Friday, November 10, 2006

Thought Leadership

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia we find a definition of Thought leaders as:

Thought leader is a buzzword or article of jargon used to describe a person who is recognized among his or her peers for innovative ideas and demonstrates the confidence to promote those ideas. The term can also be applied to companies.
According to commentators, a distinguishing characteristic of a thought leader is "the recognition from the outside world that the company deeply understands its business, the needs of its customers, and the broader marketplace in which it operates."

A web site titled "leadersdirect.com" defines Thought Leadership as

What is thought leadership?

"Whenever you advocate a new idea to your colleagues or boss, you show thought leadership. It isn't necessary to have inspirational influencing skills, which is necessary for senior executives because they need to win over the entire organization and beat off their internal competitors for top jobs. Also, to initiate organization-wide change, it helps to be inspirational. But a thought leader focuses on smaller scale changes - ideas for a new product or changes to an existing one. Thought leaders can persuade others using logic, evidence or an actual demonstration of a prototype to win support.

To be a thought leader, you need to immerse yourself in your professional domain and search for new things to say that add value to your organization's objectives. Traditional, top-down leadership depends on personal credibility or character because such leaders are asking people to join them on a difficult journey and they have a great deal of power over their followers. Hence, we need to trust them. Conversely, the thought leader could have weak interpersonal skills and an indifferent character. They could be loners or eccentrics. All that counts is the credibility of their new idea. This is why we can buy innovations offered by odd creative types who we would not entrust to manage any part of an organization. If you can demonstrate the value of your idea and explain it with conviction, you might not need inspirational influencing skills.

Thought leadership is based on youthful rebelliousness - the willingness to risk group rejection in the pursuit of a better way of doing things. Hence, thought leadership is not a learned skill. Only the content of your discipline or field is learned. Traditional, top-down leadership is portrayed as a collaborative effort between leaders and followers to achieve shared goals. But thought leadership has a more competitive edge. Thought leaders are saying, essentially, that they know of a better product or way of doing things than anyone else in the team or organization. Thought leadership ends when the target audience accepts the idea. It may be that you are using hard evidence to persuade others to avoid dumping a current process for a passing fad. In this case, your leadership does not result in any action taken. This is an important point because it enables us to define leadership as the initiation of new directions and categorize the implementation of new ideas as a managerial activity. This is important because we tend, traditionally, to focus on the PERSON in charge of a group as the leader who may both champion a new direction and implement it. Hence we think that leadership is about managing change. The real value of examining thought leadership is that it helps us to see that there is a critically important distinction between leadership and management. When executives move from championing a new idea to its implementation, therefore, they are switching hats from leadership to management. The bottom line is that leadership is about the initiation of new directions. Implementing them is a managerial undertaking."


Consider IBM as a innovative thought leader. Most of us would think of computers but when you look at IBM's revenue growth it comes from IBM Golbal Services not hardware and software. What has IBM done? They have harnessed a lot of knowledge about "how" people and companies use technology and they have instituted "consulting processes" to share that knowledge to the benefit of their customers. One example strategy is to expand tech’s borders by pushing users—and entire industries—toward radically different business models. The payoff for IBM would be access to an ocean of revenue—estimates suggest $50 billion a year —that technology companies have never been able to touch.” —Fortune

“Another example: Big Brown’s New Bag: UPS Aims to Be the Traffic Manager for Corporate America” —Headline/BW/2004. UPS is now offering Supply Chain Management services, not just brown trucks delivering goods

IBM released a study this year of 765 CEO globally and solicited their thoughts on innovation and thought leadership. go to http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/bcs/html/bcs_ceostudy2006_flat.html for a full copy of their report.

The summary of their finds show:

• Business model innovation matters. Competitive pressures have pushed business model innovation much higher than expected on CEOs’ priority lists. But its importance does not negate the need to focus on products, services and markets, as well as operational innovation.

• External collaboration is indispensable. CEOs stressed the overwhelming importance of collaborative innovation – particularly beyond company walls. Business partners and customers were cited as top sources of innovative ideas, while research and development (r&D) fell much lower on the list. However, CEOs also admitted that their organizations are not collaborating nearly enough.

• Innovation requires orchestration from the top. CEOs acknowledged that they have primary responsibility for fostering innovation. But to effectively orchestrate it, CEOs need to create a more team-based environment, reward individual innovators and better integrate business and technology. In our conversations, we found a persistent, worldwide, sector- and size-spanning push toward a more expansive view of innovation – a greater mix of innovation types, more external involvement and extensive demands on CEOs to bring it all to fruition. Based on these CEOs’ collective insights, we offer several considerations that can help organizations sharpen their own innovation agendas:

• Think broadly, act personally and manage the innovation mix – Create and manage a broad mix of innovation that emphasizes business model change.
• Make your business model deeply different – Find ways to substantially change how you add value in your current industry or in another.
• Ignite innovation through business and technology integration – use technology as an innovation catalyst by combining it with business and market insights.
• Defy collaboration limits – Collaborate on a massive, geography-defying scale to open a world of possibilities.
• Force an outside look...every time – Push the organization to work with outsiders more, making it first systematic and, then, part of your culture.

The last point of the IBM study is revealing, Force and outside look...every time. So when you think about your business plans for 2007 and beyond have you engaged an outside look or are you just repeating traditional thinking processes as it relates to your own business growth and objectives?

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