Thought Leadership
Say something a reasonable person could argue with
Most executive content fails for one reason: there is no position in it. It says quality matters and customers are important, nobody disagrees, and nobody remembers it. The work is getting a real opinion out of a busy person and publishing it properly.
The failure pattern
Why most thought leadership disappears without trace
The category has a bad reputation and it has earned it. Not because the idea is wrong, but because most of what gets published under it fails in one of four specific, avoidable ways.
- There is nothing in it anyone could disagree with.
- The piece observes that the industry is changing, that customers expect more, and that quality matters. Every one of those is true, and every competitor could publish the same paragraph this month. Without a claim someone might dispute, there is nothing to remember, nothing to argue with and no reason to read the next one.
- The expert never actually appears in it.
- It carries a senior name and was assembled from a brief, a competitor scan and whatever was already ranking. Readers in the same industry can tell, because the specifics that only a practitioner would know are missing. The byline says expert and the text says researcher.
- It is a product pitch with the pricing removed.
- Every argument arrives, by a slightly winding route, at the conclusion that you should buy what this company sells. That is a sales page, and readers recognise it in the first two paragraphs. Genuine thought leadership sometimes reaches conclusions that are inconvenient for the business publishing it.
- Nobody owned what happened after publication.
- The piece went live, was posted once, and that was the whole distribution plan. Good material needs a deliberate second life: pitched as a contributed article, sent by sales into live deals, turned into a talk abstract, revisited when the subject comes back into the news.
The standard we hold to
If a competent person in your industry could read the piece and not disagree with a single line of it, you have not published a position. You have published a mood.
This is the only editorial test that reliably predicts whether a piece will do anything. It is also the one most often failed during internal review rather than during writing, because review is where the sharp claims get softened by people acting reasonably and cautiously.
So we agree the boundaries first: which subjects are open, which need compliance or legal sign-off, and which are genuinely off limits. Then the argument inside those boundaries gets to stay an argument, and everyone knows in advance what was agreed.
How it works
Getting real expertise out of a very busy person
The constraint is never the executive’s knowledge. It is their calendar, and their entirely reasonable unwillingness to spend an evening drafting something.
Find the arguments worth making
One session establishing what this person actually believes that others in their field do not, what they have changed their mind about, and what they think their industry gets wrong. That last question does most of the work.
You get: A shortlist of positions, with the boundaries agreed
Interview, do not commission
Recorded conversations on a fixed cadence, prompted toward specifics: the decision they made, what it cost, what happened, what they would do differently. Nobody is asked to write anything or prepare in advance.
You get: Recorded interviews and transcripts you keep
Draft in their voice, not ours
Written from the transcript, keeping the phrasing and the examples they used, including the parts that are not polished. A piece that sounds like agency prose has already lost the credibility the byline was meant to carry.
You get: Draft with sources marked and claims checked
Review in minutes, not evenings
The draft arrives with specific questions marked: is this figure right, did you mean this, are you comfortable saying this publicly. Targeted review is a task people complete. An open invitation to edit is a task people postpone indefinitely.
You get: Approved piece with the author’s sign-off recorded
Publish, then keep working it
Site, social and wherever the audience already reads. Then the second life: pitched as a contributed article, given to sales for live deals, turned into a talk abstract, and brought back out when the subject returns to the news.
You get: Distribution plan and repurposed assets
Where we draw the line
The ethics of publishing under someone else’s name
What we will do
- Write from recorded interviews with the named person, never from a brief alone
- Publish only after that person has read the piece and agreed it reflects their view
- Attribute quotes, figures and borrowed arguments to their original source
- Disclose editorial support wherever the publisher requires it
- Keep the author’s actual voice, including the parts that are not tidy
- Fact-check every claim before it appears under a name with a reputation attached
What we will not do
- Invent an anecdote, a client story or a statistic to make a point land better
- Put a byline on an argument the named person has not seen or does not hold
- Claim credentials, awards or experience the author does not have
- Publish an opinion piece that is a product page with the pricing taken out
- Use an executive’s name on material produced without any input from them
- Soften a piece into agreeableness and let it go out anyway
Questions
What executives ask before starting
Is ghostwriting honest?
It is honest when the named person holds the view, has read the piece, and has approved it before publication. Under those conditions the writer is doing the drafting, and the expertise and the opinion are genuinely the author’s own.
It stops being honest the moment the byline becomes decorative: content generated without the person’s input, opinions they have not seen, or credentials they do not hold. We will not publish under those conditions, and we will say so rather than quietly working around it.
Our executive has almost no time. How little can this take?
Around thirty to forty-five minutes of recorded conversation a month, plus a short review of each draft. That is usually enough to produce several pieces, because a prompted conversation covers far more ground than an evening spent staring at a blank document.
We design the review step to take minutes. Drafts arrive with specific questions marked rather than an open invitation to edit, which is what turns review into a task people postpone.
Why does most thought leadership have no effect?
Because it makes no claim. Content that says quality matters, that customers should come first, and that the industry is changing is agreeable, unmemorable and interchangeable with every competitor publishing the same month.
A position is something a competent person in the same field could read and reasonably dispute. That is uncomfortable, which is exactly why so little of it gets published and why the pieces that do get remembered.
What if the executive says something controversial?
That is often the point, within limits we agree in advance. We map which subjects are open, which need legal or compliance review, and which are off the table entirely, before anything is written.
What we push back on is the reverse problem, which is far more common: a draft with a genuine argument in it being edited during review until nothing remains that anyone could object to. When that happens we say plainly that the piece is no longer worth publishing.
Where does the content get published?
Usually a mix: your own site, where the piece can be found and cited later, and the platforms where your audience already reads, most commonly LinkedIn for B2B.
Over time the more valuable placements tend to be elsewhere: contributed articles in industry publications, podcast appearances, panels and quotes in coverage. Those come from having a recognisable position first, which is why the sequence matters.
Find out whether there is a real position worth publishing
Give us half an hour with the person you want visible. If there is an argument in there that their industry would react to, we will find it in that conversation. If there is not, we will tell you that instead.
Related
Where to go next
- the wider content practiceExecutive visibility works best as part of a broader authority plan.
- LinkedIn advertisingPaid distribution is far cheaper when the organic presence is real.
- earned media and coverageA prepared expert is what makes reactive commentary possible.
- brand strategyA personal position should not contradict the company one.
- our own writing
- social media strategy
Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal