Bill Sherman - Scaling Thought Leadership
DH ### Bill Sherman
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Introduction to Bill Sherman
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Jonathan Stark: Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I am joined by guest Bill Sherman. Bill, welcome to the show.
Bill Sherman: Hey, Jonathan. It's great to be here.
Jonathan Stark: Today we are going to talk about thought leadership, ladies and gentlemen, all the way from a high level down to the nuts and bolts. But first, Bill, could you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Journey into Thought Leadership
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Bill Sherman: Yeah, so I stumbled into the world of thought leadership 20 years ago, and I'm sure we'll get into a conversation of what is it, right? But for me, it's been about helping people with expertise take it to scale. And I know you're looking at that question of, you know, impact and the title of the show is Ditching Hourly, right? And consulting is a great way to go, but it's also a rough business model and can be exhausting. So for me, I've been a consultant, both on the strategic HR and management side, stumbled into thought leadership 20 years ago when a C-level exec said, hey, I wrote a business book and I thought that was what C-level execs do. Now I've got requests for speaking, people wanting to deliver it, you know, elsewhere so that these ideas can travel. You kind of know how to make ideas within an organization work. Can you help me? And from there, I stumbled into thought leadership. Day role is that I'm the COO of thought leadership leverage, which means we work with a number of clients, some very smart people. I often call it as the NBA money can't buy where I get to learn from CEOs and experts and academics, their understanding of a small part of the world of business. You put that all together and it's amazing, right? I also host a podcast show, leveraging thought leadership. We're about 700 episodes in 727, I think drop today. Wow. And then I'm the lead author on the The Thought Leadership Handbook. Excellent.
Defining Thought Leadership
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Jonathan Stark: So long list of credentials, a lot of street cred here. Let's start with a dumb question. How do you define thought leadership? There's a lot of bad definitions out there, right?
Bill Sherman: Including thought leadership is what thought leaders do. Thought leadership is for people who have incredibly big egos, who need standing ovations and to see their name and lights or on a book, right? I define thought leadership a little bit differently. Thought leadership is about how do you take ideas to scale so they create impact within a target audience. And that's kind of important because when you're talking about 8.5 some billion people on the planet, it's really hard to reach that many people. I don't know how to do it. And there are very few ideas that touch all of us across the globe, right? But if you know a little bit of something, you've got expertise in career or a field in consulting that you've done, or you've got a professional license and you want to scale an idea out, how do you get it to the world? How do you create impact? And impact can be for you, can be for a client or a customer or a community. Impact can be defined in many, many ways. And I'm sure we'll get to the concept of if I practice thought leadership, can I raise
Jonathan Stark: my fees, right? Sure. Yeah. So, okay. So I like that. So to take ideas to scale so that they make an impact with a particular audience, is that how you said it? So how do you, where does someone start? Let's say they have, well, I'll tell you what the audience is like. This, the audience for the show is like, they are experts at something. They're really good at it. They've got probably five or 10 years of experience doing a thing. And they've got a sense of mastery over the thing. And they probably, many of them have strong opinions about how things in the industry should work, or they've got contrarian ideas about everyone's doing this wrong or all clients make the same mistake. And it's so frustrating. And so these, these are things they want to change. These are ideas that they want to get out there so that they have an impact with the target market for the idea. So that maybe a client stuff, I don't know, clients start designing an architecture for a software application before they start coding or hire a dev team or something like just like obvious things that it's like people just doing it wrong and they want to go out there and change that. Okay. So for someone like that who's an expert and maybe has a half a dozen of these ideas, is there a process that you would take some through someone through that that would crystallize their big idea or the one that is the most likely to scale to have the impact that they want? Or do you generally in the book, your book, um, is it more about once someone has the idea defined and they know what their big idea is, then how to help amplify it. So like, where does the book meet people in their journey? The book meets people where they are on the journey.
Bill Sherman: So this was one of the challenges, right? When you write a book titled the thought leadership handbook, you get a publisher who says, well, who's it for? And I said, look, our audience are practitioners of thought leadership. They might be emerging into thought leadership. They might be established or they might be experts. It's a small enough population that we can craft a book that meets you where you on that are on that journey. So what's an emerging thought leader? Maybe you got that idea or you've got a strongly held belief or two of this is wrong. This could be better, but you haven't built an audience yet. Or maybe you wrote your first article or gave a talk at an association or something. People came up afterwards and said, yeah, that's really good. Right. Then you did another and you're like, wait a minute, what's going on here? People want to know what I think. Okay. That's an emerging thought leader established. We work with a lot of clients and there's certainly a business of thought leadership and we can get into that. But whether it's executive coaching or consulting, workshop facilitation, keynote speaking, there are ways and stages, if you will, to get ideas out there. We've had clients who are keynoters come to us and say, you know, life is pretty good. Last year I did a hundred keynotes. Is there any way that I can make similar money and not live on airplanes and hotels because my son's, you know, 11 and I don't want to lose the time before he goes to college. Right. And then there's the, what we call hall of fame thinkers, right? They're people who have accolades, maybe they've influenced the business lexicon in general, or maybe in their industry, people know them, cite them, want to know what they're talking about, but they're looking going, you know, I've been banging this drum for 20, 30 years. Who's going to pick that conversation up when I'm gone? Cause someday I want to retire or I may no longer be on this planet. How did these ideas travel without me? So really what we wound up doing is looking at the life cycle of thought leadership. And most people having interviewed, as I said, 700 plus people. Topic of the podcast, plus worked with hundreds of clients over 20 years. I have met no one who said they dressed up as a thought leader for Halloween as a kid. Similarly, nobody went to college for this. They all realize they stumbled into it in some way.
Emerging Thought Leaders
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Jonathan Stark: Do any of them refer to themselves as thought leaders primarily? I mean, I would assume that most of them refer to them as like speaker, consultant, author, expert at pricing for, you know, solo businesses or something like that. Or is, is thought leadership a term that they're comfortable with or even really need to be thinking about? Or is it just the catch all term that we're using to have the discussion?
Bill Sherman: So yes, it's a catch all term. Yes. A lot of people identify by the primary role that they practice.
The Thought Leadership Handbook
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Jonathan Stark: Okay.
Bill Sherman: But a couple months ago, I did a search on LinkedIn to see how many people either have thought leadership in their title or in their description. They're about right. It was 650,000 people. That's a huge number who are self-identifying as either practicing thought leadership or calling themselves a thought leader.
Jonathan Stark: Okay. So that's a higher than I would have expected based on my experience, my personal experience, probably with, uh, with the three types of emerging expert and like, what was the rockstar one established, established. Okay. So let's focus on the, the start from the bottom. So for an emerging thought leader, what, what is the highest leverage thing they could do to take things to the next level?
Bill Sherman: So I would advise a couple of things. One, be very clear about who your target audience is. The smaller your target audience, the easier it is to be relevant to reach them. Second, um, and this is part of our impact equation. As you start figuring out what your big idea is, your work is to make it simple and accessible to your audience, because if they're in a meeting and it's a Tuesday afternoon and they're trying to make five decisions, if it's a page, a paragraph, or even, you know, bullet points, they're not going to remember. How do you keep an idea as simple and as relevant as possible?
Jonathan Stark: Perfect. Okay. Can you give folks maybe an example from someone who came on the podcast or someone you've worked with, some concrete ideas of what a small focused target market is, because I totally agree with you. It's something I preach all the time. Um, but to make it a little bit more concrete for folks, is there anything that you could, that comes to mind? Yeah.
Bill Sherman: So I can give several examples. Start with one where there was a CEO who wandered into their consulting company, a CEO of a consulting company, walks into the office of a chief medical officer of the firm, their medical consulting company, and says, you know, I think you should write a book. Wanders out of the office, disappears down the hallway. Okay. For whom? About what? And my friend and client Craig was like, okay, is this a brain fart from the CEO? Is this an initiative? What do I do? Right. Comes up later in, um, an executive meeting, a couple of weeks later of how's the book coming along? Okay. This is now an initiative. Great. Who are we writing for? And that we got pulled into this project. And so we were asking, who is this for? Is it CEOs of healthcare systems? Is it chief medical officers? What do you want this book to do? Because if you say, oh, this book on designing health care for humans is really written for anyone with a medical license, that's millions of people. There's over a million, 1.1 million doctors. If you say, okay, chief medical officers of hospital systems, you take that number from the millions down to the tens of thousands, it's not a list that's so short that you could list everyone by name, but you're getting there, right? And so the question is whether you're using something like a tool like sales navigator or you're listing from memory, can you list people who fit that category rather than abstraction and then use Google or use AI or whatever? Just get a sense of how large that audience is. You could say every doctor in the world, or you could say every doctor in the U.S. You could say chief medical officers in the U.S. Keep narrowing your audience until it's something you can get your hands around and have a meaningful percentage of that audience listening to you.
Jonathan Stark: Okay. I couldn't agree more. I talk about it all the time. Uh, I know that there are so many examples of bestsellers that have extraordinarily broad, they're kind of mass market books, like, I don't know. Think and grow rich or atomic habits, or it's just like a general productivity book. So it's, it feels like counterproductive advice. So I'm going to throw you a softball and say, I'm guessing and correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing that the CEO who wandered into the CMO's office had a strategic reason for putting a two to 500 hour project on their CMO's desk. What did the CEO think that effort would do for the business?
Business Models of Thought Leadership
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Bill Sherman: So we asked that question. Okay. And we had asked several follow-up questions. First question was, well, I want them to have it on their shelf in their office. And it's like, okay, yes, you can write a book. You can mail out a bunch of books, but is that tied to your sales process of the organization? And more importantly, how do you measure success with this project? Is it books on shelves? Is it inbound inquiries? Is it net new client acquisition? What is it that you really care about at the end of the day? And from there, it wasn't a process of, okay, Craig, go start writing this book, but it's get clear on the strategy, get clear on your audience, the message that's going to be signaled to them through simplicity and relevance. So there's an idea that they want to talk about and share with their team or with their peers.
Jonathan Stark: That makes tons of sense. So, so to the, so dear listener, it's, you probably, anyone listening to this is probably in no danger of accidentally writing a bestseller. So what can you do? And you're not going to get rich off of the sales, almost certainly. We did a research study on that.
Bill Sherman: It is almost certain for any nonfiction business book that you will generate a multiple of revenue from the professional services, consulting, coaching, whatever, rather than from book sales, even if you self publish and you're getting 70% of every sale. Yeah.
Jonathan Stark: So that's great. And that's my intuition. And that's my personal experience from having written a few books. So, uh, it's like you, you aren't going to get rich from the direct book sales of the book. You can get rich from the service work, the consulting work and the workshops and so forth that come out of the book, which isn't to say just, you know, write a 300-page business card. You do need to have good ideas. It's not going to spread if it stinks. Right. Yeah. So it still needs to be good, but it's not a direct, it's not a big revenue stream. So you want to think strategically about who do I want to read this, who will probably, who would probably make a really good client for me in, I don't know, 18 months or something down the road from this. Yeah. You don't want to be looking going, okay, the book's been out two weeks. I haven't seen Rainbows and Unicorns. I'm disappointed. Right. Okay. So we're, I think we're, we're oozing, we're segueing into something you mentioned earlier, which was, I think the phrase that you said was the business of thought leadership. And does, is that what aligns with the, is that where the, the expert thought leader in the middle there? Is that what they start to think about?
Target Audience Importance
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Bill Sherman: So yes and no. Okay. When I think about business models and thought leadership, I think about, okay, how are you practicing thought leadership as a season of your life? Right. You could be practicing it as a hobbyist. You've got an idea, you've got a vision of how the world or your corner of it could or should change. Like you said, whether it's the software engineer, who's like, if I've heard this a million times, I want to end it because the world is wrong. But you can be a hobbyist. You can be pitching at conferences and speaking at conferences as a panelist. You can be writing an article that you can be posting on LinkedIn. You can start your own podcast or your own sub stack. There's a number of things you can do as a hobbyist, which don't require you to make thought leadership your day job, right? You can also be a hobbyist and do it as part of your day job where it's generating visibility. It's paying forward into a community. We had a CEO of a fortune 500 company who practiced thought leadership because his expertise was on leadership. And he taught the high potential courses himself, not because the board expected, not because it was in his job description, but because it was important. And he said, for the company, this is the right call. Then the third category. So first category, hobbyist. And you can put someone who is a graduate student, someone who's working full time as a consultant, or even a fortune 500 CEO into the hobbyist category. It's not their day job. Second one is the practice owner. You are the expert. You are known for your expertise. And you may have a small team or you may be the in-house expert inside a larger organization. But when a certain topic comes up, they call you, whether they call you're selling directly or someone sells your services, right? But that's the practice. The final one is the business builder in terms of business model where the ideas can travel without you. So that's licensing, that's certification, that's workshops. You don't have to be in the room or the Zoom to create value.
Jonathan Stark: Excellent. And this is, this is all, these are all sections of the book, right? And we're not just, we're not veering into, okay.
Bill Sherman: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're talking right now of the three business models of thought leadership. And part of it is knowing what fits you in your season of life. Because I genuinely believe that when it comes to thought leadership, it starts as an introspective process. What are you trying to accomplish? Why? And if you're not aligned with your goals and your constraints, you're going to give up on it soon before you have any impact in the world.
Jonathan Stark: Yeah, totally agree. So what are some of the, are there any other ways to sort of create your thought leadership or scale your thought leadership that don't involve writing a book? Okay, so what are some of the things? We've advised more clients not to write books.
Bill Sherman: And in fact, our producer of our podcast cackled when we told him a year and a half ago we were writing a book. He said, you realize I have years of audio for the two of you, my co-host Peter Winnick and myself, where we've said we'd never write a book. And we're like, hang on to that. When we announced the book, we want that B roll.
Jonathan Stark: That's awesome. Oh, I love that.
Bill Sherman: And it's in episode 700 of our podcast where our publisher slash co-author brought the receipts and played them for us.
Jonathan Stark: Nice. Nice. Okay. So let's drill into this because what are the alternatives that are going to accomplish the goals, like whatever level you're at, but well, not just, not hobbyist. I want to go beyond hobbyist. I want to maybe go somewhere high end of practice expert and maybe into business builder where what is the package that they ship their thought leadership into the world that is going to accomplish these goals and like maybe give us some good examples. And especially, I'm especially interested in hearing when you advise someone not to write a book.
Licensing and Certification
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Bill Sherman: I generally advise that the book is not the first step, but it's a later step. Usually think of writing a book and you've done this as well. It's a lot of work and it's a long term payoff. I think of a book as a capital asset for five to seven years in terms of business building, brand building, client acquisition. That's a lot of time to invest until you're sure you know your audience, you have a message that's going to resonate and remain evergreen. So if I was thinking about theater, I would say don't set your goal for your first time on stage to be a Broadway show.
Jonathan Stark: Got it.
Bill Sherman: There's plenty of community theater. There's regional theater. There's off, off Broadway, off Broadway, and then Broadway. If you were a band, you start as a garage band and you got a long way to go before you're playing Wembley Stadium.
Jonathan Stark: So let's talk about some of those simpler modalities, because one of the things that
Bill Sherman: a lot of people discount is you use free and inexpensive media to test out, just like a comedian might roll into a comedy club to test out a few jokes on a set, right? Someone posts on LinkedIn, you can respond meaningfully related to their ideas with your own. You can test out how they respond, how others respond. You can start creating a conversation, picking up some followers and posting on your own. We've had clients as Well, I'm thinking on a book who he had dyslexia and dyscalculia, so turning around numbers as well as words and ADHD. And he said, look, if you tell me that I have to write a book to get my ideas out there, we're done. This is not cool. This is going to be hell. But if you tell me I can do short form documentary. Now you've got my interest because I love film and narrative. OK, that's cool.
Jonathan Stark: So one of the things about this is you've got to figure out where you're comfortable
Bill Sherman: creating. I call it the comfortable corners of thought leadership. Think about either you're comfortable creating in that format or you're not. Your audience is either comfortable in consuming content in that format or they're not. Now if you're comfortable and they're not, that's a great place to think, to figure out your ideas, to do the private work. The two that matter, you want to reach your audience where they're comfortable consuming content, whether or not you're comfortable. Where you're both comfortable, you and your audience, go for it. That's where you shine. Where your audience is comfortable but you're not, that's where you have to stretch. Give it a try. I mean, I'm more of an introvert and more natural in writing. Podcasting was a stretch for me, but I found that I could have some really great conversations, build relationships, and be able to really engage with the community that I'm a part of in thought leadership.
Alternatives to Writing a Book
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Jonathan Stark: That's great. So follow-up question there though, it makes total sense to me that you can tell when someone's not really ready to write a book because you can just tell, I know exactly what you mean. But are you saying that all roads don't necessarily lead to book? Do you get to the highest level of business builder, long-term legacy and impact without a book in the mix?
Bill Sherman: You could.
Jonathan Stark: Cool.
Bill Sherman: You absolutely could, right? And some of it is the expectations of your audience as well as where your strengths are. Because remember we talk about making impact through ideas and we're used to talking about people leaders. You can think about thought leader as someone who is an ideal leader, often without positional authority. So you can either advance a conversation in your field, you can bring up a new topic that's worthy of attention and that takes work to shift everybody from what they're currently wanting to talk about to something worthy of attention, but it's possible. It all depends on what your goals are. Is it impact on a field? Is it on an organization, a team, an individual? Are you more of lives touched? Are you measuring success by net new client engagements for yourself? Some of those require a book, some don't. And I'd say over the years, we've talked more people out of writing a book at that point than told them, yeah, start writing.
Jonathan Stark: Yeah, same. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people who, yeah, I can tell they have a book in them, but it's not ready. And I'll point listeners to an episode of The Business of Authority with Mike Michalowicz and Rochelle and myself, where we talked about his process for road testing the material that he's thinking about writing a book about by doing live workshops and getting real-time feedback and making sure that it sticks and finding out where people get hung up and the things that he's not articulating well or getting misunderstood. And I absolutely love that approach. I think it's so great. And it's a very short feedback loop. You immediately will find out if, you know, how close you are to ready. And once you refine that workshop, you know, over a few iterations, all of a sudden you're like, oh, I've got the answer to everything that comes up regularly. There's maybe a couple of edge cases that are new once in a while, but kind of got it dialed and then that becomes the material for a book. And if you've got it all recorded, then it's just great. I love that idea. What happens? So with that, a little bit of a segue from there, I see some connective tissue between that and something you briefly mentioned at the business builder level where you mentioned some things that I don't personally have experience with. So just for my own selfish reasons, I'd like to know what you have to say about things like licensing and like those really high level, not in the room, not in the Zoom stuff. Yeah.
Bill Sherman: So when it comes to licensing on enterprise level to an organization or in-house certification for organizations or even the possibility of exit, it's very hard to sell, say, a keynote speaking business. You can make a good living, but you can't exit that, right? What is the tangible asset that's repeatable, scalable, and has a track record on revenue? Those are things that can be answered through licensing and certification. And we've worked with clients who were keynote speakers. They do a keynote or a fireside. I can think of one individual who he'd done a fireside for the top leadership team and then some of the talent folks. We were doing a follow-up conversation with them and they said, we loved what you did. We've integrated that into our high performance or high potential leader program.
Jonathan Stark: Oh, that's interesting.
Bill Sherman: Yeah, we took the slides that you used for the presentation and it's now a module. Oh, I see. That's a beautiful opportunity to have a conversation around, would you like to license that? Would you like to not steal that? And it was not meant as theft, right? Of course. It was meant in, you know, deep appreciation of the work. And as soon as we mentioned it, that person was like, okay, I'm not the right person. Let me go get some people from our side because we definitely want to use this. Great.
Jonathan Stark: Who needs to be involved?
Bill Sherman: This was less of a sales conversation and much more around, okay, how do we ink a deal? That was a three-year deal with an annual license fee that renewed for a second set of three years. Our client was thrilled because basically he'd licensed a handful of PowerPoint slides and spent half a day in customization and had revenue for the next six years.
Jonathan Stark: Not bad. Right, right. Sure beats, you know, being on planes delivering keynotes. Yeah. Yeah. Well, like you said, season of life, right? I've been in a few of them already. It was fun flying around feeling important before I had kids, but after that it got pretty tedious. So how much of the book is devoted to the licensing and certification?
Bill Sherman: So, let me sort of, on a high level, lay out the structure of the book. So, we answer the question, what is thought leadership? Then, is it something that's a fancy word for content marketing or people with big egos? Then, go into, well, if thought leadership is a thing, we'll go into hobby, practice, or business, right? From there, well, what is thought leadership from a practitioner perspective? Are my ideas any good? How do I make them any better? What pieces do I need to go to market? That's the four elements of thought leadership, which are core ideas, a content library, market offerings, and a platform identity. And a platform identity is not a software piece. It's not a personal brand or your reach, like a publisher would talk about. It's the brand for your ideas. How do people talk about the ideas when you're not around? Because if they can't or they don't do it accurately, it's very unlikely the ideas spread. So, there's a chapter on the four elements of thought leadership. Then, we go into the impact equation, which is, well, why do some ideas seem to travel further and faster than others? And don't good ideas speak for themselves? We lay out the equation in terms of impact. What is it? It's simplicity multiplied by relevance to a target audience multiplied by the velocity, how frequently people hear those ideas. And there's a sub-click on velocity. How did they hear about them? Did they hear about them from you or not you? Then, going back to the equation, what share of your target audience do you have? If I was a marketer, I'd be talking about total addressable market and my share of that market. Here, what's the total addressable market for that idea? And I don't want to hear a big number. I want to hear a small number with a higher percentage. Because if you're at 0.0001% of your total addressable market, you got a problem. Nobody's listening in. If you're at a tenth of a percent or 1% of your target audience, you have the ability to create impact. If you get to 10%, you're starting to drive conversations within your target audience.
Impact Equation
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Jonathan Stark: Okay, let me pause you there real quick. Hold that thought, but I want to point out to the skeptical listener, my dear listener, I've never heard of the value of a smaller target market expressed more powerfully than you just said it. The market share, you want your market share number to be high. If you think about it in those terms, and you think of all the possible people who could benefit from hearing your idea, but you take that blob and you separate it into 20 more categories, and one of them, you've got 1%, 2%, 5%, 10% market share, that's the one. Yep. And I think it goes without saying why that's important, because then you can reach escape velocity in that area, because enough people are talking about it that it starts to go viral on its own, where that's never going to happen in these other ones. So it's like the idea is that, well, if the idea makes sense and a good idea sells itself, which I don't believe in, I don't think you do either, then No. Talking to more people seems better, right? It's more people. But the problem there is that you want the idea virus to spread, and it's not going to spread in these different bubbles. They're all independent bubbles. They're not talking to each other. But this one bubble, everyone, not everyone, but this one bubble, I have way more power to influence the discussion or sort of like most of my audience is whatever, software developers or something. That is the one. So I just wanted to emphasize how cool that is, because that's the first time I've ever heard somebody like, like, make it explicit why it matters as really good.
Bill Sherman: So and let's go one click further on that. Okay. The larger you make your target audience, the smaller your share, right? Yeah. But also the larger you make your target audience, the harder it is to be relevant to that larger audience. We all are busy. We are really good at scrolling through social media, through all these posts, and we decide within fractions of a second, do we want to click see more? Is it for me? Right? Yeah. Or can I tell me your target audience is this? Yes. Yeah, exactly. When you make your target audience small, you give 99% of the population permission to skip. Yeah. So that 1% leans in and goes, oh, finally, someone's talking. This is the good one in my feed. Eureka. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Right. So that's the impact equation, which is chapter five of the book. Then the center of the book focuses on why are you practicing thought leadership? Not how. It's easier to say, oh, I'm an author. I'm a consultant. I'm an executive coach. I'm a speaker. I'm a workshop facilitator. Okay, great. But you could be many of those things or all of those things. Why are you practicing thought leadership? Are you a growth minded CEO trying to grow your business because you want to open doors that your sales team can't? That's one reason to practice thought leadership. A second one might be that you're near retirement or after retirement and you want to stay part of the game. You don't want to write off into the sunset on a golf cart. You're an impact and legacy executive, right? You either want to be on boards. You want to pay back what you learn to the next generation. You have something to say. I've spoken to a number of executives who said, I retired and spent three years writing the book that I wish I could have given away to my team or members of my team, but it didn't exist. Then you've got the thought leader on the run. We've talked about it before. You have to be present and active to create value for your audience, whether you're physically present, virtually present. The ideas aren't traveling unless you're carrying them. The fourth is the in-house expert. I talked about my friend Craig earlier, chief medical officer at a healthcare consulting company. Craig was an in-house expert. He was on exec comm and his CEO came in and said, you, you need to do the book thing. Go create visibility for us and drive conversations. Not because he was going to be a shill or a salesperson, but he wanted to, the CEO wanted him to elevate the conversation and shape what the field was talking about through the book and what was possible. And then the final avatar on that, why not, how is what we call the hall of fame thinker. And that person is someone who's spent time in thought leadership and asked this question, how can these ideas travel without me? Because either I want to retire from carrying these ideas or I'm going to be gone. And one of the stories we tell in the book is a dear friend and mentor of both mine and my coauthor, and we tell the story of Mark Goldstein. Mark was a psychiatrist by training, practiced in Santa Monica. He'd spent time training FBI hostage negotiators and working with CEOs and leadership teams of large organizations, published books around the world. His body of expertise, whether they were couples, executive teams, or, you know, hostage taker and FBI negotiator, was getting people to listen to each other. Okay. And he was really good at it. Mark was diagnosed with leukemia. He'd practiced thought leadership his entire career. He got the diagnosis and he didn't do what I think a lot of people in this case would have done, which would be time to narrow down, focus on family and friends and just communicate there. Mark launched a YouTube series that you can see titled it, What I'm Dying to Tell You, and he journaled his experience and shared and talked about the difficulty of listening to someone who is going through end of life stage. It was totally on brand for him, totally authentic. He recorded episodes even until a few days before he passed. And so one of the questions for us was, why do people spend so much of their time sharing ideas with strangers they only meet once or sharing ideas with people they will never meet in their life, but trying to make an impact. That's the hall of fame thinker who
Jonathan Stark: wants the ideas to continue to make an impact. Wow. Mic drop moment there. Okay. So that was so good. I'm almost like, I'm looking at the clock. I'm almost, I almost want to leave it there. But what, what is something that if, if there's something that we missed, that's really important, what can we add in for the listener for them to take the next step other obviously than checking out your book, but what's, what's a good next step for people to take?
Bill Sherman: So I've heard a lot of people over the years who have deep expertise say, oh, nobody wants to listen to me, or I have nothing original to say, or that, yeah, I'm not ready for thought leadership. I'd argue this. We live in an age where there's a lot of AI slop out there, algorithmic amplification. And if experts, which your audience is by definition, if they're on an hourly sort of rate, right. Stay silent. The world doesn't go silent. The public square fills with noise from non-experts, right? So I'd challenge your listeners and say, okay, maybe you don't feel ready yet. Maybe you don't feel comfortable. Thought expertise in your field doesn't mean automatically you're gifted with the skills of thought leadership. However, there's good news. They are skills and they can be learned. You can reach an audience and make impact and that impact can serve you and your balance sheet, your lifestyle, whatever you want, as well as change the shape of organizations, individuals. I believe quite simply we need more and better thought leaders rather than fewer. And that's one of the core messages of the book is thought leadership isn't a word to be embarrassed about. It's the word that society and the Anglophone language is using to describe this work. And then more importantly, how do you get going, get better, and make an impact? That's what this book is about.
Final Thoughts
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Jonathan Stark: That sounds great. That is great. Well, cool. I'm sold. Looking forward to grabbing my copy. Yeah. So it is on newsstands now. Pretty much anywhere books are sold, it's the Thought Leadership Handbook. Very good. And where is there a URL? Where can you send people? So if people want to read about the book or learn more, go to thoughtleadershiphandbook.com. Perfect. Bill, this has been amazing. Thanks so much for sharing all that.
Bill Sherman: Jonathan, it's been my pleasure.
Jonathan Stark: All right, folks, that's it for this week. I'm Jonathan Stark, and I hope you join me again next week for Ditching Hourly. Bye.
