Buying thought leadership

Friday 12th November, 2010. It's been a long day. My presentation went well enough, but it's a tough gig telling the marketing managers of some of the world's most celebrated consulting firms that their marketing isn’t working, especially when you're a slightly airy Englishman and they're a bunch of hard-nosed New Yorkers who've been in the business a lot longer than you. There were nods of agreement - it wasn't, frankly, that contentious, what I was saying - but there was hostility, too. I guess I knew there would be.

As much as anything else, I'm tired. It's been a long week, let alone a long day, and I'm a bit jet-lagged. Added to which the frost-blue autumn sky has cracked above Manhattan and it has started raining. I don't mind rain in the country. Perhaps that's because its purpose is more obvious. But in the city it's useless. Drink for drains. I'm mulling on that idea as I spin through the doors of Booz & Co's office on Park Avenue for my last meeting of the day. A smile, a badge, a ping of a lift and I'm on floor goodness-knows-what, shaking hands with Art Kleiner, Editor-in-Chief of Strategy & Business, the firm's flagship publication.

Kleiner is the New Yorker I wanted to meet. Grey-haired, softly spoken and manifestly intelligent, he’s the kind of man whose name appears in print alongside the words ‘his books include’. He offers me a cup of tea and a copy of his latest work ‘The Age of Heretics ’ (as if by way of confirmation) and introduces me to his publisher, the charming, similarly erudite and since-moved-elsewhere Jonathan Gage.

We take a seat in Kleiner’s office, though I dare say study is a more accurate description of this little corner of floor goodness-knows-what. (Since we met, the firm has consolidated some of its offices, including Kleiner’s; he now divides his time between the regular Booz offices and a home office in Connecticut.) We kick off a discussion about thought leadership. My contention is that Booz & Co’s material, despite being rated by us more highly than that of any other consulting firm, fails to make the link between its ideas and the services the firm offers. At a time when thinly-veiled sales pitches riddle the thought leadership market, Booz & Co, we feel, commits the uncommon crime: they’re forgetting to sell anything at all.

Kleiner agrees that this is a major cause for concern for them, but he seems unfazed by the criticism. He says that he and the firm have learned that intellectual depth – not ponderousness, but accessible incisiveness – is a route to commercial success. As he sees it, his job, and that of his team, is to nurture new ideas and then shoot at them until they’re completely convinced they won’t fall over. Clients will gravitate to the ideas and solutions that have some staying power. I’m expecting him to add that, yes, making sure they link directly back to the firm’s services is desirable, but he doesn’t do that. His argument seems to hinge on the idea that the firm’s sales proposition is inherently aligned with its intellectual agenda. And I buy it.

I’m confident that our methodology is sound (that an appropriate level of commercialisation really ought to be one of the hallmarks of effective thought leadership) but to hell with it, this is exciting stuff! There’s so much dross out there, masquerading as thought leadership, that to find someone who’s willing to let a short-term commercial agenda go hang in the interests of building sustainable competitive advantage through the quality of their firm’s intellectual capital is deeply refreshing. After all, the narrow agenda of much thought leadership turns out to be a shackle for many firms, leading to the production of a huge number of ordinary pieces that never break free to become extraordinary. I’ve held to this view ever since.

And then the other day I was interviewing the director of a public sector organisation in the UK, and asked him what he used consulting firms for. ‘I buy thought leadership’ was his reply. Buy it? I thought. Crikey – don’t you know they give the stuff away these days? Frankly if you could offer them a guarantee you’d actually read it, I suspect they’d pay you!

Which wasn’t what he meant, of course. His view was that thought leadership isn’t what persuades him to use a consulting firm, it’s what he uses them for in the first place. And all of a sudden I saw where my reveries – and, I suspect, the views of a great many consulting firms – had ended up: with thought leadership as a critically important part...of a firm’s marketing activities.

As long as the market continues to be flooded with what I increasingly think of as pulp thought leadership then I always will agree with Art Kleiner’s view. Bring on the heretics – look where conventional wisdom has landed us. And if thought leadership isn’t simply the way a firm markets its product – if it is its product – then the debate about the extent to which there needs to be a link between intellectual depth and a firm’s commercial interests starts to look like an argument for a link between popes and Catholicism.