This is my second post but my first introduction to all of you -- i.e., what this blog will be about, who I am, and what I'd like to see from all of you readers. First, I'd like you to contribute because that's, in part, what makes blogging MUCH different than just writing and posting articles. The power of a blog, it seems to me, is not just for all of you to get inside my head but for everyone to get inside your heads.
This is my first blog, so please bear with me as I wrestle with what for me is a new medium. The medium at first does feel a little bit like my very early days as a business journalist and sports journalist. (I was a sportswriter in college and just out of college -- San Clemente Sun-Post in the late 1970s -- until I realized that good sportswriters were a dime a dozen.) I switched to business journalism in 1980 when I joined the Orange County Register in California. I loved the ability to write something and see my work in the next day's paper.
Now the "next-day's paper" is the next-minute's blog. Very powerful, and very scary.
Why does the world need one more blog? (Note: maybe it doesn't.) I have been involved in this field of "thought leadership marketing" for 21 years now. (You know something is emerging as a recognized field when it finally has a name that people recognize.) I was fortunate (and lucky) to have joined a management consulting firm (Index Group) in 1987 that had linked up with an ex-MIT computer science professor named Michael Hammer in a research program called PRISM. That program was where the reengineering concept emanated. Index the consulting firm converted it into a consulting practice, and reengineering became the blockbuster consulting concept of the 1990s.
So I was very, very lucky to have seen how the sausage was made -- how the reengineering concept was developed, packaged and marketed. And I got the wonderful opportunity to play a big role in marketing it.
Other consulting firms had been at the thought leadership game long before Index: McKinsey (McKinsey Quarterly has been around since 1964), Booz Allen and others. But none of them had created a blockbuster concept like reengineering. Index's revenue grew from ~$40 million in 1987 when I joined the firm to ~$250 million by 1995. What's more, reengineering had become a multbillion-dollar consulting industry (with firms like McKinsey, Cap Gemini, Accenture, and Deloitte all providing reengineering services).
I view thought leadership as a way for professional services firms of all types (not just consulting firms) to demonstrate their expertise to prospective clients, to give them a sample of their "smarts." Traditional marketing techniques such as advertising, brochures, trade show booths, etc., are not good ways to demonstrate a professional firm's expertise. An advertisement only allows you to declare your firm has some expertise.
There's a big difference between declaring you are the expert and demonstrating it. Clients want you to demonstrate you are a leading expert. Besides having great client references, the way to demonstrate you have expertise on some issue is to show your command of it in a 3,000-word article or 200-page book (or both and more). That's why publicizing research reports, publishing in Harvard Business Review, writing compelling business books, etc., etc., can help professional firms rise above the noise and grab client attention (and budget).
In this blog, I will share my experiences and views on thought leadership. I will point to exemplary things some professional firms are doing in the thought leadership domain, and things they SHOULD be doing to generate and market compelling ideas.
But I want to hear your views as well, and push everyone's thinking about this emerging and exciting discipline.
Welcome aboard.
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1 comment:
Bob -
Welcome to blogging! I look forward to seeing more of you demonstrating your expertise and not merely declaring it.
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