Before I read Bill Sherman’s book, I’d tell you I was already practicing thought leadership.
For example, I write this newsletter every Wednesday, it’s archived on our website, it builds trust, and it brings people like you into our world at The Upside.
But then I read The Thought Leadership Handbook and realized I had been confusing thought leadership with content marketing this entire time. Oops.
Last Friday, Bill joined me for a private Expert Session inside The Upside community. When he asked our members to define thought leadership, the chat filled up quickly with comments like:
“A distinctive point of view.”
“Challenging conventional wisdom.”
“An opinion that inspires.”
One member admitted they’d been called a thought leader and still weren’t sure what that meant. Then, Bill gave us a definition that had us all sitting up in our seats:
“Thought leadership is taking ideas to scale and creating impact, often without positional authority.”
If this sparks your curiosity, here are three takeaways from our workshop with Bill that I hope will inspire you to level up your own thought leadership today:
#1 Ideas Don’t Speak for Themselves
We all want to believe a good idea will win on its own. “Build it and the audience will come,” is what most entrepreneurs want so badly to believe. But Bill taught us this hard truth:
“Ideas don’t speak for themselves. They can’t. However, individuals can.”
He told us about a pharmacist who ran compliance trainings for nurses at elder care facilities. Since she was a teenager, she’d been writing about something she called “everyday peace.”
She’d never shared that idea until, one day, she added five unrequested minutes on “everyday peace” to the end of a compliance training. She half expected her client to question why she tacked that part on.
Instead, nurses lined up afterward to ask her questions, and the next week, a facility asked if she’d come back to give an entire talk on it.
Bill says it’s those types of “tell me more” moments when expertise becomes thought leadership.
Bill’s test for whether you’ve found your thought leadership idea is to ask yourself:
What lights you up when you talk about it?
What are you willing to repeat down to the basics hundreds, even thousands, of times?
What’s the idea you keep bringing up at dinner?
#2 Give Before You Ask
Bill believes thought leadership starts with generosity, taking ideas out from behind the consulting paywall and putting them into the public conversation. He explained to us:
“You have to put value into the conversation before you try to extract it.”
This reminded me of a free seminar I attended at my local library about college gap years, hosted by a woman who runs a gap year consulting company. I couldn’t wait to learn about the different gap year paths students choose, so I could see whether it might be a good option for one of my kids.
Instead, she spent 90% of the session talking about why students should choose a gap year. When I raised my hand to ask about different gap year ideas and paths, she was vague. When I asked what resources she suggested we use to learn more about gap years, she answered, “You can Google it.”
I quickly saw that instead of leading with generosity, she was operating in thought leadership scarcity mode. And instead of giving me the answers I was searching for, she locked them behind her paywall.
Let’s just say I left that seminar knowing with certainty I would never hire her or refer business her way. Which leads me to an important question that one of our members asked (and many of us were thinking):
“Can you give away too much?”
Bill’s answer is to share more, not less, but share responsibly. Some tools need your judgment and context to work. Those are the ones that should stay behind the paywall.
Ask yourself: What’s one framework sitting in an old client deck that could do more good out in the world?
#3 The Impact Equation
This is when the whole room leaned in.
Bill’s impact equation has four variables:
Idea Simplicity: Can people remember your idea, use it under stress, and pass it on?
Audience Relevance: Can someone tell within seconds whether your idea is for them?
As Bill put it, “Be deeply irrelevant to 99.9% of the world and you will make impact.”
Velocity: You only have so many hours, talks, and posts in you. Your personal velocity has a ceiling. The next level comes from others carrying your idea: podcast hosts, communities, partners, and clients.
Audience Share: Forget total addressable market. Ask what it would take to get 1% of a carefully chosen audience listening. Bill says that’s usually where the breakpoint happens.
Bill Sherman’s Impact Equation:
And here’s what really got me: the equation is multiplicative.
In other words, if any single variable hits zero, your impact hits zero…
…no matter how strong the other three are.
A brilliant idea for the perfect audience still goes nowhere if you’re the only one carrying it. A huge platform still goes nowhere if no one can repeat what you said.
As I sat through the session and reflected on these questions, two of my own thought leadership ideas came to mind: The Four Pillars of Value and 20/20 Market Research.
I’ve been talking about these for almost a decade and the impact of these ideas has multiplied and spread across hundreds of different Upside members, podcast conversations, communities and entrepreneurial circles.
As you reflect on your own Impact Equation, ask yourself: Which of the four is your zero right now? That’s where you start.
Bill closed with a book giveaway for two of our lucky members and an important line that stuck with us:
“There’s lots that you can do tactically in thought leadership. The goal is to work strategically.”
If you want to go deeper, here are some helpful links from Bill:
➡️Grab a copy of The Thought Leadership Handbook
➡️Subscribe here to the Leveraging Thought Leadership podcast
➡️Learn more about Bill’s Thought Leadership Frameworks
➡️Follow Bill on LinkedIn
Want to be in the room for members-only learning sessions with experts and authors who will challenge and stretch your thinking? Then join us at our Next Open House for an insider tour of The Upside and to see firsthand how we’ll help you level up your business. RSVP early to save your spot.
