About this Site

This is a collection of random, poorly organized thoughts about the ideas and concepts around “thought leadership.”

All this content comes from me, Deane Barker. If you want to reach out, here are a bunch of ways to contact me

I’ve been creating content in the content technology space for 25 years. I have been called a “thought leader” by others in my particular industry niche, though I don’t refer to myself that way.

I’ve been thinking about thought leadership for most of my career. I got to wondering if I could codify it all. Could I somehow sort out everything I had learned about it over 25 years?

My immediate, control goal was to force myself to write 10,000 words about thought leadership. Not for the sake of a word count, but just because that number would force me to keep thinking about it when I hit a wall (or ten).

Every morning, I would sit down and go over what I’d written: refining it, clarifying it, adding to it. Every once in a while, I’d think of a new angle or find an existing thought that was getting big enough to “graduate,” and I made a new page. I usually started new thoughts in the evenings.

My dream is that I somehow find “the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” If I keep at it long enough, and fight my way through the mental wilderness, will some over-arching grand thought or framework emerge? Can I distill it down to some easily explainable principles?

I don’t know if I can get there. I sure hope so.

(If you just read that sentence, then it hasn’t happened yet, so work continues…)

The writing here is intentionally not dated. I go back and tinker a lot. These are less “installments” and more “steadily groomed thoughts.” I’m sure that I hit Delete and Backspace more than every other key, combined.

The title of the site is a bit of a joke. I used the phrase on LinkedIn when I first started developing the content that would lead to this site.

As usual, Xhibit sums it up best:

Writing Mechanics

Nothing here was generated by AI. Every character came from one of my fingers hitting a keyboard, and me staring at a screen way too long.

I did use AudioPen quite a bit to capture thoughts at random moments, but that’s just note-taking.

I often listened to this YouTube video while writing here. I know the visual is not a real place, but I would still really like to go there someday.

Site Mechanics

The style of this site is based on Tufte.css, which I tweaked a little.

This site is managed using something called “KiwiServer,” which is a Markdown-based content delivery system I’ve been working on for almost 10 years and should probably document at some point.

This site is hosted on the computer in my basement, via Cloudflare. It’s sitting about 10 inches from my left knee.

(It’s cold in South Dakota. If you DDoS me, maybe you can turn my computer into a space heater.)