“Thought leadership” has become an empty, lazy label — a ready-made shorthand that circumvents the need to say anything substantive.
In Forbes, Dan Pontefract makes the case in “Stop Using the Term ‘Thought Leader.’” He says calling yourself a thought leader doesn’t make you one. Authority and influence are conferred by other people, not claimed in a LinkedIn headline.
The International Public Relations Association asks the same question from an industry perspective: “An Overused Term: Has PR Devalued Thought Leadership?”When a term gets applied indiscriminately, eventually it stops distinguishing anything.
In “The Problem with Thought Leadership,” Chris Paicely questions the premise embedded in the phrase itself: do people actually want their thoughts “led” by someone else?
Tom Goodwin is even less delicate about it on LinkedIn, questioning how much of what gets presented as thought leadership deserves the designation in the first place.
We’ve turned a description into a catch-all category. And once we have a category, we start jamming people into it.
And while we’re at it, let’s get rid of visionary, innovator, and change maker, too.
Instead of calling someone a visionary, tell me what they saw before other people did. Instead of innovator, tell me what they created that didn’t exist before. Instead of calling someone a change maker, tell me what changed because of them.
And instead of expert, tell me what you know. Tell me what all those years of experience actually add up to. How has that enabled you to understand, question, recognize, or do what someone else has not?
That’s much harder.
It requires us to do the deeper work of finding language precise enough to capture substance, distinction, and authority. Because when language is label-ized, what are we left with? Meaning disappears. Words lose their force, their precision, their resonance.
Language should make distinctions, not erase them.
It requires an appreciation for language itself, and the energy and patience to find the words that do justice to the depth, consequence, and complexity of a life’s work.
It also takes — dare I say it? — an enormous investment of thought.
Maybe we could start there.
