity, but then there's some event that happens, and the event could be a TED Talk, the event could be they go to Davos and meet some cool world leaders, it could be a media appearance, a book, and all of a sudden they're flooded with demand, with attention, with all this sort of stuff, and they don't have a system or process in place because what they've got is They're academics, they teach and they research. They usually do a little bit of speaking, a little bit of consulting, a little bit of advising, but you're ultimately dollars for time. And now the demand comes in, so what do you do? You increase the price, that's cool. Board of directors will pay you 50 grand to roll in for a day and tell you about your strategy or innovation or creativity, whatever. But they're still missing the forest for the trees. How do you codify what they've got, which they've spent 20, 30 years putting together, and make it more approachable? Put it in a format that can be digested by more people more often and not be limited to them being in the room with their content for dollars to change hands.