Thought Leadership for the Long Game | Dorie Clark | 455

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on an extension of the podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. And I'm really excited about my guest today is Dori Clark, who doesn't need an introduction, but I'll give her one anyway because why not? But I'm only using her short bio because her long one could take up the whole time that we have together. So Dori's been named one of the top 50 business thinkers in the world by the Thinkers50. She was recognized as the number one communications coach in the world by Marshall Goldsmith Leading Global Coaches Award. She's a consultant, a keynote speaker. She teaches exec ed at Duke, at Fuqua School, and at Columbia. And her latest book, there have been many, but the latest one was called The Long Game. And we have Entrepreneurial You, Reinventing You, and Stand Out. So I'm actually condensing your bio because I want to get down to it. So hey, thank you so much.

Hey, Peter. Good to be here.

So let me sort of dive in. So I obviously have read all your stuff. I feel like, what did Larry King used to say? Long-term fan, first-time caller. But it's not our first time. So I had a couple of thoughts that I could throw at you and see where we go with. How do you differentiate, or do you differentiate sort of personal branding from thought leadership? Because one of your entrees into the world of thought leadership was sort of through personal branding as a subject matter. But how do you sort of separate those two, or are they different?

Well, I, I think of, of thought leadership as kind of a, a piece, uh, potentially of personal brand. I mean, basically everybody has a personal brand in the sense that they, they have a reputation, they're known for something. People think something about them. Uh, a certain subset of those people, I, I guess, um, you know, pro— probably the more public-facing people want to create thought leadership. And that's a necessary part if you, if you want to be known widely for your ideas. But for, for most, uh, for most people, most individual professionals, thought leadership and creating it isn't necessarily on the agenda, although it might not be a bad idea for it to be on the agenda because it's, it's never really a bad thing if you're known in a positive light for your ideas publicly.

No, I love that. So I'll give you my sort of similar thought but with a little bit of a different twist. I think that when the personal branding revolution came to be in the '90s, right? Tom Peters and A Brand Called You and all that sort of stuff. The gist of it was you have to stand out, right? Because there's lots of people like you, however smart you are or whatever industry you're in, you got to stand out. But you could have stood out at that point by being goofy or wearing a purple bow tie or having cool glasses, like, whatever. It could have been some attribute that said, oh, Peter's the guy that brings cinnamon donuts to every meeting. Isn't he lovely? Right? Whatever. But reality is it didn't need to align to your expertise, your domain didn't necessarily make you smarter or more reason for someone to like you or engage with you. And I think thought leadership from a career management perspective, it's transportable, right? So all else being equal, if I'm looking to hire someone and someone's got a history of dabbling in thought leadership versus not, it's a huge value add.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right, Peter, because the way that I think about it is almost any engagement that we have, you know, for if we're hiring an employee, if we're hiring a consultant, if we're choosing to do business with someone, it's a fairly high-risk encounter, right? I mean, if you hire the wrong person, yeah, you know, you, you're gonna have to spend tens of thousands of dollars worth of wasted time and money replacing them. I mean, it's just kind of a lot of—

reputationally, you're like, oh, you're the one that brought in the consultant we didn't like, right?

Exactly. And so if you are on the end of being— of the person being hired, It is in your interest to do literally everything possible to try to de-risk that transaction for the buyer so that they feel really good about hiring you so that they feel like you are the safe choice compared to everybody else. And when you are creating thought leadership, that's a way of doing that because it allows them to have this kind of sneak preview about how do you think, what do you know? What's your point of view? What's your philosophy? And so You are the less risky, maybe even the least risky person for them to hire compared to someone else, which dramatically increases your odds of success.

No, I love that. And you can also show, like, you've written hundreds, if not thousands of articles across various outlets, but if you're talking to a potential client on a consulting engagement or something and say, great, I'm going to send you these 3 articles I wrote at HBR 5 years ago before everybody was talking about whatever hybrid work or whatever. So I'm not It also sort of says without saying it, I'm not new to this. I've been thinking about this. I've been writing about this. I've been experimenting with it for a long, long time. And I do have a perspective and I do have a model or a framework or a method, cuz people tend to jump onto whatever is topical today.

Yeah. So true.

Cool. So my, my next question, now that we thought about sort of personal branding and thought leadership, is there is, at least in my opinion, which may or may not matter, a distinction between content marketing and thought leadership, and it tends to get really fuzzy. How do you break the two apart?

Well, I think there's a lot of overlap, but ideally thought leadership is something that I would consider to be in its purest form, something that's a little more substantive, right? If you're really not going to play act at being a thought leader or creating thought leadership, but to really do it, You want to be creating substantive enough ideas so that you really are leading others with your thoughts. You're putting something new out there, something interesting, something that might in fact, if received well, create followers around it. Content marketing could be that. Thought leadership is a form of content marketing, but I think a lot of times it's a little bit more transactional. I mean, I remember, uh, years ago I was looking into, you know, hiring a new personal assistant. And, you know, I was, you know, looking at all these resumes, and a bunch of the VAs had some phrase, I feel like it was like, oh, it was article spinning. I had to Google it. I'm like, what? What the eff is article spinning? What does that mean? And basically, it means their skill set was that they would take somebody else's article and rewrite it enough that it was like, almost kind of sort of not plagiarized. And then you could publish it under your name. I'm like, yeah, that's not exactly—

Basically, yeah, that sounds like it came out of a PR universe.

Right. Not the skill set that I'm looking for in a VA. But sometimes people think of that as like, oh, that's content marketing.

Well, I also think one is, what's the point? Right? So content marketing typically is embedded in the marketing and the sales cycle. Right? So there's different pieces of content that are put out mostly to accelerate that process. When is a buyer qualified, et cetera, et cetera. Thought leadership, if done properly, again, my opinion, is sort of above the fray of mentioning product offerings, solutions specifically. You'll talk about the problems, you'll talk about the issues, you talk about your views, but you're not gonna say, oh, and we're Verizon and we make the handy-dandy web thing that happens to solve that. It's not as blatant. And I think the timeframe, and this goes into the long game a little bit, is content marketing is measured in moments, right? It's how many interactions do we have and da da da da da. I love the way you framed the long game in that thought leadership, and I've said this for a long, long time, is a long game. If you're looking to get rich quick, tune out, right? If you're looking to write an article on Monday and get hired Wednesday, not going to happen. But tell me about sort of how you view time horizon relative to thought leadership, or just say buy the book, right?

That's right. That's right. Speaking of content marketing.

There you go.

But no, I think you raise a really important point, Peter. And part of what animated me in writing The Long Game was the work that I do with clients, executive coaching work, because oftentimes the people that I'm advising, they may themselves be people who are working to put thought leadership out into the world. Maybe they own a boutique consulting firm or they're a coach or something like that. They're an author. And it can be a really hard, disheartening process because it takes a while. And it often can feel in the early days like no one's listening, no one's paying attention. And so it's very easy for the voice in your head to be like, well, why should I bother? You know, if only my mom is reading it or whatever. But ultimately what I have seen, and you know, this is not scientific in the sense that we have not done some kind of double-blind study, but what I've experienced in my own professional life and also in the dozens of people that I have coached personally and the multiple hundreds of people who have been part of my Recognized Expert community, I've managed to get a fairly good sense, both longitudinally and just in terms of a pretty broad cohort, of what it takes to be able to finally start seeing results. And so what I have seen is that generally it takes between 2 and 3 years of consistent effort to start to see— I would be, you know, being honest, even minimal results, you know, of just getting noticed, seeing some, some.

And most of us don't have that. We don't live in that time. You know, we live in the dopamine world. We live in— I can put a tweet out now and know in 5 seconds how many people got it. I mean, I literally got a call last week from someone And it was, I don't even remember this. It was a piece I was quoted on 3.5 years ago for Wealth Advisors on the power of writing books to whatever. I didn't know. It's not that I do thousands of these, but I literally didn't remember. I had to Google. I'm like, oh yeah, there's the article. It's on the website. And he said, I taped this and I put it on my desk and I have a little file of when I want to write a book. And there were a bunch of other, I wasn't the only resource. Right. And I'm like, that's the point. Right. There was no way. That if I were to judge the value of my time against, well, I spent a half an hour with a reporter on that and nothing ever happened. That was silly. Therefore, it's easy to justify never doing that again. But I love the 2 to 3 year piece, and I love that there's also a depth, right? Being quoted once somewhere is kind of meaningless. Anybody that wants to can. It's when people are searching specific subject areas or matters that you can go back and go deep. And then having that mix, I want to talk with you a little bit also about sort of the modality mix, right? So you do a lot of articles in very well-known publications, but you, you use other forms as well. You wanna talk about what the right mix for you is and how you learned about that?

Yeah, thank you, Peter. Um, one of the things that's really informed my thinking on hoping to get my ideas out there is that I, I got my start working in politics. I was a, a press secretary and a communications director on various campaigns. And one of the adages in politics is that you need to find a way to touch a voter at least 7 times before they'll even, you know, remember who you are, before they'll even consider voting for you. And typically, because, you know, people take in information in different ways, they pay attention to different things, it needs to be in different modalities. So if you're a political candidate, that might be, uh, that you get, you know, you have people phoning for you, you have a door knocker you send to somebody's door, maybe you send a mail piece, maybe you have yard signs. You know, all of that. If you are involved in the world of ideas and professional ideas, typically that might involve writing articles. It might mean you're doing live streams like this. Maybe you're a guest on somebody's podcast. Maybe you host your own podcast. Maybe you're giving speeches at conferences, you know, all these different types of things. I would say for me, the sort of primary vehicles, it's, it is kind of all of the above. I do write frequently. I write pretty often for Harvard Business Review, for the Wall Street Journal and Fast Company. Those are the places that I target now. I do podcasts pretty frequently, and around the launch of The Long Game, I was on about 160 podcasts. Uh, so it was a pretty big push. Now I've, I've tapered it down, but I'm still doing 2 podcast interviews per week just to kind of keep the, the drumbeat going. And, um, I also host my own livestream interview show for Newsweek, which is, uh, every Thursday at noon. So, uh, so yeah, a lot, a lot of different touchpoints.

Yeah. And it's hard to say which is the best at any point in time because people take a holistic snapshot of, you know, how do I consume Dori? Yeah, I could buy her book, I can listen to it. And it's all those things for most people or different pieces of those things at different points in time. 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 us a review and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcasts. So I want to move a little bit to the business side here, which is sort of my fun, or the things that I enjoy most is sort of, you know, being a thought leader, the product is your ideas, right? You're in the business of ultimately selling your ideas. I can buy it for $30 in a book. There's the various groups that you run. What are you seeing that maybe used to work well that doesn't work well anymore? And what do you see that's sticky now that is resonating?

Yeah, it's an interesting question, Peter. I think that certainly, I mean, this has been true for a while, but anybody that's paying attention needs to recognize that if you are doing traditionally published books, the book itself is usually not going to be the revenue driver. Um, that is not the case necessarily if you are self-publishing. I mean, a lot of self-published books sell 100 copies and that's it. But if you have a self-published book that, that really takes off, then there's a million things you can do with it, with foreign rights, and you can have it reprinted for a particular corporation or bulk sales and all that kind of thing. So, so that actually could become lucrative. But if you are, you know, really dealing with a traditionally published book like this one, The Long Game, you have to get smart about thinking about what is your backend. Uh, and so it really means thinking like a marketer. So the backend typically could involve things like speeches, corporate speeches, consulting, coaching opportunities. It might, uh, it might involve online courses. You know, there's—

hold you there for a second because totally agree that you need to think about the backend, I want to get into when to think about that because oftentimes folks come to me and the story is I've got a book coming out in 90 days or 30 days or 60 days. I'm like, oh, I wish we could have met a year or two before because we're so limited as to what we can do. Or they'll say, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I need to think about that, but after the book is out. But the after the book is out is if, to me, I always use the analogy. It's like I walked into a retail shop or an ice cream store and they had one flavor. The odds of my coming back, you know, the candle store with one candle, not really good. And I think that you really have to think about that before you launch the book. Any, any thoughts on that?

Yeah, no, I mean, I, I certainly think you're right. It's, it's hard for people, of course, because, you know, launching a book is a big busy thing. And so understandably people wanna be like, no, I'll do this and then I'll do this and then later I can do that.

Yeah.

But if you wanna be successful, you do need to kind of bake it in. So, For instance, something that is useful to do is to actually, throughout the course of your book, drop in references to, uh, to a URL that you want to be driving people to. Maybe it's for, uh, downloadable information or additional resources or things like that. But, you know, a problem with books is you sell a book to somebody, and if they buy it on Amazon or if they buy it in a bookstore, you don't know who they are. You don't have your customer list. So that's, that's a big challenge. How do you reach them again? You know, nope, nobody knows. But if, if conversely you can bake it into the book so that people are hopefully incentivized that they want to go to your website and be able to download things or get additional resources, then it gives you a way to build your list and to follow up and get in touch with them, to let them know about subsequent books, to let them know about offers, you know, hey, I'm doing a workshop. Hey, I'm going to be in your city, whatever it is.

Yeah, exactly. Because just, just the book sales in and of themselves, a, they're typically not the thing that's gonna move the, the, the needle. But if you don't even know who those people are psychographically, demographically, you can't come up with hypothesis to say, oh, these type of people are resonating with my work most. Now, podcasting, you kind of can, right? If you know the types of places you tend to podcast on. What else are you seeing that's interesting now that we're, we went from everything being event-based 3 years ago, remember the world pre-COVID, we actually left our houses a lot, to everybody hibernating for a couple years, to the last year being a lot of start, stop, start, stop. Any sense as to where it's going, the mix of that in-person and remote and where it might go back to a new baseline or a different baseline?

It's certainly a good question and the situation is emerging. I feel like for me personally, it really seems like in the past just month maybe, the spigot has turned back on and all of a sudden, I mean, I went from having literally two, just two in-person speaking engagements from March 2020 to March 2022, literally everything else.

One a year.

Yeah, basically.

You usually get that in by Tuesday of a typical week, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And then about a month ago, I suddenly had a week where I had 3 talks and I'm like, wait, what? I have a week where I now have 50% more than for the past 2 years. That's bizarre. And so that was kind of the first sign for me that like, oh yeah, we are coming back online. I have a trip coming up, you know, in just a couple of weeks where again, I've, I'm doing 3 talks that week. So, uh, I think—

but is this a short-term spike? Because a lot of what I'm seeing now in the marketplace is Wow. It's the first time we all got together in 2.5 years. People need to touch. They need to connect. They want to physically be in the same room and break bread with their coworkers. So is this a short-term spike and then we go back to a new baseline? Is it— we want to go back. I mean, this is a good way to communicate information content. It's a lousy way to develop connection and community where there are easier and better ways to do it.

Yeah, I think that's right. I think speaking is going— in-person speaking is going to go back to being relatively, uh, viable because there's, there's just so many organizations. I mean, uh, if a— even if a given organization is, is decreasing its amount of in-person events, you know, there's, there's plenty of different— you know, if you're an individual speaker, there's plenty of different target audiences that you could be talking to. But that being said, one of the things that I did basically as soon as the pandemic happened was I raised my speaking rates because I realized, oh, speaking in person is going to be more precious now. It's going to be rarer and more meaningful for a company, which also means that they're going to be willing to spend more on a given event because it's all, you know, maybe it's only happening once a year or something like that. And as a result, they want, they want to make it more special. They want to be able to invest in it. And so I think oftentimes that means, oh, they'd be willing to pay more to get the speaker that they really want to get.

Well, and the production values and all that. I used to love going to a place that has a ton of events, Orlando or Vegas, and wandering the halls from the conference I was at to see what else is going on. And so many times you're like, wow, there's really no difference between the dental hygienist group and the nuclear engineer group. The bar had been pretty low. It's sort of rinse, lather, repeat. And I think you're right. If we're going to convene people, forget about the economic, you know, the cost, which are much higher. We really have to focus on the experience. So they're probably less likely to, you know, nickel and dime a speaker or only want to deal with a speaker that they know is at rockstar level. I think it'll take out sort of the bottom end of the market.

Yeah.

What else do you see moving forward that you're excited about, that you see the most opportunity on the business side of thought leadership?

Well, I do think it's a good thing that people have gotten so much more comfortable with virtual events because I do think that that's going to stay. I mean, you're absolutely right. It's been proven as a vehicle for information exchange. And so I think a lot of speakers joke, but it's also true. I speak for free. What you pay me for is traveling. And because it's so terrible and grueling, all the flights and the cancellations and the Mishigas. And so if you're a speaker, being able to build a very viable business— I mean, of course the prices are reduced if it's virtual compared to in-person, but you know, let's, let's say it's half price. Well, if you're able to be at home, you can do 2 a day, maybe even more, who knows. And it's just a great steady income from home. It creates a whole new viable business model, which I think is really quite powerful. And of course, you know, I'm, I continue to be a big fan of online courses and residual income. You know, that's, that's terrific. I'm curious, Peter, for the clients that you work with, what do you feel like is sort of the low-hanging fruit that, you know, presumably before coming to you, most people were missing out on? Like, what, what's, what's the thing that people aren't thinking about or aren't doing generally?

Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think they're not thinking about the backend enough. Like, okay, Who with a high level of specificity is hiring me to solve what problem? I mean, it seems like a third-grade question, but it's really, really important because on the one end of that, continue to get, well, everybody, this work would be great for everybody. Well, okay, but your marketing budget doesn't support that, right? So knowing the who and the what, even if it is something that is arguably universal, right? I think that's really, really important. In terms of modalities, I agree with you on the distance side, the e-learning, video-based learning, et cetera. One of the things that we're seeing is that because there have been so many less events, part of the secrets underneath that is, well, where'd all the money go? Right? So every time, if I was a mid-level executive company going to 10 events a year, every time I left the office, it's thousands of dollars and my productivity goes down. Well, where's that money going? Well, organizations would rather invest consistently in capabilities development, and then occasionally in sort of speaking, doing a big high-ticket event and that sort of thing. And speaking is not capabilities development. I don't care how great a speaker is. In 45 minutes, you can't measurably change or develop a skill that leads to an outcome that is measurable, that moves a business lever. Right? So I think it's freed up money there. So if they love you as a speaker, if they love your book and you don't have something that helps others do what you are talking, speaking, writing about better, you're missing a huge opportunity. Totally different budget.

Yeah, really good point.

Cool. So yeah, so I want to go back to the, the travel piece again. It's interesting where, you know, 3 years ago, someone, you know, people giving you their travel itineraries for the week— well, I'll be in Chicago on Tuesday and LA on Wednesday and coming back to Florida on Thursday or whatever. It's kind of really nice to not have that life anymore. I mean, it's— I mean, I miss some of the face-to-face and having dinner and drinks and all that with clients, but it is really nice from a lifestyle perspective to have a more predictable existence in the place you call home, you know, the community that you live.

No, it's, it's, it's true. I mean, I realized that I am going to have to be extremely vigilant about guarding those, those borders in terms of protecting it because even now, I mean, even being relatively discerning, I'm discovering that my travel schedule is getting quite busy. I mean, you know, I've got Dallas coming up, San Francisco coming up, Düsseldorf coming up, you know, all these things. So I have to really make sure that I'm protecting enough space so that I don't get myself run down because it's very, very easy to do that. I think we were a little bit inured to it pre-COVID.

Yeah.

It was just the way that it was.

Everybody did it. Yeah. Well, I also think it's the, the portfolio diversification, right? If you were a speaker and that was the only thing you did was speak and that goes to zero, you have a big problem. If you have a diversified group of revenue streams coming in, one goes down, others go up, or this one's viable and, you know, the ticket price might be much lower on this, but the margins are better and it's, all those sort of things. And I think it's forced a lot of people to rethink their business models, plural, and not just have a business model singular, because that diversification or the lack thereof, I think a lot of people learned the hard way over the last couple of years. Yeah, it was good while it lasted, but—

Yeah, no, I'm with you, Peter. I'm the world's biggest fan of that. And in fact, my previous book, Entrepreneurial You, is really about this. The subtitle is Monetize Your Expertise, Create Multiple Income Streams and Thrive. Uh, so I'm a big fan of diversification, creating a portfolio for yourself because, uh, it's, it's true. I mean, I realized very viscerally what got me interested in this question was, was thinking about, okay, I'm making a significant amount of my money from speaking. Uh, the, the, the sort of perils that I foresaw were either that there would be a recession and so nobody would want to have conferences.

Sure.

Or that maybe I might get sick and just wouldn't be able to deliver on the speeches. And so I was like, okay, well, that would be a problem. So I need to diversify. As it happened, the good luck involved in it, I did not foresee the pandemic, but the pandemic basically created that same function of like, oh, all the speaking is gone. And so I felt very fortunate that for the past several years prior to that, I had been kind of, you know, tilling the garden in terms of, uh, creating online courses, which were, you know, because when COVID hit, I had a million friends be like, oh hey, I know you do online courses, how do I get into that? And it's like, okay, I mean, you can, but it's a little hard to get into it now. Uh, you want to dig the—

well, it's sort of like what we're seeing now. We're kind of on the tail end of it. I've been calling it the, the COVID Renaissance, where it was this A/B test of what happens when you give a lot of smart, passionate people a bunch of time back? Well, guess what? They write books. Well, that was good when we all had more time to read books during COVID But now, the business cadence other than the travel is kind of back to normal-ish in terms of people working, they're busy, et cetera. We don't have time to read as many. So it's just sort of an interesting balance how things go.

Yeah.

So as we wrap, I just want to thank you for your work and your time and sharing some time with us today and see if you've got any other, no pressure, but any other words of wisdom you'd like to drop on the universe of LinkedIn listeners that are out there.

Oh my goodness, Peter, thank you so much. It's great to talk with you. And I love, I love what you're doing. I think that it's, it's so important to really empower people to understand more about how to, how to get their thought leadership out there, how to be able to monetize that and make it viable so that they have the business infrastructure necessary to, um, to be able to keep sharing their best ideas. I will just mention for those that are, that are especially interested, interested in the question of monetizing your ideas. I have a free entrepreneurial use self-assessment and folks can download it for free at doryclark.com/entrepreneur. And it actually helps you think through how to create multiple income streams in your own business.

Excellent. Well, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. And I won't even ask you when your next book is. I know we'll buy it, but I want to give you sort of pause to not be in book mode. So, thanks again. Thanks, Dory.

Thanks, Peter. Take care.

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@thoughtleadershipleverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.