For the first 17 years of his career, Roger L. Martin worked for a large consulting firm, Monitor.
He developed a reputation for himself as an in-house thought leader.
Whenever a client faced a challenge or obstacle, they’d ask Roger for his opinion. Roger would give them thoughts in real time, then go away to think through the scenario and put together a concise, well-thought-out diagnosis with opinions and recommendations.
It’d be on subjects like acquisitions, commoditisation, culture, corporate strategy, capital investment, and talent.
And while every consultant around him was putting findings together into PowerPoint decks, Roger did something different.
He delivered a memo.
“It seemed to be a vehicle that helped me be able to frame up my point of view and be persuasive.”
Each was 2,000 words or fewer and thoughtfully formatted. If it was emailed, it was sent as an attachment, not the body of an email.
Clients loved the memos, and soon, word got around among other consultants at Monitor that Roger had a bank of memos dealing with similar client situations to their own. They’d ask for copies that they could send to their clients.
“My articles were targeted most typically for an audience of one – my client.” Roger L. Martin
Later in his career, Martin became a high-profile thought leader named in every Thinkers50 since 2009, and ranked the #1 management thinker in 2017.
Some of those memos would later become articles in Harvard Business Review.
But, as Martin says, he was a private thought leader long before he was a public one.
This reminds me of something Carl Richards did when he started creating visuals, in person with a client, to explain financial concepts, though he did publish publicly:
“At some point I started sending those visuals out. A client would call afterwards and say, hey, that thing you drew on the whiteboard, could you send it to me so I could share it with my spouse? And when I saw it go out electronically, I thought, oh, I could send it to more people. So then anytime anybody asked me a question twice, I would write the response, and I would send it to a collection of friends, family, and some clients.” Carl Richards
Roger was writing his memos during the 80s and 90s when it would have been harder to share at scale. Today, as with Carl, there’d be no reason not to publish these and build public authority.
Regardless of how you share them, responding to client questions in the form of publishable insight is a fantastic approach for developing intellectual property that’s relevant and valuable to clients and people who could become one.