The Best of 2024: Insights from Top Thought Leaders | Best of 2024 with Peter Winick | 616

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today I'm really excited. I get to speak to Kim Scott. She's the author of Radical Candor and Radical Respect. It's a pleasure to have you on, Kim.

Well, thank you so much. I've been looking forward to our conversation. Part of the reason why the book worked is that I really love writing for its own sake, not just to like share my legacy as that, you know, but I actually like the writing part and was actually interested in that. The thing that really motivated me, like the reason I left Google and went to Apple was that I realized I really didn't care at all about cost per click. The thing that interested me in my job—

by the way, if you're at— if you're at Google and you don't care about that, you probably you shouldn't be at Google.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. I mean, I think you could— cost per click was taken care of itself, really.

Yeah, right, right.

It was, it was, it was doing really well. But, but the thing that motivated me, and the— and I think the reason why I was effective at Google was thinking about how do you build teams, how do you set up structures so that people can do the best work of their lives and, and build good relationships. So So that was the thing that really interested me. And what Apple offered that Google didn't was an opportunity to spend full-time thinking about, you know, how are we going to— how do you manage people? So I think it also— the experience spending 2.5 years at Apple just thinking about teaching people how to manage was also really helpful. Like, I think most people— yeah, most people don't spend go from leading a team of 7—

but go back to why do you think that— why did it take off? Because it wasn't like you went after this with a billion-dollar marketing budget and—

no, no, no, no, I—

whatever. Like, what was going on either at that moment in time in the business universe, or why did it— why did it hit? Yeah, why do you think it hit?

So that was a long-winded way of saying I think part of the reason why it hit is that it's well-written. It's a good book.

Okay, good. No, but okay. But that— but I think that's important because there's so many books out for so many reasons that just aren't—

they're not especially well-written. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay.

I think also I was genuinely interested from the time I started my first management role in 1991. I was genuinely, genuinely interested in the management part of, of building a business.

Okay.

And, and most people aren't like— I went to business school and how many classes did I take about managing people? Zero. Not nothing. The thing I did learn at business school is that a good 2x2 framework can solve all the world's problems. And I think the 2x2 framework in Radical Candor is part of what struck a nerve. And the 2x2 framework is sort of vertical line is care personally, horizontal line is challenge directly. And when you can do both, it's radical candor. And that's really important because I think we so often feel like we have to choose between being effective and being nice, and you don't. You can do both, you know. And, uh, and I think that's part of why it struck a nerve. It, it, it kind of dispelled the nice, nice people finish last myth that is, that is really out there. I think a lot of people hate the idea of becoming a manager because it's like, if you think about all the relationships in our lives, most of them have a positive valence, you know, family relationships, parent-child, like, I mean, obviously there are bad relationships between parents and children, but mostly they're positive valence. But if you think about the relationship between a boss and their direct report, It's a very negative— even the word boss, manager, leader, all of those words have negative connotations. And yet all of us have managers and a lot of us become managers. And that was one of the things I really set out to fix. So I think it hit a nerve also because we've come to a moment in our economy where people are unwilling to pay the asshole tax. You know, they're not willing to work for someone who treats them miserably. Yeah.

And yeah, so no, and I think that's important because I think, you know, you and I are probably similar age when we were coming up. It wasn't really an option. Like, if you got stuck in the killer job and the boss was a jackass, it just—

that was your—

sometimes actually they were synonymous. Like, yeah, the best, the best opportunities came working for toxic people. I'm really excited about today's episode. I've got Marcus Collins here. He's an award-winning marketer and culture translator. With one foot in the world of practice. He's the chief strategy officer at Wieden and Kennedy, small little, agency. And then he's also a marketing prof at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. He's got a couple books out. We've got a new one. And before getting into all of the minutia of his bio, I'd rather just talk to him because he's quite unique. So welcome aboard, Marcus.

Thanks for having me, Peter. Good to be here.

What is it about the way that you'd like to market this book or your approach to marketing this book, given that it's your first, right? That's different or unique because as, as you know, marketing books is just not easy.

No, no. And the thing is what it, what it became for me, it, it really, it, it really was like a moment of truth in that I approached, I had to approach launching the book like I would launch any product for any client. That's just a very hard thing to do when you are the client. And it was an industry that I didn't understand very well either. I didn't know the publishing world very well, so I had to learn the industry, learn the players, learn the consumer behavior around it, and then design based on the congregation of people I want to interact with. And what I ended up doing is I literally went to market with the book the way that I tell brands to go to market. That is, Start with who are you? How do you see the world? What do you believe? What is your own culture?

Yeah.

Who are the people who see the world the way you do, right? People who subscribe to the same point of view that you do, and you go preach the gospel. And if you do that, if you activate those people based on the shared, the shared conviction that you have. Yeah.

I think there's some brilliance in that, in that a lot of people when they get a book out, they'll say something like, well, everybody should read this book and this book applies to everybody. And it's like, okay, great. Problem is you don't have the marketing budget to reach everybody.

That's right.

And it's really, really expensive to be in the conversion business. So step one is, you know, if there's a whole group of people that believe the opposite of what you do, or it's not important, okay, good luck to them. Right? Let me find my people. Let me find my tribe that really will lean in hard. And then it's, they, you don't even have to tell them, they will organically or naturally evangelize and say, oh man, I just picked up this guy Marcus's book. And hey man, I know you're gonna love it because I know we think similarly. And, and similarly doesn't mean bland, right? Like we have similar perspectives. Our perspectives might be totally out there and bizarro.

That's right. But we share that exactly in that way. Yeah, exactly. And, and that's the thing is that when we, when we approach marketing, going to market in that manner, we find that people don't tell other people because they love you. They tell other people because they love their people and they end up preaching the gospel about you evangelizing on your behalf as a way of projecting their own identity. Not because of what, who you are, but because of who they are. And people go and tell others about the book as a way to saying like, hey, hey, hey Pete, like, you know, Peter, you and I, like, I know you're gonna love this because we always talk about this, or dude, this is right up your alley. And by sharing it with you, you go, Marcus, thanks so much, dude. Like, that was exactly what I was looking for. You know me so well.

Well, and there's a piece of that, and, and I think there's a piece of that, that if I subscribe to the beliefs in the book, whether I, I've thought about it that way and I read the book and go, oh yeah, hallelujah, this guy's on the money, right? When I give that to someone else, I don't have to say, this is what I think. I'm giving to them and say, hey, here's a guy that's much smarter than me. He's a prophet, Ross, da da da da da. Look what he thinks. By the way, happens to be what I think, right? Or I wouldn't give you the book. That didn't, right. But it all, but it, it's sort of a weird way of validating my belief system and, and my worldview.

It becomes a, a means of social currency. It's like sharing, you know, like telling your friend about a funny movie because by telling them about a funny movie, it means that you have good taste. Right. It means that, that you know what good humor is, or you know what a good restaurant is, or you have good taste when it comes to travel or whatever we recommend. We recommend these things. So that we can strengthen relationships with our people, right? The product in this case, the book is just, uh, it's just currency by which people exchange to bring each other closer together. And thinking about the book that way, it's, it's a humbling thing to do because this isn't about you, Marcus. This is about the ideas becoming a way by which people peacock to the world who they are and find people like themselves. So I build the, the launch in that fashion. Like, who are my people who see the world the way I do? Luckily, I had been teaching for, you know, roughly 10 years. So I said, I want to reach out to my students, people who take my class, my favorite students. Right, exactly. People who already know the gospel, they already believe it. And perhaps—

but I think, I think you buried the lead there, by the way. Professors do have favorite students.

Yeah, right.

Period. And if you, and if you don't know who they are, it's probably not you. Um, just, just saying, right?

I reached out to some of my favorites, not all of them.

Some of the most favorite.

There you go. There you go.

So Marcus didn't reach out to you.

And what I know is that I really, I reached out to the ones who not only knew the gospel because they did well in the course.

Yes.

But they believed the gospel from the courses that I, that I taught.

Sure.

And they probably tried to institute the thinking in their work since they've taken my class.

So stay there for a minute because again, this is one of the quirkinesses of marking a book, if that's a word, which you're marketing the book, but you, but it's sort of only one thing that you're marketing, right? So the book is one place that all these ideas live, right?

Right.

In a, in an easy thing you can grab for $25, $30, whatever it is. But the reality as a thought leader is when you're marketing a book on some level, yeah, you care about book sales, but on other levels, there's other things that you want to happen as a result of the book. Maybe they book you to speak, or they hire you as a high-paid consultant or whatever. So it's sort of marketing once removed, right?

So, but what I find is that the, the, the most important part about the book is just scaling the thinking. It's getting the thinking in the hands and the minds of more people. Correct.

So one, so where I was going with that, if I were you going through list of my, you know, favorite students, right? They might be more favorite if they happen to be the CMO at a company that looked like one that you might wanna do business with. Theoretically than if they were working at an underfunded nonprofit. It, you know, bless their hearts. But if, if one of your objectives was to drive your business, then you gotta say, ah, hmm, these people are in positions that can really be helpful to me. The book is just sort of the first bite of the apple, if you will.

100%.

Today my guest is, uh, Kate Brovery, and Kate is interesting. She is the co-author of a new book. It's never an old book, right? Called Work Different, published by Wiley just recently. And she has been at Mercer for a long time. Her current role is Advisory Knowledge and Insights Global Leader. So we'll ask what that actually means in English in a moment. But she has an interesting background, and she was previously in a previous life at PDI Ninth House. So she knows the training world, knows sort of all the things that, that we tend to talk about. So welcome aboard today, Kate. How are you?

Ah, it's great to be here with you, Peter Winick.

What I know from my experience is the only thing publishers hate more than a book written by 2 people is a book written by 3 people, right? So now you mentioned it in a positive light of diversity, right? So you had, you know, you had, I think it's Germany, you and someone in New York. So A, talk about sort of what was the impetus to write the book, what that experience been like, and now you're in sort of launch mode.

Yeah. You know, now that I've actually worked with a publisher, I can totally understand why they would say that. And I might actually agree with them. So just 'cause I have a value that you end up landing in a better place because you have diversity of thought doesn't mean that that's the least, you know, the easiest, easiest course. I think the reason why you end up in a better place is because you have that—

3 different people with 3 unique excuses to miss deadlines, which publishers love.

So anyway, and, uh, so Kai Andersen, who's in Germany, have translated It also, because obviously things take longer than it does, end up crashing into him having a 4-month sabbatical. So you can imagine what we were all saying behind his back as well when someone goes out for 4 months. Anyway, he's made it up since, but it, no, it was tough. And so my learning was one thing I know that Mercer's really good at is we're really good at executing. And because we're good at executing, that's sometimes a problem. If you, the more important thing is getting the ideas right, the ideas that linger, the things that you go, look, This is the stuff that we would say when we've had like 2 bottles of wine, but we probably wouldn't say direct to our clients. And we wanted this a book where we came off mute on the things that we thought were fundamentally broken about work that really are gonna trip you up if you didn't do it. And in the first version, it had loads of swear words, which my boss who's in America all took out. But the book is quite, not aggressive, but it does say the stuff that we probably wouldn't say as a keynote speech. And I think we felt really passionate that we were Having these professional conversations on interesting topics like the move to skills-powered organizations and modern reward practices, we weren't having the honest conversation with, yeah, let's be honest, it doesn't pay to stay. And yeah, actually things have shifted and skills are the new currency of work. And my God, what are you gonna do all about your job architectures and all the stuff that we supply to you today? Because a lot of that's not gonna be relevant in a more agile world. So those are the sort of things that we weren't talking about. And so we were like, let's do it this way. You know, we even don't even have Mercer on the front cover.

Well, but tell, gimme, gimme the origin of the book. Was it, who had the idea and when was it over? You know, how many bottles of wine and someone said, well, it would be, it would be a jolly good idea for us to write a book.

You know, I think a lot of people in our profession might say, hey, we should put some of that down on paper at some point. I know this wasn't the start of the book, but I think it was the one that maybe tipped us over. We're in the US and Ilya and I and Kai are waiting for a flight. Then, you know, all the signs, click, click, click, click, click, comes up, cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel, delay. We're going to be there for about 6 hours. So we do what all good consultants do, you know, get your laptop out. Got to be productive. Got to be productive.

I was going to say hit the bar at the airport, but okay.

I think it was about 11, so it's probably a bit early even for us. And then we start to overhear a conversation, you know, like you do in a cocktail party and, you know, you shouldn't listen in, but it's just too good. Yeah. So, and it's obviously someone in the HR function and they're on the call to someone on the other end and they're like, I know, I know, we can't hold on. We can, we can bring the young people in because we've got a great brand, we've got great training. But yeah, you know, that's it. They're going to leave after 18 months. Oh, that's what, you know, that's what Gen, Gen, you know, Gen Ys do. They don't want to stay around. Okay, maybe some of it's us because, you know, we don't move them. You have to be in a role for a year before you could. And then they mentioned their competitor. Yeah, I know they've gone to their direct competitor. And they said, well, they give them a sign-on bonus. You know, they've even given equity to young people, you know, blah, blah, blah. And then the best bit was it ends by saying, but you know what? I'm not worried about the people who go because I think they're the clever ones. I think the bright ones. The ones that stay who don't have the guts to renegotiate or don't think that they can get a job elsewhere. That's what I worry about, that we've now got a business of people that don't think that they can go even when they can earn a lot more by moving.

And that—

But how—

the thing is like to this moment in time, because I think there's always been this issue of if you're at that super elite rockstar level, you know, the HRs, you know, the voluntary employees, hey, you know, and I know it, I can go across the street anytime I want. So you're gonna treat me with kid gloves. But that's such a small percentage of the overall population.

I think it is now. And I think that's the thing is there's these ebbs and flows. So at that time we were like, when do we stop valuing loyalty? And is this actually the businesses we want to boost? So we obviously Mercer, large consulting firms, we had to look, you know, what's the pay difference between people who switch and people who stay? And at the time it was a huge difference, particularly in the US. And so that got us talking. It is a very tiny difference in like Germany where you've got, you know, more collective bargaining. So that got us on the path saying we sit on enough data to actually say are these just fables and people griping, or is this a truth? And if it's the truth, how do we fix it? So that's sort of how we went into it. But then you're absolutely right. I mean, coming off the pandemic, people had so, so many job choices and we had, you know, what is it in the US, 50 million people quit, I think, in 2022. Yeah. So we knew that it's not just pay, we're getting a lot more wrong than that. And Global Talent Trends, which I'm just about to release at the end of February, 1 in 2 people believe that work is still fundamentally broken.

Yeah.

And 82% feel at risk of burnout, which is higher than it was 2 years ago. So some of the indicators I saw before the pandemic, I mean, they were back down in the '60s, is still there. People still feel exhausted, depleted. And, and so we've got old world and new world stuff that I think needs fixing.

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 at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. And today I'm really excited. I've got a really special guest, Liz Wiseman. She's a researcher and executive advisor who teaches leadership to top organizations worldwide. She wrote the New York Times bestsellers Multipliers, The Multiplier Effect, and the Wall Street Journal bestseller Rookie Smarts: An Impact Player. She's the CEO of the Wiseman Group, a leadership, leadership research and development firm headquartered in Silicon Valley.. And she has worked with Apple, AT&T, Disney, Meta, Google. She's received all the Thinkers50 Awards, and basically in the world of thought leadership is what we technically call a rock star. So welcome aboard, Liz. Thanks for joining us today.

Happy to be here. I have zero musical talent, so definitely not a rock star, but—

Exactly. So you're not announcing the drop of your newest album?

No, no. Like, my nightmares are like I'm on stage with a guitar and I don't know how to play. So I'm an anti-rockstar.

You're an anti-rockstar. There you go. Cool. So a lot of folks kind of, I don't wanna say obsess on the keynote, but, but stay very much in the keynote space because if you do that well, the money's great and, you know, you don't need to have a whole staff and all that. But in, in reality, my experience has been that the keynote should be the beginning of a relationship with a client, not the extent of the relationship if you really wanna drive measurable outcomes. If you want them to embrace your ideas, if you want their leaders and managers to practice what it is that you've researched and studied, and that doesn't happen in the form of a keynote. You have to actually think through what is that suite of products and assessment tools, video-based learning, et cetera. What, what have you done there to sort of drive stickiness in an enterprise and behavior change at the, at the org level?

Yeah. Peter, to answer your question, is it okay if I, like, take you back to where I—

Sure.

In my career. So I ran—

We're doing a flashback now. We need like—

We're flashing back.

Flashback.

So I ran the corporate learning function and I worked for a huge global software company. And so part of that was management training and professional development, but a lot of it was product technical training. And so when Oracle launched a new version of the database or a new suite of tools, it was my job to make sure that every single person in that company was trained on the new product, meaning they knew how to install it, sell it, tune it, you know, uh, support it.

Which probably took priority over people, right? Product probably trumped people in that culture.

This was a software company run by Larry Ellison.

Yeah.

I, that was what I was going with.

Yeah.

And, and so I spent almost 2 decades like with this mindset, which is when you have a product, you need everyone ready, like equipped with the tools, the training, the support. And so when I released my first book, it, like, on release date of my first book, Multipliers, I'm like, okay, well, here's the keynote, here's the workshop, here's the assessment.

Right.

I wasn't thinking about it from a business and how to produce income. I had had this trained into me, which is you don't put something out there into the world without the tools that people need to be successful with it. Like, to me, it was a—

But it's the basis of a far more robust business that's not dependent on Is Liz in the room or in the Zoom today?

Oh, absolutely. And it turned out to be like, I think one of the strengths of my work and research and books has not been the books themselves. It's been the ecosystem, the support system that companies can get training and roll it out. Like multipliers, you can get that from Franklin Covey or our partners, BTS. You can take the assessment, the Light Week. We've got that whole little universe around it to help people be successful with it, which means it can grow deep roots inside of organizations. But I'm just confessing that this was not business savvy or genius on my part. It's just the way I had been trained to think, to run a large learning.

But it gave you, I think that when you came out on the scene as a thought leader, it gave you a competitive advantage because lots of folks have great ideas and books and they make for a lovely keynote and people can chat about them over the cocktail party and then you know, 3 days later you're like, how was it? Oh, that was kind of cool. Like, whatever. But when it moves from speaking being maybe the beginning of the journey you're gonna take an organization or a team or a function unit, functional unit through, it's really, really different. Right? I think it's just really different when they start to use your language and your models and your methods and your frameworks.

Yeah. We, we've offered a system to organizations that wanna deeply implement the ideas. And, you know, it's, it's always, You know, it's my favorite form of feedback. It's not like, oh, hey, you spoke at our company and it was great, or I read your book and I loved it. That's nice to hear. What I love hearing is people saying, wow, you came and like spoke at our company, or we went through your workshop, right? That was like 5, 6 years ago and we are still talking about it and still using those ideas. That's what, that's what I work for.

Love it.

Yeah. And the sustainability of the ideas, cuz otherwise you get, you know, a lot of ideas, unfortunately you get the sugar high. Everybody's into it for a little bit, and then you crash, and then you move on to the next donut or whatever the case may be.

I know, but Peter, don't— let's not forget how great a good sugar high is.

Oh, yeah. No, we love it.

I'm the daughter of a donut maker, and oh, man, I love a good—

You really? Uh-oh. I am.

Daughter—

that sounds like the album cover that you're going to do, Daughter of a Donut Maker.

Yeah.

I hope it doesn't involve me having to play a guitar.

No, no, no. No, we could probably just do it with ChatGPT or something.

But there you go.

Daughter of a Donut Maker. I like that. So I, I wanna talk a little bit about the publishing landscape. You've written 4 books, 5 books.

4 books, and then 1 book was a second edition, which was as much work.

So in my mind, I've written 5 books, but we'll call it 4 and a half for technical.

Thank you for, uh, yeah, placating me on the 4 and a half.

Yeah, we'll give you 4, 4.8, whatever. What's different now about how you go about writing a book? And then I wanna talk about the, you know, the world that is, or the insanity that is the world of publishing.

Well, I'd like to think I'm a little smarter about the process and have kind of a big picture. And so there's some advantages, like I know what it involves. The disadvantage of being a multiple book author is you know how hard it is. And honestly, I kind of am nostalgic. I really kind of yearn for the days when I didn't know what I was doing and I just jumped in and When I had written Multipliers, which I think has sold over a million copies or something, it's kind of up there. I had never written anything longer than an email note, maybe like a 3-page report and then essays in college or what have you, and maybe a Christmas letter every year. But I didn't know what I was doing, but I signed a contract saying I had an idea, so therefore I needed to write a book. And so I jumped in headlong into this process. And I was the same way with my second book, Worky Smarts. Hey, I really enjoyed that book writing process. I told my publisher, I'm like, I think I loved every step of this publishing process, everything except perhaps the index creation, which they sub out to do that, but I didn't really love that. But I loved every bit of the research, the writing, the editing. And I said, I think I might have the bug. And she said, oh no, you've got the gene. You're sort of built to do this. And so I jumped into my next book, Rookie Smarts, and then I'm jumping in. And now I'm like, oh, slow down. Like, I now know how hard it is. I know many— how I know the grind. I know the loneliness. I know the intensity. I know the, like, roller coaster of emotion that goes into the process. So I'm a little slower to do it because it's scarier.

Yeah, so this has been going on for several months. So I'll start with sort of the the origin story and then hand it to you to talk about what we did and what we learned and where we're going with it. Anyone interested in downloading the survey, it is available for free. It is a, the Business Book ROI research study, and you could download it at authorroi.com. So you can just go to that site and download it and, uh, you'll be good to go. So let me give you the, the quick backstory here. A couple of months ago, my friend Dan Gerstein, who is the founder and CEO at Gotham Ghostwriters, called me up and he said, hey, I had a client ask me this question and I've been trying to find the answer to it and I haven't had any luck. I thought you might be able to give me some insight on it. I said, sure. So what the client asked him was, wow, okay, it's a significant investment between the ghostwriter and publishing and opportunity costs, etc., to write a nonfiction business book. Has anybody done any research on the ROI of that? So Dan snooped around, found nothing. I said, that is a really good question. Let me see if I can help. I spent a day or two snoofing around, uh, making some calls and I couldn't find anything. So I called Dan back and I said, we have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is I can't help you. I can't answer that question. The good news is I think we identified an opportunity and we should go, go forward and figure this out. So we reached out to a couple of folks that are good friends, Naren at Amplify Publishing, Dan at Gotham Ghostwriters. Smith Publicity, and then we engaged Josh Bernoff to help us write this. So those are your sponsors of the survey. And to add to that, it takes a village, and Bill will get to this in a little bit. We talked to a lot of people. We talked to hundreds and hundreds of authors. And even though we have a pretty slick network, we needed to reach out to our network of friends to help us do that. So we've reached out to probably a dozen other supporting sponsors, if you will. Everyone from, let's see, the Greenleaf Book Group, Jane Westman, Page Two Publishing, Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches, and probably about a dozen others. I didn't mean to leave anybody out, but I want to get to the podcast instead of just thanking everyone. This took a village to get through. So anyway, let me, let me hand it back to you, Bill, and give us the, A, what was the methodology that we used here? And then B, what were the maybe the top 3 things that we— that we—

Yes. So let's dive in with a couple things. As you said, this wound up being the largest nonfiction book study that we know of, I mean, in terms of understanding authors' revenue, expenses, experience, and that data wasn't collected anywhere, right? And so as you said, it was an opportunity more data-driven thought leadership, the ability to answer questions that an audience that we deeply care about was asking, right? Or would be deeply interested in. And so to reach this audience, we had to ask people who had written and published books. And you can't simply go to a group like SurveyMonkey and say, hey, we'll pay a bunch of money 'Can you poll some people for us and collect some data?' No, it takes a village, as you said, to find people. We had over 350 authors respond. 301 had published a nonfiction book and two-thirds had published multiple books. And so that was a fantastic response. From the nonfiction and business book author community. And so I want to give a shout out to everyone who heard the call, leaned in, and sat down and took the survey, which wasn't a quick 3-minute, you know, Likert scale 1 to 5 and you're done. We asked some deep questions, and in order to get meaningful data, We went deep and the participants, those who completed the survey, spent over 20 to 30 minutes on the survey providing meaningful information. So there's a layer of gratitude, not only for the sponsors and the people who help amplify and reach out to their communities of authors, and then finally the authors who said, yes, this is worth my time.

Great. The investment that everybody made in time and energy is duly noted and greatly appreciated. Okay, so that being said, let's talk about what the top 3 or 4 takeaways were from the report. And everybody out there listening, again, you can go to AuthorROI.com and download the full report to read for yourself.

So let's go into a couple of the top line pieces. Number 1, good news. 64% of business books showed a gross profit, and the median profit for a book that had been out for at least 6 months was $11,350. But let's go a little bit further. Authors who invested in the book to make it more successful through things like a strategy, launch PR, and ghostwriting, all of those activities were correlated with increased profitability. And so on the revenue to strategy correlation, books with a strong revenue strategy had a median gross profit of $96,000. So the question becomes, if you know what you're trying to accomplish with your book, you have a much better chance of accomplishing it with a clear strategy. And if your goal is financial, you need a clear strategy to be able to elevate those returns.

So it was great to hear this return number that people got that invested in the strategy. Selfishly speaking, for you and I, Bill, right? Like, given that that's how we spend most of our days developing strategies for people that are writing books or are thinking about writing books, that was really important to hear. I think it's also equally important to realize that the magic formula— there is no magic formula here, but if it was, is not something as simple as number of units sold times some gross profit margin per unit that varies whether you go hybrid or self or traditional. To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at Peter at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.