Leveraging Thought Leadership

Our guest today is Sue Yasav, CEO and Founder at Marquette Marketing LLC. Previously she was the Vice President, Thought Leadership and Content Strategy at Synchrony Financial. Sue discusses her early work at GE Captial building value proposition for credit card brands and the processes she developed that she would later apply to many other topics. She discusses moving to Synchrony and having to build value for a brand that wasn't instantly recognizable. In addition to building processes, Sue was involved in developing content and talent to speak about the brand so customers would understand what the company stood for, who they were speaking to, and why a customer would want to be involved with the brand. We discuss what successful thought leadership means to Sue, how to measure it, and how to identify when something isn't working and adjust the course. We wrap up with Sue giving some critical advice for anyone seeking to move into a thought leadership role at some point in their career. This is a great episode for anyone seeking to better understand and build value in their brand. Three Key Takeaways: * Thought Leaders need to understand what a brand stands for and how to portray those ideals in order to successfully build brand value. * The manner in which content is ingested has changed and thought leaders need to do the proper research to connect with their audience where they are, not where you want them to be. * The measurement of successful thought leadership is often gauged by being asked to speak in the media, be part of a panel, or being quoted.

Jim Kerr is the founder of Indispensable Consulting, author of The Executive Checklist, and his newest book INDISPENSABLE. Jim is one of the foremost authorities on leadership and community culture and we are excited to have him as our guest today. Jim discusses the frustrations that led him to write his first book and we explore the changes and challenges that have taken place over the years as publishing methods have transformed, leaving authors to be the main promoter of their books. Jim shares the successful methods he has used to promote his books, gain name recognition, and build credibility with his peers and audience. Having successfully exited two previous companies Jim has a keen knowledge of the topic, he tells us why having models, frameworks, and mythologies to your IP is the key to a successful handoff. Finally, we wrap up talking about the power of networking with other thought leaders to promote each other, problem-solve, and perhaps most importantly come together in what can be a very lonely profession. This is an insightful episode for thought leaders and authors at any stage of their career! Be sure to tune in and take notes! Three Key Takeaways: · If you are seeking to write a book, it should be about a topic of thought leadership that you are passionate about and is lacking in the market. · Building towards being able to exit a thought leadership business means building in systems that will eventually make you irrelevant. · Networking with other thought leaders is a great way to share ideas, brainstorm, and meet other generous and smart professionals.

We continue to look back at 2020 this time with a focus on some of our favorite guests from our Organizational Thought Leadership series. We kick things off with Surya Kolluri, the managing director at Bank of America leading Thought Leadership efforts for retirement and personal wealth business services. Surya shares how they are helping people lead better richer financial lives by training advisors on the financial challenges that various life stages present. Next, Nora Super joins us. Nora is the Executive Director at Milken Institute, and the Executive Director of the Alliance to Improve Dementia Care at the Milken Institute. Nora discusses how convening authority helps thought leadership and why bringing people from different areas and industries together to tackle a problem can have a huge impact. Finally, we wrap up with Luke Collins, the Managing Director, and Global Editor-in-Chief at EY. Luke explains how EY is changing the modalities in which they deliver content to ensure they are reaching their customers in the method that will connect with them best and how the first twenty seconds of your content is the most important.

We start the New Year by looking back at a few of our best guests of 2020. We start with John Jantsch, the Founder of Duct Tape Marketing Consulting Network, and the author of The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur. John discusses making his consulting networking, packaging the content to be delivered by others, and how he maintains quality control over the process of those that join the network. Next, we chat with Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and internationally bestselling author of Contagious, Invisible Influence, and The Catalyst. Jonah shares the challenges and joys of being a keynote speaker, how price can help you narrow down which engagements to take, the relationship you need to develop with the speaker's bureaus, and why it's important to add value off stage to your bookings Last but not least we finish with the incredible Tom Peters. Tom is the co-author of In Search of Excellence in addition to seventeen other books that have sold more than 10 million copies combined and recipient of the Thinkers50 Lifetime Achievement Award. Tom discusses writing about Brand You, how it is misinterpreted, the evolution of how we see personal brands and intellectual property.

Today's guest is Jen Cohen the Vice President of Engineering at the Toyota Research Institute (TRI). Jen has over twenty years of technology and operations leadership experience that she uses to make technology work for business. Jen shares how her work at TRI is helping to strengthen the research structure that is developing technology that amplifies humans, allowing them to age in place and continue to enjoy their lives with the aid of AI and robotics without replacing the human aspect. Jen discusses the ever-important need to create processes in the development stage that will guide a project to completion. With 50% of IT projects failing, she understands the need to have effective change agents in place and to never take shortcuts in development. During our discussion of what successful thought leadership means to Jen, she shares the concept of Ikigai, a Japanese concept meaning "A reason for being." We chat about how our lives feel most fulfilled when we incorporate work that we love and how TRI is helping people to achieve their Ikigai. Three Key Takeaways: · Thought Leaders can include various forms of automation in their work, the key is to ensure it enhances the human experience and does not replace the human. · When developing processes for anything thought leadership should look at the end goal and ensure the steps to get there are developed early and nothing is skipped. · Ikigai is a great concept for thought leaders. Finding ways to help others live their best life by doing work they love will increase the productivity and satisfaction of clients.

Today's guest is Cara Macklin, Founder of Caram, Innovative Entrepreneur, and Success Coach helping entrepreneurs to do things differently, accelerate success, and create meaningful change. Cara discusses her early work in her family business of healthcare and hospitality and how she helped to more than double the size of the business, while training as a coach that allowed her to understand and replicate processes and outcomes. We discuss the type of clients Cara works with, how she finds them, and why fit it isn't a good fit you might be better off referring the client to someone else. We wrap up our conversation discussing how Cara has taken coaching, which often has an outdated modality, and create a suite of offerings that allow her to serve clients one-on-one, create groups from various industries together, and finally a wide audience with an online course. If you want a sample of the aid Cara can offer check out this video just for listeners of our podcast! Three Key Takeaways: · Learning to become a coach is one of the best ways to understand the processes of thought leadership and reliably replicate the outcomes. · Your thought leadership isn't going to be the right fit for every client. Passing on clients that don't fit your offerings is better than failing them down the road. · Having multiple modalities will allow your thought leadership to reach a variety of clients with multiple platforms.

Today's guest is Harry Kraemer, a professor of management and strategy at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, where he teaches in the MBA and the Executive MBA programs. Previous to that he was CEO of Baxter Healthcare. These two careers have given him a unique perspective on how academia and business work hand in hand. Harry shares his journey from being a student at Northwestern to CEO, and back to Northwestern as a professor. We explore the somewhat strange origin of his first book Becoming the Best and how a student was the forcing mechanism that brought it to life. We discuss the trilogy of books (Becoming the Best, From Values to Action and Your 168) that Harry has written over the last ten years and how the themes all tie together to help you become a value-based leader, running a value-based organization while living a value-based life! All of the profit from the sales of Harry's books go to One Acre Fund, we highly encourage you to learn more about this incredible initiative. Three Key Takeaways: · Thought leaders can gain a lot from listening to the academic and business communities and developing a perspective that understands both. · Thought leaders need to know their values and their purpose if they want to understand how they affect how you lead and interact with people. · Thought Leaders must live their values even in the face of distraction and difficulty.

Today's guest is Rita Clifton, the co-founder, and chairman of BrandCap. She has been called "The Brand Guru" by the Financial Times and is the author of a new book Love Your Imposter: Be Your Best Self, Flaws and All. Rita is best known for her work on branding, so a book on imposter syndrome might seem like a departure. She shares why she wrote the book and the principles from branding she incorporated that can work in any aspect of your life. We discuss moving the book to the next stage and creating a business around it. What the goal of that might be, how it could play out, and how to scale it to reach more people than you ever could 1-on-1 or by webinars. In addition, we discuss the change many have experience of working from home using video tools to communicate and how it has added a touch of humanization to a business that is dearly needed in today's troubling times. If you feel like you are just faking it in your job you are not alone. 70% of people feel that way at some point in their career and this might be the conversation you need to hear in order to start believing in yourself. Three Key Takeaways: · Even the most successful professionals often feel like an imposter. Thought Leaders really need to come to understand themselves to overcome that feeling and help others. · When taking your thought leadership from written to scale, you need to fully understand your content or the tools you build from it will fail. · Often thought leaders will think of a brand as a logo, design, and packaging but it is the substance that lies beneath it all that is the most important part.

Today's guest is Dorie Clark, one of the Top 50 Thinkers in the world by Thinkers 50 and the #1 Communication coach in the world by the Marshall Goldsmith Leading Global Coaches Awards. She is the author of Entrepreneurial You and Reinventing You as well as a business professor at Duke and Columbia University. Dorie joins us to discuss what traditional avenues are still working for thought leaders in a world on pause due to COVID-19 in addition to what creative and new ideas have come from having to adapt to how the industry functions. Dorie shares how she created an online course by starting with a test group and developing the content in real-time, asking questions,s and taking feedback from the participants to nail down what was most important to them. Plus she explains how she adds community to the fully developed course and why that aspect is so important to make the content really stick. Last we discuss the future of thought leadership post-COVID-19, the plans that are being made to account for the unknown variables that still lie ahead, what changes we've made that we might stick with and what old habits will we return to. If you are thinking about developing online content or worried about how to continue business in the future Dorie and Peter have some amazing advice for you in this episode. Three Key Takeaways: * Thought Leaders can gain an invaluable amount of feedback from running their content at a discount with a test group. * You can add additional value to your thought leadership by developing a community that allows peer-to-peer learning. * Thought Leaders need to be prepared for how the industry will change post-COVID-19 and what aspects we are currently living with that might stay the same.

Today's guest is Rhett Power. In 2007 he co-founded Wild Creations which became one of Inc. Magazines 500 Fastest-Growing US companies. Currently, he is a co-founder of Courageous Leadership a consultancy that brings an amalgamation of experienced behavior scientists, entrepreneurs, and best-selling authors together. He is the best-selling author of The Entrepreneur's Book of Actions and One Million Frogs. Rhett discusses how the need to follow his gut led him from position to position while avoiding becoming complacent and then as he became better known avoided becoming over-committed. Rhett has a strong background as a writer, starting with Inc. Magazine and he shares how working for them allowed him to use their brand recognition to open doors and meet people he previously might not have received access to. Rhett hosts Linkedin Live interviews and he details how he is not only able to build two and three other pieces of content out of each interview but how he is building relationships that help share his content, introduce new people, and even become clients! Three Key Takeaways: · Thought leaders need to trust their gut and move to new challenges when it tells them to. · Live interviews via podcast or Linkedin live can be turned into multiple pieces of written short-form Thought Leadership after the fact. · Building a following for your thought leadership is a multi-year commitment. You have to have a work ethic around it and be persistent.