474 From Expertise to Impact: How Leaders Take Ideas to Scale with Bill Sherman

Welcome to Partnering Leadership, a top global leadership podcast for purpose-driven leaders with a growth mindset, seeking to learn from the leadership journey of change makers and business insights from leading global thinkers. For additional leadership insights and bonus content, visit us at partneringleadership.com. Now here's your host, Mahan Tavakouli.

Bill Sherman, welcome to Partnering Leadership. I am thrilled to have you in this conversation with me. Hey, Mahan, it's great to be here. I was thrilled when your book came out, The Thought Leadership Handbook, How the Experts Elevate Their Big Ideas, and How You Can Too. So can't wait to talk about your book that you wrote along with Peter and Naren. Before we get to that, Bill, I want to know a little bit more about you. Whereabouts did you grow up and how did your upbringing help contribute to who you've become?

So I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, close enough to a big city that for me, anywhere without a skyline doesn't really count as a city. I now live in Las Vegas, so most of the skyline that I see is hotels. I think it's 16 or 17 of the 20 largest hotels are on the strip, but they form a skyline, right? But to your question, how did I become this guy? Son of a librarian, right? Which means incredibly bookish. In fact, I went through undergrad doing a master's undergrad in English and theater, master's in drama. I thought I was going to do a PhD in English Lit, put on a tweed sport coat, probably some LO patches, teach some English lit classes to undergrads, and probably direct a play or two at a four-year liberal arts university. And then I saw there were a thousand applicants for tenure track position in English lit. I said, that's a really crappy set of odds, right? And so I migrated from my PhD program before I sat for comprehensives because I am so let alone wrote my dissertation and stumbled into the world of corporate learning and development that went to strategic HR and organizational development. And I had a client back in the early 2000s who was a C-level exec at a tech company, wrote a business book because he thought that's what C-level execs did at the time, got it on the cover of Fast Company, the print magazine. And then people started saying, Hey, can you come give a talk? Or how do we take some of what you learned to do and apply it to people in our organization? That led to a conversation. That led to this question of how do you take ideas into inside a book and take it to scale within an organization? And really, I moved from running an OD consultancy in the early 2000s to, as you mentioned, meeting Peter Winnick and then 2013, we merged companies and we're full-time thought leadership leverage, focusing on helping people take ideas to scale and create impact.

Before we go further, Bill, I want to understand that term: thought leadership. What is thought leadership? What is a thought leader?

Number one, if you ask a lot of people, they cringe at the term and they're like, it's icky. Or yeah, I see a lot of people with it on LinkedIn. What does that mean? Did they go to school for thought leadership? No, nobody went to school generally for thought leadership. Very few programs out there. And additionally, I have yet to meet anyone who dressed as a thought leader for Halloween as a kid, right? So given that, I've heard answers from people. Oh, thought leadership. That's for people with big egos that need to make them feel themselves feel important. I've also heard, oh, that's for your organization. Thought leadership is your smartest content marketing. It's designed to fill the funnel, and it's the smartest stuff you got designed to attract clients. Okay, fine. I'd argue thought leadership is a little bit different. That thought leadership is akin to people leadership, but different. So, people leadership, you may be in charge of a team, a department, the entire organization. You may be a functional leader where you're responsible for a process, but may not have a team. What if you're responsible for an idea and getting that idea out into the world, creating impact, and taking it to scale? Might be within your organization, might be within your ecosystem of vendors, suppliers, customers, clients. It could be regulators.

What a beautiful range. So want to get your view on the heads of organizations, CEOs, more senior executives. What role does thought leadership play for them?

So I would say there's a maturity curve there, obviously. There are some CEOs that are growth-minded. Maybe some of them are running startups and they don't have a comms team. They don't have an outbound strategy and tools team. And they're like, I got to get our product visible. I've got to open doors that my sales team can't. I've got to be on stages that either we'd have to pay for in a pay-to-play way if marketing booked an event. But I want the ideas out there. I want to shape the industry. I want to challenge what they think is possible today, right? So we see patterns in thought leadership. And it's easy to go, oh, that person's an author, a speaker, a consultant, a coach, an executive. But if you flip the question, go, why are they practicing thought leadership? Much more interesting and creates patterns. The first is the growth-minded CEO. As I said, they could be someone in a vistage group running a local business. They could be running a multi-million dollar business, or they could be a Fortune 500 CEO that's practicing thought leadership. Obviously, maturity curve. But the growth-minded CEO has a pattern. They want to open doors, they want to shape conversations, or they may have their board asking, hey, you gonna write a book? We had a client who their board went and said year one. So we think you should write a book. I don't think this is the time. Year two board meeting, same question. We think you should write a book. Year three, how about that book? And that CEO came back and said, I found out I could tell my board no to a book three times. Okay. The board saw value in the creation of thought leadership and getting the earned media, the attention to the company, not as just a provider of services, which often leads as a race to the bottom, but someone who is advancing the conversation, who has something that's worthy of interest.

So, Bill, we live in an interesting age now, specifically as a result of AI, where the value of intelligence is going down to near zero. Everyone with a click of a button can generate a thought. Put it on LinkedIn, put it elsewhere. So there's a ton of noise out there. Do you still see there being value to thought leadership? And if still, what differentiates your thought leadership from the massive amounts of thought that is coming at us?

Oh, absolutely. So a couple things, and let me make your question even harder before I try to answer it. I love it. Okay. So I've been paying attention in the news, and my channel feed winds up giving me interesting things on ideas and research. There has been a rapid surge of math problems that have been a hundred years out there or more that have suddenly been solved and validated as mathematical proofs of questions that humans have tried for 100, 150 years to answer. We have a system of the best and brightest minds becoming PhDs, and a handful of them win the Fields Medal. And that's the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in mathematics, right? What do you do when AI is solving problems that were generational, that no one had cracked yet, and goes, oh yeah, that was a 70-second problem. You should have looked over here. Where's the human value in that, right? That's hard. So I look at it this way: number of organizations and individuals post on LinkedIn social media. Maybe from five or 10 years from now, it'll still be LinkedIn or something we haven't even seen yet, right? The question is, how do you get your ideas to the right audience? There's what, 8.5 billion people on the world? I don't know how to be deeply relevant to them. Even the 330 some million in the US, again, don't know, don't have a way. But if I narrow my audience and say, I'm going to be irrelevant. In fact, I'm going to be deeply irrelevant to 99.9% of the population, I want them to scroll past and go, oh gosh, that sounds uninteresting. But if the right people click Steam more, there's value. Because not only for me, if I'm running a business, but I'm engaging in a conversation that maybe geography wouldn't allow or timing wouldn't allow. Maybe we didn't meet at the conference together because we went to different coffee stations at the conference and therefore never bumped into each other. Some of this is the creating the opportunities for a conversation with the right people. So if we take that and we ask the question of, okay, we've got AI that makes social media posting easier and easier, right? And it's a race to the bottom. I look on LinkedIn now, and there are a lot of people going, there's so much AI slop here. What do we do? Okay, yes, I'd read a hundred of those posts. I haven't seen a solution. One, I guess we can ask people to stop posting slop. Yeah, maybe there's a system that, and there are ones that are AI detectors that can sniff out was this generated by AI or not. Okay, that could be useful. That's a upstream platform solution. But I think what's much more interesting and important is if you have knowledge or a new perspective that answers a question that people are struggling with, that if it solves a problem in an industry, I'd argue that you're needed in the conversation. Because it's really easy to go, oh, there's a lot of plausible slop that's there. That's blaming the pollution. I'd rather put deeply relevant content that's high quality and put a challenge to the experts. It's like, where are you in the conversation? Don't just complain, contribute.

That's a powerful point that you just made, Bill, with respect to understanding what is the 1% of the population or the segment or the grouping that you are interested in and you can add real value to them. I would argue that when people say AI splob, it's not because AI has written or helped in writing those posts. If anything, I would encourage everyone to use AI to write their posts if they have unique thoughts that are of value to a specific target group.

Exactly. It's the difference between broadcasting, narrow casting, and point casting. Broadcasting is hoping someone out there somewhere will find it useful. Comment, smash a like button, and it's sort of the field of dreams approach to thought leadership. If you post it, someone will like it. Yeah, that's a lousy business strategy. Pretty good movie, but doesn't make sense, right? So how do you create value? How do you create impact? Because you may look and go, okay, I'm doing thought leadership because I want to grow my business. That's okay. But at the same time, I would strongly argue having talked to 700 people on our podcast and interviewed them on thought leadership practices, plus in the field for 20 years, you have to be willing to give value, significant value, long before you ask in return. So it's from, and let's use that ocean metaphor again. There's somebody who's polluting and putting AI slop out there, right? And it's not adding to the conversation in any way. And I'm not anti-AI, it's just it's echoing what's been said before again and again. Nothing new under the sun, right? If, however, you're contributing to the conversation, you're advancing the conversation, you're giving value, you're solving problems that people are facing. To your question on, hey, person has a million followers, but no one's engaging. That's a radio station broadcasting, but nobody's tuning into the channel, right? So I'd rather have a thousand people actively engaged. And from a marketing perspective, and if you're running a business and leadership, you go, what's the total addressable market for this business? I ask the same question in terms of an idea. What is the total addressable market? Who might listen to this, find it useful? And then it's easy to start going, what percentage of my total addressable market am I reaching? And if you're at 0.0001 of your total addressable market, no amount of thought leadership, not even paid media, is gonna help, right? So you have to reduce your addressable market and you have to signal you're deeply relevant. We have a framework we call the impact equation, because what is thought leadership is one question we get. The other one is what is impact? And maybe it's you want to generate revenue for yourself, maybe you want to create a social outcome or result, maybe you want to impact how organizations work or leave a legacy, whatever. Impact can be defined however you want. There are a few variables and it's not numerical, it's directional. Number one is the idea simple. If the idea has simplicity, other people will remember it when they're in a meeting on a Tuesday afternoon, cognitive load, stress, and they've got to make a choice. If it has no simplicity, congratulations. Ain't nobody going and pulling a 700-page book and go, hold on, everyone, let's pause the meeting. I need to consult the tome of wisdom. No. So idea simplicity. The next thing is relevance. The quicker you signal relevance, and I'd argue in this age, you have fractions of a second on social media. And if you're lucky on a podcast, you've got 60 to 90 seconds. That's hard, right? But it's your responsibility if you think you have something of value to signal to an audience, we got to crack through the noise. So idea simplicity, audience relevance. Then the next question is how are you going to get that idea out there? If you're a leader of an organization, you're a CEO, it might be a case of, okay, I'm going to go out and talk and do things. Or I may look and say, I have a sales team, I have other individuals who are in-house experts. They're going to go to conferences, they're going to talk with clients, and we're going to advance the conversation. And I want everyone with their own flavor of thought leadership. It all ties back to the organizational strategy. But we encourage people to practice thought leadership and advance the conversation. Because, boy, if you're doing that, you're doing good for your career, right? Rather than being known as, yeah, that's the person who says the same things I heard last year from everyone else, right? So in Velocity, it's two sources. Velocity comes from either you or not you. And if I was a leader, I'd be looking, going, okay, I'm going to put some of my time in, but a good leader knows how to delegate. How do I delegate that ability to drive conversations and get into rooms that even I, as CEO, can't get into? So that whether it's someone on a customer support line, all the way to sales, to customer engagement and satisfaction and success, all of those firms, all those team members know how to advance the conversation, show what's coming around the corner. That's how you grow a business, right?

You mentioned simplicity. At what point does simplicity devalue an idea versus making it memorable and sticky? So there's a little bit of a trick to that, honestly.

You don't want it so watered down that it feels simple or simple-minded, right? The the rubric that I use when I'm looking at thought leadership and now having worked with clients for 20 years, I get to go through a lot of people's intellectual addicts where they've had ideas, they're not quite sure if it's fully baked, if it's ready for prime time. And when we work with client on strategy sessions, like, no, show us everything. Let us judge what you've got, because you may have a gem in your attic that you haven't brought out to the world, right? I look for in thought leadership insights that are simple and especially in the leadership concept. And since this is a leadership podcast, I'll focus here. Simple enough that you give me three to five minutes with a newly minted manager. They understand what I'm talking about. Do they have the skills to apply it? No. I can take a similar three to five minutes, have a higher level and more sophisticated conversation, different language, different stories, different examples, talk to a CEO, talk to a seasoned C level exec, and they respond and go, Oh, I see things differently. And you know what? I'm gonna be spending the rest of my career trying to master that. And so there's a tension there. How do you make it accessible enough so that someone can grab it with low levels of familiarity, experience, or context, but be wise and useful enough so that people at the top of their career and the top of their game are challenged by it?

So I'm curious, but what might be an example of that or a couple of examples? Yeah.

So with this, I'm thinking of. Trusted Advisor, which you may have run across that book that's David Maester, Galford, and Charlie Green. If you've been in professional services consulting, it's a book that lives on your shelf, right? The concept trusted advisor, yeah, I want to be one. That's a platform identity that's sticky and makes me say, yeah, I want to be a trusted advisor. I want my team to be trusted advisors to customers and clients. Okay. The next obvious question is how do I do that? Okay. If you look in trusted advisor, there's something called the trust equation. Okay. And it has a numerator and denominator. Three terms in the numerator: credibility, reliability, and intimacy. And these are things that you don't get to score. Your audience scores. Do they find you credible? Do they find you reliable? And they feel like you care about them, that you actually see their world rather than you as an ATM. That's the numerator of the trust equation. The denominator is self-orientation. So if your self-orientation and you feel like you're selling, all of a sudden all of the work you did on credibility and reliability tanks. Okay. I could explain that to sales 101, right? People who had never been in front of a sales meeting ever. I could also have a sophisticated conversation with a head of revenue and say, okay, let's do a diagnostic on your team. Let's understand where your team shines, where you need to put in work. And it may vary by level, by function, by geography. Same framework, different conversation.

Beautiful example where, on one end, as you explained it, it's very easy for anyone to understand. On the other end, you could spend hours, days with pretty experienced people analyzing each element of that framework. Absolutely.

And one of the things that I see about good thought leadership, not only from a practitioner perspective, the people who practice thought leadership often are drawn to it because there's a puzzle or a problem or something they're trying to understand. And they start at the 101 level themselves. And then they keep going deeper and deeper. And so what you're looking for is thought leadership does not solve a Y2K problem that has an expiration date of January 1st, 2001. Either the world is ended or it hasn't for technology. Thought leadership has to spark someone's curiosity deep enough to ask, how does this work? So they're willing to spend a large chunk of their professional life and even their off hours asking, how does this work? And then figuring out, how do I explain this to anyone else? Because if you do the first, how does this work? Congratulations, you're an expert. If you do the second as well as the first, then you're in a position to practice thought leadership.

I want to touch on something else. You've been in this business, in essence, 20 plus years, as you mentioned thought leadership. You've assisted lots of authors, many of them I know, people you've helped think through their ideas, communicate their ideas, CEOs, executives. You hadn't written the book up to this point. How come?

So there's a surface level answer, and there's a deeper answer. The surface answer goes like this: we're in a service business. We serve people who are authors, speakers, etc. Our our purpose is to help them shine rather than stand in the spotlight and say, hey, look at us. Okay. That's a variant of that answer that I gave for a good 15 years, right? Let me take you back a little bit further behind the curtain on that. One, don't write a want to write a book that people look at and go, eh, that's cute, right? Two, if we didn't have a strategy on how does this book align to our business, then it was a vanity project. Three, we needed something that we felt had value and we knew our audience for. And one of the realizations that we came to was we developed a number of tools, frameworks, processes, but the only way for anyone to get to them was they had to be our client, right? And so we talked about this concept of you got to put value into the world before you ask for others. That started to sting and sting hard. It was like, wait a minute, that not writing a book thing is a cop-out. And we've got tools that could help people that we never meet, that they never work with us, and yet the world needs more and better thought leaders out there advocating good ideas. That was a harsh mirror for ourselves, right? The other reason on a personal level, so back in the mid-2000s, early client I did work for, I was a back-a-house guy trying to figure out how to scale and reverse engineer a book that wasn't written to be teachable at enterprise scale. Okay. We were going to do a meeting. He had an event at ENY in New York, and they've got a lovely office, Times Square, looking down. And I get a call a couple hours before the event where I was just going to hang out in the back and I knew the stump speech. I could tell when the jokes were going to be, when tears would come from the audience. I knew how this worked as a keynote. And the message was simple: hey, our flight in Buffalo got delayed. We're not going to be able to get there. Do you think you could go across town? Because I was midtown east in a couple hours and go deliver a talk to ENY. Yeah, sure, right? This is me mid-30s, ponytail. It's like you show up looking for Aerosmith or Duo Lipa, and instead you got the roadie, right? And as much as I could, I tried in the two hours that I had to personalize and customize someone else's message and deliver it to an audience that's looking at me questioningly, like the dog that cocks its head and looks and goes, who are you? I hate that session. It was not just bad, it was awful. The lesson I took from it was, oh, other people belong on stage, not me. The lesson I should have taken was I shouldn't try to deliver someone else's message without really having it embedded in my core, right? I learned the wrong message. I shied from the stage and was happy to be the consigliary, the person who guides from experience, but never steps out of the shadows. So as I started working on the manuscript and working with Peter and Naren, one of the things I realized was the book came alive when we told the stories of guests who'd faced moments of struggle, vulnerability. It wasn't all the rock star life of high-fee keynote speeches, amazing venues, and all the glamour. It was moments like a CEO of Deloitte Consulting and chair of their board, who, when Janet Fouty was asked by her comms team, hey, can you write a book? We can connect you with the president of Simmons University. We think you could write a good book on women's leadership. Janet responded, I'm not sure the world needs another book on the women's leadership. What do I have to say? And that's something that a lot of people have to get over, that imposter syndrome, let alone content insecurity, right? And Janet talked about her hardest moment being reaching out to clients and saying, hey, can I interview? Can I talk about this issue with you? And she said she hoped that the EAs for these executives would just respond, give a few answers, and that would be it. Thank you very much. And email after email came back, and they're like, this is great. I don't want to answer just one question. I want to do all six. Can we meet in person? Those stories become the heart of the book. And I think what happens when you practice thought leadership is you reach a point where there's something deep inside you, something passionate. You've seen one corner of business or professional development that is clear. And you got a choice. You can shut up and not say anything and go live a good life. You can be exemplary and people go, how does that person do that? How does Mahan build deep relationships that lead to business, right? Or you can take the next step and choose to speak about what you've learned. You can put it out into the world, and that's one of the things I believe. When you reach that point, you have a duty to speak.

So one of the other things I'm wondering, Bill, is what value is there in thought leadership in a world of infinite free intelligence, where we now have our chatbots pretty soon, earbuds where we have that intelligence with us nonstop, answering questions, guiding us, and accessing insights from countless thought leaders.

It's a good question, but it's a challenging question here. Because if you go back a couple decades, you want to talk about disruption and innovation, Clayton Christensen, right? And you knew there were frameworks or Tom Peters in terms of his frameworks and models. Things were attached to individuals and sources of credibility, right? And again, I am a fan of AI, but I think this is something that needs to be navigated carefully, is that I think as a consumer of advice, given hallucination still exists, given that I can send the same prompt three times, be told I'm brilliant twice, and get four different answers, right? If I'm a leader making a decision and a material decision, let alone being a CEO who making an MA decision, right? I've got a senior partner at one of the big consulting firms, maybe a McKinsey or something, but I can go to that person and ask, what is your recommendation? There's an accountability, there's a face, there's a brand, there's a name that stands behind it. As much as I am a fan of the AI companies, do I think they are MA experts and will they stand behind that recommendation as a firm if I type in a query? Probably not. So the question becomes if we have the ability to organize the world's knowledge, taking the next level from Google's big hairy, audacious goal back in the day. If we had that ability, how do we add credibility? Because remember, I was talking about credibility, reliability, and intimacy divided by self-orientation. If I'm as a consumer asking, hey, did you give me that recommendation because that's a paid ad inside of whichever flavor of AI I'm using? That's self-orientation on the AI process. What credibility makes this claim? Data analysis being different than business strategy or leadership, or how do I have a difficult one-on-one? If you look at Robert Cialdini's principles of influence, we don't want to go out on a limb and not try something that no one else is doing. We want to know do people like me come to the same conclusion? So, sourcing, I think, has to become part of the answer and AI drawing from credible, reliable sources to provide that answer. If I just get a recommendation without links, or if I get links that it's a random page, and I'm not sure I trust it. Yeah, no, I want branded thought leadership that is, oh yeah, that link was on point. It spoke to my problem. Rather than I have no idea what probabilistic engine came up with that.

I would both agree with you and add that in a world of free access to intelligence, what you mentioned, which is the credibility and the brand that goes behind the judgments that you believe an individual has, becomes of even greater value.

And you have a choice of do you firewall your best knowledge, or do you put it into the knowledge commons, knowing that AI is going to spit it out, and a percentage of those people will never ever know it was you, let alone contact you as a client. And I think we're far better to deliver knowledge to the commons, support attribution where appropriate. I think that's a healthier commons on that for knowledge, rather than okay, we scraped a bunch of stuff. Here's what the machine came up with. And no, we can't tell you what black box came up with this recommendation. As a leader, that would horrify me, right? And even think about it this way. So if you go out and buy a book, hardcover, softcover, business book, you're spending somewhere between 20 and 35 bucks, right? You hire someone who's a professional keynoter, you might pay 10, 20, 35,000 for 90 minutes of their time on stage. You can bring them in for an executive offsite. Meanwhile, the book is 30 bucks and the TED talk they did in 18 minutes is free. You can go on YouTube and watch it. That tells us that there's a value to physical presence and being able to look in someone's eyes and test that sense of are you paying attention? Are you engaged with me? Because it's not just a small percentage, it's orders of magnitude.

What a powerful example there, Bill, of the real value that, as there's this proliferation of content, information, intelligence, the real value that credible human resource can be for organizations. Now, I imagine you learned some things this time in writing the book and now trying to promote the book versus all the advice that you were giving as a professional to your clients for 20 plus years. What has surprised you the most, whether in writing or in promoting the book?

So I'll answer that a couple ways. I would walk into my office, and if you're watching this on video, you'd see there's a number of books behind me. Many of those books were written either by colleagues, friends, clients. I would walk into my office every day and feel surrounded by friends and they're thinking, that was a pretty cool thing, right? And I started writing the book. I had to make choices. My mom and dad moved in with us when three years ago, they were having mobility and memory issues. I was spending evenings and weekends writing this. I don't think I appreciated how much time and sacrifice you give up, whether it's caregiving for a child or the weight that you put on a spouse for the running of the household while you're sitting writing for some potential reader someday. That was one of the things that struck me. And I walked into my office one day during the writing, and instead of seeing sort of a warm room of friends, I was surrounded by years of their lives. And I saw the books as years of their lives. And I think that was a moment where it was like, yeah, each book that exists, each idea that someone advocates for, they've made a sacrifice and a choice to bring that idea out into the world.

Absolutely beautiful and true. I'm glad you, Peter, and Naren made the sacrifice to bring this one into the world. How can the audience follow your work, find the book as well, Bill?

So a couple things. The book is the Thought Leadership Handbook. Bill Sherman, Peter Winnakin, Naran Arial, and you can find it wherever books are sold. It is available in hardcover and Kindle Editions, hardcover US Domestic for now. Additionally, if you want to reach out and follow me, I'm on LinkedIn as Bill-Sherman-aha-Moments. And then if you want to talk with us about strategy and thought leadership, we're out at Thought Leadership Leverage.com.

I so appreciate the conversation, Bill. Thank you so much, Bill Sherman.

Mahang, this has been a joy. This has been fun.

You have been listening to Partnering Leadership with your host, Mahan Tavakoli. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating and review of the podcast on your favorite podcasting app and forward the conversation to a friend or colleague so you can help more people discover their purpose, grow professionally with meaning, and have a greater impact. For additional leadership insights and bonus content, visit us at partneringleadership.com.