In this solo video, Peter Winick, founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage, warns thought leaders against conflating an inspiring narrative—specifically the 1989 film Field of Dreams and its "if you build it, they will come" premise—with a viable business strategy. He explains that while building a product can be satisfying, it does not guarantee customers. Winick urges leaders to rigorously assess market demand before committing resources, recommending pre‑testing, pilot programs, and preselling solutions to ensure a real market exists and to avoid costly opportunity‑cost mistakes.
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Hey there, it's Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage, and today I wanted to share with you a recurring theme, an issue, a struggle that I see thought leaders deal with over and over and over again, and that is confusing a great movie for a great strategy. What am I talking about? So in 1989, Kevin Costner came out with Field of Dreams. Field of Dreams, the premise of the movie, if you remember way back in the stone ages of 1989, was that if you build it, they will come. So this was an Iowa farmer that was gonna build this amazing baseball field in the middle of a field in Iowa, and all of the amazing players, Sleepy Joe and all these things, Shoeless Joe, not Sleepy Joe, would appear, right, and fulfill all of his wildest dreams. And because it's a Hollywood movie, it obviously ends that way. The analogy or the parallel for thought leaders is it is often more fun, more satisfying, easier, if you will, to build stuff than to sell stuff. And, you know, therein lies the conflict of the strategy, right? Build it and they will come. Great movie, stupid strategy. What I would suggest for thought leaders is before you invest your time, your energy, your effort, your money, the opportunity cost fully loaded, be honest with yourself on what the nature of the investment is. Make sure there's a market for it. Make sure you can pretest the waters, do pilots, presell solutions before you make the investments. So again, great movies don't make great strategies necessarily. Love to hear your thoughts. Thank you.
