Living in the Age of Thought Leadership. | Peter Winick | TEDxSantaBarbaraSalon

So I'm Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and I'm the host of a podcast that's called Leveraging Thought Leadership. And I'm really happy to be here this evening.

Peter, as I was excited about having you on the show and thinking about why specifically it was perfect for the TED audience is TED Talks are really conversations with thought leaders. Like, it's— they're not just random talks. We don't just talk to anybody. We're looking for someone who, as I will say, has an idea worth sharing that the world needs to hear now, and they somehow have permission to be the one that brings that idea to the audience. So one of my first questions is, um, How do you identify an authentic thought leader versus a wannabe influencer?

Ah, that's an interesting question. Actually, I don't think there's much confusion between the two. So at least in my mind, there's not, right? So if your last name's Kardashian, you fall into one bucket. But I would think an authentic thought leader is someone that really has— is recognized by the community that they serve. Has deep expertise in their space, is constantly giving and adding to the conversation and the discipline and the domain. And an influencer, by definition, they're trying to influence you to do something. And I think in most cases, a thought leader doesn't have such a deliberate agenda saying, as a result of this interaction, Mark, I want you to buy perfume or potato chips or something. I want to share an idea with you. You do with it what you'd like. You could agree with me. You could disagree with me. You could add to it, you could question it, but I'm not pushing you or influencing you by definition to a place that you may or may not desire to go.

That helps a lot. What confused me is when I Googled, what is a thought leader? Just to see what does the Google machine say? And it's a thought leader or influencer. And I went, yeah, no, I'm going to talk to the guy who knows. So thanks for setting me straight on that because to your point, I'm influencing you influencing you to do something. Whereas a thought leader, like at the end of a TED Talk, we have a call to action. Do I want you to take a position, to think differently, to look through the lens different, or take whatever it is? There is some kind of call to action, which is very specifically not to buy something, right?

Exactly. Exactly.

So in your definition, what you just said is you said which I appreciated, recognized by their community. Talk a little bit more about that.

Yeah, so anyone that calls themself a thought leader is not, right? So it's not for me to call myself a thought leader. So when I mean recognized by your community, however you define that community, you might be an expert in the leadership space, in agility, in resilience, et cetera. But others that are respected in that field acknowledge you and recognize you and bestow upon you, if you will, that accolade, that title.

And I like that when you say you can't call yourself a thought leader. I'm curious, in your world, how many people contact you and they say, I'm a thought leader and I want you to help me get on a national stage?

Yeah, some, but I don't think it's— national stage, quite frankly, is a tactic. So if someone were to approach me with a statement like that, I'd say, well, what does the national stage mean to you? Because sometimes they'll come to us and say, I want to write a book, or I want to do this. And I'm like, okay, that might mean proxy for something else. So does the national stage mean that you'd want to unleash the power of your ideas so they have more impact? Does a national stage mean you're an egomaniac that needs to be fed by fame? Does the national stage mean fortune? I need to understand what that means and then decide if we can be helpful.

One of the— as I'm looking for people to put into the red circle, so to speak, I find that a lot of people are pinging us on a regular basis because they see doing a TED Talk as a checkmark to them. And Just so everyone knows, all of us organizers know about that, and that doesn't work with any of us. Really, we're looking for that, the reluctant person, the person who has that great, or that you read about something they've written and you're like, wow, where is there some more of that there? So to your second point, you said they're constantly adding to the conversation. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Yeah. So there are lots of ways to, to sort of add to the conversation in the space that you're in. It could be research, either original research or experiential stories that you share based on what you do. It could be putting short-form content out in the world, long-form content, video, being a podcast guest, being a podcast host, interviewing others. Early on, it might be commenting on other thought leaders' things that they put out there. That you have a different twist or a different take. So I think it's, you know, you have to figure out who are you trying to reach, right? Who is your target market with your, for your thought leadership? Because it's really few and far between where people say it's everyone. That's really not true. Most of the time for most people. So once you get really clear about the who you're trying to influence, then you need to understand the how, right? Because you and I are of a certain age where we probably do something odd, like read a book. If we were talking to a Gen Z, like remember books, they're like physical, you can touch them, whatever.

I have some here.

Yeah, I have a few. Yeah. But if we were to think everybody must be like us because we're book nerds and anything that we do is in the form of a book, but our target market was Gen Z that likes to consume, you know, video, we're gonna miss the mark based on our own biases and our own misunderstanding of the marketplace. So you have to understand who your market is. And how they prefer to consume content and make sure that the way that you put it out in the world is aligned to the way that your target audience prefers to consume it.

Talk about books for a second because there's this joke, I guess, that a book is just a $10 business card and it really is just a legitimizer Do you think— yeah, I love the look on your face.

I think too many books are $10 business cards, and quite frankly, they're crappy books, right? So it's like anything else right now because of technology, because of cost, because of various ways to get published, etc. It's actually really easy to get a book into the marketplace. It's not easy to get a high-quality book out into the marketplace. So I think if you're, you know, phoning it in, if you're putting out a book just for marketing purposes or to check the box, it shows, right? You know, when, you know, we, we live in a world now where there are publishers that focused on, you know, breast surgeons in local markets writing a book so that when someone comes for a consultation, they can say, I'm the doc that wrote the book. That's fantastic from a marketing perspective. That's not thought leadership, right? So I think, you know, a, a, a book, I think in the way that you're referring to it is really something that should jar your thinking, something that should be engaging, something that, you know, one of the jokes that I hear is, well, that was a great book. And someone might say, well, that originated as my TED Talk. And then there are other books that you say, that was a great— that's not such a great book. It could have just stayed a TED Talk. It didn't need to be 300 pages. 18 minutes was sufficient.

One of the guiding thoughts we get from TED New York, especially from the editorial crew, is they'll say, That idea could have been done in a 6-minute talk. Didn't need 18 minutes, right?

Or in an article or— exactly, exactly. And if you're gonna, you know, the way I think about it is, listen, I don't care about the $20 or $30 or whatever it is that I spend for a book. I've wasted far more on far sillier things, but I'm not gonna waste 8 hours of my time on anything.

Right, right.

I think that's really the piece that people don't understand, the sacredness or the value of time. I can get the $20, $30 back. 8 hours, I can't get that back.

Right. That's why I like listening to some of the summary services where you can, you know, I can get a book in 8 or 9 minutes and I can give it 8 or 9 minutes because it's— so let's stay with that for a second. It's thought leadership. Sometimes with people that I find they have a thought, it was— it's a great thought. But there's just one. There isn't another. There isn't a stream of thinking that follows that up. It's like you had one great idea. How do you categorize the difference between those and how do you coach someone who had a great one? Boy, yeah, I need chapter 2.

Well, I think there's a difference between a great idea and a great platform, right? So what you're talking about is here's a great idea, whatever that idea is, and you go, wow, you know what? Really good idea, right? Fascinating idea. That really got me thinking. Now, a platform could start with that idea, but then constantly builds on it, constantly looks at it in a different way, constantly shapes it, constantly molds it, right? And you can tell that it has the same DNA of the idea. It's almost like an archaeological dig and you go, ah, that was the root of this when it started 5 years ago, 20 years ago, whatever. Look what's been built on it now. And listen, it's got to start with a great idea. Sometimes it ends with a great idea and it's not sort of platform worthy. I—

there are so many times I've heard someone and I just really love that. And the next time I see them, it's kind of a retread of the same deal, you know? And it's like, so, so I'm curious of the people that— because you're in this world, how many of them do the work? Because I know it's a lot of work. To build a platform out of an idea?

Yeah. The ones that we work with do because ideas have a shelf life. Now, there are ideas that are timeless and ageless, etc. They're few and far between, and they're not easy to build a business and make a living from for some long period of time. Right? If you're serious about the idea and you're really passionate about it, it's putting in the reps, putting in that hard work to think about, well, what's the platform here? And what does this platform represent? And what would be logical people to come through this platform and how do you use it as a filtering mechanism to say, mm, doesn't really fit. That would be a stretch because you also see people trying to shove a lot in a platform. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Don't know what to expect from them. Right. And what I wanna know is if you're a thought leader that I trust, Mark, it's like when I get in my car and if I left it on Sirius Radio, the jazz channel, I don't want to get in and hear heavy metal, like without my switch. Right? There's an expectation of when I tune into that, it's warm, it's fuzzy, it puts me in a certain mood. I might want other things, but I don't want to hit, you know, the jazz channel and hear hip-hop. That's not what I signed up for.

I appreciate that, getting that distinction. You had said something where they try to cram too many things into— when we're working with a speaker for TEDx, is only 18 minutes. You can really only have an idea fully fleshed out. And that is the hardest thing for people to do. When you're working with people, how do you convince them? Because they, they, oh no, I got to talk about this and I have to talk about that. It's all of this where it's going to be most powerful.

It's counterintuitive, right? Because we're dealing with, you know, literally some of the world's best in class at what they do. And I said to them, okay, we got to get this, we got to get it down to its essence. We got to get down to something simple. Like, but I've been doing this for 25 years. I've written 5 books. I'm cited in all these journals, whatever. I'm like, that's all fine and dandy, right? And I appreciate that. But if you can't resonate in a short conversation with a typical person that's representative of your target market, it's too heavy, right? It's not going to work. It doesn't mean that there's not a place for that depth, but not everybody wants to go in at the 500 level. And I think it's the curse of the expert that thinks, well, everybody, everybody gets it at the level that they do, right? So I, I think they, it, it really has to align with what their goals and objectives are. If you want to democratize your content, if you want to get those ideas out there that spread further, you have to get it simpler so that you can get more people to come in. And I, the way I look at it is people need to become aware of your ideas and your platform. A subset of those people choose to become engaged. That's interesting. And a subset of the people that become engaged, you activate to do something, buy your book, follow this, do that, whatever. But that awareness piece is very high level and very simple. And I think a lot of people try to get to that awareness through the heavy content that's more on the activation side. And there's a mismatch.

So when you say activation side, I just wanna make sure, because our listener, I know they're thinking they've got this great idea. In them, they want to get it out. It's as, as simple as possible at the top of the funnel, so to speak, in the awareness side. And as I'm getting it down, I can add more density because the person has already opted in to say, hey, I really like what you're saying.

I—

could you go into more detail on that? Which is why writing for something like Medium or writing on LinkedIn or doing YouTube videos or expanding on those things, the sample model, right?

So if you walk into the bakery on a Sunday morning, you're standing there, it smells wonderful. And they took a muffin and they cut it up into 20 little pieces and it's out there and you taste them and you go, oh my God, that's awesome. Well, what do you do? You buy 6 of them. Now, you might not have walked in and said, I want 6 of that odd muffin that I've never heard the flavor of because the risk-reward might not be there. But once you've tasted, you're like, now I know what I'm in for.

Realistically, how—

if—

because a lot of people we talk to, the idea is kind of a side hustle. Right? They're doing something and they have this idea and they want to do something with it. What's a realistic time commit for, for someone who wants to get started in this world, being a thought leader?

Yeah, I mean, that's, that's a great question. I think it— the commitment should be as serious as you are about it, right? So in the early stage, it's an experiment, right? In the early stage, you want to fail fast and realize like, that's a dumb idea, Mark, like don't do that. But if you're serious about it, it's going to take work. It's going to take effort. It's going to take energy. Yeah. We hear about the lightning strikes of someone did something once and they took off and overnight success. And there are plenty of examples of that on TED, etc. Those are the exceptions, not the rule. And it's almost like you think of the comedian. They're not going to— you don't think of Jerry Seinfeld doing clubs with 3 people in Bayonne, New Jersey in 1973. But I guarantee you, he did a lot of those.

He did a lot of those. Peter, thank you for helping us understand what it takes to be a thought leader.

My pleasure. My pleasure to have that conversation with you, Mark.