Worrying about the corporate silver

When we measure the quality of thought leadership, we look at four dimensions (tried-and-tested with clients over many years):

• Appeal: A client has to believe that the material has been written with their sector, almost their individual, needs in mind. Generic thought leadership is likely to be discarded without being read.
• Differentiation: While relevance may engage a client’s attention, the only thing that will hold it is to provide new insights, even in – especially on – topics with which they are very familiar.
• Resilience: Clients want to see what other organisations have done and, ideally, quantifiable benefits.
• Commercialisation: At this early stage in a client’s thinking, everything is theoretical. The most effective way of making clients develop their ideas is to prompt them into acting.

Of these, the last is also the most problematic. Concerned that they will annoy clients by offering up thinly-disguised sales pitches (and nothing does, indeed, annoy them more), consulting firms run to the other side of the ship, making no connection between their thinking and their services. Actually, this reinforces a much deeper problem: how we connect thought to action. “Between the motion and the act falls the shadow,” as TS Eliot said.

The crucial aspect of commercialisation is getting the reader to do something. Actions help reinforce memory, so they increase the likelihood that a client will associate a firm with a given issue. But they also play a crucial role in ensuring that embryonic issues/ideas evolve into projects. So commercialisation can take many forms: simple, but practical questions for the reader; benchmarking data; getting people to respond with comments. It’s also as much about tone as content, focusing on the “how”, rather than the “what” or the “why” typical to most thought leadership.

But this is where some firms start to get nervous: “Aren’t we giving away our intellectual capital?” they ask. “Won’t that cannibalise our services?” I don’t think that’s the case, for several reasons. There will always be the occasional client who “steals” ideas and implements them themselves, but they were never going to buy your services anyway. The challenge here is to avoid wasting time selling to them in the first place. By the time they turn to consultants, the vast majority of clients have some idea of what they want to do (though they may still need help framing that). What they do need is help in implementation – and thought leadership will never be a substitute for that. In a world in which clients want increasingly specialised skills, consultants gain far more credibility from showcasing their thinking than they lose. Finally, the best consulting firms will always have more to say: why would they be worried because a client (or even competitor) has taken yesterday’s idea, when they’ll develop a better one tomorrow?

Thought leadership isn’t like silver: it shouldn’t be kept in a vault.