Expanding Your Reach Through Thought Leadership| Malcolm Hawker | 447

How will people find your organization's ideas? And where will they engage with them? If you don't purposefully answer these questions, the answers will most likely be they won't find the ideas and they won't engage with them. So today I want to talk about expanding your reach through thought leadership. And I've asked Malcolm Hawker to join me. Malcolm is the head of data strategy at Prophecy Software, and he and I will explore how thought leadership works within and beyond the paywall. We'll talk about being more competitive through thought leadership, and we'll explore what it takes to expand your reach. I'm Bill Sherman, and you're listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let's begin.

Welcome to the show, Malcolm.

Thanks for having me, Bill. I'm excited for our conversation.

So thought leadership struggles with the concept of a paywall. Often organizations say, hey, these are our best thoughts, let's keep them behind, whether it's for clients only or you have to purchase them. What are your thoughts on that?

I sit out in the open. I have no paywall currently, but I've experienced both. So prior to my current role at Prophecy, I was an analyst with Gartner. I lived exclusively behind a paywall. So to get to see me, people had to— and to talk to me and to access my research and my thought leadership, people had to pay a lot of money. And that model worked okay. Obviously it works well for Gartner. They're, they're a very successful company that's been around a while. But in terms of growing our market and in terms of expanding my reach and expanding my impact, it was very limited. There's As a matter of fact, I actually ended up leaving Gartner in part because I wanted to make a bigger impact within the market because it was certainly limited, right? Being behind that paywall meant that I was talking to Fortune 1000, 2000 companies, and that's great. That's great. Don't get me wrong, but it's a very limited market, right? So I decided to make a jump to a smaller company that gave me the freedom to operate outside of the paywall. So that's where I live and breathe right now.

So let's talk about when you come and step beyond the paywall.

Yeah.

What do you gain and what did you lose?

Oh, it's a good question. So what I gained was access to a far, far broader audience, far, far broader audience because there's people out there that are looking to LinkedIn or looking to the web or looking to Reddit or looking to anywhere for insight, for leadership, for guidance. On issues that they struggle with that are near to my world, which are all data-related issues, data governance challenges, those types of things. So I gained a much bigger audience. That's obviously the biggest gain. I gained a lot of freedom, right? I could kind of pick and choose the channels that I wanted to operate in. Previously at Gartner, it was pretty much written research or what they called inquarting, which are phone-based interaction one-on-one with analysts over the phone. And some conference interactions obviously as well, right? Where there's Gartner conferences, we go on stage and do presentations, that kind of stuff. But the delivery channels for the inside of Gartner were limited, right? Now outside the paywall and outside that experience, I can pretty much define my own distribution channels. I can be operating wherever I want to be, however I want to be, or however my company feels that I should, that aligns with kind of where I want to take my individual brand, where my company wants to take their brand. Right? So a lot more freedom on what content is delivered, a lot more freedom around the messaging itself, right? I feel like my messaging is really mine now. When I was behind a paywall, it was curated. It wasn't entirely 100% curated, but it was most certainly curated. We had editorial themes that we wanted to stick to. We had kind of tracks, and we had perspectives that aligned to corporate perspectives, and that was fine, that was great. But, but Being where I am now, I've got a lot more freedom around my messaging and the content that I create, where I go, kind of my editorial calendar, my editorial focus, my thought leadership focus, and how I do that. What did I lose? Uh, some interesting things. Well, one, obviously I was working for a big company that was, that was selling insight, that was selling thought leadership. So, you know, the brand equity there of a Gartner or a Forrester or of an IDC or others that sell thought leadership. This would include like a McKinsey or Deloitte or any big company that is basically paying for, or where you're paying them for insight, leadership, and guidance, right?

When you're a brains-based organization.

Exactly. If you're— yeah, bingo, right? If you, if you are, if you're a knowledge worker, right, um, there's a lot of kind of brand equity that goes along with working for Gartner or Forrester or an IDC or McKinsey or Deloitte or Boston Consulting. I work for a smaller software company now, so they gave me the freedom to kind of exercise thought leadership the best way that I felt that it needed to be exercised. So but I did lose a little bit of that kind of that brand cachet, but we're building it back up. One really interesting side effect here that I noticed was that when I went to go work for a software company, so Proficy's a software company, one thing that I kind of lost is, I didn't lose it completely, but I didn't anticipate this at all. I thought, hey, I'm a Gartner analyst, I've gotta have some weight in the industry, and, you know, people are still gonna wanna hear what I have to say, which is true, but I lost the ability to access a lot of conferences, industry conferences. Because I work for a software company, I would reach out to this conference, "Hey, we're doing a conference about whatever, ABC, things related to data, my world." I'm like, "Hey, great, I'd love to speak. I'm a Gartner analyst, I'm a thought leader, I've got some great stuff to add, some great value to add here to your audience." And the answers are, "Oh, sorry, you work for a vendor, you're going to have to pay." Right? And sometimes my company is willing to do that, but in terms of the overall opportunity to speak at these conferences based on how much budget we have, one certainly exceeds the other. So I've kind of lost the ability to, to have complete freedom in terms of what conferences that I'm participating in, which was a bit of an odd side effect that I didn't anticipate. But that's been, that's been some of the, some of the downside there. So in all, it's been, it's, I would say it's been a win, oddly, in moving from a company that sells thought leadership to being kind of on my own, a bit of a, you know, sole proprietor, as it were.

Well, and the ability to be one step aside and adjacent to the product marketing and sales of the organization, because if you're 100% that voice, then as you said, you're perceived as vendor.

Yep, yep, that's exactly right. Well, so that's kind of the— that's this tightrope that I have to walk, right? My company and my boss, our CMO, fully supports me being and positioning myself as a thought leader. And we are very, very conscious to avoid me appearing like I'm peddling anything, right? We don't— we actually don't want me to be, you know, associated with peddling software and out there being overt about it. And I am not. I actually consciously work at— this sounds a little bit odd, but I kind of have to consciously work at avoiding creating the appearance that all I'm trying to do is sell my company's services or software. Even though they pay my mortgage, which I'm extremely grateful for. But we believe, and the proof will be in the pudding here, it's yet to be determined, but we honestly believe that the best way to kind of approach thought leadership and building, you know, my brand as an expert in the space depends on creating, avoiding any sort of perceived conflict of interest of me being a salesperson and trying to shill stuff.

Well, and there are things that you can do which classic marketing cannot. So category education, category creation is easier when you're practicing thought leadership and being in a position where you can weigh the pros and cons without it sounding like 100% of the time your call to action is a talk to one of our salespeople. Right, right. And yes, there is a place and a need for that. But at the same time, that doesn't fit with a call to action on education.

Yeah, no, I completely agree. Now again, there's another bit of a tightrope there that I need to walk with my internal sales organization in that I've already experienced— I've been doing this about 5 months now, meaning my transition away from Gartner, and I've had to experience situations where I've had people come to me. One was at a conference, a couple of others were through LinkedIn, where they've reached out to me and basically have said, "Hey, I trust you. I want your insights." And it basically said, "Don't push me over to salespeople." So I've been having to kind of manage my own opportunities, conversations very, very delicately because there's this balance that I have to maintain between helping a lot of people day in and day out and becoming a consultant in essence. Where I'm devoting time to these people who have reached out and expressed a trust in me and want to work with me as an advisor. That's exactly what we're going for. But at the same time, if I did that all the time, over and over and over again, I wouldn't be out there kind of building my brand. I wouldn't be helping as many people as I could be. I would be basically just being a consultant. So another balance.

Well, and there's a difference between the evangelist who's out there speaking to ideas and the consultant who's solving problems. And if you're an unpaid consultant, that is sort of worst of both worlds, right?

Yeah. Well, I'm glad you used the evangelist phrase because that's the role I was recruited for. Okay. So, so, so the recruiter, the job posting was evangelist. That's what it said. Now, I didn't actually choose that as my title. I had some conversations.

So say more about that. How did that conversation go and where did you land?

Well, so, so my CMO recruited me and we had conversations about the title. And he said, well, how do you feel about the title? Do you feel it's an appropriate title for what we're trying to accomplish here? And I said, yes, it's a completely appropriate title, but I'm not sure it's the one that I want to use because it's not being used within my customers, right? My customers and the people that will be seeking my insight, my guidance, my input will not be seeking an evangelist, right? An evangelist is an inside-out, you know, but what What my clients want is something else. They want somebody who can be viewed as a trusted advisor and not somebody who's trying to evangelize something to them.

So did that insight come from your time in the world in Gartner, or how did that aha come to be?

Yeah, it was really through my time at Gartner, right? Which is, you know, this is about delivering value, right? So yes, my company sees me as an evangelist. Out there, build, making a bigger pie, as it were, right? Making a bigger market, growing the size of the market, growing awareness, growing demand, building demand for our solutions in the market. That's my internal job. But my external job is to be out there adding value, right? And it's free, right? Hopefully you will come to us to buy our solutions, at which point obviously there will be a cost. But my job externally is to go and provide value, to help people to help people understand what best practice looks like. And that's what is exactly what I learned at Gartner, right? Which was the clients that had success, the clients that were gaining value from my conversations were the ones that, I mean, don't sell me, right? I'm not here trying to be sold. And it's interestingly that that's something that Gartner kind of just hammers and drills into your head from day one because of their interesting position in the market in that they don't want to be seen as favoring anybody. Right, right.

It's very much an editorial position.

Yes.

Where you're keeping clean hands from that perspective.

Exactly, exactly. And that's actually, at Gartner, is a matter of corporate policy, right, to keep those hands clean. You can't be out there saying we prefer A or prefer B or prefer C. Now, of course, they have their beloved magic quadrants that actually put a fence around who's in the industry and who's not in the industry, which is, I guess, is a slight form of favoritism, but when I was having conversations, I could not say, "I recommend A," or, "I recommend B." What I would say is, "Well, you may want to consider A, B, and C. For companies with your requirements, with your limitations, with your budgets, you know, E, G, and F may be good options." And I still do that. I still do that. What I always say is when I'm having these conversations is, "Well, let me put on my Gartner hat." Right, right. And I often speak in third person, which I know can be weird, and/or I will speak in plurals. I'll say, "Well, we think this, and we I can't imagine sometimes that the people I'm talking to directly is like, "What, he's got a mouse in his pocket? Who's this guy?" But yeah, avoiding overt favoritism and overt selling is something I have to deal with and just manage daily.

So you talked about that role of getting out there and engaging in the conversations with your audience, right?

Yeah.

And there's a couple pieces there. Sometimes the challenge is sparking a conversation that's not going on that needs to be had. Other times it's contributing to a conversation that's ongoing. And sometimes it's listening and really absorbing. And so you have to be not only out in the world engaged, but also seen as listening. Yes. So it's not just one direction, push content out there.

Yes.

How are you doing that?

Hopefully I'm doing it well. I'm not entirely sure. So to paraphrase you, flavor one is net new, I would view it as kind of net new insights, right?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Like tell me something I don't know or I should be thinking about but I'm not today.

Exactly right. And that stuff is important and it's valuable. But honestly, establishing brand new beachheads is hard, particularly on LinkedIn, because it seems like the algorithm doesn't favor net new things, right? Because if people don't know them, they're not gonna click on them, they're not gonna like them, they're not gonna follow them, they're not gonna comment on them if they seem—

Well, that's true on all algorithmically driven content. You can't SEO optimize for conversations that aren't happening.

That's exactly right. However, I think that's where the greatest value rests in tell me something that I should be thinking about that I'm not thinking about. Tell me a new perspective on something. Tell me a new way to solve this very old problem that I've been wrestling with for weeks and weeks. That swim lane is very attractive to me because I know that if I establish a beachhead somewhere and I own it, own, for lack of a better word. It could be very, very lucrative. I would argue there's, there's plenty of these to be, in, at least in my world, in the data and analytics space, where people will go and create these new words, right? They do this all the time. Like, they'll create— in the tech space, this happens all the time— these new words that pretty much mean the same as the old words, but they're brand new words so that you can market them and position around them and all this.

Well, we could have a long conversation on the difference or similarities between knowledge management and thought leadership, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So to make a long story short, that, that swim lane, the, the tell me things I, that I don't, I'm not really thinking about that I should be thinking about, that I should be aware of. It's a big area of focus for mine because I, I think it's needed in the channels that I play in, particularly LinkedIn. I think it's needed and I think that it could be incredibly valuable for me and for the people that trust me as a thought leader. For example, one of the areas where I'm betting significantly, that is probably roughly 30% of my day-ish, and not this one topic, but this notion of kind of establishing a new beachhead, is I'm really focused on blockchain and cryptocurrencies and what that means to my corner of the world. I happen to think that it's relevant. Most of the people in my world don't think it's relevant. So that's aside. Then there is number 2, the kind of the swim lane, which is, you know, talk about everything that everybody else is talking about, right? Like, right, add on, add new insights, add a different twist, add a different perspective. And this, to me, this is the world of LinkedIn, right? This, this is what I see day in and day out, everybody piling on to Topic A or Topic B that are well established. And, and, and can be often those, those conversations can be slightly inflammatory and slightly divisive because then you get some tribalism building up. And I really try to avoid that, but at the same time It's the stuff that people are clicking on, right? If you have this kind of this A versus B or these like these specific— I'll use the word tribes for lack of a better word— but these, these specific kind of people kind of align to this solution is the best way to do things, and people aligned in other solutions the best way to do things, and they will kind of create their, their divisions. And then there is, you know, the back and forth that is very common on, on Twitter and other channels that I, I try to avoid. But that's probably 30, 40% of my time as well, right? Which is easily probably a little more than closer to 40%, which is just kind of contributing to things that other people are saying. Because frankly, a lot of that has to do with aligning myself with other thought leaders that have bigger presences than I do, right? So I want to be the guy tagged in the post from the person that has 200,000 followers.

Right. And you also want to be seen as someone who adds value in the comments. So that comment pops to the top, you're visible, et cetera, right?

Yeah, exactly.

And it's a challenge of when you're joining a conversation to distinguish yourself. Either you have to push your position further out to try and make it distinct, or you have to try and put, like you said, that twist on it, right?

Yeah.

I think of the old '70s police procedural show Columbo. Right. Where notoriously at the end, the Columbo, the investigator would turn and just say, oh, and one more thing to the suspect who was the murderer. And that would be the thing that would unravel the puzzle. Right.

Yeah.

It is very hard to just drop into a comment and be and pull a Columbo.

Right. Yeah. I actually remember Columbo. My parents made me watch that. Peter Falk.

As did mine. As did mine.

Yeah, yeah, I remember that. But yeah, I guess I'm trying to come up with my Columbo moments on LinkedIn, like the mic drops, right?

Right, exactly.

Exactly. As it were. They're infrequent. I'll be honest, they're infrequent. Sometimes they work. I had one recently where this complete celebrity, and I won't name any names, but this complete celebrity in one of my worlds that I live in, the data and analytics space, this complete celebrity responded to something that I tagged her in, and I had no idea she was gonna do that, but that drove like 50,000 impressions for that one post, right? Because for some reason, I don't know why, but the celebrity chose to respond to me. I don't know what magic secret sauce I did. I don't know what I did differently, what looked any different, but obviously it was good enough that this person would, okay, comment back, and then all of her acolytes are now, you know, listening to what I have to say. So yes, that's, it's an important part. Number 3 is the just listening. Right? This, this to me is professional development. This to me is maintaining my edge, maintaining my thought leadership, right? This, this is understanding what's going on in the market, what people are saying and not saying. I just spent a week last week in Seattle at an industry conference. It was Microsoft's big annual event. That's part of the listening, right? What's going on out there? What people are saying and what are they not saying? So being active and being present in the industry in any way that you can, whether that is conferences or whether that is attending virtual events, I'll be doing that tomorrow afternoon where I'm just kind of sitting in. That can absolutely bear a certain amount of fruit. I'll give you a specific example. I had signed up for an industry event. It was an online event and where I was just watching and there was a chat window along the side during this one presentation. The presentation was about the metaverse and I found it fascinating. A lot of people were out there saying, okay, well, this is kind of silly and who wants to pay millions of dollars for JPEGs of Bored Apes and okay, fine. But I said, you know, I think there's some promise here and this is interesting and there are use cases in the B2B world. And that was it. I thought that was, you know, I was kind of mostly just listening, listening to this presentation. Well, the organizer of that conference reached out to me individually and said, I like what you had to say. Would you like to come and speak at my next conference? There you go. I was like, aha, eureka. Yes, I sure would. And I'm about to do it again up in December. The intent there was just to listen and to learn. And because I have a hard time, you know, not contributing in an interactive environment, it actually led to something. So yes, all three are important. And it's again balancing that.

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So one of the things that you said that I want to underline here in that listening is the negative space, because we often focus on what's said. Versus what's not being talked about. And I think part of thought leadership's opportunity is to look at that negative space. And I think about the classic FedEx logo where there's the arrow between the E and the X, but until it's pointed out, you don't see it. And so in some cases, thought leadership is looking at the pattern of dots of conversation within industry or within your vendor ecosystem or your customers and saying, What aren't they talking about? What's 3 years ahead or next year that they better be talking about now because they need to be prepared for?

Yeah. And that's a really difficult skill to build. I think, I think that I came at that— I don't want to say honestly, I just came at that through 30 years of being in business. A big part of that being in product management related roles where I had specific training in essence to read between the lines, right? Like, users will say what they want, but that really isn't what they really want. What they're saying is something that they're not actually saying.

I know that doesn't make any sense, but apparently what they're asking for is not necessarily what they want solved.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So I had a decent number of years of training of being able to listen, then to be able to say, okay, wait a minute, Right? This, it's, they're saying they want web feet and they want feathers and they want an orange beak. Oh, okay. It must be a duck. Well, hold on a second. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's an amphibious form of transportation. I don't know. I'm being glib, but the training as a, in the product management world helped me to be comfortable with probing a lot more, with listening more, with then, and then asking all of the right questions. So the listening does have to transfer over into some sort of interaction, but Yes, what's not being said could be equally or even more valuable because then it would lead you back to swim lane 1, which is talking about things that nobody else is talking about.

Exactly. And that creates the cycle, right? Where if you're constantly putting things out and just jumping on random beachheads, good luck with that, right?

Right. Yeah. Well, this is another part of something that I'm honestly still trying to figure out, which is my narrative. Okay. Like, what is, if I was to do kind of the tombstone exercise with my thought leadership career, right? What would my tombstone exercise? Well, here lies the thought leadership career of Malcolm Hawker, who was focused on that and helped by whatever, right? Like what would be the retrospective positioning statement, for lack of a better word? I think that could work. What would that positioning statement be? Or what would that tombstone exercise look like? How would you like to be remembered? And who would you like to be remembered for helping? Or how were you different? And I'll be honest and say that that's evolving. And I'm still trying to figure that out because I'm still trying to figure out what pieces of spaghetti are sticking to the fridge and which ones are not.

Well, and there's also a piece on that where you have to look and say, what is timely for the moment where people are leaning in, but in 60 days or a year, that topic's going to be passé. There's only so long you can talk about Y2K, for example, right?

Yep.

Versus what is evergreen and can evolve as the conversation evolves, especially something like your world in data. Yeah, that's, that's substantial, right?

Yes.

Because whether you're talking about blockchain and our understanding of blockchain today versus where it's going to be in 10 years, that's going to be a night and day difference.

Totally agree. But this also explains why in my world there are a disproportionate number of thought leaders in data science, AI, and ML, right? And if you just— what I've done as a part of my research is I just went through LinkedIn and, and pulled up names and went down a whole bunch of rabbit holes, and literally it was a couple weeks long exercise. If there are reporting tools for this, so be it. But I, I, I, I try to figure out, okay, well, who are all the thought leaders in, in my, in my universe, right? And I kind of occupy a corner of the universe, but I was looking for, for everything.

Well, and we all do, as individuals, as organizations. There is no even single organization that can occupy all lanes in a, in a conversation, right?

And, and what I found in that is that there were a lot of people that were around just kind of whose narrative was very, very closely aligned to data science, AI, and ML. Because I think to your point, though, it's kind of evergreen, right? It's not going away. It can be applied in a lot of different use cases. It's timely. It is technically difficult to execute. So there's a lot of things, a lot of reasons why I think people are, are focusing there, at least those that are really kind of focused on thought leadership. What I also found was, is that there are a lot of people that are focused on thought leadership and what they're really focused on is building a training or academy type experience and that that's their business, right? And that's okay. Fantastic. I'm fully supportive of that. That's not what I'm trying to do. I'm not trying to necessarily monetize my thought leadership and monetize my insights, at least directly, not directly. But I think your point is valid here, which is, you know, for your narrative and who, where do you want to be and how do you want to be remembered? 2 words that you want to be remembered for, people hear your name, what are they? And what is your kind of your broader narrative? I'm really still trying to figure that out because—

Well, and I would push that even further because we've been talking about brands. I would say that both individuals and organizations have brands. So personal brand and then the organizational brand. But there's a middle lane in there for thought leadership, which is the brand for the ideas. I typically called it a platform, right? And so you want your ideas to be able to go out into the world, have a reputation for themselves, and become what I would say is self-replicating, right? That other people start talking about them. And rather than try to force a term or a buzzword in the industry, people go, oh, that's a shorthand for something that we've needed to describe. "Right?" Or that sums up an idea. We want that. And so when you build the brand for your ideas, it doesn't have to rely on you as the messenger. Hey, sometimes you're the roadie, you know, sort of like for the band. And that's fine, right? But you want the ideas to scale and you don't want to be the limiting factor because there's only so many places that you can speak on your own or so many articles that you can write. And so it's about scaling influence and impact.

Yeah. Now that's one thing, what you just described, that's one thing that analysts at Gartner are very good at. And say more. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so when your product is insight and you exist in an ecosystem of analysts that are arguably competing for mindshare and that are arguably competing for places on that conference stage at those podiums, right?

Right.

In Bangalore and in Tokyo and in Sydney, and you get flown around the world. There's only a limited number of spaces at the podium, and if, you know, there's 100 podium spaces and there's 2,000 analysts, well, there's, there's competition to get to that podium, right?

Right.

So what happens is, is that analysts will— are, are actively trying to establish new veins, new genres of thought leadership to basically outcompete their internal competitors and get to the top of the heap, right? So it's interesting. It creates a lot of what I would call kind of odd byproducts in that often there is repackaging of existing insight where there's just a minor tweak, a word that is changed, an insight that has changed, but it's repackaged as something that is new, right? If your product is toothpaste or toothpicks or other highly undifferentiated products or products that don't change that often, there's a, there's a lot of motivation to find ways to change them proactively, right? Make it more of a marketing exercise than anything else. You're not changing—

if you're in Unilever or Procter Gamble working on product categories for CPG, you've got a limited number of levers you can pull.

Exactly right. And I see that in the analyst community in that a lot of these best practices, a lot of the insights really don't change that much. They certainly don't change year over year, right? They may change it for 5, 6, 7 years, right, aligned with technology, um, uh, you know, hype cycles related to new technologies and development of new technologies. But year over year, they're not changing that much. So these— so analysts will go out there and try to change them and create these new narratives, create these new storylines, create these new genres of insight that really aren't that different, but where they're kind of— they're their core driver here is to differentiate themselves within that broader thought leadership community, which I found an interesting exercise. But Gartner analysts are very, very, very good at that because when they succeed at that, they outperform their competitors who are the other analysts that work with them.

Well, and it's the challenge both internal, if you're an organization such as a Gartner, or if you're an organization where you're doing the role that you are at Prophecy, where you are in an ecosystem where ideas are constantly competing for mindshare, right? Regardless of where your audience is, you want attention in a world where we judge when we scroll through social media and we determine, is it relevant to me or not in 2-second bites, right? Do I tap more? Do I scroll past? And so— That's a harsh standard to meet. And you've got to figure out how do I grab attention? How do I signal relevance so that the organization can punch above its weight?

What a great thing. If there was one thing that I was trying to do for my company, it's that, right? It's find a way to punch above our weight. What, what a wonderful, what a wonderful saying. That's exactly what I'm trying to do. And sadly, you're right. There's no shortage of voices out there, right? There's just not. Before embarking on this journey about 5 months ago, I thought, well, hey, I'm ex-Gartner analyst. I actually do know what I'm talking about. Not only was I a pundit, but I was actually an IT leader. I have bought these solutions. I've managed teams. I've actually been the guy climbing the hill. I'm about as close as they come to an expert in the space, at least self, you know, diagnose.

You've got the gravitas. You've done the, done the labs. I thought, yeah, reputation.

Yeah. Yeah. And having been actually a practitioner, I wasn't just this ivory tower guy. I had actually been a practitioner and I thought, okay, well, I'll get out there and, you know, I'll bubble to the top. No, I'm not bubbling to the top. And there's a lot of me's out there that I didn't even know were out there. And I'll be honest, really smart people with really great things to say. Right. And I was like, wow, that's great insight. I wish I had that 3 years ago when I was bringing it to Gartner, because I would've used it. But the point here is, is that there's no shortage of viewpoints. There's no shortage of people. And in my world, which is honestly kind of a boring world of data, but there's a lot of us out there. And how do you differentiate? How do you distinguish yourself? How do you, how do you establish that unique voice? It's something certainly that I'm trying to figure out, you know, One of the interesting things I'm really trying to avoid, and maybe I'm trying to avoid it too much, I don't know, but I'm trying to avoid being— right word here— um, I, I don't want to be a sideshow, right? I, I don't want to be producing a lot of content that is like me singing in the shower, right? Right. Or, or produce content that maybe, maybe funny and entertaining, but really doesn't have very much to do with what, what I do for a living. I see a lot of people that do that and are very successful at it. Now, maybe I should be more open to that. I don't know, because I do see there that there's a certain degree of authenticity, right? And, and, and, and I like that, right? If, if you can do it in an authentic way, if you can be, you know, singing a Link's lip sync in the shower, or if, or if you can be taking a video of yourself while you are dancing or something. I don't know, but it doesn't have anything to do with data management, right? It's something else that is probably entertaining and light and generally more akin to what you would probably see on TikTok or Twitter, right? So I think if you do those things well and you're authentic and that shows that it could be a net positive, But if it's not authentic and it seems contrived and it seems like you're trying to entertain too much, that can backfire. So for me, when looking at that, like, you know, positives, negatives, here's what you can gain, here's what you could lose. I was like, okay, I'm just going to avoid being a TikTok star. I don't need that. I'm okay being the boring data guy.

But as you said, there is value in being authentic. Yes. Right. And showing a little bit of yourself, because if we, especially on social media, right, if we were at a conference, we would get to know each other even in a 5-minute sort of bump into each other over coffee at the break between sessions. Right. I'd get a sense of who you are. It is very hard without consciously revealing a little bit of yourself in social media to signal Who is the voice behind this? Right?

Yeah.

And we are creatures of interaction. We look for connection. And you were talking about earlier about spotting a lot of smart people in your space. And you can look at it as a downside or you can look at it as an opportunity to go, wow, there's a community of very smart people here who are going to expand my thinking, challenge it, and we can carry on these conversations as far as we want to take it, right? And so it's this balance between who are you talking to. And the way that I think of it is the more that you spread the peanut butter thin, the harder it is to be relevant to anybody, right? So you have to sacrifice in some ways and go, yeah, 99.9% of the world is going to look and go, oh, it's the boring data guy in my feed again. Okay, yeah, that's fine. But for the 0.1% or the 0.5% that's excited to see, they should light up and go, that's cool stuff, tell me more.

Yeah. Now my happy place here, the one area that, that I'm pretty comfortable with, is when it comes to authenticity. For, for me, that shows in my passion. Right. If, if, if you watch any of my 3, 4 short-form little videos that I post out on LinkedIn or other videos that I take, even ones that are kind of instructional, the ABCs, 1, 2, 3s type videos.

Right, right.

It's pretty obvious, at least I think, and I've had this, I've had people tell me this, so this is good. It isn't just me and I'm looking in a broken mirror that I'm passionate, right? And that I care about what I'm talking about and that I care about the people that may be listening to the things that I have to say. So that's one area where I feel that if I, if I double on that, if I double down on that and I stay passionate, I stay interested, I'm focused on topics that I'm really, really interested in, I feel that I know a decent amount about, that's where I can live and breathe. And maybe from that place I can try to branch out a little bit. I'll give you an example of a way that, that I kind of kind of stretched my comfort zone into kind of being slightly entertaining and, and potentially a little overly pithy. Um, I, I live on the east coast of Florida, and I live in this area called the Space Coast. And about 30 miles from here is Cape Canaveral. And I'm, I'm relatively close to the beach. And if you go out to the beach when they're— when, when Elon Musk is launching rockets, you can see it. It's pretty cool. Like, there's these like giant trails, and at night the whole sky lights up. So I figured to myself, I was doing this video on how to launch a specific solution. In our case, it's called MDM, how to launch MDM. And I thought, oh, there's an interesting metaphor there. I'll take a video of myself with the 3 to 4 things you need to think about when launching an MDM program and the metaphors with the rocket. I knew exactly when the rocket launch would be. And if I time this right, I could be doing my thing on LinkedIn and this rocket could basically come out of my shoulder and take off. Anyway, it was the mic drop moment, right? So, right. Um, so I'm out there, it's the middle of the day and it's the beach and it's windy, and I was using a lav mic, so the sound— I think the sound was okay, but I was recording it on my phone, so, you know, I had the arm out and, and, you know, the telltale selfie, uh, framing. And, uh, and, uh, I'm doing my thing and, and I'm aware of the time. I was like, okay, wait a minute, hold on a second, I should have seen the rocket by now. Like, looking— like, I was looking at the screen which was pointed behind me, and I should have seen it by now. I looked over the beach and it was— I felt like it was— I was like Les Nessman from WKRP. I don't know, another '70s, uh, TV. Yeah, we're doing '70s television shows today, right? And, and I felt like I was like the mobile, you know, the mobile news reporter. And I was like, I was looking down, I was like, well, people are looking up at the sky and okay, well, then I look behind like, oh rats, there goes the rocket! I missed it. There's the exhaust. And as it turns out, my head completely was completely blocked. The one place that I could have had my head in frame, right?

Right.

And there was a lot of room, there was a lot of ladder, but the one place where my head was, was where the rocket— and if you look at the video, there's this little, like, this little white orb that goes like— it comes out of my head. And, and I was like, okay, well, oops, you know, best laid plans, best made plans, uh, so be it. Uh, my giant noggin was in the way blocking you from the rocket, but hopefully you get my point, and I'll see you next time. So yeah, that was my stretch into, you know, being a slight entertainer and going a little bit beyond my comfort zone.

But a couple lessons there. In terms of getting ideas out there, the deployment doesn't have to be perfect, right?

Right.

It can be authentic. And the other piece you talked about showing passion, I think video is an excellent medium for that because the spark in the eye, the smile, the nonverbals, all of those things that you show when you talk about a subject, you can reveal, right? And the more signal that you can put in on that, you know, white papers are high idea, low signal, right? In that regard.

Yeah. So you're right.

As we begin to wrap up, I want to ask you a question. I know you've moved into the world of Beyond the Paywall for Thought Leadership. But my question is this: if you were to go back to your younger self and offer a piece of advice, what advice would you give?

Oh gosh, vis-à-vis my current—

in terms of practicing thought leadership. So gosh, well, to prepare you for today.

Yeah. So number one is you are always a thought leader. Everybody is a thought leader and everybody has value to add. And just because you may not be a VP or a senior director or somebody with an extremely large title, you have a unique voice and you have perspectives. You have experiences that matter and are valuable. And finding ways to share those experiences with other people in any way possible without an expectation of return, meaning if you are able to share what you know, and share your insights, share your experiences, what works, what doesn't matter, doesn't matter. If you do that, it will come back to you, right? And just because maybe you're just starting your career, maybe you are young in your career, maybe you're just trying to figure out the ropes, you still got a valuable story to tell because you still got valuable experiences and people will want to hear them. So going back, if I were to go back in time, I would have been doing the things that I'm doing now more often. I would have been out on social channels more often. I would have been doing more pro bono work. I would have been publishing stuff on wherever, LinkedIn, subreddits, doesn't matter. I would have been publishing stuff and sharing my perspective and sharing my viewpoints because I think that if I'd done that and I'd reached the point where I am now, I would have had a lot of this stuff already figured out. And I would be in a far better place. I would be potentially a sole proprietor. Maybe I'd even have a small company teaching other people about how to do this. But I do know now, I do know now you have a unique voice. You have things to— you have value to add. And the more that you give it, the more that you throw it out there, the more that it will come back to you.

Fantastic. Thank you very much, Malcolm, for joining us today and for a wonderful conversation.

Thanks so much, Bill. I enjoyed it.

If you're interested in organizational thought leadership, then I invite you to subscribe to the OrgTL newsletter. Each month we talk about the people who create, curate, and deploy thought leadership on behalf of their organizations. Go to the website orgtl.com and choose join our newsletter. I'll leave a link to the website as well as my LinkedIn profile in the show notes.

Thanks for listening, and I look forward to hearing what you thought of the show.