What if the best practices you’ve painstakingly uncovered are pushed aside by sheer power of will?
One of the fundamental “truths” of thought leadership is that the breakthrough business insights that really change the game weren’t invented by some brilliant “expert” out of thin air. No. They didn’t just materialize in some “business lab” and pop out as an HBR article. Poof!
No, they were “discovered.” Fred Reichheld and his peers at BCG discovered the Net Promoter Score in a quest to find a better, more elegant way to measure customer loyalty. Brett Adamson, Matt Dixon, and team at CEB discovered the fundamental truths underlying the Challenger Sale by studying the behaviors of salespeople who were “crushing their quotas” during the financial downturn of 2008 – 2009.
And this is how much of the great thought leadership we use to shape the course of our businesses is developed.
We seek out best practices. We find the organizations already solving a business problem. We codify what they’re doing and how they do it. And we illuminate the path forward so others like them can yield similar successes.
This is great when we’re looking at sticky business issues that will remain issues for the foreseeable future.
But What About the Issues Clients Don’t Know Are Issues?
For this, we turn to thought leaders. The larger-than-life entrepreneurial personalities that seem to come out of nowhere and shape the market narrative.
These are folks that will an issue (and its solution) into being. They don’t just discover best practices for solving a known problem. They paint a vision of a better future. One that they themselves can see, but many around them cannot.
They drive that vision into reality through sheer force of personality. And many of them achieve incredibly outsized rewards. A few notable examples:
- Elon Musk and an Electrified World – The automobile industry has been talking about electric vehicles since the earliest days of the car. In fact, several early entrepreneurs developed electric-based vehicles as far back as the 1800s. But it wasn’t until Elon Musk came along and willed that vision into existence with a clear POV on what an electrified automotive industry could look like that serious adoption started to happen. And, let’s face it, the earliest investors and earliest adopters of his products were buying into his vision of the future much more than his car.
- Jeff Bezos and Same Day Delivery – These days we largely take same day / next day delivery for granted. We can buy just about anything we want with one click and have it delivered in hours or days. Paper towels? Click. A mattress? Click. But this sounded like an absurd idea just 20 years ago. At the time, same day delivery sounded ridiculously expensive and unnecessary. E-commerce was slow and clunky. It took at least 4-5 minutes on a computer to enter a credit card and complete a transaction. Smart phones didn’t exist. Most e-commerce organizations were struggling just to process, receive, and fulfill an order. In fact some traditional retailers, like Toy’s R Us, just gave up and handed the whole thing to Amazon. Jeff Bezos and the folks at Amazon had a vision of what could be and were putting all the pieces in motion to make it a reality. In fact, it was 1999 when the company patented its “one-click” purchase functionality … a full 8 years before the release of the iPhone and the app store.
- Mark Benioff and “No Software” – Did any of us ever know that we wanted or needed to “work in the cloud?” Once again, I remember the first rumblings of this thinking around 2000 when futurists were predicting that in the not-so-distant future computers would be inexpensive, conduits to software deployed from a data center far away. To be honest, at the time, the vision seemed absurd. Everything you did on a computer you did on the computer. If you worked in a large company you might post things to a centralized network. But, you spent most of the time on your desktop. Even posting things to a central file server could be slow and painful. I remember our agency staff thinking I was crazy when I moved our timesheets online in 2001. What if we lose Internet? An early version of the cloud showed up in the 2000 – 2005 window under the absurd title of “Application Service Providers” (aka ASPs). This fad, of course, failed to catch on (terrible naming, perhaps?). It wasn’t until 4-5 years later that the cloud really gained traction under the larger-than-life personality of Marc Benioff and the Salesforce visual tagline, “No Software.” These days the cloud is pretty much how all computing is done. In fact, nearly 100% of middle market companies are “in the cloud.”
That said, there are plenty of examples that haven’t landed quite as well (at least perhaps for the visionary?):
- Adam Neumann and CoWorking – Adam Neumann ushered into the world a new way of thinking about work. Gone were the days of a rigid office with cubicles and dedicated workspaces. In was a flexible, hybrid co-working space where gig workers and enterprise employees alike could come and go as they please. Pick a spot. Work for the day. Come back another day. Work anywhere you want. And do it all on a subscription. It was a great vision. The company IPO’ed at over $400/share in 2020. The interest and growth in co-working, spurred with an infusion of WFH in the pandemic, has been remarkable. But unfortunately, WeWork’s story hasn’t been so pretty. The company was fraught with mismanagement and eventually declared bankruptcy just a few years later. Its stock as I write this is worth less than 12 cents. That’s over 99.99% of value destroyed. That said, WFH isn’t going anywhere soon. And, co-working continues to be growing at a healthy clip.
- The Asset Light, Flexible Lifestyle – For over a decade we’ve been fed the narrative that millennials would live differently than the generations before them. They wouldn’t own homes or cars. They wouldn’t even bother getting a driver’s license. They’d simply live with a mobile phone. Grab an Uber. Embrace a life as a digital nomad and roam from place-to-place by bouncing from one AirBNB to another. And surely many have. I’ve worked with a few people who live that lifestyle. Yet, I’ve met and worked with far more young people who own cars, want to own homes, and have a desire to set down roots like the generations before them. Driving the prices of homes, minivans, and SUVs through the roof.
What Can We Learn From This?
The beauty of developing thought leadership by “discovering” best practices is that it’s an approach that’s largely accessible to anyone or any firm. Given a little time and a structured research approach, anyone with the curiosity to seek out a better way to solve a sticky business problem can generally find one.
Yet, we always have to keep our eyes on the horizon for the cagy entrepreneur that sort of comes out of nowhere and paints a picture of an entirely different reality. A picture that reshapes all the problems and the solutions that follow.
In 1999, it would have been smart business to build a POV on how traditional retailers could build and run a profitable e-commerce organization. Smarter business would’ve been to study how commerce was going to change over the next 10 years and build a POV on how technology and e-commerce might shape the very nature of retail.
Here are 2 ways marketing and editorial leaders can learn from this:
- Ensure You’re Studying the Right Best Practices – When starting a research initiative to identify best practices on a topic, take a moment to step back. Ask yourself, are we looking at this topic through the right lens? Will this business problem remain a business problem for the foreseeable future? What could happen that would make this problem go away entirely? What’s the likelihood of those things happening?
- Stress-Test Your Firm’s Master POV – The best professional services firms are built upon a clear POV about the world. Tercera was founded on the belief that the cloud’s 3rd wave would require a new generation of service providers. Jump Associates consistently points out the need for a future-focused approach to organizational strategy. TBM Consulting regularly emphasizes the importance of speed in operations – the greatest rewards belong to the fastest companies. If your firm lacks a clear master POV, here’s how to develop one.
