Leveraging Thought Leadership

AI is a hot topic right now, but many don't fully understand the ramifications. How do you present data sets and explainable AI to the average person? Today we sit down with Keith Goode, the Vice President of Services at ZeroedIn Technologies which provides HR solutions by combining people data with business data for one source of truth. Our conversation begins by getting a sense of how complex ideas like AI can be used by people who are not familiar with it. Keith shares how he identifies the business issue or concern at hand and that AI could be useful to help solve those problems. From there they seek the right data to answer the questions and then qualify that information by looking at historical data, then aggregating it together to generate an AI model that can predict outcomes based on the predetermined traits. Building a data set is a crucial part of creating an accurate AI model. Keith explains how they use a template that has key factors that have been used in the past coupled with various data elements that are unique and important to the client. Keith continues by explaining how the model can be tested and updated to make the model more accurate. If you want a better understanding of AI in terms everyone can understand you'll want to tune into this episode. Three Key Takeaways: · If an idea is not explainable, then it is also not actionable. · AI models are not a one-and-done solution. You need to update and retrain them to ensure relevance and effectiveness. · AI models allow for a deeper and more complex dimension of examination of complex topics.

Why do we do what we do and buy what we buy?What invisible forces drive those actions - and how can they be seen? Today our guest is Marcus Collins an award-winning marketer and culture translator. He is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Ross School of Business and an award-winning author. His newest book is For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be. Marcus shares how there is no greater external force more influential to human behavior than culture! However, if you ask ten people what culture is you'll get a different answer each time. Marcus explains that you must understand who you are, how you see the world, and what you believe if you are going to create a coherent and positive culture. Marcus's first solo book For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be came from his exploration of social sciences to understand better who we are as people and what the underlying physics of why we take the actions we do. Marcus states that as a marketer we have to gain that understanding to get others to adopt the behavior we are promoting. While launching the book Marcus chose to eat his own dog food, taking the same approach to his book launch as he would launch a client's product. Building out from understanding the culture the book represents he reached out to former students who embraced the thinking he taught, enlisting them to boost the signal of the book on launch day. By doing this he created a following of true believers willing to evangelize his book and ideas! Marcus shares smart advice for anyone who feels their culture is lacking clarity or for those who struggle to truly connect to their target audience. Three Key Takeaways: · There is no external force more influential to human behavior than culture. · It's about getting your thinking in the hands and minds of more people. · If you can activate people with shared convictions, then those people will evangelize on your behalf.

Should you try to make your thought leadership relevant to everyone? Or, is being focused the answer? To examine the effectiveness of "going narrow" with your thought leadership, I've invited David G Ewing to join me. David is a trailblazer in customer experience innovation, and the CEO of Motiv, the world's largest Oracle CX exclusive partner allowing clients to manage their customer experience (CX) through every step of their journey. David shares how he uses thought leadership to differentiate and drive business, by narrowly focusing on customer experiences using technology from a single vendor. This has allowed him to tackle any challenges a customer might bring his way. David explains that a narrow focus allows him to find the exact target customer which is a match made in heaven for both sides. With thought leadership content focused directly on their pain points the customer knows from the outset the partnership is a good fit. Part of finding that focus came from coming up with a mission and motive. David trimmed that down to a single word "Growth." Having a one-word mission made it possible to have a lot of creativity while remaining focused. David shares excellent advice for going deep for elevated relevancy! Three Key Takeaways: · The more focused you are the more useful you are despite being relevant to a smaller group of people. · Having a good and clear mission statement can allow you to stay focused on your vision. · It's never too early to start thought leadership.

In today's episode, we showcase some of the best guests from our Organizational Thought Leadership series. We think their insights will be as useful this year as it was last! Lynette Jackson is the Head of Communications at Siemens. She shares how thought leadership can act as an umbrella for your brand, bringing all the various disciplines of communication together under it, enabling them to move in the same direction with purpose! Kathy Risch is Senior Vice President, Shopper Insights & Thought Leadership at Acosta. She takes us inside what it takes to understand how and why people buy. She shares how it goes beyond the usefulness of a product and dives into the impact the emotion a product or service can tap into while speaking to an underlying need or frustration in the consumer's life. Kasey Lobaugh is the Chief Futurist for the Consumer Industry and Principal at Deloitte Consulting, LLP. He shares how the research they did over a year is more than a white paper, it's a platform! Kasey explains how they can shape the thinking of the future of not only Deloitte but their entire industry by engaging with hundreds of people inside and outside the company. He shares how they approached people from diverse backgrounds to get a better picture of the future by seeing it through many unique perspectives. Three Key Takeaways: · Having the ability to create content that speaks to an audience on their level, be it introductory or expert is the key to reaching a wider audience. · Connecting your product or service with the consumer's insights is how you hit the sweet spot. · When engaging others on large scale research you need to allow them to engage with and shape the content.

As we ring in the New Year it is always a good idea to take a moment and reflect on the past year. We continue our tradition of doing so by providing a compilation from a few guests who provided timeless advice. Jenna Fisher is the Co-lead of Global Financial Officer Practice at Russell Reynolds Associates and a Wall Street Journal bestselling author with a new book To the Top: How Women in Corporate Leadership Are Rewriting the Rules for Success. In this conversation, Jenna shares how she interviewed dozens of women who provided inspirational and practical stories that she used in her book. In addition, she discusses the synergy the book has with her business and what she learned in the process of writing. Mark Miller, is the Vice President of High Performance Leadership, Chick-fil-A Inc. and author of Culture Rules: The Leader's Guide to Creating the Ultimate Competitive Advantage. Mark gives insight into being an embedded research house within Chick-fil-A and how pragmatism and leadership are the keys to balancing the scales between the two. Lily Zheng is a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion speaker, strategist, and organizational consultant. Recently they wrote DEI Deconstructed: Your No-Nonsense Guide to Doing the Work and Doing It Right. Lily discusses the ebb and flow of DEI in the workplace and how it is something that is needed all the time not just when things go wrong. Jane Hanson is an Emmy Award winning Journalist with thirty years of coaching experience helping people communicate more clearly and efficiently. Jane shares what thought leadership means to her and how the heart of soul of it is communication. She discusses knowing your purpose and provides tips and advice for communicating in mediums you might not excel at. Three Key Takeaways: · While doing research for a book or any thought leadership, reaching out to a diverse audience can help give you a wider and more balanced perspective. · Everything rises and falls with leadership. · As a thought leader your purpose needs to be getting the important information you have out into the world for others to hear and use

Thought leaders come from a wide variety of backgrounds and skills. Each unique path leads to inspiration, solutions, and frameworks that can reach niche groups on a personal level. Selena Rezvani is an internationally recognized author, speaker, and consultant on leadership. Her newest book, a Wall Street Journal bestseller "Quick Confidence: Be Authentic, Boost Connections, and Make Bold Bets on Yourself" is a guide for overcoming the nine most common obstacles that stand in the way of building authentic confidence. Selena shares how her journey in thought leadership started while she was a young management consultant whose boss created a policy that all consultants would have to write and present at conferences twice a year. While incredulous at first she was also thrilled at the challenge and agency the opportunity presented. That push into thought leadership resulted in seeking an MBA to better speak to her audience. Selena shares how during her MBA program she interviewed high performing C-suite level women to discover the commonalities and hardships they face. The result of these interviews came together as her first book The Next Generation of Women Leaders: What You Need to Lead but Won't Learn in Business School and led to continued relationships with many of the women interviewed and Selena breaking out on her own to further her thought leadership work. Selena shares how her business continued to grow adding speaking, learning to value herself and the years of previous research that were required to create engaging and actionable speaking engagements. Selena shares wonderful advice for speakers, authors, leaders, and budding thought leaders on how to create content, build relationships, and measure your own success and self worth. Three Key Takeaways: · Great things happen when you bring the frameworks and thinking of one discipline into another that might not typically be blended. · You have to value yourself. You have to own your authority. Ask for what you need. Don't settle. · The success or failure of an experiment is not a measurement of your success or worth. You will either win or you'll learn.

You can find an audience for your thought leadership on almost any social media platform. Time is the ultimate commodity - so, how do you break through the noise to get your audience's attention? Today's guest has a keen understanding of audience, message, and modality! Robert Glazer is the best-selling author of Elevate: Push Beyond Your Limits and Unlock Success in Yourself and Others, a keynote speaker, award-winning executive, and host of The Elevate podcast. Our conversation starts by discussing creating content and discovering what the audience is seeking. Robert shares how experimentation is required, but one trick for content creation is writing an article on anything you've been asked about five times. This shows that the topic is a pain point to many and allows you to point back to the article as something you've previously dealt with, not something you are tackling at the moment. Furthermore, Robert tells us why you have to create content that is more than a sales pitch. By creating content and opportunities that are mutually beneficial you increase the odds of reaching your audience. In addition, we look at the medium for thought leadership Robert explains that you need to understand the reason for tackling the platform you are. Many platforms like podcasting reward longevity, so digging in and preparing to stick it out through the crickets is required to find success down the road. He also discusses picking one channel and learning to excel at it. Once you've built an audience there, you can expand to other platforms. Three Key Takeaways: · Pick a strategy, pick a tone, and pick a channel. Learn to do that one channel well before moving on to another. · Success of a platform can take on various looks. From increasing brand awareness, creating new relationships, or by establishing yourself as an expert in your field. · If you want to make something go viral, make something worth sharing.

Can you spot a good idea? And when you do, how do you successfully find its best audience? These are just two questions we examine with today's guest, Ward Kampf. Ward is the President of Northwood Retail, which leases, manages, and markets a portfolio of over five million square feet of mixed use and community properties. With retail facing constant technological changes, leaders are always trying to discover the next frontier. Ward shares with us the exciting way content and context come together to impact a potential consumer. Part of creating that impact involves staying relevant, fresh, and - if possible - first to market. Searching for the next frontier means having to constantly examine new ideas. Ward explains why we need to step back, absorb the idea, and learn about it. Only then can you create a vision, strategy, and execution that can bring success. We also discuss building relationships. Again, retail and thought leadership involve creating relationships based on trust, which means not always seeking to make a sale. Ward shares how some of his best relationships took years to develop before any business transactions took place, but that time invested has paid off in the long run. Today's episode is a great example of how thought leadership can have an impact on a wide variety of industries - around the world! Three Key Takeaways: · You have to have an open mind and a want to listen and learn. It's an evolve-or-die environment. You can't afford to become irrelevant or stale. · Financial and human resources are not infinite. Go where you can be your most productive with the resources you have. · It can take years to develop a business partnership. Investing time can pay off down the road when you are trying to sell a better experience and partnership instead of just a product.

It can be easy to think "I'm just not a confident person" But confidence isn't something you have to be born with. Like any other skill, you can practice behaviors to grow that skill. Our guest today is Emily Jaenson, a keynote speaker, host of the hit podcast Leadership is Female, and co-founder of The Assist Group a collective of experienced sports professionals ready to step in and provide sales, marketing & leadership consulting. Emily has an impressive resume in sports and thought leadership, but at one time she was too shy to even order a pizza. She shares her journey leaving her small town to attend university where she realized she needed to level up and that could only be accomplished with confidence! She pushed through one uncomfortable situation after another taking them as opportunities to grow and even take on leadership roles helping others grow. One way Emily has been able to help others grow is with her TEDx talk "Six behaviors to increase your confidence" which has been viewed more than 3 million times. Emily discusses how the TEDx talk was the culmination of years of knowledge, experience, and interviews from her podcast distilled into an incredibly impactful twelve-minute talk. The talk was so impactful that corporations began to reach out to her to deliver that message to their employees. We learn how she took this opportunity to grow her business, going on the offense creating a website, networking, and developing a pitch to take her content to the world instead of waiting for it to come to her. We wrap up our conversation with Emily giving examples from her career on the behaviors others can practice to get through tough times, expand their comfort zone, and ultimately grow their confidence! Three Key Takeaways: · Once you have content out in the world you can't sit and wait for the clients to come to you. You need to network and take the content to the people who need it most. · People tend to believe you are born with confidence or you're not. However, confidence is a skill. It can be taught and learned. · Confidence is competence. And you gain competence through curiosity.

When the time comes to hire someone new, how can you tell if you have the right candidate? Plenty of thought leaders can tell you that even the best programs often have knowledge gaps, between what is learned in school and what it takes to do a job from day to day. Our guest today is William Vanderbloemen. William's been a senior pastor for 15 years, and comes from a strong HR background at Fortune 200 companies. He is the founder of the Vanderbloemen Search Group, helping churches, schools, nonprofits, family offices, and values-based businesses find key staff, and also the author of Search: The Pastoral Search Committee Handbook, the go-to guide for creating a pastoral succession plan. William shares his journey into thought leadership, starting with his blog on how to build, run, and maintain a great team. As his business expanded, he instituted a content quota for everyone in the business, literally making thought leadership a companywide responsibility. With so many contributors to the content pool, it would be easy to get off track. William describes how they've created detailed "personas" (also called "avatars") to guide their marketing. These "personas" are clearly defined, allowing them to address specific, identifiable pain points. Additionally, William shares how these personas are regularly updated to keep up with the changing world. Finally, William discusses his book Search: The Pastoral Search Committee Handbook, which targets a micro-niche audience but has sold 60000 copies and secured him a spot as the go-to guy when churches are seeking a succession plan. William shares how the book is full of quantitative data with qualitative stories, giving data-driven facts instead of opinions. This conversation demonstrates how you can find great success by getting super focused on your audience and how you can accomplish that. Three Key Takeaways: · If you create target avatars to guide content creation, update them often – and be sure to know their current challenges! · Content-based marketing and thought-based leadership that doesn't come from the top it's not going to work in the organization. · Clickbait might get immediate attention, but thought leadership earns you a loyal following!