TWG DESIGN MASTER.indd 6 5/10/11 11:16 AM€¦ · Author of The Marketer’s Handbook and Marketing...

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TWG DESIGN MASTER.indd 6 5/10/11 11:16 AM

‘If you want to become a thought leader, and you want specifics on how to get it done, it’s essential you read Think Write Grow.’

— Mike SchultzPresident of RAIN Group and co-author of the

best-selling Rainmaking Conversations

‘This is a really useful guide from a well-respected practitioner. It will certainly help anyone who needs to write blogs, white papers, presentations or other material to convey complex ideas.’

— Pip ArthurA/NZ External Relations Leader, IBM

‘Highly entertaining — an easy read full of practical ideas, references to resources and sound advice. In today’s crowded reading market, it is short, fresh, value-packed, fun to read and fantastic value-for-time.’

— Sean LarkanPartner, Edge International

‘A little gem. It will particularly help accountants, lawyers or consultants being urged to use thought leadership to grow their practice by marketing people or their managing partners.’

— Laurie YoungAuthor of The Marketer’s Handbook and

Marketing the Professional Services Firm

‘This book deserves a very wide readership.’— Sir Gustav Nossal

Professor Emeritus, University of Melbourne and former Australian of the Year


GR ANT BUTLER

How to become a thought leader and build your business by creating exceptional articles, blogs, speeches, books and more

‘Grant Butler offers practical ways to increase your value as an expert by getting your knowledge out there.’

— Debra WoodmanDirector, Business Development, Middletons

‘Think Write Grow is valuable to every business – and the marketing agencies that serve them – because it teaches companies how to write and deliver content that differentiates the customer experience and makes selling channels more effective.’

— Stephen DiorioPartner, Profitable Channels LLC


GR ANT BUTLER

How to become a thought leader and build your business by creating exceptional articles, blogs, speeches, books and more

thinkwritegrow


First published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd42 McDougall Street, Milton Qld 4064

Office also in Melbourne

Typeset in Bembo 12pt

© Grant Butler 2012

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Author: Butler, Grant.

Title: Think write grow : how to become a thought leader and build your business by creating exceptional articles, blogs, speeches, books and more / Grant Butler.

ISBN: 9781118208199 (pbk.)

Notes: Includes index.

Subjects: Communication in management. Communication in science. Communication of technical information.

Dewey Number: 658.45

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (for example, a fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review), no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, communicated or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. All enquiries should be made to the publisher at the address above.

Typesetting by Anthony Vandenberg

Author image: © Honeydew Photography

Printed in China by Printplus Limited

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DisclaimerThe material in this publication is of the nature of general comment only, and does not represent professional advice. It is not intended to provide specific guidance for particular circumstances and it should not be relied on as the basis for any decision to take action or not take action on any matter which it covers. Readers should obtain professional advice, where appropriate, before making any such decision. To the maximum extent permitted by law, the author and publisher disclaim all responsibility and liability to any person, arising directly or indirectly from any person taking or not taking action based on the information in this publication. The views and information provided in this book are those of the authors solely and do not necessarily represent the views of the businesses identified in this book.

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CONTENTS

About the author vii

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction xi

PART 1: THINK

1 What is thought leadership? 3

2 What is thought leadership marketing? 9

3 Who are thought leaders? 15

4 Finding your sweet spot 33

5 Types of thought leadership material 41

PART 2: WRITE

6 Preparing to write 61

7 Writing to capture, convince and close 75

8 Writing: words, flow and storytelling 95

9 Editing and revisions 119

PART 3: GROW

10 The benefits of thought leadership 129

11 Your investment 141

12 Strategy and promotion 147

Conclusion 162

Appendices 163

Index 170

Notes 175

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Grant Butler is managing director of Editor Group, Australia’s leading corporate writing firm. Before founding Editor Group, Grant was a senior journalist with The Australian Financial Review and held PR and lobbying roles in Australia and the United Kingdom.

Over two decades, Grant has worked closely with and reported on senior executives and experts from the world’s largest companies and professional service firms, and from the government sector. This has included writing and editing speeches, opinion articles, research reports, media statements, books, websites and other thought lead-ership material. He has also delivered extensive training in writing and media skills.

Grant’s clients include leading accounting, engineering and law firms; information technology and telecommunications companies; financial institutions; government departments and regulators. His work has been featured in major media outlets and used at events including CeBIT, Davos and the World Economic Forum.

Grant is the founding editor of PSF Journal, a magazine for partners and marketing and business development teams at professional service firms, and author of Where’s the Loot (Allen & Unwin, 2000), a book about the dot-com boom and entrepreneurial success.

He lives in Sydney with his wife and three children.


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For Callan, Finlay and Eloise.


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ACK NOWLEDGEMENTS

A sincere thank you to all the people who helped in the production of this book, particularly Scott Butler, Sally Chadwick, Angela Damis, Stephen Diorio, Olivia McDowell, Matthew Rodgers, Peter Sheridan, Charmaine Teoh and Cat Wirth who provided invaluable editing advice, research and design support. I’m also grateful to Lucy Raymond, the commissioning editor at John Wiley & Sons and those who agreed to be interviewed including Kevin Bloch, Nancy Duarte, Andrew Hobley, Andrew Lumsden, Sir Gustav Nossal and Tom Switzer. Finally, thank you to Cassandra, my wife, and all the staff at Editor Group for their assistance and giving me time to write.


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INTRODUCTION

With our thoughts we make the world. GAUTAMA BUDDHA

In 1998 I had the good fortune to be invited on a media tour of Lucent Technologies’ headquarters at Murray Hill, New Jersey, in the United States. You might not be familiar with the name Lucent (now known as Alcatel-Lucent) but at the time it had just been spun out of American long-distance carrier AT&T as a new company with revenue of more than US$20 billion and around 137 000 employees. The operation included Bell Labs, one of the largest and oldest technology research facilities in the world, and the place that invented inter-city data networking (late 1940s), the transistor (1947), solar cells (1954), the laser (1958), commu-nications satellites (1962), touch-tone phones (1962) and mobile -phone networks (proposed in 1947 then launched in the 1970s), among many other inventions we continue to use today.1

I was a reporter at The Australian Financial Review newspaper at the time so the trip presented a great opportunity to learn about the company, meet its top executives and see Bell Labs first-hand. Part of the trip was a series of presentations from Lucent’s technologists and salespeople about its products and trends for the future. Journalists were there from around the world and the speakers were some of the top engineers in the field, talking about the coolest new technologies at the height of the telecommuni-cations boom. This should have been an event akin to Steve Jobs launching the first iPhone or Bill Gates announcing Windows. Instead, much of the event was long, slow and overly technical, even by information technology (IT) industry standards.

What was the problem? Maybe it was just jet lag, but it seemed the brilliant minds put forward to present hadn’t simplified their material enough to communicate effectively with their audi-ence — a ragbag of about 50 journalists with differing levels of


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T H I N K W R I T E G R O W

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

technical knowledge and English language skills. We just weren’t connecting. After 20 minutes of some slides promoting a product that I gathered was new and had a ‘gigabit backplane’, I risked the ridicule of my peers by launching my hand into the air. Proceedings ground to a halt and the speaker turned to me. I asked: ‘Thank you for that but can you please tell me what it actu-ally is?’ The speaker, let’s call him Bob Smith, looked at me blankly so I rephrased. ‘Sorry, I’m sure it’s just me, but can you maybe tell me what it looks like, for instance? Is it shaped like a box? Are we talking a shoe box or a packing crate? And how much does it cost?’

If you know anything about telecommunications switches — the things that sit at the centre of phone networks and redirect your phone calls or emails — you might realise there isn’t actually a simple answer to these questions. You’d also know that having a gigabit backplane — the ability to move a billion bits of data a second — was quite revolutionary and that back then switches did sort of come in boxes (or ‘racks’) about the size of a fridge. But everything else depended on what you wanted to do with it. Even so, it was bemusing that Bob couldn’t grasp the question, let alone describe his complex toy in concrete, everyday terms that an arts degree graduate like me and my general business readers might understand.

Fortunately, my next meeting was just the opposite: an inter-view with Carleton ‘Carly’ Fiorina, the charming and articulate senior Lucent executive who had driven the company’s split with AT&T and subsequent IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, and who had just been named America’s most powerful business-woman by Forbes magazine. She would go on to become global CEO of Hewlett-Packard the following year. Fiorina locked her steely gaze on me, worked out the level at which to pitch her answers (low), and then proceeded to deliver her key messages in the sort of flawless and engaging way you might associate with a

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figure like Barack Obama. It was a tour de force performance, and I was just one of presumably 10 interviews she would give that day. Reading her autobiography years later I realised that at that time she was under enormous pressure in the business and had a gravely ill mother, which made her engagement and poise all the more remarkable. As she writes, ‘The fall of 1998 was terrible. I became a celebrity and my mother died.’2

Figures like Fiorina are exceptional and have such star appeal that it’s hard for them not to dominate news reporting about companies and, in turn, become seen as the thought leaders in their industries. Some are even tagged as visionaries. The tragedy is that guys like Bob Smith are often gifted thinkers who fail to gain the recognition they deserve because their subject-matter expertise isn’t matched by their ability to communicate. Not only are they outshone by megawatt CEOs, they are eclipsed by col-leagues and competitors who may know less but are sought out by the media or to speak at industry events.

This book is designed to help those who know a lot but would like to improve the way they communicate about knowledge-intensive fields such as accounting, economics, engineering, finance, IT, law, medicine, science or the equally demanding field of general management. In particular, it is written for those who want to use communications to build their business, drive policies or promote a cause. Whatever your goal, the ability to use words to clearly articulate your ideas and persuade others will have a huge bearing on your future. And while this book is directed to you as a thought leader who writes — or wants to — it should be equally useful to any management and marketing teams that sup-port you and depend on your results.

The insights in this book are based on my work with thought leaders from varied fields and the communications profession-als who assist them. Writing thought leadership material can be an exciting process as smart, interesting people throw around


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ideas and develop great ways to express them. But I have also observed some common issues that seem to hobble the process. Given thought leaders are by definition intelligent, well-educated experts, these problems rarely relate to basic spelling or gram-mar. Instead, they tend to stem from ambiguity about purpose, insufficient or unrealistic resourcing, organisational politics or a misunderstanding of how thought leadership can be used as part of a sales and marketing strategy.

The book discusses these issues and outlines the techniques effective communicators use to write and promote thought leadership material. At its heart, great thought leadership should deliver strong ideas for solving other people’s problems or helping them discover opportunities. The first part of the challenge is to identify those issues that really concern or excite your audience then come up with new and compelling solutions and ideas. The next parts are ensuring those thoughts are heard, then converting your audience’s interest into results — whether that’s sales of your products and services or achieving a non-commercial goal.

If there is a warning in this book, it is that thought leadership is challenging. It takes hard work and moments of brilliance to come up with new and valuable ideas. But when you do, and can communicate those ideas in a way that inspires others, the results will be electric. There is also a plea, which is to respect the role of thought leadership material. People find thought leadership valuable because it delivers on a group of expectations. Those expectations include that the author will offer advice that genuinely helps the reader solve problems or realise opportunities; that the information will be factually accurate or clearly flagged as opinion; and that the author is presenting views they personally believe in.

If your thought leadership fails to meet these expectations, it may disappoint readers and make it hard for you to reach your audience. Worse, it will undermine people’s faith in the thought leadership genre you have used, making it less useful to the next author.


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So, why do it at all? What will you gain from becoming a well-known thought leader in your field? Plenty. As we’ll explore, effective thought leadership material enables you to demonstrate your expertise to potential customers in a way that opens doors, builds trust and reshapes agendas. It is essential to raising your pro-file, differentiating your products and services in crowded markets, expanding your networks and attracting other talented people to work with you or provide other support. You may also enjoy per-sonal rewards, such as travel and spending more time with other interesting experts, and you can certainly make money directly by selling your ideas in books, speeches and other ways.

The world of thought leadership isn’t exclusive either. In this book, I focus on a number of exceptional and high-profile writ-ers, researchers, professionals and executives because they are great models to learn from. They also illustrate different aspects of the thought leadership challenge and provide valuable insights that I hope you can apply to your own situation. However, thought lead-ership is open to anyone. All it requires is that you can develop and communicate ideas that are of value to an audience you care about — your followers. Whether you’re a top stock market com-mentator reaching millions on TV or a small business owner sending out a newsletter to your customers, the idea is the same: you are building your business by passing on your expert knowl-edge to customers and prospects to help them create a better future. Within reason, the more freely and generously you offer that advice — the more value you give others — the more rewards you are likely to gain.

Perhaps the most enticing and rewarding aspect of becoming a better writer, in particular, is that it will make you a better thinker. The act of writing plays an enormous role in crystallising your thoughts and helping you organise them into powerful, effective and memorable arguments that will propel you and your readers into new cycles of innovation, reflection and discussion. If there is


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one overriding message I hope you will take from this book it is this: writing isn’t just something you do once you have become a thought leader; it will help to make you one.

Grant ButlerSydney, 2012


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TWG DESIGN MASTER.indd 6 5/10/11 11:16 AM€¦ · Author of The Marketer’s Handbook and Marketing...

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