💥 What is thought leadership?
💥 What is thought leadership?
A skill not everyone has, but one that can be developed—my thoughts on how
NOTE: I originally set out to write a very different post, about whether ChatGPT is capable of writing thought leadership. My answer to that in a future post, where I will also explain how I use AI tools to help originate ideas and support my writing.
But before any of that, I realized I needed to set some terms. Everyone throws around the term “thought leadership,” especially marketers—but what is it exactly, and how can one begin to develop it? Here is my best answer.
I. Not everyone can be a thought leader
Let’s be real for a moment—not everyone can be thought leaders.
It’s like everyone thinking their child is ahead of the curve on intelligence, or artistic ability, or athletics. It’s a curve; by definition, at least half of people are behind it.
Even doctors.
Yet for as long as I’ve been doing this, every physician, group, health-tech company, and internal marketing department I’ve ever worked with has told me that they are leaders in their field, that their doctors are doing amazing innovative things, and that their programs are the best in the business.
It does make sense on some level. If you start a new enterprise, you do so usually because you feel you have something new to add to the industry that no one else is providing. You think you have a different way, and when you describe that to the world you are hoping to be seen as leaders.
But what is it we’re actually aiming at here? What IS thought leadership? How do you recognize it?
II. What thought leadership isn’t
First, let me tell you what thought leadership is NOT.
It’s not a webinar, or a white paper, or a research study. It’s not a spiffy brochure, it’s not even a blog post. The point is, the medium is not the issue. And all the fancy design in the world will not mask mediocre ideas at the heart of a piece.
Nor is it about length, which many mistake for substance. Simply writing 10,000 words does not in itself connote seriousness. I’ve come across a lot of very long books with poor ideas in them, and these books soon disappear into the void, no matter how good the PR team. The length of your content does not matter.
The idea matters. The size, scope, and medium that idea is expressed in all come later.
I’ve come across a lot of people who think what they’re doing is just the most innovative thing in the world, and the reason they are not getting more attention for all that innovation somehow has to do with distribution and amplification. Sometimes it does, but more often it’s that the quality of the ideas just isn’t there.
If you want to make waves, you have to say something worth paying attention to.
Thought leadership is about the quality of the ideas.
III. My favorite example of thought leadership
There are a ton of examples in healthcare, but one of my favorites is The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande (pretty much any Atul Gawande book would qualify, but let’s start with this).
Published in 2009, The Checklist Manifesto completely changed the way hospitals operate. Gawande presented data to show that an overwhelming number of people were dying each year from hospital-acquired infections. He explained why hospitals had yet to address the issue, and then he suggested a concrete fix, which was the manifesto—a checklist of things to do to dramatically cut hospital-acquired infections.
Hospitals that implemented his suggestions saw infections plummet. As the Huffington Post reported in 2010:
When the state of Michigan began using a checklist for central lines in its intensive care units, its infection rate plummeted 66% in just three months. Soon, its ICUs were outperforming 90% of all hospitals nationwide. In 18 months, the checklist saved an estimated 175 million dollars and 1500 lives.
This is the “Why.”
You should aim for excellent thought leadership because it could save thousands of lives and millions of dollars.
But it’s also good marketing.
IV. Other examples of thought leadership
Ok, but we can’t all be Atul Gawande (maybe the truest thing I can say here).
Still, in my work doing content marketing & strategy for physician groups and healthcare organizations around the country, I’ve come across lots of great examples of thought leadership. I know because they got a lot of attention outside the specific marketing and promotion.
They had lives of their own outside the marketing team.
One example I saw that comes to mind is From Insights to Interventions, otherwise known as the paper that identified the post-discharge “Gap” in patient care.
In the paper, Dr. Randy Pilgrim of SCP Health analyzed more than a million patient encounters to describe in fine-grained detail what is likely to happen to patients after they are discharged from the ER, including exactly how many days go by before certain cohorts are likely to bounce back. (This paper got passed to me by other clients who wanted to emulate it).
Everyone who works in an ER knows there is a problem post-discharge, but the SCP paper gave the problem a name; described it in finer detail than before; and used data to uncover opportunities for emergency medicine groups to step in and do better.
The paper was shared widely and birthed a series of follow-ups.
And there are many more examples. Not all need be reliant on millions of data points to provide insight. Thought leadership can simply be a new idea or a new way of looking at an old idea. Some more examples:
Dr. Jason Hallock at Access Telecare has published widely on new ways of looking at telemedicine in an acute care setting, both on his Medium and at Forbes Business Council.
Nikhil Krishnan of Out of Pocket is always giving fresh takes on healthcare innovations that make you think in new ways. Highly recommended.
Dr. Leon Adelman’s EM Workforce newsletter has become a must-read in the industry not just for its muckraking coverage of the emergency medicine market, but especially for his extensive tracking of data on EM physician groups. No one else is publishing this kind of stuff.
Another newsletter acting as thought leadership is Dr. Boykin Robinson at Core Clinical Partners, who has written precise and perceptive pieces on the impact of the No Surprises Act on physician groups, use cases of AI in healthcare, and how to solve geographic rounding, among many other topics.
Finally, I must highlight long-time client Dr. Angelo Falcone, who has been writing on business and healthcare for more than a decade. A few recent “thought leadership” pieces include:
A new integrative medicine Health Pyramid.
And his take on why the U.S. healthcare system is failing.
The above are just examples (if you have good examples of thought leadership in healthcare, by all means send them my way—maybe I’ll feature them in future posts).
But what is it that binds them together in the “thought leadership” category?
V. Key characteristics of good thought leadership
There is no one, definitive rule for good thought leadership. It’s like the famous definition of pornography from Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart—you know it when you see it.
Still, there are certainly some key characteristics:
Thought leadership picks a fight with the status quo. It points to what’s wrong currently and points a way toward fixing it. It offers a solution, but an unexpected one. Not a widely held or widely adopted solution.
Thought leadership often relies on data, but interweaves that data into a narrative. Like The Checklist Manifesto, seeing the numbers on hospital-acquired infections presented in a clear and compelling narrative about what was going wrong in American hospitals was incredibly impactful.
Thought leadership makes a prediction. Every time you see an end-of-year New Year’s post about major trends to look out for, that is an attempt at thought leadership. Predictions can be tricky because they are so often wrong, but if you can argue compellingly why you think your prediction is going to turn, and what will happen if you ignore the prediction, you have a good chance of capturing attention.
Thought leadership is associated with a person, not a company. This should be obvious, but no one wants to read thought leadership from an organization. We all want to see a name behind the idea. Besides, hardly anyone associates whole companies with being innovative—much more often, we’re talking about the leader of a particular company, and that warm glow then rubs off on the brand of the company they lead.
Finally, thought leadership is by its nature a minority opinion, or a completely new one. It is not something everyone already believes. Think of Mark Twain: “When you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.”
VI. The one question that will get you started
Everyone in healthcare knows the system is deeply, deeply broken in many ways. But this is part of what makes it interesting. The problems in healthcare defy easy answers.
This means the industry is ripe for new approaches!
In fact, it’s not hard to stand above the crowd in healthcare, mainly because the crowd is so concerned with risk avoidance.
But you will have to dispense with the idea that you are going to play everything safe. You can’t write as if all is well, all positive, nothing but the forward march of the triple and quadruple aim, and improving patient care, and focus on quality, and all the very worn-out phrases that you’ve probably heard a thousand times.
That’s not real thought leadership.
Real thought leadership is a critique of the existing order.
Real thought leadership says, “Something is deeply wrong, and perhaps we know a path forward to fixing it.” This is why your business exists in the first place—because you thought you could do it better than the others out there.
So: what exactly is your critique of the existing order?
Another way to ask this is to borrow from Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One. I have no comment on Thiel’s politics, but few would deny he’s an insanely smart businessman. In the book, he advises all entrepreneurs to ask themselves a question.
The question is this:
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
The answer to this question is your critique of the existing order. If you don’t know the answer, you should go for a walk, think about it in the shower, or whenever you have time to do some focused thinking. Consider what your answer to that question might be.
This is not easy. It is one of the hardest questions, in life and in business. But I promise if you have important truths that few people agree with you on, that is an extraordinarily powerful seed from which to grow a brand, a marketing plan, and a thought leadership program.
And it’s a powerful seed from which to grow a company.
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So, where does ChatGPT come in? Can a computer really do thought leadership? Can it help? How? That’s for next time.