Blueprint for Unleashing Innovation in Thought Leadership | Maxine Mackie | 619

And welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on the podcast today, which is leveraging thought leadership. Today, my guest is Maxine Mackey. She is the managing director at Label Sessions based in Scotland. So I will be the one with the accent today because she's got better language than I do. So anyway, Welcome aboard today, Maxine. How are you?

I'm very well. Thank you so much for having me, Peter Winick.

My pleasure. So give us a bit of an overview of your thought leadership journey and your experiences with thought leadership.

Fab. So I founded a company called Label Sessions, which is a global innovation expert network. So for me, thought leadership is crucial and the core of our offering. What we do is kind of two different things. We run accelerator projects with big brands around the world, and also our clients access our kind of a global innovation expert network directly. And what I found is we set up and really kind of, we've been in stealth mode with Label Sessions for a few years, really interested in how you can kind of really find the people who have been there and done that to work on a problem inside our clients. And that really for me was, was key because I had this amazing experience in consulting where I worked with, my job was essentially to translate. I worked for IBM and I, my job was to translate all these research assets and new patents, right, that were coming out from thought leaders in their fields. But they were thought leaders that weren't really kind of in market and As an example of that, the research labs were directly built in out-of-town locations, so they weren't in cities, they weren't in and around people who were using a lot of kind of products and services, uh, just like you would see in the cities. And my job was to translate new tech and emerging tech and think about really creative and commercial use cases of them. Yeah.

So stay, stay there a minute because I, I think there's a lot of folks in the thought leadership space whose job is somewhere between translation, cross-pollination, call it what you will. So you get this really great thought leadership that comes from, call it an academic bent, right? Like a really, or, or technical or subject matter expert, et cetera. And it's really, really good, but it might be a little thick. It might be a little heavy. It might be a lot to wade through because certain disciplines, that's their training, right? If you're an academic, You know, you, you don't order lunch without having 19 footnotes. It's just the way you are, right? But when you move to the commercial side, the business community wants to know what is it, what's in it for me? How does it impact my business? Why is it important in about 7 seconds? So it sounds like that's a lot of your gift is to be able to take it from the technical or the academic to the business.

For sure. And it's really around, I guess, the wider kind of a proposition design. What do we want to do? Why do we want to do it? What rationale do we have? To put the business in that space, and then how do we do it? And for me, part of my thought leadership journey in becoming an expert in innovation and bringing to life first-for-kind products, innovation programs, is really to understand what's possible with technology, what does the world need, and to be able to hook into so many different, I guess, areas of expertise from— I need to be into trends, what's happening in the world, what's happening all around the world. What are people doing? What are consumers interested in? What is technology allowing us to do? And try and then bring that to strategies for the clients that we work with. And because I think I've had the opportunity to work with so many thought leaders, I really lucked out when I was in consulting. I had a really initial experience and as a result have really been passionate about finding the people who have really been there and done that because I was lucky I won a bunch of awards for projects I've done. Looking really interesting being in big conferences or hearing other people from my company talk about, you know, the kind of projects that we kind of won all these awards for. But the reality was we were 7 people in a room with taped out windows under like really strict NDAs, and only really 7 people knew the levers that we had to pull. And because of that experience, I have been really driven and passionate about finding other thought leaders, bringing them into projects that we deliver at Label Sessions, and also allowing people who have really cultivated their craft a mechanism to commercialize their experience. Because most people in big businesses and the clients that we work with want to speak to someone who's been in their shoes, similar shoes.

The value prop of Label Sessions is really this network that you've got is you're finding these, let's call them somewhat obscure, you know, experts instantly. But I want to go back to a couple, a couple of things that you said earlier, relative to innovation. It definitely applies to innovation, but I think it also applies to some other domains of thought leadership as well, which is who, like nobody's opposed to it, right? Like it's very rare. That you sit in a boardroom or a meeting with senior leaders and say, you know what? Yeah, that innovation thing. It's okay if we're less innovative. We don't need to be innova— like there's not a big anti-innovation movement out in the universe. And if there was, they probably wouldn't say it out loud. It's not gonna be good for your career. I think the question becomes, and you talked about the technology and, and some of those issues, who really owns it? What does it mean when we say innovation here in this context, at this company, at this moment? And then what do we do about it? So I think that's kind of a pre to what you're doing. So it sounds like by the time they've gotten to you, but do clients come to you when there's, there's still some fuzziness around ownership and, uh, even definition of what they mean by innovation versus, you know, incremental product improvement?

So for us, I think it's probably not incremental product innovation that sits within the kind of different business units and teams, but It's a real challenge because I think you alluded to this, Peter. Everybody wants to do innovation and companies want to do it in-house as well. There's a real shift away from completely outsourcing some of those functions, but what we've seen and what we do in sessions is companies really wanting to bring in expertise to coach their teams on a particular thing, expertise to kind of bring thought leadership on a particular area. It could be around How do we treat design leadership? How do we use GenAI really creatively in brand strategy work? So what we find is it's typically under the remit or the ear of the kind of a most senior leader, the CEO. They really kind of, their involvement is the thing that can often support traction, but different teams own elements of innovation. And I think that's a really good thing. It creates a real kind of a marketplace. It does also mean it's challenging because there's lots of things going on, but that's, I think, always the case in a big company.

If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL. And share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. So, so I wanna go in a slightly different direction now. So you're, I would imagine, constantly out there on the look for talent, right? For thought leadership, for interesting folks. And I think what's interesting or what's challenging about that challenge is a lot of these folks are pretty quiet. They're isolated. Maybe they're a bit introverted and they don't do a lot of personal branding, self-marketing, et cetera. So from a sort of think about the thought leadership of each of the individuals that are in your network, how do you sort of scan the landscape to see, ooh, somebody's out there that's doing something interesting in whatever, Internet of Things or what biotech or whatever.

I mean, we have a kind of a research team that does a lot of this where we are really looking at who's talking about different things in different conferences, who's writing about things, who are referred to us. We often get really incredible referrals from our existing label mates. I should say that we've got a really detailed onboarding process. There's kind of a, quite a few different hours we spend with each of our label mates, talking to them, really understanding how they cultivated their craft and really kind of—

but I, but I guess my point is if somebody's got this deep expertise and really cool thought leadership and they're not writing about it and they're not speaking about it and they're not in the marketplace about it, you're not gonna find them, right? Like that's, that's kind of the point. And most of the folks that are doing, and I'm, I'm, I'm painting with a broad brush here. Most of the folks that do this type of work are not self-promoters. They're not used to the spotlight. They're not looking to get all this attention. They want the idea. They, they're kind of the shepherds of the ideas, but they don't necessarily, they're not necessarily wired that way to be, call it self-promotional, right? For lack of a better word. But, but it's a chicken and egg. But if they're not, folks like you don't get to see them, so they don't get onto the cool project. So if you were, if, if you were to think about someone's out there, or several people I hope out there listening today that fit into a potential thought leader that could work with you, but they're not, they don't know kind of what to do or how to do it or not doing it enough. What might you advise them?

So for us, if they're interested in what we do and being part of a global innovation expert network, so that could be anything from tech, creative, marketing, leadership, HR, really anyone trying to make progress happen, they can sign up through Label Sessions, and we, our team, one of the team will kind of reach out and talk to them and understand where their expertise lie. So that's one way we get lots of people reaching out to us because we create a lot of content showcasing each of our individual kind of a label mates. So often people will come to us and anyone listening, go to labelsessions.com. You can kind of inquire about what it means to be a label mate. But the key thing that we do is because we really do believe in the power of the network, we get a lot of referrals from our existing label mates. And that works really well. No, that's correct. And, and I encourage that because you get a really great level of kind of an insight and sometimes it's really nice to group those people on, you know, curated sessions together. Yeah.

So I'm gonna build on, on something you said earlier, which was sort of part of your superpower is to be able to bridge and sort of translate various types of thought leadership from sort of the, the highly technical to the highly relevant. From a business standpoint, I think that when you think about what is the business side of the house looking for, they're looking to see the connection between whatever it is under the innovation umbrella that drives a business outcome, right? Is that part of your sort of superpower of translation to show them the, either the cost of not doing or the benefit of doing?

Yeah. So that would be very much the same when you're kind of shaping up a strategy. When you are thinking about what right to play and like the client has in a space, part of that is like, this is the cost of not acting as well as these are the opportunities if you do, do something. I think that's, but really what this highlights is in all this space, there's very rarely one black and white answer for anything. And part of the power, I think, of leadership is being comfortable in having opposing views at the same time and working them through and the implications of them. And part of what we do if we're running an accelerator is really call out, if we say proceed with this strategy A, let's call it, there are kind of implications to that. So let's not be naive to them. These are some of the, the direct implications. If we go down this route, we might cut off opportunity X, we may not have a right to play in space Z.

Cool. So anything you would add to things that folks could do when creating thought leadership? What I mean by this is very, very broadly speaking, there's two ways to create thought leadership, right? Go off in isolation, lock yourself in a room or a hotel or whatever, you know, sort of the Walden Pond and go at it, right? You know, stock up with some coffee and, you know, 500 books and come out with some brilliant ideas, polish 'em up, and then see if there's a there there. Or the other way is to be collaborative on the front end, right? Are you seeing a shift in which processes happening more often today or is more impactful or more successful?

Well, I could prob— what I believe is more successful is far more in collaboration where it's discussion of things, but I think I'm biased because I kind of believe in the power of networks. And what I see is when people with real domain expertise talk around the differences, either in their industry or their specialism, that's where I think a lot of new ideas really get born from, or new thinking, because you're shaping it with somebody else. I think it works in isolation for something. So for example, if somebody's becoming a thought leader in GenAI prompts, for example, it really works. You need to do the work to really understand it. So to a certain degree, you need to go and lock yourself in a room and go and really work through it for kind of a, for 5 days and nights.

For that, for that subset of, well, you had to polish up your prompts. Yes. Yeah.

And, and that's, that's a very kind of a, that's a binary example, but really I think where the power comes from is the collaboration and discussion with other people. I also think that speaks to our human nature too. And, you know, we're more than the sum of our parts. So for me, I think I see more progress when people are in discussion and collaboration. I see that in the programs that we deliver. We never really, if we are curating sessions for somebody, so even in say leadership development, and are we curating like, you know, 5, 10 different voices for them to talk to? I think it's, it is always interesting when it's a real mix of things because that's where I think those connections really happen rather than just kind of a, always kind of a direct one one-to-ones.

That makes a lot of sense. I mean, the other, the other thing I was thinking is the risk of being in isolation too long is, you know, are you actually solving a problem that anybody thinks needs to be solved? Right? Because sometimes getting that feedback early on, hey, I'm thinking about writing prompts that do X, Y, or Z, or whatever. We're thinking about whatever, and here's what I've done so far. And so far it doesn't need to be 300 pages of heavy-duty research, but gimme the gist of the idea of what you're trying to do and how you're doing it. Put that out there and get the feedback. And, you know, if the overwhelming feedback is okay, like, you know, it's not, wow, that's interesting, tell me more, or when is that gonna be done? You might wanna reconsider, is it worth the investment of another 3 months, 6 months, whatever of your life to polish it up? Not everything is worthy of polishing.

I think there's maybe two things to that. I learned very early on when I, I mentioned earlier being at IBM and getting to work with their research labs around the world, they were all individual researchers in isolation and you could see that there wasn't the connection to a lot of the challenges that IBM's clients had at the time. So, I was really young, really kind of ambitious, excited, full of ideas, and doing that translation job was really powerful for me and really formative. In helping me think about how do you make progress happen.

Yes.

So that's kind of one part of it. I've seen that when that doesn't really work. And the other side of it is if you are in isolation for too long, you can, in your thought leadership, whatever area that is, you can get to a point of a level of expertise I've seen where it's really hard to then translate that to different clients in different industries because you can, you can kind of galvanize your thinking as you kind of reach this like apex of your thought leadership without being able to bring in the distinct challenges a particular organization has. And I think having that bit of flexibility is really kind of important because for everyone, I think the only constant in our working life, our, our personal lives is change. And that's why I think you can always be striving for the, the, you know, the last 2% of perfection with thought leadership, but actually connect with others because that 2% is a moving target.

Well, and I think that's right. But I think that, you know, oftentimes many experts are perfectionists, right? And they, and they're, they put their, their name on it. They wanna make sure it's polished, it's perfect, it's thoughtful, it's whatever, which obviously is important. But there's a time to be a little bit more lenient and say, this is, this is still, uh, in, in the formative stages. This is not definitive yet. So therefore it might not be up to the standards of some of my other work, you know, or, or my published work or whatever the case may be, right? Like a work in progress is not the same as finished product.

But I think a lot of like to be part of that kind of earlier access to, it's not polished yet, but this is what I'm thinking and it could be the kind of next frontier for me.

That's very true. So any other final thoughts you have as we start to wrap up here or anything else you'd like to share about your journey or where you've learned or? Anything along those lines?

Really learned around the power of network and really being so, so kind of energized by so many interesting people in the world doing really interesting things. And I'm a bit spoiled because I get to have great conversations with them all the time. I've built the career I wanted and it's getting to connect with amazing people who have truly cultivated their craft. And my job is to kind of fit them into kind of projects, programs, curated sessions, but it's A lovely thing to be an enabler of thought leaders.

I love it. I appreciate your time today and I appreciate the conversation. Thank you, Maxine. Appreciate it.

My pleasure. Thank you.

To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter@thoughtleadershipleverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.