How to become a visionary thought leader.

“You miss 100% of the shots you never take. I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it’s been. A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be,” Wayne Gretzky, the world’s greatest hockey player.

In our decade and a half working with companies of all sizes, across a broad range of industries, we’ve found that most founders and CEOs need guidance navigating and learning the art of how to build their executive visibility as an industry thought leader. You may ask, what are the benefits of thought leadership and how to get started?

What is an industry thought leader?
To be a successful industry thought leader, you have to stand out. This is no easy feat when there is so much noise on the internet. Did you know that thought leadership comes in several flavors? From the get-go, you want to avoid vanilla flavor. Why? Because vanilla is safe. It’s like the khaki pants of ice cream flavors. You’ll just be one of many in a sea of executives sporting the same khaki pants. To stand out, you have to be distinct. The type of executive leader that we examine in this blog post is what we call a visionary thought leader. 

Thought leadership goes well beyond the knowledge of one’s business, product, technology, or industry landscape. The goal is to build an executive’s visibility and brand, typically within a vertical sector, so much that the person and the issue, industry, or technology often go hand-in-hand.

Visionaries thought leaders aren’t born; they’re self-made.
Visionary thought leaders are executives willing to plant a stake in the ground and share their perspective as to the future of a market sector or technology. A visionary thought leader can break down, across a myriad of ways, their long-term view of how an issue, industry, or technology will unfold. For example, they are comfortable predicting how specific trends or business factors will ultimately shift the current status quo. Or they can share their deep understanding of how a developing or highly complex technology, such as artificial intelligence or neural networks, will or won’t play out, discuss existing barriers, and what’s needed to progress. Visionary thought leaders typically have a very close finger not only on the industry’s pulse but also with their customers and partners. They have a deep understanding of their customers’ concerns and challenges to keep their businesses competitive.

Visionary thought leaders often have sharp clarity about what’s around the corner from a future perspective well ahead of the market. In a previous blog post, we shared a detailed example of a visionary thought leader and their key traits, taking a close look at industry titan, innovator and thought leader: Jeff Bezos.

3 tips on how to get started in building your executive brand

1. Instead of a bio, tell a story
Unlike a bio that lists your professional work experience and academic studies, an executive profile, on the other hand, provides an opportunity to tell a great story. What trials and tribulations did you have to go through? What monsters did you have to conquer? What voyages or quests did you take to arrive at where you are today? Who helped you along the way? How did you develop into a better leader?

2. What’s your core theme
Identify a core theme that you can confidently and passionately share your perspectives and unique point-of-view. You need to then expand this theme out on several fronts. What are the significant unaddressed facets or plausible scenarios related to which you can provide your perspective? 

Different aspects of your core theme might include imminent industry regulations, customer behavioral trends, diverging approaches on a particular technology, etc. Think about the plausible market, business or technology outcomes, and likely scenarios that will help you get started. An executive can help the market and its target audiences understand how rapid technology advancements are unfolding, what their impacts are likely to be, who stands to lose, and why. For instance, as we face today’s new normal, a broad spectrum of industries are likely to change indefinitely. What does the future hold for your industry? There is no time like the current. Now is an excellent opportunity to look forward and begin to share your unique point of view as to what that future may hold. This analysis will become part of your platform and should be rolled into your content marketing calendar. 

The global pandemic has disrupted the economy and business world into an unprecedented state of chaos. As the country now begins to ‘reopen,’ one highly relevant, forward-looking theme is about redefining work and the future of work. How do businesses move forward in these highly turbulent times with a deadly virus still running wild? How does “business as usual” resume given we are all operating in a time of “business unusual”?

3. Build your social media presence
Begin to share your unique point-of-view by developing a series of thought leadership articles. Once you have a few executive viewpoint pieces ready, start to amplify your content via social shares. It will be important to begin to grow your social media presence. There’s plenty of opportunities to share your perspective with select media about what you expect to unfold in the market. There are opportunities to secure guest post articles in business or relevant industry outlets. Go beyond written communication. You can videotape your perspective and secure a spot as a guest in a related podcast. From there, you can create a landing page and lead magnet with a short ebook and amplify some of this valuable information and content within the company’s LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook channels.

Once you’ve done these things, you can sit back and watch the results come in, right? Unfortunately, no. Building thought leadership doesn’t occur overnight. We’ve worked with clients where results can happen in under one year and some when it took longer. We would not recommend a choppy, intermittent approach, because you lose the momentum you began to build. Becoming a thought leader requires a commitment of time, input, resources and conviction. The more you do it, the more it will pay off for you in terms of market presence, personal brand, and sales opportunities.

How to build your personal brand like Elon Musk when you don’t know the first thing about rockets

"Elon Musk" by JD Lasica is licensed under CC BY 2.0

For multiple years running, startup founders rank Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk as their most admired tech leader. In fact, with 23% of the vote, he’s blows Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, with a distant 10%, right out of the water. These two admired leaders also have their fair share of critics, landing them in other executive rankings as overrated CEOs. Regardless, the truth about bold leadership is not being afraid to rock the boat with your opinions, actions and vision.

Musk is a wildly controversial guy who’s a huge risk-taker, looking to colonize Mars, send tourists around the moon, build a transportation fleet powered by solar energy, and dig a vast underground network to fight gridlock. He’s as audacious, ambitious and bold as they come, and his grandiose ideas regularly make headline news. While most C-level execs are neither in the billionaire club nor looking to build Mars-bound rockets, they can learn something from Musk’s bravado.

How to build a bold, personal brand that elevates your reputation as an industry thought leader

1. Go out on a limb
While thought leaders should be industry visionaries, there’s a tendency to “play it safe”. Everyone is saying artificial intelligence is the next big thing. If you are a player in this space, you need to do more than spout forecast numbers. What will AI do to the automotive, retail and restaurant industries? How will the technology’s advancement impact safety and jobs? According to Musk, the advance of AI will be a detriment to the U.S. workforce: “What to do about mass unemployment? This is going to be a massive social challenge. There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better [than a human].”

This kind of statement is not sensationalism. It’s opinion grounded in reality and industry knowledge. Don’t be afraid to make bold predictions. Remember, you are an expert in your space, and your opinion makes you interesting and a great resource for viewpoints that go well beyond the “bits and bytes” stories.

2. Take a seat at the table
If you want to be heard, you need to take a seat at the table. It’s not always your ideal company, but – like voting –.if you don’t cast your ballot, you don’t have a voice. Lots of CEOs would prefer to keep their heads down, work on making a great product or service, avoid distractions, and stay off the radar. Earlier this year, Uber’s CEO made this choice when he stepped down from Donald Trump’s Advisory Council following backlash from consumers who took his participation as tacit endorsement of the president’s immigrant ban. Musk, on the other hand, opted to have a seat at the table to engage and discuss business policy. In that seat, he hopes to influence the new secretary of state on the carbon tax, denounce the ban on immigration, and push forward more of his own agenda. “Attending does not mean I agree with actions by the administration,” said Musk. “I believe at this time that engaging on critical issues will on balance serve the greater good.”

3. Offer solutions
Bold thought leaders don’t just forecast the future, executive leadership means offering possible solutions to real-world problems. What infrastructure improvements need to be made for fully self-driving cars to become a reality? How can we curb the downside of automation? How can we fight traffic? Musk is so sure that automation will displace millions of workers, he’s suggested a universal basic income, wherein everyone gets a certain amount of money annually. What about traffic congestion? He proposes a vast underground network containing as many as 30 levels of tunnels for cars and high-speed trains. Are these ideas far-fetched? You bet. But he’s willing to put himself out there to propose his viewpoint and ideas to solve real problems.

4. Don’t be afraid to be a nay-sayer
In the process of building their personal brand, many executives don’t want to criticize existing ideas, for fear of coming off as negative. There’s nothing wrong with having an intelligent discussion that disagrees with other ways of solving a problem. Musk’s proposal to dig thousands of miles of tunnels sounds preposterous to most, but he points out that other ideas, like Silicon Valley’s go-to traffic solution of flying cars, are equally outlandish. “Obviously I like flying things,” he says, “but it’s difficult to imagine the flying car becoming a scalable solution.”

5. Share your vision and unique point-of-view
Oftentimes companies are very “stealthy” about their product plans and roadmap, afraid to give anything away to the competition. That’s valid, but what a CEO can do is skip the near-term and intermediate details, and go straight to the company’s master plan. A CEO should be willing to spell out his vision for the company, and what success looks like. Musk has famously told his employees he plans to “die on Mars” after he helps a million people move there on his rockets at $500,000 per ticket. Leaders make bold predictions, and that’s something that Musk excels at in spades.  

In our next blog post, we’ll apply these tips and show you five key ways you can use content marketing to build your personal brand.