Comparing apples and pairs in thought leadership

Having just completed our mid-year evaluation of the thought leadership produced by the world’s largest consulting firms, I’m struck with how unfair a process it is.

We use a methodology, developed with clients, that rates material according to its appeal (will it get noticed?), differentiation (will it keep people’s attention by saying something new or in a new way?), resilience (how much evidence is there?) and commercialisation (is there the faintest possibility – and usually there isn’t – that a good piece of thinking will be subtly linked to the services a consulting firm wishes to sell. But what it doesn’t do is take account of objectives.

In days gone past, many consulting firms used thought leadership to communicate, not with their clients, but with their colleagues. Internal divisions were rife, so being in a different area of the business was tantamount to being on another planet. Thought leadership was one of the few ways people could explain what they did. Thankfully, better technology and changing culture mean that this is less of an issue today, but many firms have still only moved up one rung of my notional thought leadership “pyramid” and use thought leadership to stay in contact with existing clients. It’s not a bad strategy, but it’s not exactly ambitious. Indeed, if anything, it reinforces the status quo: “clients know us for doing X, so X is what we’ll tell them about.”

More adventurous firms use thought leadership to gain the attention of prospective clients, the intellectual equivalent of cold-calling. This is a much tougher proposition, requiring much more investment in research and effort in promoting. But the top of the pyramid – the hardest, but potentially the most valuable strategy – is to use thought leadership to create a market, to set an agenda, if you will, much as McKinsey was able to do around offshoring in the late 1990s. Few firms do this – McKinsey being the most obvious – because it doesn’t just require huge amounts of money but an unswerving focus. Neither markets nor agenda are created overnight.

The problem with pyramids is that they imply that apex is the best and there are many firms which would argue that a lower level (coincidentally the one they’re on) is just as sensible a strategy. A firm with deep, long-standing relationships may prioritise keeping these clients above winning new ones.

But it does have an impact on the quality of thought leadership they produce. Using thought leadership to gain internal recognition or reinforce external relationships may not produce poor material, but it certainly doesn’t produce great material. So perhaps our approach isn’t so unfair after all.