“Thought Leadership” is a much bandied-about term which, personally speaking as a confirmed jargon hater, drives me nuts. It seems such a buzzword for a self-aggrandising activity.
We recently covered the topic of thought leadership at one of our Remit Consulting team discussions and the commonly held view was that not only are you, allegedly, required to write a “thought leadership piece” to advance in business, but that it is even rarer for the limelight-seeker to be the one who actually composes it. Just ask a PR consultant or press team how often they are asked to create a compelling piece of groundbreaking prose to propel someone’s career.
A recent Forbes article suggested you don’t need to be a genuine expert or master of your field, just a chancer who can spot the opening to exploit. To avoid any kind of legal backlash, I must point out I am paraphrasing here! Now that we have time-saving, thought-saving, imagination-saving AI to come to our aid, well, surely we will all be leaders of thought in no time.
So, onto Leadership vs Management – two topics eternally circling the world of business: one the more desirable (allegedly), the other the more mundane but arguably more pervasively powerful. Ergo, if we have thought leadership, surely, we have also thought management, the scarier counterpart?
In an ideal world, ‘leading’ people’s thoughts would take us all to an intellectual nirvana, encouraging us to branch even further afield in the relevant topic and find us breaking new ground in business, technology…life even. But, as with all leadership, there must also be management and having our thoughts ‘managed’ seems infinitely more sinister. Yet, that is what is happening to us: “Think the way I think, or you will be cancelled”.
Why should our thoughts be led in the first place? Here’s to creative, unfettered, and lateral thinking. Oh, and for you, dear reader, random musing.