Best of 2022 | Art Kleiner, Dan Pontefract, and Stephen M. R. Covey | 456

I want to move to the different thread here, different track that you and I were talking about. I think this is really something that a lot of thought leaders, aspiring thought leaders, etc., struggle with and don't understand, which is how hard it is to build an audience. One would think intuitively, well, it should be easier because there's all these— there's LinkedIn, there's Instagram, whatever. There's so many different places versus 25 years ago, folks like you, the editors, controlled things. Why is it so much harder today to build an audience? And I would say the right audience, right?

Well, so partly it come— it has to do with what you have to say, and partly it has to do with how large and fragmented the audience is and the body of thought leaders are. And a lot of times people don't recognize— people compare themselves to, you know, the pundit the visible pundit.

Yeah.

And they don't compare— they do better to compare themselves to who they were a year ago. So for instance, one of the first people I worked with was Peter Senge, and I still work with Peter. And when he did The Fifth Discipline, it felt like an overnight sensation. He had been working with those ideas in an adult education context with partners and collaborators for 12 years. Honing them, refining them, kind of bringing them to life and making sense of them.

But that's the practice of the violin before Yo-Yo Ma gets on stage, right? That's the part nobody sees.

And then there's another part, which is then we went further and we did the field book and we did, you know—

Right.

Anyone who is basically putting out a book is also putting out a campaign around it, a portfolio of pieces. So for instance, again, when we advise people on thought leadership strategy, and I'm sure we're not alone in this, we advise people around the portfolio. There's your core idea, and you want to make sure the logic of the core ideas is really good and based on, you know, sort of substance and, and the person you can talk to. But you also, you have to show up, maybe not every day, maybe every week, But you have to show up with something, and you also have to make the most of the audience you have and the audience that they're going to help you develop. And you need to, you know, there are people who will read 500, there are people who will read, you know, 1,000 words or 5,000 words even, and there are a lot of people who will read 300 words.

And so you have to find ways to connect Well, then there are people that don't read any words and want to see what you have to say in video or in this—

Exactly.

—podcast like this or something. I want to expand on a piece that you said there is that your audience, I think part of the issue or the struggle that people have is they're so passionate about what they do. Right? And to some degree that could make them a bit myopic and they see the power in their ideas. They know that when it's unleashed, it changes lives or companies or teams or whatever for the better. So they want to be evangelical around the idea, except the reality is you have to be really narrow, not really broad. Nobody's got the budgets of Coca-Cola. So you got to say, well, who am I serving? Who will this idea resonate with the most given the limited amount of time and energy and resources I have as a thought leader to get it out there and build my audience?

Yeah, I love the way you put it. They're sort of like the engineer who's releasing a new, you know, a new type of monitor or something and gives you a remote with like 50 different buttons on it because each one of those has a value and they love the value of it, except no normal human could figure out how to use the damn thing, right? Right. So you want an idea that's simple without being simplistic. And then on the other side, so you said broad or narrow audience, And I wanna put an asterisk there myself. I think— Sure. I think we aspire to the right audience and we aspire to an audience that connects. And a lot of it is figuring out who we connect to. So for instance, we work with IFC, which is part of the World Bank on case studies of company, mostly healthcare companies, some education companies. You could say our audience is people in emerging economies. You could say our audience is people who like case studies. You could say our audience is investors, because a lot of what the World Bank does is marshal investment. Yes. You have impact in the emerging world, in emerging economies. But the audience really is people who are looking for ways to solve the particular type of problem that these companies solve, which is how to be innovative either when you're in a startup or when you're in a startup economy situation. And our job as leaders is to connect with those people and find a way to define and reach them.

Well, I would almost debate the term audience. I think there's two types. There's users. There's a lot of people that would read what you have to say and, you know, write a lovely comment. They appreciate it, the thoughtfulness, etc., etc., etc. But they can't really do much for you selfishly. They're users. Then there are buyers who are the subset of the people that would read what you're putting out into the universe and go, "Wow, I want to hire KPI. That was such a great job that they did." Because quite frankly, that's the journey of the thought leader. You need to tantalize an audience, if you will, with your thinking and your thoughts and your writing, et cetera. But it's only a very, very, very small subset of the readership, if you will, that's your buyer where you have to put your thumb on the scale and say, I need to spend more energy connecting with them because they pay the bills.

Yeah, but it happens in a nonlinear way. So, you know, John Wanamaker famously said, you know, half my money on advertising is wasted, but I don't know which half. Exactly. When it comes to content, probably 50 or more percent, 70% of the effort I make is not going to bear fruit today, but it'll bear fruit. No, and that's fine.

That's okay. But I want to even push on that. Some of it, when you say it will not bear fruit today, I would push even further. Some of it may never bear fruit, and that's okay. Some of it may bear fruit later. You're planting the seeds in an emerging leadership class that might embrace your ideas down the road, or students, or whatever. It'll bear a different kind of fruit, or it'll—

yeah, I mean, there's only so far we can take this metaphor.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it will— so, okay, there is an intrinsic value to having the right idea out in the world at the right time.

Absolutely, absolutely.

There is a real value to having the ability to craft an idea recognized And there is a huge value in being part of a larger community that is working with management ideas. And here's where I think the thought leadership community has an opportunity to really improve. I mean, we have groups like the Thinkers50 and MG, MG100, 1000, yeah, where we're building bridges among people, but we don't yet but we're emerging towards a sort of common understanding and shared language. You know, we're going through a little bit what psychology went through, you know.

Yeah, I think that's right.

You know, James Hillman and Michael Ventura wrote this great book about a while ago called We've Had 100 Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse. Yeah, you know, we've had 35 years of thought, of business thought leadership, and things are getting more complex. But we have opportunities to make sense with each other as much. We're competitors, but we're also looking for the same thing, which is going back to that audience we talked about right at the beginning, that person who's going to make decisions or make things happen, and who doesn't just need to make a decision, right? They're not looking for, give me the wisdom to solve this problem. Sure. In fact, in our research, one of the other things that came up the most, the strongest, was, "I want something that will change the way I think." And what they're really looking for is, "How can I be the kind of leader I need to be?" Exactly, exactly.

Your path is an interesting one, not totally uncommon, but a little bit different than normal. In that you're basically a high-performing exec at a big telecom. And during your time there, amongst other things, you developed your thought leadership, you started speaking both as part of the job and as part of your passion. And now here we are several years later and you're on your own. So maybe let's start with sort of how that journey came, because you could have continued to be an incredibly successful exec, but then you sort of pulled off of that, right? So let's talk about sort of that transition.

I guess I needed to stay married. That's, uh, that's the number one reason. Get out of Denise's hair, right? So I even— probably starts a little bit earlier. I thought I was an educator. I guess I am an educator. So I started out teaching high school for 2 years when I was 23, 24. That led me to then realize I wasn't probably that good at helping children, but maybe adults. So I switched to higher ed.

Which are kind of like large children.

They are, that's true. Yeah. With all amygdala. Other issues. All amygdala, no prefrontal cortex. So that wasn't for me. Everything was irrational decision-making. Although most executives are irrational, so that maybe you're right, yeah. So then I got into higher ed and that was about 6 years. And I said, okay, well maybe I need to be actually in the real world outside of higher education. And so I joined what eventually became SAP. And so in 2001, through basically 7 years, I was in high tech as a, as a leader helping organize the organization with its internal culture, its development of competence, and the external revenue-generating consulting arm of education services. So that led me to 2008, and I was having some, I would just say, probably issues with SAP, trying to like, what the heck is culture? And they didn't get it and that's fine. And so yeah, a Canadian kind of telecom called Telus literally phoned and said, hey, we've got an issue over here. Why don't you come join us and help us with our culture change? I was like, this is great. Up until that point, Peter, I wasn't doing really anything publicly. So I had talked a few times, you know, with my SAP hat on publicly in a conference or what have you, but I didn't have a book strategy. I didn't have a writing strategy. But when I joined TELUS, I literally said to myself, all right, here's an opportunity, here's an organization that's, you know, 50,000 people. You're coming in as Chief Learning Officer. Maybe you should be public about your work. And so surreptitiously, I sort of would write, starting out with my own blog that I finally started, yep, about culture change, about leadership, about learning, about—

when you say, say public, so I, I want to sort of understand that. Now, did you mean public lowercase p, like these 50,000 employees are my audience per se, or the more broadly speaking public of whether they're a TELUS employee or part of the general population, I can be writing to, to them?

I wrote to Earth. To Earth. Dear Earth, this is—

before you did that, no, okay, so you're, you're going— so Were there any pushbacks or raised eyebrows from the powers that be at the firms that, "Hey, Dan, this is your day job. What are you doing all this other stuff?" Or were they cool with it? Or did it take some coaxing? Because there are so many thought leaders that are, I don't want to say stuck, but they don't have the permission. They haven't figured out how to navigate that public piece of it.

I have always believed in the adage, Peter, that a slapped wrist after the fact is far better than a hand cut off up front. Got it.

So forgiveness, not permission, right?

I didn't seek out permission in which to be sort of public. Now, I wasn't like spilling the beans on company secrets, right? But I would use the experience of culture change, leadership learning, organizational dynamics, right, in my writing and then eventually my speaking.

So again, right, because that's in essence a laboratory for you. Because what's interesting about this is that you've got OD people that are strictly consultants that, that live in the more abstract theoretical. Yeah, you're embedded. So you're coming across emails and meetings and stuff every day that probably goes, ooh, that's fodder for a good blog. If I— let me change some names to protect the innocent or whatever, but like, wow, here's a real thing, right?

Like, that's exactly— yeah, yeah. And it was, and it still is, because we can get to what I do these days, but it's the same model. It's that when you're a spy in the camp, if you will, uh, so long as you, you know, don't detrimentally, uh, use names and figures to the chagrin of their personality or personality disorder, you can use these experiences and examples as exemplar to what is working and what's not when you're going through culture change, you know, organizational building and so forth. So I, I never thought of it the way as you just adroitly discovered or pointed out, sorry, and that is it was a living lab. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, so it became lots of fodder.

Now, at what point— because I sort of know where the story not ends but is today, and we'll get to that in a moment—

at what point do the powers that be go, hey, this is good, we should encourage this, this Dan guy to do this, this is actually good for him, good for us, good for the employee, there is really no downside here? How did that come to be?

Yeah, I mean, uh, again, not asking for permission, I was just writing and, and speaking, and then, you know, as my My writing lifted from not just writing for me, but, you know, then Forbes somehow reached out and said, hey, would you like to be a writer on our leadership channel? I was like, oh, that's probably a good idea. Yeah.

That'd be pretty cool. Yeah. Right?

And then, you know, I wasn't taking any money from Forbes. I wasn't taking any money from the speaking gigs because I was gainfully employed by TELUS. That's, you know, kind of a conflict of interest. But I just, yeah, I started like getting more opportunities and more requests until at one point exactly, like, they tell us— realize that I was a, you know, contributor to Forbes, which is a news media outlet. And then it was, uh, Dan, we need to sort of chat with you about, you know, what you're doing. And that's okay. I, I wasn't— I get— I knew it was going to come at some point. So, you know, then it was, hey, you know, make sure you're not outing a customer, you know, don't talk. Yeah, right, right. So Again, it was a pretty collegial relationship. And again, as I'm speaking now, I'm— now I'm speaking about some of the actual TELUS examples. So now TELUS, in the middle of some of my keynotes, would be like a 15 or 10 minute case study of here's where we were, here's what we're doing, here's how it's going, here's what you might want to do, right?

Which is good for them.

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I want to go down a different path for a moment before we get to the content of— given that you and I all, you know, have a couple of gray hairs here, you've also seen the thought leadership world move from a largely analog buy a book that lands with a thud, bring our consultants in to do workshops or keynotes or whatever, all analog things, deliverables, and they're all great deliverables, they still exist today. And then the power of digital so that it gives you more ways to deliver the message and the content and to monetize it to more people. And it seems to be moving so quickly and, you know, it wasn't all that long ago that, you know, a TED Talk was the short-form content. Of 18 minutes, which is now War and Peace in terms of content length. But talk for me, if you could, a little bit about sort of the balance or the transition, if you will, from analog to digital in many areas.

Yeah, no, this shift is enormous that's taking place. And here's the good news. The good news is still the power of ideas, of intellectual property, that gets kind of codified is still the underlying engine. Sure. Absolutely. It's just that our mediums and our ways of spreading it is shifting and changing in extraordinary ways that can have a greater impact and also can even increase profitability as well because of the fact that now suddenly there's possibilities and opportunities that maybe we didn't have before under the old analog model. You know, going out and doing it yourself and this and that. And even, I will say this, even the old analog model, we were at the forefront at pushing the envelope on that, doing things like creating certification and like train the trainers. And yeah, yeah, trainer, it sounds commonplace today. At the time it wasn't. And, and, um, it was seen as, well, why would you do that? Why would you do a certification? Yeah, it'll take away your presenting days. But you can reach a lot more people and you can do a lot more work. And so, even some of the analog, there's some breakthrough thinking and you have a similar thing happening today that enables you to move into whole new arenas, including, for example, like subscription and this type of thing where you try to, you can kind of codify, you still start with intellectual property, with ideas that are codified and branded and the like. But then you have now new ways of scaling it and of disseminating it and of also creating new business models for it, where suddenly, for example, a subscription approach could be valuable and other approaches that you just didn't have in the analog model that you have in the digital model.

The trick today, because more choices give you more options to make good choices and bad choices, but getting really clear about who you're serving and how you're serving them helps you make decisions around the modalities, right? So even if you look at where I think the most confusion lies is in social media. And I hear all the time, should I be on TikTok? Should I be on Instagram? Should I be on Clubhouse? And I'm like, well, where are your clients and potential clients? Where are the people you want to reach hanging out? It has nothing to do with you, whether you like TikTok or not. It's not about you. Is that a place that A, is aligned to your brand, right? And what else are they what else are people talking about or doing there? Will it connect or is it just noise or is it the peer pressure of what everybody else is doing? Right? And until you could sort of make the case business-wise, I would say you don't need to be the first kid on your block on TikTok or Insta or whatever. The market sort of will guide you where to go there. Absolutely.

The market sets par and, you know, and it guides you and it helps you. But I think that that step of really understanding markets and customers. That the fundamental marketing step and really business step is the very first step, understanding markets and customers. And starting with needs and then the markets and customers, and then you figure out the channels and the modalities and the like. But too often, if you just jump right to the channels and the modalities and skip the understanding markets and customers, and we'll find ourselves again fragmented, trying to do too much.

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