Mastering Innovation and Clarity: Best Practices from 2024's Thought Leaders | Best of 2024 with Bill Sherman | 617

The journey of thought leadership isn't easy, and the road often isn't straight. In this year-end summary episode, I present 5 thought leadership practitioners who are each at different stages of their careers. You'll hear from Martin Gonzalez, Neri Karasselliman, Clémence Soppe, John Kagan and Peter Boatwright, and Ann Latham. As you listen in, listen to what I listen for: passion, clarity of message, and self-awareness. In this episode, these best of 2024 guests share how they approach their thought leadership work, how they overcome challenges, and how they relentlessly focus in on the audiences that they serve. If you practice thought leadership or want to practice thought leadership, there are lessons to be learned here. I'm Bill Sherman. You're listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership.

Ready?

Let's begin. Welcome to the show, Martin.

Thanks for having me, Bill.

So you went to the literature and said, okay, why do VCs stay Startups fail 65%, right?

Yeah.

Now, a reasonable next assumption would be there's a lot of research done into, well, why does this happen, right?

Yeah.

And details. You would assume there's a fertile field out there.

Yeah.

I assume you did pretty soon, either in building that first workshop or soon after, a look at, you know, what the literature said. Next clip.

Yeah.

Was there a lot?

Well, so it's interesting you say that. So there were a few really seminal pieces during that time that we leaned on that were academic and then kind of more practitioner-oriented in nature. But there wasn't anything that really honed in on like what specifically do founders at that very early stage during these hypergrowth periods, like what do they need to be doing kind of as leaders as they build the company, as they build a team around the product? In fact, one of the people we had reached out to was Linda Greer, who was then at Stanford Business School. And I come to her with this question of like, okay, we're building out this very kind of no-frills program. I would love to at least ground it in some research. And at that time she was teaching a course at Stanford called The Psychology of Startup Teams. I thought, okay, great, there must be an answer here.

Right. Clearly there's an entire class devoted to that within that course, right?

That's right. And so I ask her, so if I were to ask you to summarize what the traits should be or what the behavior should be of effective founders, like what is that list? And then she kind of says, well, you know, it's an early field. There really isn't much that's been studied, but here's kind of what I teach in the course. And I look at— she sends over the deck and I look at the deck and I think it's based off a Forbes article that's like a listicle of like top 8 things or 10 things that you should be doing as founders. And it looked like no jab on like, I think that's how, that's how early fields operate, right? It's let's take our best guess, let's put it out there and, you know, let's kind of gather reactions, spur on new research. So essentially there was really not, not a lot to lean on. And so it felt like, wow, we should maybe more seriously like go about the work of, you know, assessing founders and then validating that assessment tool, which is exactly kind of what we do over time with this program because we run a 360-degree feedback survey, you know, with the founders in these programs.

Well, and there's a couple of things that pop out from the Forbes article on Listicle, right? And like you, often someone puts sort of the early footpath down.

Yeah.

And then someone says, well, how would we test this?

Yeah.

How do we measure it? What are the, even the hypotheses? And brings rigor to something where, you know, a smart person has sat down and said, you know, I saw a pattern, I'm just going to create a listicle. I think listicles are a great way for spawning ideas, but there's this tension between the absence in the academic literature and one article in Forbes. It wasn't even in the pop literature.

Yeah. And, and, you know, so, so the first thing to say is I think the jury's still out. Like, I, I won't say that, well, my work therefore, so, you know, answered the question.

I think there is the next step on the journey and you're going to spin off other research hypotheses.

Right, right. And so, you know, everything begins with descriptive analysis, right? Like, what do we see and how do we describe what we see? And then you can go on and do more correlational analysis, which is stuff that I do and I do with a Wharton collaborator, Valentina Asenova from Wharton, where you now correlate this with real startup outcomes. Like, do startups fail? Do startups kind of go to IPO? And so we— but at some point you want to then go to the, I guess, the gold standard, which is let's do experimental stuff. Let's run a, you know, let's, let's kind of run a control group, experimental group. And, you know, each of these steps of kind of building thought leadership has its own challenges, right? So at the very beginning, these listicles, they do suffer from survivor bias, which is usually the writer of this will look at successful founders and then conclude that what they see that they do or what they claim that they do is the formula for success. Well, unfortunately, for that to be really true, you'd have to check kind of if the people who failed did the same and failed anyway. And that's kind of what we tried to do with the data we had, which is we looked at, you know, the best and the least effective, put them under a microscope and tried to see what was different between those two cohorts.

Well, and in addition to survivor bias, there's also probably a file drawer problem. Of people who have collected data that might be relevant but has either never been published or— yeah, it's buried in a way that you don't realize the existing pieces of it, right? So some of what you're doing is putting a spotlight on the research question and saying, hey, we'd love to engage with other people who may have had an idea, either anecdota anecdotally, anecdata-ly, or actually a full dataset, right?

I agree.

And you know, through the years I've learned— so one is I've learned to, instead of asking the question on google.com, I'll ask the question in Google Scholar. Then you come, you at least, you unearth some of what's been done. But recently I've been doing the search on SSRN, which is kind of a database of papers that have not yet been published but are kind of in the review process, then you start to see like some of the early thinking, especially now in this moment where there's a lot of energy around generative AI and there's a lot of research going on. But for you to actually know what's going on, SSRN seems to be a really good place to start because, you know, the review cycles in these peer-reviewed journals, while really robust— wow, it takes forever. It takes years.

Welcome to the show, Neri.

Thank you, Bill. Very, very happy to be here.

So you point out a couple times where you either found in your PhD studies a difference between your passion and where you thought you were going to research—FDI versus the immigrant entrepreneurship—and then Finding that gap in the scholarship, finding that gap that leads to the aha, that allows you to ask the questions no one's focused on yet. And to be able to have both passion and then the insight is a powerful combination. Because you're coming from a place of lived experience. You talked about, hey, when I was studying, I was using my own company as a laboratory, right?

Yes, absolutely. My thesis, my thesis consists of 3 different articles. We are going back many years now. This is almost 20 years ago, but I use my company as a case study for including one of my papers talks about autoethnographic research. Where I study, where the researchers studies his or her own company or background or culture. And again, everything is in my thesis was very much personal. And I think even today what I write about, and for those of us, for those who listen to us and are curious how they can find their breakthrough idea, it Of course, always comes from a personal experience, passion. And this is what I would say not misled me, but when I was trying to figure out where can I make impact, I was thinking, I don't know if people will want to read about immigrant entrepreneurship. And this was a mistake in some sense because I was thinking it has to come from a passion, from your lived experience, as you mentioned. And if I give one advice, it would be that to focus on what you know, focus on what you are passionate about.

Well, and I've said many times here that your audience for your ideas will never be more engaged than you are. In the topic, right? And so if you find questions that cause you to say, why is that? Why do immigrant-formed companies survive longer than average? Or why are immigrant-founded or children of immigrant companies overrepresented in the Fortune 500? Or in unicorns? That's a question that's intriguing and say, what can we learn from that? Yes. And really a deep question. And there are plenty of reasons and variables and possibilities and study design to try and figure out what's going on. But it's easy. What I like about what you've done there is you've taken complexity and drilled it down to a question that someone can listen and say, I didn't know that. That's interesting. Tell me more. And more importantly, what's going on? I don't have to have the same lived experience as you do as a migrant entrepreneur to, to say, what can I learn?

Right? Very true. So in fact, my book, the audience is not about, is not immigrant entrepreneurs. They are anyone. And years ago, again, when I was writing and researching on this topic, I had an idea to write a paper about build your own family. Because when I look at immigrant entrepreneurs, they build businesses based on homophilic ties, which is, uh, you know, we, we have a shared experience, we have this shared history that binds us together and makes us work towards a common goal. And I thought, how can anyone else copy and do the very same thing in their own company, in their own workforce? They don't have to be immigrants, but What are the principles that you can take from immigrants and apply them to your own company? And that's what the book is about.

Welcome to the show, Clémence.

Thank you for having me.

So I'm excited to have a conversation around the hypothesis testing and thought leadership and really bringing an organization together. To create impact, right? And you've had an interesting career in thought leadership. I want to jump first to one of your early roles, and then we'll come back to what you're doing now. So you told me early on that you were involved in yacht sales. Tell me a little bit about that and the process of selling high-ticket item?

Oh, uh, the luxury industry is very complex, right? So you have to do your homework and make sure that when you're reaching out to a potential buyer that he's ready to buy, because it's a lot of effort. We call it cultivation strategies. When you're cultivating a high-profile individual, you have to invest a lot. So you have to make sure that as you're doing that, be doing the right thing so you can land the deal. We always go for almost 90-80% conversion rates. Otherwise, you're wasting a lot of money and resources, right? So how do you apply digital knowledge or digital, I call it social listening or digital information in this kind of high-profile engagement? There is huge power and potential in digital networking., right? So when you're scraping through the net and you're finding information about specific individuals, it helps you to engage at the right time, at the right place for them, and improve this conversion rate. Let me tell you a story of how we did this particular example. So this was even recent because I always, you know, I wear many hats at the same time, right? The pandemic hits. I already left the company, but they reached out to me again because of my algorithm knowledge and because I studied all of this B2B platform. So they reached out to me again during the pandemic and said, we want to break into a new market. We need your help to understand how we can break into a new market and we're targeting a new target audience and it's new to us. Luxe. So what did we do? We went on LinkedIn platform. I like to start with LinkedIn because LinkedIn is always very tangible. And it's a people-to-people platform. We always have to define a spokesperson. I tell, I, what, what I've learned over the years is that you can build trust very fast from a person, from as a person than as a brand, really. If you want to break into a new market, building that trust at the personal level always brings, uh, gives results faster. So we had a spokesperson and so we identified the a key target audience on LinkedIn, CEOs of scale-ups, startups, big companies who could be potential buyers of this product. Then we had our thought leader talk about the product that we were selling. And then in this case, we hired, you know, a renowned celebrity to be the brand ambassador also on LinkedIn. And we created a community. On LinkedIn, we created a private group. And so these folks were the thought leader and the ambassador were inviting our target audiences to this group. And in the group, we were nurturing them. I know, and then we started inviting other people as the recommendation. Would you invite 4 or 5 more people as with the same similar profile of yours to join the group? That's how we, I call it like social networking plus social selling, right? Because we started the conversations online and then took it offline.

So that's an example. That's a great example.

And I want to go back to something that you said early in your response because I want to underline it for our listeners. You said, hey, we needed a 90% conversion rate, otherwise the effort for marketing and sales didn't make sense, right? And so with a high-ticket luxury good, you have a small population target audience, right? And yeah, and so with that, you can spend the time to get to know them well. It's a relationship selling piece, but instead of broadcasting or even narrowcasting to an industry, you're really doing pointcasting. You're targeting individuals where in many cases you're researching them by name, by profile, and saying what What is important to this person? What do they value? How are they going to respond? That's a very high-touch approach to thought leadership.

Yeah, it's high-touch, although we combine it with a multiple-touch approach, right? Because you have a pool, we had a pool of people that we were targeting. So we went meticulously one after the other. But there is what we call like lookalike audiences where it's, I think the communication on all social platforms is always twofold. Once you position yourself as a trusted advisor and you put your content out there, the algorithm works in ways to put your content in front of people who would value it. And if you're answering their questions, guess what? You put yourself on their radar and they were not even part of your target audience. So you're also multiplying your efforts by doing that. That is what I wanted to highlight.

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 thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. Welcome to the show, Peter and John. Thank you. Good, great to hear. So both of you have spent the better part of a career studying the work of innovation as process as well as how to lead it. And the reason that I'm excited to have the two of you on this podcast is many people who practice thought leadership often do it in an expansive, exploratory way. They get excited about the next big idea and don't know when to pause that exploration. They're always interested in the next article they're writing, the next book, the next piece of research they're doing, rather than taking it to scale. And so I want to ask you around your book, Managing the unmanageable, which is around the innovation process within organizations. What does it mean to manage the unmanageable?

Peter? Sure. Well, the unmanageable that we're talking about is product and service innovation, and we recognize that, you know, there's lots of tools and methods, etc., but it's a chaotic realm, lots of exploration, but you need to at some point bring that together to make forward progress and make decisions. So that, you know, what we've looked at and researched is how to allow for and benefit from the chaotic nature, but also move forward productively towards bringing out products and services. So that's the unmanageable in particular that we're talking about.

And the structure of the book, and I want to give a little bit of an introduction to this, John, is really written and framed to someone who's tasked with leading an innovation team rather than a textbook. That's, that's correct.

And it's, it is really written for people who are practicing the management of innovation and innovators. It's very different than how you look at a process for innovation. What steps do you follow to create the product or the service? We're looking at how do you manage those people that are on teams that are actually going through that process.

And so, John, I want to ask you, do you start with a story tied to your research? And it involves peanuts and shelling, for example. Could you share that story with our audience and the research in terms of what the difference of managing that process looks like?

Sure, I'd be happy to, Bill. And so I did a study at Carnegie Mellon with a couple of colleagues, Josh Ghiori and Ken Kotovsky. And in particular, really, we were trying to understand what is the impact of managing a process versus going into and actually doing the design itself. And so we had a process of problem setup. We had 5 different designers. They were engineers, they were mechanical engineers who were all working on real time trying to design a device that would shell peanuts by crushing the peanuts and removing the nut itself unarmed and then separating that out. But it was for a rural area where there's no electricity and there's no fuel. So we gave them an hour to work on this problem. And then we had another set of conditions where we actually removed someone from that team or a similar group of teams So now there's only 4 people working on the problem instead of 5, and we replaced them with a manager. And that manager was the manager of the process. They didn't go in and meddle with the design itself. What they looked at is how are people communicating? How are they interacting? Are they staying on task? Are they solving the problem? And if not, they would intervene and nudge the team just on the process itself. And at the end of this, we took the sets of designs from both sets of teams and we had them evaluated. And if we look at excellent designs, which really are the ones that we want if we're going to be doing innovation, there was a fivefold increase in the excellent designs from the managed teams versus the unmanaged teams. So what we showed really was that management makes a huge difference, but it's management of the process. You want to let the innovator be innovative, but you want to manage them and not try to meddle with the design of the solution itself.

And if I sort of step back from that, one of the things that I recall is that the manager or the observer was limited not only in how they could communicate with the team, but the types of suggestions they could— I think they had note cards, is that correct, that they could hold up? Right.

They had a limited library of interventions that were deemed appropriate ahead of time, and they could only use those note cards. They weren't having a conversation. They would just put the note card down. It was up for the team to look at it, to recognize what the manager was saying, and then to, if they chose to, to act on that.

And I love that because by limiting the vocabulary, you wind up having a richness that you didn't have, right? Whereas if you freed someone up to say, hey, I could say anything, let me give them feedback on how the— I think the idea is, all of a sudden it's easy to get sucked in.

Well, it's that, and it also gives us rigorous data. Absolutely. Distant from our experiment to be able to truly be able to isolate and identify, in this case, the manager in terms of what we're trying to understand about the manager.

So Peter Winick, when you think about someone who's responsible and is managing a creative team, an innovative team, you and John distill down a list of 13 recommendations. There's a lot of literature out there, let alone the research that you've done. How do you take what could be an endless list of recommendations and similar to the experiment that John just described, give yourself a limited vocabulary of what are you going to communicate? On Process. So how did you come up with the recommendations?

So I think this partly comes from our experience in managing teams. It partly comes from conversations with others who were involved in innovation. And these were— I mean, a lot of material is known or pretty logical. Uh, we don't need to write about things that would— that managers would anticipate. So these tips were ones that struck us as interesting. And interesting is partly that there's some aha there. There's something that we weren't really sure if you took the hypothesis up front, should the manager behave in, you know, way A or method B, or should we structure teams in one way or another way? It's not necessarily obvious ahead of time. Um, but then we explored and found out answers. So it's that kind of way that we decide on what tips to write about, or the ones that we found intriguing.

Welcome to the show, Anne. Thank you, great to be here. So you have built thought leadership around clarity. And my question for you is, how did you come to land on clarity as the area that you were focusing on? That's a great question.

So before I quit my corporate job to start my independent consulting business, I was reading books about how to be a consultant, but I, I knew that my value proposition was critical. So I sent an email out to all to my boss, my previous bosses, my colleagues, coworkers, just anyone I could think of and said, what is it I do especially well that is most unusual? And I got these wonderful, thoughtful responses that would talk about how I take in large quantities of information and cut to the chase and find the kernel, find the essence. Get everyone on the same page and move them forward with concrete decisions and concrete ideas and plans. And so after reading all these different emails, I said, I create clarity. So it was pretty clear.

So was clarity a word that kept popping up in those responses, or was it one that you sort of had to infer and distill down from the responses?

It was both. They, they used the word and, and it was pretty clear the way they were talking about things that that's what I do. Of course, then I searched for a URL that made sense and, and I had, I came up with Uncommon Clarity because they said I am uncommonly good at this. So uncommonly clarity, Uncommon Clarity was available and that's my website.

And that's a great start to clarity. Because it answers the question not only what are you good at, but also how do you make it memorable for others? You've got a great sort of hook into the name of the platform, Uncommon Clarity, rather than, well, Common Clarity, right? So my question really lies then, you said you had this aha, oh, I'm good at clarity. You gotta take the next step of how am I good at clarity? How does this happen? Right? And so how did you decode clarity?

That's another great question. So I said I create clarity. That was what my value proposition was all about. And what I discovered is that that's not something people want to buy. It's too vague, it's too unclear. They don't know what the value of that is. They don't know what the purpose of that is. Everyone thinks clarity is a great thing, like mom and apple pie, but it's not. There's no urgency there. So while I was looking at, you know, how I create clarity and I started writing about how to create clarity and how I do it right away, I did strategic planning, I did team effectiveness, you know, I did process improvements. I helped people with all kinds of things, but clarity improves productivity, it improves confidence, it eliminates mistakes, it makes everyone be able to maximize their potential. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. So I could weave that into pretty much every aspect of how you run your business.

And it leads to a question of what is clarity? Is it a skill or set of skills? Is it a mindset? Is it a process? Is this a system? You know, that leads to, you know, it's a word we use often. Hey, I need more clarity here. But it's not like there's a barcode at the store, you know, where you can put it on the checkout counter and go, hey, I picked up, you know, 3 units of clarity. So what is clarity? And mindset, skill, talent, you know, are some people born with it and that's just luck, or clarity is a word that's incredibly unclear, which is really sad.

And when you think about it, we have more shared vocabulary to talk about the temperature of soup than the degree of clarity, because soup can be scalding hot. It can be very hot, nice and hot. It can get down to, you know, warm, lukewarm, cold, frozen. You know, there's so many. And we know what those are and we know what order they come in. But when we talk about clarity, We talk about things being a little unclear, a little confusing, not very clear. We need a little more clarity. It's just like there's this nebulous point in the sky and we're always just a tiny smidgen off that point, right? We're never grossly unclear. We're just a smidgen off. So we don't have any words to really agree on how unclear are we. So I created a spectrum from disclarity, which is the complete lack of clarity, because I got tired of typing lack of clarity. So from disclarity on one end to uncommon clarity on the other end. And I chose the uncommon because most people think they are clearer than they really are, but I don't think very many people would say they are uncommonly clear. So now we have a spectrum and we can talk about.

So you created a scale basically, right? Yeah. So the equivalent of a thermometer readings of— Exactly. Can we discuss and agree if I think I'm at one level of clarity and you think you're at another level of clarity, then we've got to sit down and have a clarity conversation, right?

Right. And we don't even have to agree on exactly where, because what happens in— and I, I wrote the book The Power of Clarity. The first chapter is we're not as clear as we think we are. And there's a ton of examples about why we aren't. And when, you know, I said that people always think they're just a smidgen off being clear. And when you look at those examples and you go, where are they on the spectrum? Guess what? They're way down here on the disclarity end, over and over and over again. So that's closer to our natural state.

Okay, you've made it to the end of the episode, and that means you're probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are 3 recommendations. First, check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game in thought leadership, as well as just starting out. Second, subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership. And finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights take them to scale through the practice of thought leadership. Maybe you're looking for strategy, or maybe you want to polish up your ideas, or even create new products and offerings. I'd love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.