Louise McGregor Book of the Month, Book Review

10 Books to Read on your Summer Break

It’s time to run away on your summer break, finally you’ll get time to read, what should you pick?

Leadership

(1) I will be reading Leadership BS, by Jeffrey Pfeffer. Which promises some ways of rethinking leadership.

(2) If you’re trying to re-think how you manage your team, then Why Work Sucks will take you through the concepts of a results only work environment – there are things there you can implement when you get back from summer.

(3) Your own leadership style comes out of your own attitudes The Art of Possibility is my favourite book to focus on personal leadership.

Innovation

(4) I’ll be reading How to Fly a Horse: The Secret of Creation, Invention and Discovery, a refreshing look at creativity.

Business

(5) I’ll be reading Industries of the Future, by Alec Ross. It seems to be a mashup of predicting trends and business applications.

(6) I want to read Phishing for Phools, reviews vary with some economists deriding it and some business people applauding it.

(7) The last business book I read (and reviewed) was Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, which challenges our current monetary system and looks at some alternative models for the future of business.

Biography

(8) I want to read the biography of Elon Musk, although I usually am wary of biographies of living people. Musk is such a fascinating entrepreneur for me, he seems driven to solve the world’s challenges as opposed to building a better widget.

Personal Effectiveness

(9) I want to read The Happiness Track, I’ve thought a lot about the way we work and the demands we put on ourselves. I’m hoping this book challenges the ideas behind our current cultural definition of success.

Fiction

(10) If you’re more into fiction – I’m halfway through The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes, one of my favourite writers. The BBC has a list of ten books to read that’s making me itch for a bookstore trip.

Happy reading and happy summer.

Image: Summer Read  |  LWYang  |  CC BY 2.0

Louise McGregor Leadership

Positioning Thought Leaders

This is the third post in a series; in the first post of this series on thought leaders I wrote about defining thought leaders and gave some well-known examples.  In the second I talked about finding your thought leaders. Today I’m going to suggest ways to position your thought leaders to best represent your company or organisation. Most often this is a “big company” question, so I am assuming some internal support, but a number of the ideas can be adapted for smaller organisations.

Your thought leaders need to have the credibility of the organisation behind them and they need to be speaking on their thought leader topic both internally and externally. Here are some ways to make that happen.

Job Title

Their Job Title needs to match their role in the company and their authority as a thought leader.

AOL has a digital prophet, David Shing (known as Shingy), who turns up at conferences and event around the world. Would he be so popular as a conference speaker with a job title “Trend Analyst”? There are plenty of other creative job titles out there to consider, are you more curious about the Chief of Operations or the Chief Troublemaker?

Maybe such edgy titles aren’t right for your organisation, pick one closer to your organisation’s business culture that reflects the authority and expertise of your thought leader.

Internal Role

Your thought leaders should be known across your company for their vision and expertise. Your employees should be be inspired by your thought leaders otherwise who are they leading?

Having your thought leaders speak at internal events builds their reputation as visionaries, it gives them practice at speaking, and it gives your employees confidence to “spread the word” with their own networks which builds the thought leader’s external visibility.

External Visibility

Speaking Events

Identify the key events that your thought leader should speak, go beyond your own industry and look for more events with a wider audience.

Pitch your thought leader as a speaker, many conferences have open calls for speakers, but don’t be afraid to contact the conference organiser and discuss your ideas. The more  you know about the conference the more specific your pitch can be.

Support your speaker, with training, speech-writing and preparation sessions. You want to have a high impact.

Promote your thought leader’s participation in all speaking events – before, during and after the event; this could be internal announcements, press releases, company tweets, or relevant articles sharing some content from the speech, or publishing the presentation online.

Online

Use online tools to build and re-inforce your thought leaders’ reputation.

  • profile on company site makes a clear association between the company and the thought leader.
  • company blog – on company’s own site or via an external platform such as Medium – gives the thought leader
  • social media,  which platform you use will depend on your audience but likely candidates are;
    • LinkedIn profile, a quality profile will support your thought leaders’ reputation, you can add presentations to the profile to boost the content
    • LinkedIn Pulse,  you’ll have to work with LinkedIn to make this work, but it’s a great way to build a reputation. Part of joining pulse means committing to a minimum publication cycle of one post per month..
    • Twitter, use of twitter depends very much on the target audience, but even if your consumers are not using twitter other business people and journalists are.  It can be a great way to promote content for other content, and during events. One of the best CEO’s on twitter has become a bit of a thought leader on organisational culture, Peter Aceto.
    • SlideShare, this is a great way to store and share presentations made by your thought leader, and they can be embedded into other sites, or shared on social media.

It’s an integrated approach that will take discipline and time, but it will build the reputation of your thought leader across audiences.

Image: The Thinker  |  Christopher Brown  |  CC BY-2.0

 

Louise McGregor Leadership

Finding Your Thought Leaders

In the first post of this series on thought leaders I wrote about defining thought leaders and gave some well-known examples. Today I’m going to suggest ways to identify thought leaders in your company or organisation.

So what are we looking for? here are my criteria for a thought leader;

Expertise

Your thought leader needs to have expertise in their field in order to be credible to any audience.  Looking at the examples of thought leaders from last weeks post all five people have expertise in their field.

Most often this expertise is clear from their track record, as is the case of Warren Buffet, Sheryl Sandberg and Elon Musk.

Sometimes the credibility comes out of personal experience;

Malala Yousafzai is a teenager, her message is not wildly new, but she has enormous authority to call for equal rights for girls in education because of her own fight to have an education.

Ellen MacArthur is most known as a sailor, and it was on one of her solo global circumnavigation re realised that human’s impact on the world needs to change and she now devotes herself to the circular economy.

Leading Change

Thought leaders really need to be leading change, either by leading a programme of change or holding a role of accountability in your company or organisation. This builds their credibility but also means that they have something interesting to say on their field.

Communication Skills

Thought leaders communicate ideas, to inspire and convince the audience, so strong communication skills are essential. Your thought leaders need to be able to connect with their most relevant audience and they need to be able to convey the your company’s values and mission to an audience unrelated to your business. If you’re a tech company can they speak with passion about technology to non-tech people?

Importance

Thought leaders need to be working on and thinking about the thing that’s most important to your company. If you’re a healthcare company it’s innovation in healthcare, if you’re an NGO it could be policy development, if you’re a product company it’s your designers.

Begin by looking for someone who is leading change; perhaps the woman who challenges the status quo, or the guy with stealth project that turn out to make money.

Most often the person will have a senior role, either in their organisation structure or in the scope of projects they lead, simply because to have the credibility of thought leader across audiences. However the person will also need to be a representative of your brand; if you’re a youth fashion brand for example look for someone young and cool, who embodies the brand’s style.

Who gets called to speak at conferences? People who are thought leaders in your company may already have been found as speakers for events.

It’s a tricky combination of skills, knowledge and character to find, and you really want just one per business or perhaps per geography. Thought leaders are rare and valuable.

Next Week; Positioning Thought Leaders

Image: The Thinker  |  Christopher Brown  |  CC BY-2.0

 

Louise McGregor Leadership

Who is a Thought Leader?

The concept of thought leadership has been around for a few years, long enough to attract its own stand-up comedy character.

Thought leaders can have important role in positioning your company or organisation, in a series of three posts I’m going to provide;

  1. a definition of thought leadership, with examples
  2. the benefits of thought leaders and how to identify them in your organisation or industry
  3. guide on positioning thought leaders in your company or organisation

So what does “Thought Leader” mean? Wiki gives the definition;

A thought leader can refer to an individual or firm that is recognised as an authority in a specialised field and whose expertise is sought and often rewarded.

A true thought leader will have a solid base of expertise, skills in communicating with the relevant audience, ideas about the future, and be driving that future.

It’s a tough position to fill, so who qualifies as a thought leader? Some examples will help.

Humanitarian; Malala Yousafzai

The youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, the girl who famously took a bullet in order to go to school. Malala now lives in the UK and continues to campaign for education and other rights for girls and women.

Innovation; Elon Musk

Founder of Pay-Pal, Tesla Cars, and responsible for landing big ideas.  I saw him interviewed at the Dublin Web Summit and was immediately impressed by the scale of his vision

Business; Sheryl Sandberg

The COO of Facebook and the first women to join their board, her book Lean In has inspired a movement of Lean In circles supporting women’s growth in business.

Investment; Warren Buffet

Buffet’s rules for investing well have become famous, some can be applied to business or even more generally to life. He’s one of the founders of the Giving Pledge, where very wealthy people pledge to give away at least half of their wealth.

Environment; Ellen MacArthur

MacArthur famous for sailing solo, non-stop around the world as the fulfilment of her childhood dream. She now campaigns for economic reform to sustain our environment, the Circular Economy.

Most of these are household names, but a thought leader may be less broadly known, but well-known, and sought after, in their field.

 

Next Week; Finding Your Thought Leaders

Image: The Thinker  |  Christopher Brown  |  CC BY-2.0

 

Louise McGregor social media

More than a Tweet; Vision

It takes more than a tweet to make a company social. This is part 2 of a 7 part series.

In each part there will be an explanation, some examples, what happens when it’s not done well, some tips and resources. To close I will use an invented case study based on the NewArt Museum to demonstrate the step.

Vision

What is the vision you have for social media? What does it bring the company/organisation?

The vision should be expressed in a sentence or two, and it’s forward looking and ambitious.

A good vision statement will help you build buy-in, and it will help you make decisions for all the following steps.

It might be “We use social media to raise awareness of our brand” which positions your social media efforts into content publishing and community management. It could be “We use social to support consumers” which means your efforts focus on social care and possibly some community management. From these two examples I think you can see that defining this first is key.

In large companies it’s likely that you will want a high level vision, while various business teams within the organisation will need to define their purpose in a more specific way. In a previous job our vision for the Enterprise Social Network included “this is the way we will work”, businesses and projects then could use the concept to challenge existing processes and refine a vision for their own use of the tool. For some it because a support tool, for others it was a collaboration tool, others used it to support global communication around new programmes.

Without a well defined vision that is aligned with business goals your next steps risk losing focus, and you will struggle with subsequent decisions or conflicting demands of stakeholders.

Here are some tips on writing a vision statement, and a whole presentation on vision statements. Plus just for fun, some examples of really bad vision statements.

CASE STUDY; NewArt Museum

I’m going to  use an invented organisation to demonstrate each step in this series. Introducing the NewArt Museum.

Background

The Museum was famous and well visited when it was first opened, but recently visitor numbers have dropped, and the analysis shows that the majority of visitors are in a 40+ age group, with very few visitors are in the 18-25 age group. The Museum has secured a art grant aimed at changing this and launched a programme under the name “Secure our Future”.

They have developed a new vision for their business; The NewArt Museum is building new audiences of art-lovers, and supporting contributions from new artists.

Translating this business vision to one for social media = leading a community of young art lovers who engage with the museum and promote its activities.

Next week in this series; Strategy