All CEOs, founders, business owners, and entrepreneurs have stories to tell about their companies — the ups, the downs, the great decisions, the poor ones, the sudden crises, and the risks taken along the way. These anecdotes, case studies, and recollections are a potential goldmine for thought leadership content.
However, very few business leaders take the time to reflect and capture those experiences in written form. They have the expertise, but rarely is it documented and then transformed into compelling, thought-provoking thought leadership material.
Part of the challenge is recognizing which aspects of those experiences will be most interesting and educational to others. Your perspective on what happened and why, as well as your thinking behind your decisions, are all critical to your position as a visionary and thought leader.
There is significant value in your stories, but sometimes an outside perspective, such as from a professional ghostwriter, is what you need to clarify your ideas and turn them into thought leadership content.
The Hidden Goldmine in Your Executive Journey
Think back to your biggest wins and your most embarrassing failures. Did you launch a new product that absolutely flopped? Did you acquire a company that was supposed to be a slam-dunk addition and turned out to be nothing but HR headaches? Or, on the positive side, what about how you convinced the CTO of your competition to jump ship and join you, impressing your entire industry?
These are all more than mere business stories. They’re masterclasses in strategy, research, persistence, pivots, and timing. And they’re all the bases for frameworks you can share for handling difficult situations that other CEOs want to learn.
Like you, many CEOs see their daily activities as nothing unusual. They frequently discount their own thought process and decision-making approach, which is where much of their genius resides. Your thought leadership assets lie in the pattern recognition, decision frameworks, and insights applied from other industries that you’re able to overlay and use.
The key is in finding a way to view and share your expertise as broader universal principles rather than your personal experiences.
The 3 Pillars of CEO Thought Leadership Gold
CEOs and executives who are visionaries, who make connections and spot opportunities that others overlook, rely on three abilities that they’ve honed.
Pattern Recognition.
At the core of thought leadership abilities is an intuitive sense of how events impact future opportunities. Not that you’re psychic, but you have a sixth sense that not everyone does in business. You can spot occurrences that frequently trigger other scenarios or that somehow impact other industries, for example. Maybe you’ve identified a series of steps that consistently need to be taken during an economic downturn that can result in rapid growth. Or maybe you’ve recognized leadership characteristics that are essential when a company scales beyond $50 million.
Several years ago, a CEO client of mine wrote a thought leadership book that was very well received. In it, he predicted a Black Swan event within five years that would disrupt normal business operations. Want to know what happened two years later? The pandemic. Those who read his book expressed increased respect and admiration for his insights.
This ability to recognize patterns and articulate them is what separates you, a thought leader, from a subject matter expert, who only knows one aspect of an industry or business inside and out.
Decision Frameworks.
Decision frameworks are how you process complex problems. They’re your unique internal system for compiling information, filtering it, and analyzing the relevant facts and figures. Every CEO develops their own frameworks for assessing and addressing problems and opportunities, whether they’re potential acquisition targets, competitive threats, a shifting regulatory environment, or emerging technologies, to name a few.
Another of my CEO clients wrote about how mentorship by his predecessor helped shape his decision frameworks, which made possible continued growth and profitability within the business for decades. The business memoir we worked on together shared his perspective, decisions, and the impact those had on the corporation’s growth and success.
What differentiates thought leadership books from memoirs, however, is how well the underlying strategies and lessons learned are extracted from the personal experiences. Memoirs are stories and personal reflections where thought leadership titles help the reader understand how they can apply certain approaches or methodologies in their own businesses. It has a how-to element that offers valuable takeaways.
Contrarian Insights.
Spotting patterns and developing your own decision frameworks are foundational for writing a thought leadership book. The third piece is the lessons you’ve learned and the experiences you’ve had that fly in the face of generally accepted business wisdom.
Contrarian insights are the realizations of when conventional insights are dead wrong. For example, maybe you’ve observed that hiring from within only reinforces continued bad policies. Or that a matrixed organization makes decisions faster than flat org structures.
These types of perspectives, when backed with examples from your personal experience, form the backbone of thought leader books.
One of my most recent projects for a CEO lays out his contrarian insights and ideas alongside his forecasts for the future. I know it’s going to receive strong buzz as soon as it’s released because what he shares is unconventional, but it makes a lot of sense.
From Raw Experience to Refined Thought Leadership
What makes thought leadership writing different is that it takes specific stories and lessons and widens the lens to make the lessons learned universal. The focus shifts from talking about what you witnessed and grappled with to how others can face similar situations and know how to handle them. So, instead of “How I Led My Team in Pivoting During the Recession,” you could write about “A Framework for Assessing and Leading Through Downturns.”
Your personal experiences give you credibility as an industry leader, but the universal framework helps your reader recognize how they can apply your wisdom to their situations. That’s what makes you a thought leader, by shaping the thinking and actions others take. This ability to break down complex ideas into accessible, actionable content is what differentiates CEOs from CEO thought leaders.
The Advantage a Writing Partner Provides
However, recognizing what makes thought leadership writing different doesn’t necessarily make it possible for all CEOs. You can be a brilliant, articulate CEO who can also benefit from working alongside a professional ghostwriter/collaborator/writing partner.
Your ghostwriter can help you identify those patterns you instinctively see, communicate the frameworks you use routinely, and shape your experiences into universal insights that others can learn from. Having someone else to bounce ideas off, to talk through what examples will hit home the hardest, and to help structure your message can turn your book into an award-winning, celebrated thought leadership title that captures attention. Just ask your colleagues who’ve worked with ghostwriters about their experiences.