Become a Thought Leader

Thought leader is a buzzword used to describe a futurist or person who is recognized among their peers and mentors for innovative ideas and demonstrates the confidence to promote or share those ideas as actionable distilled insights. Thought leadership is an increasingly vital driver of business success. The term was first coined in 1994, by Joel Kurtzman, editor-in-chief of the magazine, Strategy & Business. The term was used to designate interview subjects for that magazine who had contributed new thoughts to business.

Among the first Thought Leaders were British management thinker, Charles Handy, Stanford economist Paul Romer, Mitsubishi president, Minoru Makihara, and University of Michigan strategist, C K Prahalad and his co-author, Gary Hamel, a professor at the London Business School. Since that time, the term has spread from business to other disciplines and has come to mean someone who enlivens old processes with new ideas.

Interesting, isn’t it? Believe it or not, by using the power of public relations, you can also be regarded as an Industry Thought Leader. Try and identify one such issue that the industry or category that you operate in is facing today. Find a solution, even though you may not want to, or you may not have the capacity to implement. But you can most certainly take the responsibility of educating the masses to help the industry overcome current issues. Talk about the solution freely. If nothing else, it will at least spark a healthy debate among your peers, and an industry body or the government will most certainly take note of it.

This will not only help your business, but you will also be regarded as a Thought Leader in your industry. Whenever an industry story is initiated, you will be among the first people to be contacted for a quote.

“Knowledge is, indeed, that which, next to virtue, truly and essentially raises one man above another.” - Joseph Addison