Three Things You Need as a Thought Leader
6 Sept 2019 · 1 min
1:16
Pick one thing to own, build a brand around solving it, then turn your expertise into products you can sell at scale instead of trading hours for money.
Pick one thing to own, build a brand around solving it, then turn your expertise into products you can sell at scale instead of trading hours for money.
So first thing is the strategy. The second piece, and I think I've said this to more than one of you today when you've showed me your cards or I've looked up your bio, is you've got to have a platform. And I call this solve for X. You've got to be the X guy or gal. And I get that in the campus world, you actually— that's not true, that you need to have multiple domains that you're an expert in. But when you get to the corporate world, I mean, nobody has an attention span. They need to know you're the X guy. Marcus Buckingham is the strength guy. When I work with Pete Frazee, he's the relationship guy. They don't care that there's a Harvard ed and 40 other things. You have to hit it from a brand standpoint. There are exceptions to that, Blackwell's Code or whatever, but most parts you got to pick one lane and you got to stick with it to the point where you're nauseous hearing your own stuff. If you're not sick of hearing your own stuff from that, then you're not— you haven't developed the brand and the platform. That's the second piece. The third piece is you've got to have the products, the offerings, and the services that are beyond you, and it's got to move from analog to digital. It's got to move from, you know, most of you now are trading time for money in one way, shape, or form, and you got to get Not that you have to get out of that, but you have to layer on top of that extracting value from all these assets that you've built over the years in other formats that don't require you to be in Cleveland on Tuesday and Denver on Friday.
