How Top Thought Leaders Stayed Relevant in 2025 | 687

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today's going to be a lot of fun because I've got a dear old friend, Keith Frazee, joining me today. Keith is the author of many, many books going back from Never Eat Alone to now Never Lead Alone, and he and I worked very closely together for quite some time. When I look at somebody's body of work, I sort of chunk it into two categories. Here's what's evergreen, right? Here's his, here is what will always be true regardless of the stock market went up, it's a recession, who's in the White House. So again, I'll use Never Alone as an example. I still give those books out to people all the time because there's some evergreen principles, even though that's written in the days before social media, there's some good, really good stuff.

We rewrote it, by the way. I don't know if you knew that. Yes.

We rewrote it for the digital era. Yeah.

So Paul and I dusted that off and redid it.

Yep. But the, so where I was going is, so there's the principles that are sort of evergreen and then there's what, what can you do to connect it to what's going on in the world today? Exactly. Okay. So in your case, you know, what is the C-suite staying up late at night thinking about? AI. What is, what is AI? Is it gonna attack my business? How do I use it to grow? Where is it?

You know who I am and exactly. And so what I'm doing is I'm bringing a methodology to approach that question.

Right.

So the methodology and people, it's, you know, I, I, I, I'm saddened for people who are one-note Johnnies.

Yeah.

And you know, and by the way, let me say this. Some of those one-note Johnnies do quite well.

Yeah.

Because it is an evergreen topic and they just stay focused and that is all they are. And it actually kind of works well for some of them.

Yeah.

Well, and it's also, they don't have to have the things that you do in terms of the research, right? Because if you didn't have the research arm, you probably wouldn't have much more to say about AI than most other people, right? The research gives you the cutting edge stuff. So you're taking the theoretical and closing the gap to the applied in a way that's of high value. Right. And I mean, years, it'll be a different thing and you'll have new research coming up, but it also makes you really relevant to the C-suite because they're, again, when you think about, you know, the worst place to be as a thought leader is selling training and development into the HR channel. Yawn, yawn.

Right.

Because that's a commodity. Somebody's going to do it for a penny less or LinkedIn Learning is going to eat your lunch, whatever the case may be. But having cutting-edge content out there, you can charge a premium for that. Yeah.

I've been, I've been very surprised and deeply appreciate where anybody can carve out some market at some level.

Yeah.

You know, not any, not everybody is looking to build a global impact brand that changes society and makes tens of millions of dollars, right? I mean, that's, that's a certain level. Of aspiration. Sure. Any little bit of what I'm doing could make somebody a very good living. Tomorrow morning, I'm addressing an audience at coaching.com, and what I'm going to be giving them is a way for any coach. And now there are millions of them, as we know. Anybody who is in between jobs as a coach used to be that anybody in between jobs was a consultant. Now anybody in between jobs is a coach, right? Again. And so I'm going to be giving them a simple methodology in, in Never Lead Alone on how they can begin to step a team through transformation in a, in a set of high return practices. And I basically give away the coaching manual. I think that's, you know, for me at this stage of my life, you know, it really is about trying to make the biggest footprint on the planet. I think Never Eat Alone did that. I don't think, I think the way we talk about networks and networking today was forever changed with that book 20 years ago. And I'm blessed for that on a global basis. Now I'm looking to do the same thing around leadership by focusing on teamship. And what is the role of the team? I think we have radically underindexed on What's the role of a team in leadership? We focus on leaders and leaders giving good feedback, but we don't focus on teams and how they give each other feedback. We focus on leaders and how they hold a team accountable. We don't focus on how the team holds each other accountable, how the team keeps each other's energy. So this idea that there's a layer that's undercurated, and I think that's important for your listeners who are interested in being thought leaders for themselves. They need to find The white spots, where are the empty spots? And always be looking for that gap. And I realize in my world, teamship is a major gap in terms of the leadership.

John, no, I think that's interesting because we all develop the skills to be good individual contributors at whatever we do, marketers, accounting, finance, whatever. And then the other thing we want to aspire to be is leaders. But the reality is we're spending most of our time and most of our working life in teams and we're not really taught what is a good team? How can I create the environment and the feedback and the culture of a good team? Because without a good team, hey, you know, we've all been on great teams and we've all been crappy teams, right?

And we are, you in that, in most, and what I find with my diagnostics and the diagnostics are in the book and so is the data, the average team is pretty mediocre. Yeah. And I, and meaning. On a scale of 0 to 5, the average team is a 2 in terms of its ability to be courageous and speak openly in the room.

Yes.

Now, if you look at that and you're trying to double the market cap of a company, there's no way you can do it with half your team being conflict avoidant.

Yeah.

Oh, the, the power of the team is overlooked. HR has spent so much time looking at employee engagement, right? Enterprise equity and inclusion. What we miss is the work level. We got just not focused on how teams get shit done. And yeah, you can go back 20 years ago and pull off Lencioni's book, which inspired me greatly and still does. But it's a 20-year-old parable that needs to be updated for, you know, the modern era of hybrid work. The modern era of a global marketplace of American D&I that still is scrambling to find its foothold. Yeah. And, and for the volatility that exists and the tools that are available today, change teams have changed.

Today, my guest is Stephanie Chung. She is the author of How to Lead People Who Are Not Like You. The short version of, you know, stellar career in aviation. To thought leader? Because it sounds like somebody, you know, made a hard right turn or left turn or whatever. I don't, I don't, how did we get here?

Yeah. Yeah. So great question, by the way. Absolutely spent most of my career in aviation. I've been in aviation for about 40 years. And, and so what started happening is I started to get a lot of inquiry to speak on things that were aviation, you know, not aviation related from other industries. And that's really how the snowball effect started off. And, you know, at the end of the day, aviation's such a big industry and it pretty much affects everyone, but we're a very unique industry because we have zero tolerance for mistakes, right? And so we, we have a very unique type of industry. And, and what I have found is other industries really can glean a lot from our industry because we, everything is such high stakes and, and the differentiator is really the customer experience. So.

Got it. So how does it get from that to authorship and your take? 'Cause you and I had a, a couple of great calls about leading people who are not like you, 'cause it's such a well-framed thought as opposed to, you know, DEI's gotten politicized and all this other craziness. But tell me, how did you get to this as, as a, as a platform?

Absolutely. So when I came from private aviation, there was very few people, like, like literally, honestly, as I was coming through the ranks, there was really no one that looked like me, uh, that I came across, uh, often. And so from a perspective of when I looked at all the different books that were out there and it was time for me to, you know, write a book, I felt like the books, honestly, Peter, needed to go deeper and wider because the books that I saw out there were really geared more towards men and specifically white men, trying to share with them, here's how you lead women or people of color. And though that's good, right? But I felt like, well, this needs to go much deeper and wider because here I was a leader in an industry that, that, you know, not a lot of people looked like me, thought like me, had my same type of background, and I was leading teams that, of people who were not like me. And so therefore it's like, well, where's my book? Like, I want a book. I want that book, right? And, uh, and there really wasn't one. And so I decided to create one because with everything going on, and you and I have talked about this, we've got 6 generations at work. So all the intergenerational stuff I think is, uh, really having, uh, leaders pull their hair out. Right? Yeah.

So, so stay there. So, so that's one, not like me. I'm age and there are people above, below me, sideways, whatever, from different generations. That's one sort of perspective.

That's right. And then you have— yeah, it touches everything. Then you have women, right? So women are now the majority of the country's population. So we see things differently. We think differently. We communicate differently. So that is a different dimension. Then you have people in the LGBTQ+ community, or you have people with different abilities, um, you know, physical abilities, or you have neurodiversity and you have all the ethnic demographics, right? So I just felt like we needed to go much broader and much deeper. And then this is not a DEI book, it's a leadership book because all of us in leadership are leading people who are not like us. And so how do you do it? And my experience is I've always led people who were not like me. And so here's the tools that I use to be able to be successful and still have a team that thrives. And so I wrote a book to help other leaders, to hopefully give them some tools and, and kind of, uh, lift the burden, if you will, of trying to figure it out on your own.

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Today my guest is Michael Horn. He's the author of several books. Probably the most notable is Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career. He's the co-founder and a distinguished fellow at the Clay Christian Institute for Disruptive Innovation. So, so now let's go to your world, right? So it's 20, what'd you say? 2014, 2015?

2015. Yeah.

Yeah.

My, my, my twins were 1 year old and I said, I'm done with managing and growing the institute.

I want to do my own thing and have a little more fun.

Flexibility. Got it. 'Cause a pair of 1-year-olds wasn't enough to keep you busy.

You said I gotta—

exactly, exactly. Some more uncertainty into this mix. So what did that look like and why? And you know, because before you did that, I'm assuming that you obviously had some ideas formulated. This is what I'm thinking about. This is where I'm going. You don't just wake up one day and say, I think I'm gonna do this, right? Like what got you to that point where you said, and now is the time?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think it was a couple things going on. One, At the Institute, you know, we were thinking, we were doing research, big thought leader ideas, right? You'd go to policymakers or entrepreneurs or whomever, and you were sort of giving these big broad brushstrokes. And for conflict of interest reasons, you never got your hands dirty yourself. Right. And I realized I actually really like some of these entrepreneurs. I want to get in business with them and be on their boards and advise them and help them in the early turns and things like that. So that was a big motivation of. How do I actually use this set of thoughts we've developed, these things about views of how the world should be, if you will, and actually advise them into, you know, as they're building all these tools, because there'd been a series of entrepreneurs inspired by the books and the white papers and the writing, but let's get messy, right? Let's do it. So that was one.

And then two is like, so there are other folks that have the opposite view of I was tired of being in the trenches, being the consultant, doing the stuff, et cetera. And I wanted to move into thought leadership because I thought I could stay sort of stay above it.

Thank you.

So I, I just love that there's a, there's a path for everyone and it's not that yours is right and someone else's wrong or better or worse or whatever the case may be. So I love that, that you said, you know, I wanna get in the trenches here and see, you know, the, see how the sausage is made a little bit.

100%, right? And, and I will tell you, right, it's evolved over time, right? So I did that for 5 years. I was spending a lot of time with a venture studio. We were building edtech companies, investing in them. In the pandemic, we got acquired by one of the companies we had initially incubated and invested, which is like super awkward, right? And part of the deal was me going full-time in with Guild Education and Rachel Romer, who was the founder, incredibly visionary, persuasive individual. She said, it's short term. Short term was 2 years. And eventually I was like, or one of the themes is everybody lies. Everyone lies. I suppose so. Or they're really good. Uh, they're really good talkers. But I realized at that point, Peter, that I wanted to spend more time actually back up a level, right? Like full-time leading this work. I had sort of gone back in too far into the trenches, if you will. And I wanted to level back up to the thought leadership because I, when I thought about where do you make the unique value add in the world of education and work and so forth, Michael, there were 12 people who could have come in and come up with a better comms or marketing or government affairs plan than me, like within a day. My value add, I thought, was a couple levels higher. And so I've gone back, you know, guns blazing into the thought leadership world.

Got it. So, so take that to the, not necessarily the actual next step, but one of those next steps was job moves, right? Was the book. So where did that come from and what has that meant to you?

Yeah. So there's a personal side of it and then there's like the research side of it. I'll do a little bit of both.

Perfect.

The research side is that Ethan Bernstein and Bob Mesta, who are my collaborators, Ethan is a professor at the Harvard Business School. He's Clay was his dissertation advisor. Bob Mesta founded the Jobs to Be Done theory with Clay. The two of them start collaborating in 2010 after sitting through a class with Clay. And they start building a course together and advising people about their job moves, right? Using the Jobs to Be Done research. And then simultaneously, Bob and I are using the work to write this book, Choosing College, helping people make this choice around where to get educated using Jobs to Be Done. And all of a sudden I find myself starting to use the work on my own career decisions, right? So I got offered a presidency of a university a couple years after I left the Christensen Institute. And Bob literally uses this on me and I realize, wow, that sounds great on paper and it's the last thing I want to do in actuality. Uh, and I'm like, this is powerful stuff. It starts to help me avoid mistakes, help me make some moves that are counterintuitive, but really fulfilling. And then Clay passes away January of 2020.

Yeah.

The three of us look at each other and we're like, we've got something really powerful here. It would be a really cool testament to Clay if we put it together in a book. And that, that, that was the conversation, frankly, like a month after he passed away of like, how can we honor him? And it was, let's take this body of research. Let's double down on it. You know, we were in the pandemic then, so we had 3 years to go super deep on coaching and studying a lot more individuals. And then we, then we wrote the book and published it this past November.

Today, my guest is Paige Velázquez Buddy. She is the partner and a CEO at Zilker Media. A lot of friends in PR, obviously, and then have a lot of clients that engage in it. And there's oftentimes this gap. So are there things that you look for or look out for in terms of a red flag of during an early on conversation with a potential client in terms of their expectations just being, hey, you're gonna make me a New York Times bestseller, or I'm gonna sell 30,000 copies, right? Like, what are the things that you look out for? Because what you don't want, or I imagine you don't want, is 90, 120 days after bringing on that client, having to have some difficult conversations that could have been avoided.

That's right. That's right. You know, there's a few things that the most important thing is just having a clear understanding between us and a client of one, what are those goals? But are you clear on where we're starting? You know, a lot of people come to us. If you come to, to us 4 months before a book launch, have never done PR before, the expectations that things are gonna one, be live by the time your book launches, or two, you're gonna be in the New York Times. During that launch, that's not necessarily, you know, oftentimes the case. Typically, you need to start doing PR way ahead of that, and the first time that you're launching the book shouldn't be the first time you're making a media appearance. You really start—

you need to—

you really need to start building up that thought leadership, ideally a year or so out, and giving expert commentary, thought leadership. So by the time that you're launching your book, We're circling around to some of those media opportunities to promote the book. We are saying to media, hey, this person has been featured on X, Y, and Z previously. This is why you should pay attention to them. This is why we wanna feature in the book. That's extremely important. You know, and another thing is a lot of people, you know, sometimes come to us and think they're gonna get rich quick on their first book. And Book sales, as you and I both know, aren't the way to do that. But if you have a clear strategy of what a book can do for you as a tool, whether it's helping accelerate lead generation, helping you up your fees and the speaking arena, whatever that might be, that's where you're gonna really see the value in terms of investing in PR to get the book out there. Book sales alone are not a clear enough goal.

Well, stay, stay there a minute because I think you're 1,000% right, is oftentimes authors, particularly first-time authors, obsess over sales because they, they take sales as a proxy for success or validation or whatever the case may be, or they didn't really understand the market and realize that having an expectation of selling X number of units is not realistic in the period of time that they thought they would. And I think at some level, for most, the number of units sold, you know, is really irrelevant. And this is where there's a lot of tension in the marketplace between the author and the publisher, because in most instances, a publisher's compensation is some function of number of units sold times profit per book equal, is that a good deal or not? For an author, it could be, wow, at first blush, if you look at my numbers, that was awful. You only sold 1,000 copies or whatever. And the author might be going, that was the greatest thing I ever did. 'Cause I picked up 3 clients that are spending $1 million a year. And, and that has nothing to do with the publisher's success. So your metrics for success are different than the publisher's, which, which means we're not in alignment. Right. So, right. So I think having that clarity upfront, having that strategy upfront that says, as a result of writing this book, this is the follow-up. This is what I want, would like to be different. One year after the book is out.

Yes. And that, that's oftentimes the first question we ask is why did you write the book? And what do you hope to achieve with the book? You know, visibility and book sales for us a lot of times is a red flag if there is nothing beyond that. The same instance with media these days, there's a dated mindset sometimes of I need to be on Good Morning America. In order for my PR campaign to be successful? Reality is, from what we have seen, you know, the past 5 to 7 years of, of book PR specifically, especially even just business PR in general, having those big TV hits do not move sales units or lead gen for your company the same way the right micro media or the right targeted media strategy will. You know, if you are interviewing a PR firm, ask them about their industry. Are they consistently placing both in top tier as well as micro media? If you have a PR company that is just throwing top tier in front of you, top tier is great for eyeballs. It is great for credibility. I'm talking, you know, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune, those types of, you know, Bloomberg. But if you also don't have a micro media strategy with the right podcasts, with the right trade publications in certain niche industries, with right blogs, you aren't going to see as much lead generation or even, you know, at times book sale movement.

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