Thought leadership is entertainment

Thought leadership is entertainment.

Entertainment means we, the audience, experience a release of some combination of endorphins, dopamine, oxytocin, and/or serotonin.

In thought leadership, you trigger that release in two ways:

1. Deliver a new perspective on an old frustration, or;
2. Provide new arguments or words to capture a feeling or experience we don’t currently have words for.

What makes thought leadership different from other forms of entertainment is that it addresses a frustration the reader would pay to solve.

So the question becomes: how do you consistently deliver new perspectives or language?

You narrow your focus until patterns become visible.

Blair Enns, for example, talks about business development. Nothing unique there.

But, because he focuses on one specific audience, he notices a context-specific frustration:

Creative service businesses systematically give away their best thinking to win new work. They hate doing it and they’re providing their most valuable strategic asset for free.

He delivers a new frame and alternative approach to win work:

Win Without Pitching.

He builds a remarkable business and brand on the back of that delivery.

That's not entertainment for entertainment’s sake.

It’s recognition that, “He sees exactly what I’m going through,” combined with relief of, “There’s an alternative.”

And because it’s about a problem they’d pay to solve, it fuels his entire business.

Narrow audience → sustained observation → pattern recognition → new frame

The discipline is in the narrowing. Because the broader your focus, the more generic your observations. You end up saying things that are true but obvious. “People buy from people they trust.” “Add value before asking for the sale.”

But narrow your focus enough, and suddenly you’re seeing things nobody else sees. Because nobody else is looking at that specific intersection long enough for the patterns to emerge.