Resources
Some more information
This will be an evolving list of other things I’ve looked at, read, absorbed, etc. It will never be complete.
(These are mostly books… I read a lot.)
Books
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So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport
I loved the message of this book: be smart, don’t just act smart.
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A good look at how you can learn to incorporate new ideas and paradigms into your current understanding.
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Ready to Be a Thought Leader?: How to Increase Your Influence, Impact, and Success by Denise Brosseau
I didn’t love this whole book, but it did have some neat ideas about social thought leadership which I thought were good – some ideas of just starting a “thinker’s dinner series” and such.
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From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life by Arthur C. Brooks
A discussion of what it means to get older and how that impacts the way you think and how you should evolve your career to match. (Hint: it involves moving into more thought leadership…)
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Wellsprings of Knowledge: Building and Sustaining the Sources of Innovation by Dorothy Leonard
An absolute classic of knowledge and innovation management.
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Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen
A great book on personal productivity, but valuable more for its emphasis on “collection systems” to avoid losing ideas.
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Processing the News: How People Tame the Information Tide by Doris Graber
A classic about how people understand the “news,” meaning a never-ending stream of new information, and how they integrate that with what they already know. A good background on how to understand how people incrementally learn over time.
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Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential by Tiago Forte
Not perfect, but I like the idea of a book concentrating on nothing but helping you organize your thoughts.
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On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by Willian Zinsser
A classic about how to explain things well in words.
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A discussion about how stories combine to form narratives that become embedded in our culture and minds. (Thought leadership is essentially a narrative…)
Blog Posts
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How to do Great Work by Paul Graham
A magisterial blog post from a legend in software engineering about how to “do the work.”
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How to Grow Professional Relationships by Tejas Kumar
A discussion and model for how professionals work together and network.
Videos
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Everything is a Remix by Kirby Ferguson
A discussion of how almost every creative work is just a pastiche of other works. Watch this when you worry that you’re not breaking any new ground.
Example Programs
It’s tough to say that a thought leadership program is “working” without inside information. The best we can do from the outside is find programs that (1) are long-running, because the realities of business would likely have killed poorly performing problems; and (2) seem to carry some weight in a particular industry.
Also, know that these examples of “successful” programs are by my own definition only. I tend to be an idealist about content, so these are content-rich examples, and they tend to be lower on the scale of marketing and calls-to-action? I have no doubt there are many other programs on the other end of that scale which are producing great results for their organizations and can be therefore objectively labeled as “successful.”
The examples below are from my industry: content and marketing technology.
Any of the analyst firms. This is almost unfair, because they literally exist to “lead thought” – that’s their entire value proposition; it’s what people pay them for. But it’s worth looking at firms like Gartner and Forrester to get a feel of the type of content they create.
CMO by Adobe
This used to be cmo.org, but it redirects now.Postlight Insights
Postlight was acquired by NTT Data. I’m not sure what that means for the brand. All their content is now on an “archive” site.ThoughtWorks Radar
The Radar is a branded model or framework that ThoughtWorks keeps updated over time. With every installment, they plot the movement of the items they track and discuss the reasons and characteristics of the change.