Why leadership development may be the missing link in execution, growth, and investment success.

This episode explores how leadership capacity, founder readiness, and people analytics can help reduce execution risk as companies scale. It also examines the challenge of turning complex thought leadership into a viable business by validating the market, identifying the right buyers, and building trusted paths to adoption.

What if luck is not random, but designed?

What if the biggest risk in a company is not the strategy, the product, or the market—but the leader’s ability to grow fast enough to match the business?

In this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, Peter Winick sits down with Logan Yonavjak, founder of the Founders Readiness Institute, to explore a bold idea: leadership capacity can be measured, developed, and used to reduce business risk.

Logan’s work sits at the intersection of people analytics, vertical development, AI, and executive performance. She is building tools that help investors, boards, and leadership teams understand how founders and executives think, behave, and respond under pressure.

This is not traditional assessment work. It is not about labels. It is not about personality typing. It is about readiness. Can a leader handle complexity? Can they adapt? Can they scale with the company? Can they make better decisions when the stakes rise?

Peter and Logan dig into why founder readiness matters. Many companies do not fail because the idea is weak. They fail because leadership breaks under scale. A founder who can lead seven people may not be ready to lead seven hundred. Logan’s work helps surface those risks earlier—and gives leaders a roadmap to grow.

The conversation also explores the business side of thought leadership. Logan shares how she tested her market, interviewed more than 125 venture capitalists, and learned that curiosity does not always equal a buyer. That insight pushed her to refine her positioning and focus on private equity firms, corporate boards, and middle-market companies where execution risk is already a costly pain point.

For thought leaders, this episode is a sharp reminder: great IP is not enough. Science is not enough. A compelling model is not enough. The market decides. The buyer decides. And the best founders listen, adapt, and move.

This episode is for anyone building a thought leadership platform around a complex, emerging, or category-defining idea. Logan shows what it takes to turn deep expertise into a practical business tool—and why the right go-to-market strategy matters as much as the idea itself.

Three Key Takeaways:

• Leadership readiness is a business risk issue, not just a people issue. Logan’s work reframes founder and executive assessment around risk, scale, and execution. The core question is whether leaders can grow at the same pace as the companies they are building.
• Thought leadership needs market validation, not just strong IP. Logan had science, a model, and a compelling idea. But after speaking with more than 125 VCs, she learned that interest does not always equal buying behavior. The market pushed her toward private equity, boards, and middle-market companies.
• Strategic partnerships can shorten the sales cycle for complex ideas. Because Logan’s work requires education, trust, and context, Peter highlights the value of distribution partners and champions. The right partner can reduce friction, accelerate credibility, and make the idea easier to buy.

If Logan Yonavjak’s episode made you think differently about founder readiness, leadership risk, and scaling, Jim Adler’s episode is the perfect companion listen. Logan explores how leadership capacity can be measured before it becomes a business risk. Jim brings the investor’s lens, showing how startups use thought leadership to build credibility, earn trust, and strengthen their market position.

Together, they reveal what it really takes to move from promising idea to durable business. Listen to Logan for the human readiness behind scale. Listen to Jim for the investor perspective on startups, value creation, and thought leadership.

Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, this is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage and you’re joining us on the podcast which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today my guest is Logan Yonavjak. She is a financial services professional. She’s a social entrepreneur. She’s an author. She’s and angel investor. And has just a really interesting background which we’ll get into here. So welcome aboard Logan, how are ya?

Logan Yonavjak Thanks so much Peter, great to be here. Thank you.

Peter Winick So how did how did this happen? Because as one of the things I find in doing the work that I do is it’s usually not linear, right? You know, you ask certain professions like, oh, how you got here and you can kind of figure out the answer. But how did all this happen, how did we get to be here today?

Logan Yonavjak Yeah, I think the story is actually a really interesting one. And to your point, not linear. And there’s a through line, but I wouldn’t say it’s right here. So my original career interest was actually being a psychotherapist when I was in high school. I was very interested in Jungian psychology and understanding human motivation and potentially doing the therapy route, maybe even clinical psychology. And I got really persuaded by the environmental movement early in my career. I was, I grew up in North Carolina and there’s a lot of sprawl development where I grew and I was introduced to a lot of topics around climate change, et cetera. I did a wilderness, a three month wilderness course out of high school. So I was sort of exposed to conservation work and I decided to take my career in that direction because I felt that it was an imperative for me. I felt very drawn to supporting those efforts. And so I took a financial route basically thinking if I can help direct more capital to land conservation, to climate change efforts, then perhaps I can have more of an impact that way. So I learned how to be a financial professional and investment professional. I went to business school. I worked for several private equity firms and then. Kind of started making my way to earlier stage investing and, um, more startup work. I started finding that the technology, the innovation that was around climate that was in climate tech or ag tech, forestry tech was more of my interest. And then a lot of where I’m at right now came from observation about people and teams. And so I found that a lot of the teams I worked for were were functional and some of them were dysfunctional. There was a variety of different leadership styles that I thought were useful or not aligned. And so I kind of going back to my original like high school interest, I thought, is there a way that we could leverage leadership analytics and people analytics in a more effective way to create innovation teams, to create leadership constructs that would actually be more meaningful and seeing some of that.

Peter Winick So say more about the analytics piece, because I think oftentimes when we’re talking about sort of people analytics in HR in the workplace, it’s things like stack ranking or efficacy, or it’s somewhat heartless, if you will, and a little like, meh. That’s an interesting word, yeah. But that’s not the angle that you’re taking at this, right, like, so what is the lens by which you’re looking through sort of the leadership analytics, because… Yeah. Team efficacy is typically a people issue, not a numbers issue.

Logan Yonavjak Yes. And so I would say, well, our lens is leadership capacity and human development. So the body of work that we’re drawing from is very much on adult, it’s called vertical development. And it shows patterns in how people evolve and how they think, behave and act over time. And there’s really an evolutionary process that happens within the psyche. And we’re measuring where someone’s at in that process. And It’s a very holistic approach. And we’ve honed it in for the context of business and leadership, primarily for executives, to see how they’re gonna think, behave, and act under pressure and with complexity over time. And we’re making the case that, you know, AI is bringing in even more complexity into our system. And so by identifying leadership leaders that are really able to manage this level of complexity, we can have hopefully better leadership at the helm that can then drive better innovation outcomes.

Peter Winick Very cool. So then, take me to the book then. Then there’s a book? Because you don’t have enough going on here?

Logan Yonavjak Oh, we have I’ve been a published author in the past, but we would love to publish where the beginning, you know, more beginning stages of our startup. So I think the thought leadership pieces are coming together. But we are that’ll be in the future.

Peter Winick Got it, okay So what does it look like in terms of, you know, you’ve got the Founders Readiness Institute, so to me that sounds somewhat self-explanatory, right? Because a founder goes out there and the typical path is a founder or two come up with ideas, concepts, minimum viable, then they go to shop the market. And usually the investors are looking at probably more than two things, but if we simplify it, they’re looking at like, wow, this is a cool idea, and do I trust these people? Do they have the capacity? The ability to become what they don’t know they need to become if this thing is to work the way they’d like it to, right? Because I would argue that most people don’t become a founder and say, and you know what? In two years, I’ll be a total jerk or I’ll be a raging narcissist or whatever. But like, if you’ve been on the other side of it, you’re like, OK, what are the things that we could look out for? So I love this concept of founders readiness as a concept, right.

Logan Yonavjak Yeah, it’s like risk flags and markers like any, you know, when you’re forecasting any business plan or product, go to market strategy, there’s going to be risks involved. And so when someone’s trying to scale alongside their company, you know, they might start off at a certain level of development and they’re going to be asked and pressure tested over time. And there’s gonna be cracks that that show up that might have been more visible if you’d looked earlier on. And that’s what we’re making the argument you can do. Is actually see some of these patterns emerge through our transcript analysis that you can watch over time. And then ultimately, if you wanna still make the investment in the team or the team wants to work on themselves, there’s a pathway, there’s roadmap. And I don’t think most leadership analytical tools offer that roadmap as much.

Peter Winick Really a risk management issue from the standpoint of the investors right because too often the founder or the founders implode or just don’t have what it takes to lead a thousand person team when they could lead a seven-person team or whatever right. So it also sounds like it’s not destiny right. Like if you if you pick up these things on the assessments and stuff that you’re doing, people could be aware of their weaknesses and work on Is that?

Logan Yonavjak Yeah, that’s the idea. I mean, I think it’s also not that lower stages of development are necessarily bad. I think where people are and recognizing where they might sit in the trajectory of a company development too, like those who are more execution focused, you know, and have a certain level of development and coachability or purposeful agility, which are two things we measure, they might be fine at the very early stages, but then they need to Um, you know, a new CEO or new team needs to be brought in for that scaling portion. And so there’s all sorts of ways to think about it, but we’re, we’re measuring six different dimensions just to love it grounded a little bit. We pulled these from the research. Um, my co-founder is a psychologist and data scientist. And so he’s, he’s been studying this work for 25 years. And with AI, we were now able to do a lot of automated analysis. But we called the literature looking at, you know, which constructs are really identified as predictive, more predictive for future startup success. Things like follow on investment.

Peter Winick Investment. Stay there for a minute. So yeah, from a validity scam point, you know, there’s science underneath this, right? I’ll just Oh, yeah, absolutely. Right. So this that we know what the six are, we know why we pick those six, as opposed to 66 others that we could have picked, etc. But now I want you to sort of, you’re wearing two hats, right, you’re the thought leader, and you’re this CEO in this entrepreneurial venture. So now you’ve got it. And I think, oftentimes, not oftentimes, but there are times where someone comes out with something and it’s a solution to a problem that nobody cares about. How are you validating it in the marketplace that actually, you’ve got the science, but just because you have the science doesn’t mean there’s a market for it. Oh yeah, absolutely, I mean. How are testing that to go, okay, I’ve got to goods, is this a problem needs to be solved that someone would pay money to be solve that I need to position in a certain way just to have the conversations, because it’s not like you’re in a space where somebody’s looking for, okay, a founder readiness assessment. Per se, right?

Logan Yonavjak Well, you do a couple of things there, and I’m very transparent about these things. I appreciate the, you know, business side of this, because, yes, you can have and this happens all the time, like founders fall in love with their product. And it’s like, well, is it really solving a pain point? And so we’ve talked to over one hundred and twenty five VCs. That was our primary target initially was.

Peter Winick They’re the buyers right are they’re either the buyers or they’re gonna mandate that someone go through this right? Yeah

Logan Yonavjak So that we have an incentive for the founders to take it

Peter Winick But when you say talk to them, was it a structured interview? Was it like, OK, and what was the gist of the interview and what were the outcomes of that process, because I love that.

Logan Yonavjak Yeah, well, I mean, to get a little bit in the weeds, I use a process called the unbiased interview. It’s a prompt and AI prompt engineering where you like design questions that will really focus on getting to someone’s pain point. And so that was the majority of the initial customer discovery, if you will, and the rest have been sales calls. So I use some of the same techniques, but I would say the, you know, the latter of the conversations have been more of a. Let me actually try to sell to you. What I found is that VCs actually aren’t an ideal customer for us, and there’s a couple reasons why. One is they have very informal decision-making processes. They have small.

Peter Winick Right, Gunfeel, yeah.

Logan Yonavjak And a lot of them pride themselves on the gut feel. And so it’s just an informal decision-making buyer. A lot of curiosity and a lot of like, oh, this would be really interesting. But then when it comes to actually, you know.

Peter Winick Okay, that’s a good learning though. So if you have been a great learning and they add behind that was great. And then you go, okay, but the VCs for whatever reason, good, bad or ugly, they’re just not it. There’s not what’s plan B.

Logan Yonavjak Yeah, so we’re moving into private equity boards, like corporate boards and middle market companies in the financial services industry to start just because that’s where I have most of my network. But really with the idea being that we’re solving execution risk as a pain point, like 40% of middle market companies when they make a promotional decision, it doesn’t work out within 18 months. And working out is a variety of things, doesn’t mean they get fired, but they’re not meeting their deadlines. They’re not needing their strategic execution needs. And so that costs like 1.5 times a base salary. So we found that was about 270K per hire or per promotion. And so if you look at the numbers there, these companies have existing HR functions. They’re familiar sometimes with assessment tools. So. Much better buyer than what we initially started with. So some great learnings there as a founder on my end.

Peter Winick Got it. Cool. And what is the current go to market play now?

Logan Yonavjak Yeah, so we’re focusing on private equity firms where they have done B2B SaaS or technology sales usually like software. And so they have a familiarity with just the space and we can incorporate ourselves into their portfolio companies. And then some larger corporates and corporate boards are where we are focused right now.

Peter Winick So one of the risks I’ve seen thought leaders take on, sometimes willingly, sometimes unwillingly, is you’ve got something that’s cutting edge, that’s revolutionary potentially, that’s really, really cool. Which is awesome. That’s what we have. Yeah, yeah, yes, yes. I’m just, I mean. Yeah, but that means on the other side of it, right, like if I’m selling something that people are used to buying, PR services, you know, payrolls or whatever, I don’t need to spend a lot of the sales cycle educating people on what it is, why it is why you need it, et cetera. And guess what? You’re not getting paid for that. So how do you condense the sales cycle because somebody might engage with you and say, wow, that’s really cool. Let me have another call and another call and another because they’re learning something, which is fine. But when you connect that to a sales cycle, because you have a buyer that’s I wouldn’t say they’re not sophisticated, but they’re now educated in this domain. How do you thread that needle? Because that could be tough.

Logan Yonavjak I think a lot of it’s qualifying who you’re the lead that you’re talking to more up front like are they the decision maker, do they have budget, are they in a position where they’re actually in a sales buying cycle for something like this. Those are just some of the key learnings from my own experience. But I think working through trusted partners is how I’m finding the most traction. So people who take our assessment and then are champions for us and going to some of their colleagues who. They no need this type of work. So I’m thinking of one individual in particular who has taken our assessment and now she’s talking to three corporate boards and a very large corporation on the chief people officer side to get our technology embedded in their systems.

Peter Winick We found a lot of chance really cool. So a lot of folks go down the route of a strategic partner, distribution partner, because I’m going to guess that you’re probably not a marketing whiz or didn’t wake up one day and say, wow, golly gee, I can’t wait to build.

Logan Yonavjak I wish. I wish. It just right downloads would come. But yeah, no, it’s there’s a lot of different skill sets involved here. I’ve been, you know, there’s cold email outreach and all the automation work and lead magnet. I mean, it it’s dizzying for a founder in many ways.

Peter Winick So if you could secure, if you, if you could break that down and say, okay, well to, to thrive as a company, we would need what I’m just making is, you know, a hundred clients a year in order to get there. Here’s all that activity. I can do the math backwards and go, oh my God, that’s a hell of a lot of emails and LinkedIn and whatever. But there’s another way to do this. What if we got two or three or four, a handful of, of, uh, strategic distribution partners that got who we are that have already, uh an installed user base made, they’re selling a suite of other product services and offerings and this is either an Zellra and add on or you’re riding that wave we love that you know in terms of the work that I do because it cuts it cuts the cost of cuts the cycle you’re connecting with trust. I’m another partner and it’s easy to manage three or four relationships other than deal with the churn so it seems like that’s the route you’re taking.

Logan Yonavjak That’s been the big light bulb moment for me. It’s interesting because I come from a lot of my career, I’ve sold financial products to institutional buyers. And so the work is very much like these strategic partnerships, these longer, bigger contracts. And so in many ways I’m reverting back to my sales experience. I thought it would be more of this. Kind of like managing, you know, tons of leads. And I was doing that in the beginning, but then I reverted back to this approach because it is, for an early stage company, it’s been one of my biggest insights about sales, is what you just mentioned.

Peter Winick Got it. Love that as we start to rap here any other Thoughts learnings etc that you would have say for you two years ago. There’s someone out there now Maybe probably doing different IP or thought leadership, but could say, you know are thinking right now like wow That’s where I am now or that’s where was a year ago. What would you what’s the wisdom you might share with them? No pressure, but it’s got to be life-changing for this

Logan Yonavjak It’s going to be life changing. Well, I think your own internal resilience is so important because your mind mindset about where you’re headed and these different perspectives that come in, being able to hold multiple levels of complexity and actually stay objective about what you’re seeing from the market has been probably my biggest learning because in the beginning, I really had this. Desire to change venture capital and to bring in these people analytics tools. And I realized that it just wasn’t.

Peter Winick That’s a small feat. I’m just going to change venture capital.

Logan Yonavjak Well, I wanted I wanted to embed a layer of people analytics in and de risk some of the investments because I want to see better innovation outcomes. I’m a systems thinker and I was like, oh, this is so cool. And then the reality of just the buyers themselves and how they function, I was, like, I just had to step back and be like, this isn’t the direction we need to go anymore. And of course, you hear about pivots all the time. And then when it comes to you actually doing it, it’s like, OK, well, I have to stay objective here. This is what the market’s telling me. And I think that it’s the sobriety of that experience.

Peter Winick I think that’s really the big one, or one of the big ones from today, is that you could think whatever you want, and your friends could think whatever they want, your advisors could think what they want. The only thing that matters is what does the market think? It’s hard to maintain objectivity relative to that, but three, four, five, six types of buyers that make perfect sense for you tell you, yeah, but no thanks. Time to rethink it, right? So it doesn’t mean that, you know, I love the way that you pivoted and you didn’t do a total crazy pivot and now you’re in the direct-to-consumer space. It’s like, okay, I need to think about this piece of the process. How do I get to whom? Right? Right. And what does that look like? Because your instincts were right. I think it was just more of a slight directional shift as opposed to a radical pivot of, okay, now we’re gonna be in the, you, know, package goods business or something silly.

Logan Yonavjak Oh, yeah. Well, I also think there’s an art to letting go of a dream, you know, and just there’s a knowing when you have enough information to make a decision. Like, there are still VCs we’re talking to who are excited about this, but they’re not the place I should spend most of my time. And so there’s always people who are going to tell you, oh, get more information, get more information. It’s like you have I think the onus is on the CEO to be like, no, it’s time to move. And so. I think it’s really developed my own leadership abilities. I’m more confident in my own decision making.

Peter Winick Well, this has been great. I appreciate your time and thanks for sharing your journey with us, Logan.

Logan Yonavjak Great. Thanks, Peter. Thank you.

Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter at thoughtleadershipleverage.com, and please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.

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Turning Market Design into Practical Thought Leadership

This episode explores hidden markets, scarce opportunities, and the rules that shape who gets access. It shows how better systems can create fairer, smarter outcomes in work, life, and organizations.

What if luck is not random, but designed?

In this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, Peter Winick sits down with Judd Kessler, Wharton professor and author of “Lucky by Design: The Hidden Economics You Need to Get More of What You Want.” Judd’s work brings market design out of the academic journal and into daily life. He studies the hidden systems that determine who gets access, who gets opportunity, and who gets left waiting.

These systems are everywhere. School programs. Job assignments. Consulting projects. Ticketing platforms. Government services. Nonprofit resources. Even your own time and attention.

Judd’s thought leadership gives leaders a new lens. First, see the market. Then understand the rules. Then decide whether those rules are helping or hurting the outcomes you want.

For organizations, this is not theoretical. Poorly designed internal markets create frustration, waste, and inequity. Better rules can improve allocation, retention, performance, and trust.

Peter and Judd explore how a book can move academic insight into practical use. They also dig into the harder work after publication: building an audience, entering the cultural conversation, and turning expertise into influence.

This conversation is a sharp look at how thought leadership scales when it makes invisible systems visible. And when it gives people the tools to redesign them.

Three Key Takeaways:

• See the hidden market. Many opportunities are shaped by invisible systems, from school programs and job assignments to access, attention, and scarce resources.
• Design better rules. Poorly built systems create frustration, waste, and unfairness. Better rules lead to smarter outcomes.
• Make ideas practical. Strong thought leadership turns complex concepts into tools people and organizations can actually use.

If this conversation made you think differently about the hidden rules that shape behavior, go back and listen to our episode with Luke Battye.

Both episodes explore how people make decisions inside systems they often do not see. Judd Kessler looks at hidden markets, scarcity, and the rules that determine who gets what. Luke Battye looks at behavior change, design thinking, and how small shifts in context can change what people do next.

Together, these episodes give you a sharper lens for understanding systems, incentives, and behavior. You’ll walk away with practical ways to design better outcomes for customers, teams, and organizations.

Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome welcome welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO at thought leadership leverage and you’re joining us on the podcast which is leveraging thought leadership today my guest is Judd Kessler. He’s the inaugural Howard Marks endowed professor at the Wharton school at UPenn he does a lot of interesting research combining laboratory and field work for market design public economics labor economics behavioral economics etc. He teaches undergrads and MBAs, and he’s got a book out, which I am almost finished, called Lucky by Design, The Hidden Economics. You need to get more of what you want. So welcome aboard, Judd, how are you? Doing well, thanks for having me. And thanks for almost being done with the book. Well, some could have been done with it early. Like, I’m actually intent to finish it. I got up early this morning to try to finish it and didn’t make it all the way through. But no, it’s a great book. Thank you for writing it. So how does this happen? So I get, like, you’ve got. Demanding schedule right you live in New York you teach a Wharton a lot of time on a track or whatever Three kids the whole deal what drove you to write a book and what more importantly drove you write this book

Judd Kessler Yeah, this book was kind of in me for a while. I’ve been at Wharton for 15 years. And mostly when you were an academic, your main audience is other academics. So writing, yeah, writing articles that nobody, that nobody reads. Hopefully some people cite, but the insights that I was learning in my research felt like they had more practical uses. And so… When I got tenure and the publisher or parish kind of pressure is we’re a little, we’re led up a little bit. Uh, it’s like, all right, maybe it’s time to communicate some of these ideas to folks who actually could make their lives better as a result of them learn how to see hidden markets in the world, learn how to navigate through their rules and then figure out the strategies to succeed.

Peter Winick Stay there a minute. I want to point out that oftentimes when academics write non-academic things, like things that people actually read, you pick it up and you go, oh, geez, he’s an academic. But what I say is the book is real. It’s readable, right? Because I often feel when I read, which is not often, academic journals and such that, oh here I go again, I’m the dumbest guy. This is not written for consumption. It is written reflecting

Judd Kessler Yeah, no, there’s the goal is to do as little flexing as possible. There’s some embarrassing stories in the book about me. So I, you know, I don’t know, uh, I dunno that, uh it’s as big a flex as one might hope. But the, this desire to make the book approachable so that anyone, even people who are not. You know, didn’t study economics when they were in college or, or, you know, don’t want to read an academic home. I wanted it to be approachable. I wanted people to pick it up and immediately get that this is going to be helpful for you and it’s not going to feel like being in class. And actually that was, it gave me a little bit of writer’s block at the beginning of the process because I, I did know how to start the book in a way that would be accessible in the ways that I wanted that would communicate what’s at the heart of the book. But without. Being, you know, pedantic. And I finally, like I cracked it. It was midnight. I was laying in bed. I sprung up. I was like, I know how to open the book. I had just taught my youngest daughter, who was four years old at the time, how to play rock, paper, scissors. Right. And that was an important lesson for her because that was one of the hidden market rules that we used in our house to decide, you know, which TV show to watch, what to have for dinner. And she would watch her older siblings make what, to her, were totally incomprehensible hand gestures at each other until she understood how to play rock, paper, scissors and understood the rules. Once she understood it, then she could figure out what was going on. She could get why her older sister was happy and her older brother was sad at the end around. But then she played for the first time… Against her, her sister, and she just threw scissors on every territory and their sister’s like, okay, I get this. I’m going to throw a rock. Now my youngest like scissors at the time she was learning to cut. So you could see why she did that. But to me, that story was approachable, but it was also an allegory for what the book was about that to succeed in these markets, you needed to. Understand their rules. You needed to know what was going on, understand that, you know, this was a game that had rules that you could learn to play. But then also you needed strategy. It’s not enough to just understand the rules. You have to know what it is. Even before the

Peter Winick understand the rules, there’s a couple of examples in the story where you have to be aware that there’s even a thing. Oh, yeah. So what is there a lot a lottery for after school programs or Shakespeare in the park or whatever it is. So one is you got to know like, okay, how do I get what I need to get? Okay, oh, there is a set of rules. Okay. How do I obey the rules? Bend the rules honor the rules maximize the rules whatever. And what and think through like you said, what are the best strategies to play which are applicable, right? So… Are there other? Well, let me put it this way for you as a thought leader, right? So you’ve got academia is sort of the profession. Yeah, we’ve got author in as part of that thought leadership portfolio. Is there other things that you’re doing in terms of speaking, advisory consulting?

Judd Kessler Yeah. So I’m starting, the book was like my coming out party. That’s how I think of it as a, so I am starting to kind of tiptoe out and do more of those other kind of in the world types of action that are, you know, supported by the thought leadership or consistent with that. So helping organizations, uh, actually one of these is in the book of my like kids after school program where it’s a first come first serve race to click to be the first one to sign up for the desirable after school classes. The parents hate it. I mean, they will send, you know, what’s that messages and text each other. Oh, gauntlet day is happening. Everybody has to cancel their plans. They’re sitting there. And, uh, you don’t, our schools after school platform, like it has never yet crashed when people are going on. But as, after I wrote about this, I learned this was a problem that lots of schools have, and I started getting, you from folks who are trying to solve this problem for their school and trying to help them integrate, okay, let’s think about better ways to do this. Let’s use lottery-based systems rather than first come, first serve. What would that look like? Some folks are trying do it on their own. They’re reinventing bad mechanisms. It’s interesting to see in real time how people respond to this. Having talked with.

Peter Winick The company is engaging with you to help figure out, hey, we have this thing. What’s the best way to allocate this when we know demand is going to outstrip supply, other than increased prices, which is classic economics.Judd Kessler Yeah. So the conversations I’m having are a real combination of nonprofits, government, and, you know, private sector firms that are looking for better understanding how the ways that they allocate, like if I have conversations with the consultancies around their staffing, just like, you know, you have this, this is a hidden market. We have lots of folks who want to work on specific projects who want to do work in specific industries. Who want to work with specific people, and it’s a complicated array of preferences. And are we doing the kind of right, do we have the right market rules for our organization, kind of the meeting of needs of the clients and of the consultants. And are, we kind of max maximally getting what we can out of the consultants that we have. You know, and, and the important thing when you approach each of these markets is to say, all right, what is the actual objective? Like you obviously want to deliver good work for your customers, for your clients, but like, do you want to satisfy the preferences of the consultants or do you know that like this consultant needs that kind of experience and it’s a little more paternalistic?

Peter Winick So you could add another variable and say, yes, we want to satisfy the client that’s non-negotiable. We want to develop the consultants on the dime for the client. We want an increased retention, right? And certain consultants have expressed that they’re less likely to want to travel long distances or something. So you’ve got to put all those in the mix and say geez, how do we weigh those? How do we weigh all those variables, right?

Judd Kessler Exactly. And, and what I’ve noticed when I’ve had these conversations, and it’s possible that the folks who are interested in talking are the ones who are seeing problems with their internal hidden markets. And so that’s why we’re having the conversation is they think that there’s a problem, but lots of the conversations that I’m having reveal that folks are designing mechanisms, kind of Either through historical accident or somebody had an idea that seemed good at the time, but the situation has changed. And so there’s not as much reflection on what are the rules that we have in place to do this allocation.

Peter Winick And are the rules up-to-date? Are the rules-up-to be? Consulting 101 was get on a plane Sunday and come home Thursday. That’s just the way it was. And then we had this COVID thing, and it’s like, actually, there’s other ways to deliver, right? There’s other ways you get value. There’s others ways to less wear and tear on the consultant. So I want to ask you on the book side, because the book’s been out a bit now, right. Is it a year? Less than a year. No, less than a years. So almost five months. So I was talking to a publisher friend Recently And the person was telling me that one of their authors just submitted the manuscript and the author said to the publisher, awesome, I’m in the end zone. And the publisher said, actually, you’re at the 50 yard line, right? Meaning the work, there’s different work. Some would argue it’s as hard or harder work on the post publishing marketing piece. Tell me about sort of the pre-pub and post-pubs. Like the writing guide and then the, jeez, I gotta get this out there and talk to. In the next like me all day to try to come out of it.

Judd Kessler The not does not a pain in the neck. This is quite fun. The, the writing bit was different than the kind of writing that I had done before. So I described, you know, academic writing, like a little bit of a chore or having gotten to that point and wanting to reach a broader audience. It is hard to write, you when you spend 15 years writing academic work or 20 years at this point, including graduate school, writing academic work, it’s hard to kind of switch into the, I want to write a book. That’s more approachable and mindset. That was the writer’s block I described, but I had done that in college. I had written for the newspaper. You know, so I had some experience with, with writing in the voice that I wanted to write in. So it just took a while to get that voice back, but yeah, after the, so the writing, the manuscript ended up being quite fun. I really enjoyed that process. Okay. This, so up to 50 yard line, you know, some stumbles at the beginning, but, but enjoy the process. It really is something that in particular, I think academics. Don’t have a lot of experience with when we’re doing the second bit, doing the book promotion, because it’s, you know, it’s one thing to have written something to think that people will will like it if they get their hands on it. But we’re competing with lots of books, lots of sub stacks, lots other forms of media. Yeah. And yeah, breaking through is tough. So I’ve I’ve enjoyed all the conversations I’ve had, but… It’s very different than walking into a classroom when people have decided to come to Wharton, they’ve decided to take your class, they’re gonna listen to you. You know, all you have to do is talk.

Peter Winick I went out at Wharton they’ve never they’ve ever said your I Judd we’re having a slow a slow quarter can you go out there and hustle up some clients some students to yeah

Judd Kessler Yeah, exactly. And, and also, you know, you’re, you know, the, the students are not sure who to listen to. We’re going to have all the classes at the same time. They might talk to, yeah, listen, Adam Grant talk, or they might come to you. It’s like, Oh my God, like it’s not, yeah. It’s a very different environment than we’re used to. So it’s, it’s been nice and interesting and a challenge to kind of do something new. I think that’s something I’ve really appreciated about both, both the first 50 yards and you know what, wherever I am on the right now. On the, on the back half of, of the, of this process, it’s been fun to be doing something new and challenging that I haven’t done before. It’s easy to get complacent if you’re just doing the same thing every day.

Peter Winick Good. So what are the things on the marketing side that you might not have even realized your thing, right? Because what really what you’re competing for is not 25 or 30 bucks for a book, you’re really saying to someone spend five or six or seven hours with and my ideas.

Judd Kessler Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. I had a conversation with somebody at one of my book events. So it was a book party somebody threw for me. It was a bunch of people from college and their partners and random folks who had come. One of them was like a year and a half behind me in the process. He had just signed the contract for the book. And I was like, Oh my God, I’m so glad I got you at this moment in time. Because if I knew now what I, you know, if I new then what I knew now, I, I do some things differently, like start to, you know, kind of figure out how you’re going to enter the cultural conversation, because the books that everybody reads are the books that kind of already have a little traction going into release. And so it’s harder to generate that after the book is out, right? Like you hope for word of mouth, you hope your podcast, like getting somebody to pick up the book. But, you know, you could start thinking now 18 months before the book is released, like, you know, what are the things that you’re going to be? How are you going to get the word out? And maybe that would help you kind of. Optimize how you spend your time. While you were writing, you know, are you developing a audience? Are you like having contact, you know, getting contacts with people in the media? Like, what is the what is the plan? And it was like both. Kind of disappointing, but also like a relief that he was like, oh, no, no. It’s fine if I’m just going to write a great book and like people, you know. You know, it’s like, all right, that’s it. That was kind of how I felt like no one gave me the straight talk then. Oh, or if they did, I didn’t hear it. But yeah, so I think it’s like the figuring out how to. I’ve been saying enter the cultural conversation, but like become something that everybody is paying attention to. We’re focusing on that’s that I think is like the magic.

Peter Winick Yeah, and I think that, you know, if I were you, I look at your book and say, I think there’s two big things here. Number one, the individual, right, in the marketplace can now, you’ve sort of given us filters and lenses to look through and say oh, there’s a thing here. Oh, there is rules here. Let me think about how best to play it to optimize my desired outcome, right? Like, I didn’t even know about that. I just thought that, like, take a master, you go take a Master of 1002, like whatever. And we’ve all been subject to these things, but we never really gave the thought of who designed these, how to play the game, whatever, right? We’re going to play chess or checkers. We know the rules. We know, the game we sit down and say, let’s play, right. That’s number one. Number two, whether it’s nonprofit government agencies, organization, thinking about the, the pros and cons of how to design these things. Hey, we’ve always done it this way. We’ve always. Okay, well, is there a better way? Is there a different way? Is, you know, technology? How do you use technology and, you know, all those sort of things?

Judd Kessler Yeah. And, and I, I wrote the book, I think mostly for the first audience. I mean, so what you’re 80% of the way through. So I have a little bit at the end about thinking about yourself as a market designer and how you have, you know, we are also the most telling me mostly we, I read the book for the folks as market participants, trying to navigate through, figure out the rules, get what you want in all of the, the markets that you gave us name, but, but many more labor markets, dating markets, school admission. And then there is in each chapter kind of how could market designers do it better. So you’re in an organization or you’re working at a nonprofit or you know, you interact with some government agency and you see the system that they’re using. You think this is terrible. It has to, it has to be a better way. There probably is a better and if you are involved, you can kind of start thinking carefully about it. You can read the book and maybe on your own, figure out what the right tweaks or solutions are. You can contact folks like me or other people who do this. And make things better for the markets, uh, that you are involved with. And then in the book, towards the end, I also emphasize like you are a market designer for markets that you control. So a, a hidden market that needs these market rules is just a way of allocating situation where you’re allocating scarce resources and not doing it with a price that rises to, you know, decide who gets what. So, that describes. Things like the market for your time and attention. There’s a limited amount of it. A lot of people want it. Lots of things you could be doing with it. You’re not, I mean, you might be if you’re a consultant or someone who’s, you know, charging for your. Most of us are not saying like, oh, I’m going to, you know, if you pay me enough, I’ll respond to your email and otherwise I’m gonna ignore it. We are developing rules that are determining, okay, whose meetings do we take, whose email can we respond to, who do we, you know, give the time of day and who do, we ignore. And that is a hidden market. We have to develop the rules that we follow. We can decide how strictly we follow them. But that way of thinking, the hope is that you will improve the markets that you are controlling, as well as the markets you’re a part of or participate.

Peter Winick Yeah. And that you have control. There is something to be controlled. Well, this has been great. I appreciate your time, Judd. And thank you for putting something out there that’s interesting.

Judd Kessler Thank you. Thank you for talking to me about it and you know, helping to get the word out as we as we said, that’s the ballgame at this one. You got it. Thank you.

Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter at thoughtleadershipleverage.com, and please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.

The post The Economics of Getting What You Want | Judd Kessler | 715 appeared first on Thought Leadership Leverage.

Daily questions, accountability, and behavior change that lasts.

This episode explores how daily questions, personal accountability, and small behavioral shifts help leaders create sustainable success without losing sight of who they want to become.

What if success is not the hard part?

Lisa Broderick, Managing Partner of Conversus Group, and co-author of Permanence with Marshall Goldsmith, brings a practical answer to one of leadership’s most overlooked problems: how to stay the person you want to be after success arrives.

Most leadership advice focuses on achievement. Hit the goal. Grow the company. Build the platform. Scale the impact. But Lisa’s work asks a sharper question. What happens to your behavior, identity, and relationships once the pressure of success starts to reshape you?

In this conversation, Lisa unpacks the power of daily questions. Not vague reflection. Not motivational slogans. A simple, measurable practice that helps leaders notice their behavior in real time. That noticing creates agency. Agency creates change.

The breakthrough is in the wording. “Did I do my best?” is different from “Did I succeed?” It removes perfection from the equation. It puts ownership back in the leader’s hands. And it makes behavior change sustainable.

Lisa also shares how accountability changes everything. Leaders shifted their actions during the day because they knew someone would ask. Not an app. Not a dashboard. A person. That human connection made the work harder to ignore and easier to sustain.

This episode is a powerful look at thought leadership in action. Lisa and Marshall are not just sharing ideas. They are turning research, coaching, behavioral science, and real-world executive practice into a framework leaders can use immediately.

For CEOs, coaches, advisors, and thought leaders, this conversation is a reminder that success can create drift. One small compromise at a time. The right questions can bring leaders back to intention, clarity, and permanence.

Three Key Takeaways:

• Sustainable success requires more than achievement. Lisa Broderick’s work focuses on what happens after leaders become successful. The danger is “identity drift”—small compromises that slowly pull leaders away from who they want to be.
• The right questions create real behavior change. Daily questions like “Did I do my best?” shift the focus from perfection to effort, ownership, and awareness. That makes change more practical, measurable, and sustainable.
• Accountability makes thought leadership actionable. The practice worked because leaders knew someone would ask. Human accountability turned reflection into action and helped leaders change their behavior in real time.

Lisa Broderick shows how daily questions and human accountability help leaders create lasting behavior change.

Adam Fridman takes that idea further, showing how small habits can be built and scaled across teams and organizations.

Listen to Lisa’s episode to understand why change starts with awareness. Then listen to Adam’s to see how daily habits turn into measurable business impact.

Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, Welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO at thought leadership leverage. And you’re joining us on the LinkedIn live version of the podcast, which is leveraging thought leadership. And today my guest is Lisa Broderick. So Lisa is amongst other things, the CEO of gold Smith advisors. She is an author. She’s a C-suite leader. She’s the co-author of permanence, which is her new book. We’re going to talk about that, that she wrote with Marshall Goldsmith. And here she is to spend some time with us. So welcome, Lisa, how are you? Peter, I am terrific. Thanks so much for having me. Really fun. There’s so much I wanna touch on here because I had so much fun when we were prepping for this. So before we get into sort of my stuff, I wanna get into the origin story. Why are we here and how the heck did this happen?

Lisa Broderick Well, we’re here because Permanence came out about a week ago on February 10th, but going way back in 2023, Dr. Marshall Goldsmith called me up and he said, Lisa, I want you to do a research project for me. Now, if you know Marshall, he is the originator of executive coaching around the world, the preeminent CEO coach in the world. And so that research project could have been just about anything. But of course, I said, Marshall, What do you have in mind? And he told me what he wanted. He wanted me to call a cohort of his leader clients who are among the most influential leaders in the world for a year, every weekday, and ask them a set of simple questions about their life that Marshall had devised, and then also some questions that they may want for themselves in order to affect behavior change. And so these leaders agreed to do it, and I did it. And for the next year, I chased them around through trips, and snowstorms, and weather events, and delays, and sometimes dinners with heads of state to ask them their six daily questions, as Marshall calls them. And what we learned was very interesting to follow these leaders for a year. Couple months in, and by the way, I was keeping the data, I’m keeping the data. I’m an economist by training. Now I’m working in executive coaching, so I’m really interested in this project. So I’m keeping the data and so he’s keeping the data one is a number one is closer to no. And a number 10 is closer. So every day I’m keep the data. I’m calling them. I just listen, no judgment. If they needed to talk, then I’ve, then I would talk with them. And, uh, throughout the whole year. So the first couple of months all over the map, you could imagine, right? All, all noise, no signal. We start to get to about six months and they start to coalesce all of the numbers for the entire cohort at least above five. So five would be halfway. Then we’re going more and more and we’re continuing to do it and they’re hanging in there and I’m hanging in there. And we get to almost close to a year and the scores all coalesced around nearly perfect. Of course anybody can have a day, right, a day that’s not great. But mostly for the six questions and the questions about their lives, they were coalescing around it and it was phenomenal. So Marshall and I started to look at the data and then we asked the cohort, we asked the individual leaders, what their experience was. And that’s where the really remarkable, remarkable results came. So first of all, we asked them, when you’re doing your daily questions and you’re thinking about it throughout the day, why do you think your scores got better over the year? And they all in a different word said the same thing. They said, I changed my behavior in real time because I knew you were gonna call me.

Peter Winick Stay there a minute, though, because, yeah, stay right, so, I mean, this is the same theory of, you know, why do we hire a trainer when we know what to do at the gym, right? It’s because, well, we’re paying somebody and they’re going to be there at 5:30 in the morning and we can’t let them down. But I want to go back a little bit. So when you read Marshall, definitely Marshall’s work and lots of other thought, yeah. It all makes sense on the page, right. So Marshall has written about this before. Here’s the sick question, these six questions, ask yourself these six questions every day, or have a coach to like, so this is not a new concept per se. And I love that the moving this from totally theoretical, like this could have been an abstract, like, Hey, here’s an idea to your deep in the, I couldn’t get deeper than in the applied than you did of chasing them down during dinner and saying, Hey you know, it’s Lisa, you got to eat again. You do your best to be happy today. Yeah. Right. Right. Did you do your to be happier? Okay, so one is. You know, it’s just really, really cool to go from, okay, this actually works. And there is something in this age of technology and AI, you can easily, you know I could probably do an agentic AI and create the app version of this in nine seconds today, but different because it’s easy for me to disappoint my phone. That’s a thing. It is, it is not a person. But after. You know, hearing from you every day, I’m not going to blow you off. I’m going to look at that on my caller ID, you know, voicemail, whatever. So yeah, talk about the. I love what you learned, but what’s the impact of maybe a case study drawn the impact these folks in terms of where they started, what’s different, how it impacted their life, their business, how they lead, how they matter.

Lisa Broderick Well, it’s great you brought up a trainer because the same dynamic exists there. And that is people don’t wanna suffer the shame and embarrassment of not having tried their best, but that gets back to the genius of the questions. So it’s not just that you’re doing it, it’s what the questions are. So years ago, Marshall with his daughter, Dr. Kelly Goldsmith, who’s a wonderful professor at Vanderbilt University, she and Marshall developed this approach and it was her idea. Marshall was working on daily questions and she said, why don’t you change them into, You know, instead of Was I happy today? Did I smile during meetings? You know, was I kind to coworkers? We did an active question. An active question is, did I do my best to smile today? Did I do best to be kind to co-workers? And here’s the difference. The difference is, at the end of the day, I could have said, did you smile? Were you happy? All this kind of stuff. And they may have said yes, no, yes, no, and we move on to the next day. But if the question is did you do your best? They didn’t want to suffer the shame and embarrassment of having to admit they hadn’t even tried.

Peter Winick So stay there, because that brings to light some of the beauty that is the art and science of only something an organizational site could do, right? Because you might say, well, the question is, did you smile today during the meeting? And you go, yes, smile. But was it a smirk? Was it like a really like, did your do your best? That could only mean one thing because you weren’t in the room. They could, they could lie to you. Why would they? Right. But like, it forces someone to be introspective. The nuance of a great question from, from an org site perspective is the difference between sort of an outcome and a, I smiled at the meeting, but yeah, it wasn’t my best. I was a little cranky or I was a little distracted or whatever. That’s, it’s, that’s a, just a really cool example of why we hire the right people to write music.

Lisa Broderick Well, and also in framing the question that way, it removes the failure from it. You know, it’s not success oriented, it’s sustainable behavior focused. So that’s number one. And number two, life happens. So you’re doing your best to smile in meetings and you spill coffee all over yourself, you know, in the morning and then you got coffee on your shirt all day. And so did you smile in all your meetings? No, under the circumstances, did you do your best? Yeah, you did. You made the best of it, which is something Marshall would say. And so it just lets people, it lets people have life happen to them while actually creating sustainable behavior change.

Peter Winick So I’m wondering if during this process, how many people were you calling?

Lisa Broderick I wouldn’t be able to reveal that it was a cohort of leaders and names have been changed to protect the changed, the people who achieved permanence.

Peter Winick Okay, so there’s a decent amount of people. A decent amount people. Yeah. Were there patterns that either you picked up and brought to their attention, or they picked up? So it could be like, hey, Peter, when I call you on Fridays, you’re particularly grumpy or everything, you know, I call on Fridays and I know you have your staff meeting on Fridays. And that’s something that you typically, it stresses you out or whatever. Or the folks, some of the folks come to those own realizations of the patterns that they

Lisa Broderick Have a great day. Well, you’re absolutely right. And permanence and the daily questions is all about noticing. Right. When you notice your behavior, you have agency, right? Awareness gives you the opportunity to change. And so yes, we talked about patterns. Mondays are typically not great. Fridays are better, right. It’s things you hear all the time about the work week. But there were things that happened in their lives with regularity that we could relate back to the data. And then because they notice, And when you noticed, you’re able to choose actively, proactively, and so they were able to choose, oh, this is Monday, I’m going to do X, or my staff meeting’s on Thursday, I’m gonna do this. And it helped them, it fostered even greater behavior change because they noticed the consistent small behaviors and the patterns that resulted in either them becoming the person they wanted to be in that moment or not.

Peter Winick And I’m assuming for most of these folks, they have the agency to make those changes. Like maybe we better to pull the staff meeting to it the morning versus the afternoon or whatever the.

Lisa Broderick Yeah, but you can’t change Monday, right? Or you know, you’re and you’re let’s say you’re commuting to work, right. So you get there on a Tuesday and leave on a Thursday because you’re flying somewhere to actually go to an office. So there are things that were immutable about their behavior. But again, back to noticing, it doesn’t matter what you notice, just notice gives you the power to choose change.

Peter Winick So I want to talk a little bit about the book, so it’s achieved some status already in its short period. So Amplify is your publisher. I’ll tell you a little because I’m always fascinated around the process, right? So how did this get written in terms of, were you and Marshall doing jam sessions? Was it most like.

Lisa Broderick Well, yeah. So after that, so the data came in, that was 2023 to 2024 that year. And then we did something because we’re both data scientists. Half of the cohort stopped and the other half continued. Oh, yes, what happened? The cohort who continued to do it remained better. And the cohort which didn’t do it self-reported that they did not. So that was very interesting. So having having all that real world data, and it was leaders, and having done AB, after the fact, Marshall said, we’re writing a book. We’re gonna write a book about the application of daily questions for this research study and what people can get out of it. And so again, I went off to another great adventure, writing the book. And so it was so easy to write, it almost wrote itself. Marshall talks a lot about this in his work. I mean, he has so many different things he talks about in relationship, in relation to sustainable behavior change and also his other famous works. But some of them just needed to be included in the book. So for instance, plan or you versus do or you. Plan or you, I get up in the morning, it’s the first day of the week, it’s first hour of the day, the first of the month or day of year, and I have big plans, and this was me. Big plans, I’m gonna do this, I have a planner, I’m going to put it down, I’m make all my things that I’m doing to do. Take a nap, I am tired. And then the cat’s sick. And then my kid came home from school. And then, you know, my partner’s spouse has to fly to Germany, whatever happens, right? And there goes your plans out the window. The do or you is different. So the book includes all of these different works, all of this different thoughts and thought processes that Marshall’s had over the years in one single place so that is literally a compendium of every single angle you could look at doing sustainable behavior change through daily questions.

Peter Winick So let me ask you a question then. So one of the things I’m taking away from this is A, it works, right? And if you stop it, it works if you do it. It works if you do it, right. If you stop and it stopped working, right, we know the value of the carefully crafted questions, right could a couple of people read the book and say, Hey, let’s be question buddies or something and do this on the road.

Lisa Broderick That is a great question, and the answer, of course, is yes. So it’s one thing. So the book starts out and it lays out, first of all, it tells the origin story, which is hilariously funny. And then it starts talking about what these questions are, and then it goes deep into the questions and gets people doing their own questions. Then we talk about how to actually do it in daily life. And in daily live, someone to do this with who understands you and who will reliably call you, and if they’re smart. You will, on that conversation, you’ll do questions with them, which is the buddy system that you just started and you can also do if you have a, if you have a professional coach, this is an outstanding activity to do with a professional coach. Imagine the behaviors you’re working on with the coach. Let’s say you did a 360 and it covered some behaviors that you really want to, uh, to make sustainable in your life in order to change that coach knows it, they go into daily questions, the daily questions are asked, they follow you over time. If you fall down or falter or not that great that day, you can talk about it with them. So there are a lot of ways to do it.

Peter Winick And there’s also technology. The follow-up to that then. So the folks that you were calling had the benefit of not just a world-renowned coach, but a data scientist, like, okay, if I had to design who would be the perfect person on the planet to do this, it’s probably you. Maybe there’s a whole new plug-in.

Lisa Broderick That occurred to me also. 

Peter Winick Right. Then the question would be if it’s just a buddy of mine and we’re both committed to each other and we don’t take these things lightly, whatever, do I have to document the data on every call? Like, do I to do all that stuff?

Lisa Broderick You know, it’s best, I’ll tell you. And so we have, first of all, in the back of the book is a blank journal, get started right away. We are both people who, as Marsha would say, what are you waiting for? Get started. So, you know, and the scale from one to 10 is very useful. You can do it on a spreadsheet, you can do on a piece of paper. You wanna know two things. Did you do it? Did you your daily questions? That’s all that matters. Did you get better or worse on whatever the question was? So in that sense, you do wanna keep some of the data. The 1 to 10 scale is so you can be more precise, because we were doing it for a reason, and we recommend people be precise. It’s so easy. They’re blank on the website. You can download blank pages.

Peter Winick It doesn’t, how would I put this? So of the questions, my guess would be, but I could be wrong, that it becomes fairly obvious, fairly quickly in the process. What are the things I need to focus on? Or does it bounce all over the place, depending on the kind of day or week or month I have.

Lisa Broderick Well, it bounces all over. Remember, there are six foundational questions. Did I do my best to be happy? Did I did my best define meaning? Did I my best set clear goals? Did I do best to make progress toward those goals? Did I to my best build personal relationships today? And did I do to my to be fully engaged? So those are the foundational questions, and after that, the questions, I mean, I have heard some just remarkably profound questions. Did I best to forgive my parents? Right. Did I do my best to forgive myself? Right, right. Did I make angry or destructive comments? I mean, people went deep. And those and so for any of those questions, let’s say they’re, you know, nine or 12, they’re six foundational, they have six of their own. Those, they could be all over the map. And Marshall and

Peter Winick I just want to understand process. So the six foundation, everybody gets those. Yes. Variable ones that I would get to pick might come from a 360 or might come something I’ve identified as an area that I want to work on and yours would be different than mine.

Lisa Broderick Yes, and I continue to do this work today with clients for whom I’m a coach. And so we develop the questions. We pretty much review the questions every six months in order to change them. Because when you start getting tens consistently, move on, grow

Peter Winick Right. Interesting. Anything else relative to because it’s that you know the answer that you gave me like the book just wrote itself is not the typical answer I get…

Lisa Broderick Nice job. Yeah?

Peter Winick Yep.

Lisa Broderick Marshall is a gift, right? He’s just so much material and he’s just, so he enjoys life and he is literally a treasure. And I think about the book, the sounds, you know, and I’m the, you know, the co-author. The book is a treasure, the treasure in the sense. It’s very, it’s small and compact. You can do it right away. It is all of Marshall’s teaching. Marshall and I are speaking it, speaking in it, in the first person. So, we’re literally addressing the reader, and the audiobook is hilarious because it’s the both of us. So really fun for the audiobook. Right, but you know that here and here’s why we wanted to do it and why marshal want really wanted to address it So this this process of permanence and daily questions. It’s about a problem that doesn’t get talked about enough in leadership circles Leadership conversations are all about how to achieve success, right? Almost none of them are about how, to stay the person you were after you got successful none So then what do you do? And of course, you’re always striving and growing, but then you’re going backwards. Sustainable success has not been a topic in leadership conversations. And that’s what permanence is.

Peter Winick No, and I like that framing because a lot of times like, okay, if the objective is X, make a company public, do this, grow the market share, whatever. It’s almost implied for a lot of type A leaders at by any means necessary at any cost within reason, right? So then they get there, they get the brass ring and they’re exhausted. They’ve had a heart attack. They’re 50 pounds overweight. Everybody that works for them thinks they’re like, wow, there’s a lot of damage in the wake. Like that’s not real permanence, right. That’s not.

Lisa Broderick No, it’s not. It’s the opposite. And so even, so let’s talk about you. So something we talk about is identity drift. Let’s talk about you and your growth just as an example. So you have this wonderful show and as your audience grows, so does the noise in your life, right? You have expectations you have to meet. There’s validation. There’s all kinds of things that happen. Eventually for everyone, they subtly shift who you are. Into someone that you may not want to be, as you said, 50 pounds overweight, having a heart attack. And it’s not dramatic. It’s one small compromise at a time. You didn’t eat right today. You didn’t spend the evening with your kids and you promised to, you worked all weekend. And so this book is really about that. It’s incremental. It is addressing the incremental creep that happens to all of us because of our success. Right. That we can not only stay that way but become more successful because we have a replicable tool.

Peter Winick Yeah. And I think it’s the, this is sort of the, the cost of success or the trade off of yeah. Certain times we have to sacrifice certain things. There’s only so many hours in the day, but you can’t permanently be in sacrifice other in order to achieve an objective or an OKR or something.

Lisa Broderick No, we all but we all do and actually the book covers what Marshall calls the success culture And the comparison culture wow and the two together are deadly So success culture everybody wants to be successful and where do they see it on social media? And they’re and then what are they doing? They’re comparing themselves, but what goes on social media in many cases some fictional version of someone’s self where they are Absolutely flawless in their complexion and everybody’s beautiful and nothing bad ever happens because who post that And all, and suddenly you are, I, we, everyone is comparing themselves to them. It gets you really down. And so you just, you know, you can’t even become that successful person. And so knowing, knowing these things, noticing these things and taking action. Because when you have choice, you have agency in order to not fall into that trap of comparison culture and not fall in to the trap of success culture and be your own person. And then permanence allows you to define who that person is that you want to be and then become it.

Peter Winick Fantastic. This has been great. I appreciate you taking time out of your day to come on board and share your journey and your story. Absolutely. I wish you permanent success with permanent.

Lisa Broderick I hope so. It’s aspirational. Every title should be aspirational, right, Peter?

Peter Winick Yeah, I love that. I love that. Thanks for everything, Lisa. Good to see you. Thank you. You too. Bye bye.

Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter at thoughtleadershipleverage.com, and please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.

The post Permanence: How Leaders Sustain Success Without Losing Themselves | Lisa Broderick | 714 appeared first on Thought Leadership Leverage.

How professional speakers turn thought leadership into lasting revenue.

This episode explores the strategy behind professional speaking, from speaker reels and client prep to shorter keynotes, pricing, follow-on opportunities, and staying relevant in a changing market.

What separates a paid speaker from a true professional in the thought leadership business?

In this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, Peter Winick sits down with Andy Freed to unpack what it really takes to build a sustainable speaking business. Andy brings the perspective of a speaker bureau veteran, entrepreneur, founder of Virtual Inc, and author of Lead Like the Boss. His lens is practical, direct, and grounded in what clients actually buy.

Andy makes one thing clear: being good on stage is not enough. It is table stakes. Great speakers need sharp video, clear market positioning, and proof that they can deliver value in different formats. Big stages matter. So do boardrooms, executive off-sites, and virtual environments.

The conversation digs into what happens before, during, and after the keynote. Andy explains why the “gig” starts long before the speaker walks on stage. Every client call, every prep conversation, every detail matters. The best thought leaders do not show up and perform a canned talk. They listen. They adapt. They speak the client’s language.

Peter and Andy also explore how a keynote can become the opening move in a larger thought leadership business. That might include consulting, advisory work, training, leadership development, or deeper client partnerships. Andy’s answer is direct: nail the keynote first. Deliver so much value that the client naturally asks, “What else do you do?”

They also tackle shorter keynotes, changing audience expectations, the role of books in speaker fees, and the pressure on thought leaders to stay relevant. Andy reminds us that longevity in speaking requires renewal. Your core ideas may be evergreen. But your examples, applications, and relevance need to evolve with the world.

For speakers, authors, consultants, and experts who want to turn thought leadership into revenue, this episode is a practical look at what separates amateurs from professionals.

Three Key Takeaways:

• Great speaking is only the starting point. Professional speakers also need strong positioning, clear marketing, and credible video that proves they can deliver.
• The keynote starts before the stage. Prep calls, client language, audience needs, and customization can make or break the outcome.
• Relevance drives longevity. Thought leaders need to refresh their examples, applications, and delivery so their core ideas stay connected to what clients face today.

Enjoyed Andy Freed’s take on building a professional speaking business?

Then listen to Peter’s conversation with Keld Jensen.

Both episodes go beyond the keynote. Andy focuses on positioning, video, client prep, and creating value before and after the stage. Keld adds a global view on standing out, using books strategically, and building demand in the market.

Together, they show what buyers value, what speakers need to prove, and how thought leaders can turn expertise into sustainable revenue.

Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you’re joining us on the podcast, which is leveraging thought leadership. Today is going to be fun. My guest is Andy Freed. Andy just wrote a book called Lead Like the Boss, which is a reference to Bruce Springsteen that we’ll get into a minute. But he’s got another gig, right? Like so his main gig is he is the chairman of his company, right? He’s got 20 plus years of experience. He’s gotta be in government. Harvard University, Master of Public Policy. So interesting fellow, but somehow, amidst everything he’s got going on, he’s like, I gotta write a leadership book based on Bruce Springsteen. So I had to take advantage of this opportunity. So welcome, Andy, welcome aboard.

Andy Freed Thanks for having me here.

Peter Winick Cool. So first, let’s start with some of the back story. When you and I spoke a little while ago, you mentioned how many Bruce shows you’ve seen. So this isn’t a theoretical. This is an applause.

Andy Freed How many times have you seen The Boss?

Peter Winick But about 95 shows. Got it, got it. And what was it, you know, what was the spark? Why did you say, I gotta write a book about this and here’s how I need to frame it. Because there’s been lots of books written around Bruce in terms of just movies. There’s like, this isn’t the first time somebody’s noticed that this is an interesting gentleman. Right, but tell me your take on this.

Andy Freed So my take, I’ll be honest, a little bit of self-preservation. So I was coming home from a show in Phoenix, Arizona, in about, I think it was 23, 24, and said, geez, I got to justify that. I just went out to this thing, um, you know, because, uh, lo and behold, there was a client meeting there, but I stuck around for the show. So I got, I should write something about why I was there because I learned a little something when I was, there wrote something up on LinkedIn that Wind up. Not really going viral but getting pretty picked up by a lot of people who said this is interesting stuff because I wrote about just the lessons I had learned from watching the way Bruce interacted with his band and watching the ways he interacts with the audience.

Peter Winick So stay there for a minute. So I think that’s, you’re going through that quickly, like of course I wrote that up. LinkedIn and other platforms, you know, with Substack, whatever it is you might be using, are great places to throw stuff up just to see if there’s a there there, right? So you didn’t say, I’m gonna write this little piece on LinkedIn, and then that’ll turn into a book, and then I’m going to do this, that, and the other thing you’re like, let me just share this, right. And then, you now, there was validation. And lo and behold, there’s some.

Andy Freed And it went on, absolutely.

Peter Winick Yeah, so that tells you that you struck a nerve because it’s probably not what people typically expected to come out from Andy Right based on your brush what you’re doing. Whatever’s you’re like, why is this dude riffing about? You know a springsteen show and what he observed. So anyway, I think that’s a good takeaway for folks to say Well, here’s something I’m doing. It doesn’t dead-on fit into what people expected me, right? But let me throw it out there and let’s just

Andy Freed And that was what social media was supposed to be. Yeah. It was supposed be social. I mean, idea that you could throw out ideas and actually have some dialog about stuff. It’s turned into something else, but there’s still elements where you can do that on social media, for sure. You’re absolutely right there. Very cool. So now, how do you determine what the gist of the book is? Yeah, so that got it started and then I started looking deeper at it. So what first drew me to it? I’ll say kind of the first lesson I kick away. Um, and one of my first things that I, that I still love so much about Bruce shows was as the kind of example of Bruce’s leader is, you know, Bruce at the end of a show, you on the last tour, he played with 19 people on stage while at the of every show. He retreats to the back of the stage and as they’re leaving, leaving the stage to the end the night, he shakes their hands, whisper something in your ear to thank them for a good show. And that’s whether it was. You know, Gary Calland, who he’s been playing with since 1973, or there’s people on the tour last time, they just started playing with this tour. Um, or he thanks every one of them. And what they say is for 10 seconds every night, Bruce Springsteen makes me feel like the most important musician on the face of the earth.

Peter Winick Let’s stay there a minute as a business guy. You’re a chairman. Number one, a one to 19 ratio is not ideal, right? It’s been taught that it’s one to eight, one to 10, one to 12, whatever. And I’m assuming that just because there’s 19 people on the stage, there’s probably another multiple of that doing things. If you don’t, no, no question probably another 50 or I don’t know whatever the math is, but it’s not 20. So The fact that he acknowledged each of those 19 and could have said, well, the chorus, Sally leads the chorus and there’s three ladies in the chorus. Like I just talked to Sally. Those are not my, there’s a skip jumps or whatever. To go to each one and acknowledge them. Now we know this as leaders, right? This is not a new revelation. But when you saw that firsthand and said, oh, wow, because when we make up our own.

Andy Freed To see, you have to see that he also gets that, you know, Jake Clemens gets a hug, somebody else gets a high five, somebody else gets something whispered in his ear. He knows what matters to them. But like, imagine if like, when you hear them say, like, I feel like the most important musician on the face of the earth. Imagine if your whole company felt that way every day because of something you

Peter Winick Well, the other thing I would say is most rock stars, not most, but many, and I think this applies to most CEOs or many, ultimately become divas. You know, when you’re the CEO, you’re not worried about the Uber, the car’s waiting downstairs for you. Somebody took care of your lunch.

Andy Freed I’m the first one to leave the stage. Yeah. Right. I’m gonna leave the state before you guys do and drink and I need all the refreshments.

Peter Winick And we could justify, and this even goes to organizations where I’ve even got my own elevator and nobody goes in my elevator. I have my own bathroom in my fancy, like, so there’s this diva-ness around CEOs. And we can talk about why that is, their time is valuable and all that sort of stuff, but it’s the opposite of sort of rock star, or it’s similar to rock star behavior, but it is different than what you saw with Bruce.

Andy Freed And what Bruce gets also is, you know, it’s a hundred years ago, but William James, who was the father of American psychiatry wrote the deepest human need is the need to be appreciated. Yeah. Think about that deeper than sex, deeper than money, deeper than power, the deepest need we have is that need to be appreciated, you know, so that idea and understanding that and understanding, just show an appreciation to somebody so important, just that moment of saying, you know I see what you do and it matters. Yeah, like how powerful that could be for a leader. So that’s what started it for me was realizing that like, okay, that’s an idea worth spreading.

Peter Winick So now you decide, now you throw it up on LinkedIn, right? And you’re like, there might be a there there. At what point did you say, or did somebody influence you to say, okay, let’s do a book? That there’s a potential for a book here.

Andy Freed I think seeing the response to LinkedIn page, which wasn’t like, it wasn’t like a million people responded, but a lot of people who I respected responded saying, well, this is kind of interesting. Uh, was there more here? Um, and just to your point on LinkedIn, you’re throwing it out there and now you’re getting that response and thought, well maybe there is more here and you know, maybe I should start thinking about it more. So then it was when I kept going to shows, I just kept thinking about it more and I’m still enjoying the show. But I’m also like looking at other little things and thinking about what else is going on.

Peter Winick Okay, give me an example of a nuance or something that you picked up because you went in with this sort of lens of, hey, I’m not just here to have a couple beers and enjoy the show. I have a theory here and I might want to learn something. So what are the

Andy Freed I think just watching Bruce’s energy on stage and recognizing that, you know, Bruce at any moment is the pinnacle of energy in the arena. There is nobody that cares more or has more energy in the arena than he does. And contrast that with how many times have you watched somebody just phoned it in for a PowerPoint presentation?

Peter Winick But stay there. So I mean, I think we could even extrapolate this to performers, whether it’s Broadway, theater, whatever, where you’re like, somebody says, oh, you went to see so-and-so, and it was a phone it in. Like, yeah, I got to see a band that I’ve loved for 30 years. Was it, I’m disappointed, right? I can’t say they didn’t do a good job. It’s not like they slung the notes off cue or the music was bad or the, you know, can’t nail it down to something like that, but it’s like. Yeah, and you know tomorrow they’re going to be in Pittsburgh and just doing the thing, right?

Andy Freed Yeah, but by contrast, Bruce’s play Born to Run Live, 1,878 times in his career. And every time he brings it his all, because he knows that there’s two kinds of people in the audience. People that have seen him 95 times and are comparing him to the other times they’ve seen him and seeing as he lost a step, and people are seeing him for the first time and want to see what all the fuss is about. So he brings and he gives it his All. And if he’s at a nine in energy, the audience can be at an eight. You know, but if he comes in at a five, you can’t expect the audience to be at an eight or a 10, um, that’s just not going to happen. And that’s what I think a lot of leaders forget when they’re presenting or when they were talking to a group is they’ve got to be the pinnacle of how much somebody cares about that material. You know? If I’m sitting there and saying like, well, it’s the staff meeting. I do the staff getting every month. I’m just going to phone it in. I can’t except my staff to be any more excited than I am. You know they’re going to come if I’m at a fire, they’re coming in at four. And that’s something which Bruce gets, is that I’m gonna bring it my all so that the audience can hit that level as well with me.

Peter Winick All right. So I want to go in a little bit of a different direction. And that’s this, you’re a business guy. So you’re CEO of a company, right? How big is the company? Uh, virtual and no. How, and how big is that? How many, we’re about 200 people, right. So this is a significant company. There are a lot of demands on your time. There’s a lot things that you can be doing. What are you hoping happens or what are some of the outcomes that you’re hoping because the book is fairly recent in terms of its pub date.

Andy Freed What do you, what’s your hopes? Well, what I would say is more than anything, what I’ve tried to kind of build my career out of the company is the notion that the job of leaders is to create more leaders. You know, that’s like job one of leadership is create more leader. So I’ve been trying to do that in my company and I’m hoping the book’s a chance to do that outside of the country as well. Some people can read it and learn a little something about leadership. They can hone their game. They can up kind of how they’re doing and I am creating more leaders Man, that is mission accomplished for me as a leader. Okay, so how does the-

Peter Winick So explain to me how the book helps with that, by reading it?

Andy Freed Yeah, so the book really follows the arc of a Springsteen show and talks about the leadership lessons that comes out of each kind of moment of it, and gives people practical tools and tips that they can do and that they bring into their own leadership. Because I’m not a big theory guy. I’m looking to write a big, you know, Harvard Business Reviews kind of story on here’s how I hope things work. I’m big on, again, I’m a roll up your sleeves, you get a hoodie wearing CEO. That wants to get things done. And if I began done faster, great. You know, so a lot of what the book’s trying to do is draw a very short line between that theory and practice. Yeah. Somebody can leave with some things they can really do.

Peter Winick Would be kind of fun if the next time I went to a brew show in the merch section, other than overpriced sweatshirts, there was a book section. That would be good. That would pretty cool. I’d be all for it. Now, how, if at all, might it benefit you professionally and or the business?

Andy Freed I mean, for me, it’s a little bit of this. It’s a, you know, what we’re doing right now. It’s exposure. You know, so our business is a business that runs tensor on in the background of a lot of organizations. Okay. Um, you, so. Our business is that we run technology consortia and standards bodies. So we work with a lot multi-company companies that are multi company organizations that are trying to get something done. For example, we worked with a group that was trying to create the standard for mobile payment, which is about 300 companies coming together to make that work. Okay. Nobody knows we exist. We’re virtual. That’s why we named our company that we were, we exist in the background. Right. So the book is a little bit of a stepping into the foreground of this is what we do and this is our secret sauce, you know, so it’s an attempt to kind of drive, drive some exposure for the work that we’ve done.

Peter Winick So stay there for a minute. If you’re in the background, I would imagine your competitors are in the background. So in a, and I don’t mean this in the wrong way, we’re all being commoditized. So a lot of the work that you do is a commodity. So now if I’m looking at three providers, and one of them’s got this kind of out there, maybe not out there but CEO that sees the world a little differently and wrote a book on Springsteen, it’s going to at least get me to pause and go, Well, that’s interesting. Tell me more.

Andy Freed I’ll say the people that pause on that are also frankly the people I want to work with Yeah, and that’s something I learned along the way is like well You know if somebody looks at that and says that guy’s a little out there, and I don’t really want to Talk to the springs. You know that that crazy bald guy that likes springsteen. Hey, that’s great I saved myself some time because that was gonna be a miserable working relationship. You over

Peter Winick Right. So I’ve never seen an RFP that says, and, you know, attach the manuscript of the book your CEO wrote about a rock star, right? Like, I’ve never seen that, right. But I’d like the self-selection piece, right, if they’re only looking for the lowest price or the service, you know, the things that are the things, then that’s kind of going to be a boring relationship. But I would imagine it’s definitely a conversation starter. There’s lessons there, you know, and I don’t know if you’re doing this, but you could offer a potential client So, hey. I’d be happy to come in and talk to your team about this, if those resonate.

Andy Freed Absolutely. And look, I go back to years ago, I worked for Senator Paul Song, that’s when he was running for president. He remembers when he first got out of college, he went to the Peace Corps. Yeah. And he was one of the first Peace Corps classes and he went after the Peace Corps and interviewed at a law firm and they said, what’s this Peace Corps thing and described it. And he said it was, you know, the greatest experience of your life. And they said well, I guess we can overlook that. I know from the law path. And he walked out of the interview and said, this isn’t for me. And I remind my kids when they interview that like your interview in the company too, like whether or not it works for you and, you know, with clients, it’s the same thing of like, if somebody looks at this and says,

Peter Winick backwards on that right so if there’s a self-selection process that goes on on both sides of the equation I would guess that your retention rates of clients are higher your margins are good your business is stable you don’t get hit often with our biggest

Andy Freed That’s more than anything, life is more fun. Your work is more fulfilling. You work with people that wanna work with you, that you wanna work, that are your kind of people. Life’s too short to do anything else.

Peter Winick Fantastic. Any other surprises that have come to you either from the process of writing a book, because that’s usually a place where light bulbs go off to people, and or the phase you’re in now, which is sort of helping, you know, supporting the launch and getting the book out into the world.

Andy Freed I want a couple of things. One of the things that in terms of the process of writing a book is it really forces you to understand why you know the things you know, and that’s sometimes a really hard thing to figure out at 57 years old of, you know when somebody, you went, when you say, for example, you’ll lead, geez, linear messaging doesn’t work, but you’re talking points aren’t as effective as, as other ways to approach things. And then somebody will why. Well, I just know that I’ve been at this for a long time. Well, okay, tell me why, give me an example. So the books really forces you to go back to the fundamentals of why you know the things you know.

Peter Winick So questioning a belief and did you uncover some that said, you know, I always thought X, but on further reflection, I’m actually wrong and need to reconsider and maybe Y is true.

Andy Freed Sometimes it’s that or sometimes it’s that, well, I didn’t really understand what was behind that. You know, if you can’t go back to what we’re saying earlier about appreciation, you know, going back to well, it’s not just that it’s really nice to shake somebody’s hands. It’s that it the deepest human needs somebody has and that there’s science behind that and there’s a lot of things within the book that I also will talk about some of the brain science and neuroscience that goes behind some of this, you know, that just the idea of. You know, why am I more at ease listening to Bruce lyrics in the car? Then I get tense when my daughter has control of the radio and Taylor Swift comes on, even though I like some of her stuff, but familiarity also is something which, you know, it goes back to brain science.

Peter Winick Well, there’s a comfort it’s it’s sparking memories that you might have had hanging out with your buddies on the shore or whatever Right, like there’s connection to it that you probably don’t have to Taylor Swift as a 57 year old

Andy Freed That’s as simple as understanding that familiarity in our reptilian brains told us that we weren’t under threat. And when you hear something different, your immediate reaction is, this is unfamiliar. I wonder if there’s a threat out there. And just understanding that and how that can give you greater comfort. That goes also to, for leaders, understanding that that’s why it’s so important to repeat messaging that would be helpful. Same message the same way seven times, people pick up on it, but they get comfortable with it in a way that they don’t if I change it every time. And I might think changing it every times is keeping it fresh for them, but really I’m adding to their anxiety and adding to the uncertainty. Unintentionally. Unintensionally. Right. Unproductively.

Peter Winick Right, which is not a good thing to do. All right, so I’m just gonna, just for the record, I’m hoping there’s not a sequel to this book on the Swifty School of Management or something.

Andy Freed I’m going I’m not quite a yeah, I’ve been to the Taylor Swift show. I got to the era’s show with my daughter I had my friendship bracelet on Okay, but I wouldn’t say I’m all in yet as a Swiftie.

Peter Winick Good. I would say ditto. I don’t think we’re the demographics, right?

Andy Freed I’ll say this, the line for the men’s room has never been shorter than when I went to the Iris tour at Gillette stadium. Um, I mean, that was really the, you know, the cherry on the Sunday, if at all.

Peter Winick So on that note, I appreciate your time. This has been great, and thanks for sharing your story, Andy. Appreciate it.

Andy Freed Here has been a lot of fun.

Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter at thoughtleadershipleverage.com, and please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.

The post The Business Behind the Keynote | Andy Freed | 713 appeared first on Thought Leadership Leverage.

How thought leaders can use preparation, positioning, and client experience to grow their business

This episode explores how organizations can turn scattered expertise into a structured thought leadership platform that builds trust, sharpens market positioning, and supports business growth.

What separates a great speaker from a true thought leadership business?

In this episode, Peter Winick sits down with Martin Perelmuter, co-founder of Speakers Spotlight and a longtime leader in the professional speaking industry, to unpack what it really takes to build a sustainable speaking platform. Not just a great talk. Not just a strong stage presence. A real business.

Martin makes the case that excellence on stage is only the beginning. It is table stakes. The real leverage comes from positioning, preparation, market demand, and the ability to turn every engagement into a high-trust client experience.

They explore why video is now one of the most important assets for any speaker or thought leader. A strong speaker reel is no longer optional. It is proof. It helps buyers sell you internally. It shows range. It shows confidence. And it shows whether you can deliver in front of 2,000 people or 20 executives in a boardroom.

Peter and Martin also dig into the moments most speakers overlook. The pre-event call. The language of the client’s industry. The follow-up. The difference between serving the event and trying to sell too soon. Martin’s view is clear: nail the keynote first. Create so much value that the client asks, “What else do you do?”

The conversation also challenges common assumptions about fees, books, and fame. A bestseller can help. A platform can help. But the market ultimately decides. Demand, value, and outcomes matter more than credentials alone.

For thought leaders, the biggest takeaway is this: speaking is not just performance. It is a business discipline. The best speakers keep refining their content, updating their relevance, and connecting their evergreen ideas to what leaders are facing right now.

Three Key Takeaways:

• Great speaking is table stakes. A strong business requires more. Martin emphasizes that stage presence matters, but it is only the starting point. Thought leaders also need clear positioning, strong marketing, credible video, and a professional client experience.
• The keynote begins before the speaker steps on stage. Every touchpoint shapes the client’s confidence. The pre-event call, industry language, audience context, and preparation all determine whether the talk feels generic or deeply relevant.
• Relevance is what keeps a thought leader in demand. Evergreen ideas still matter, but speakers must continually refresh their content. They need to connect their core expertise to today’s issues, including AI, remote work, economic uncertainty, and rapid change.

If Martin Perelmuter’s episode got you thinking about speaking as more than a performance, Jeff Kavanaugh’s episode takes that idea inside the enterprise.

Both conversations focus on what it takes to turn expertise into a real thought leadership platform. Martin looks at the professional speaking business. Jeff explores how organizations build institutional thought leadership that earns trust, creates influence, and supports growth.

Listen to Jeff Kavanaugh’s episode to hear how companies can move beyond one-off content and create a disciplined thought leadership function with strategy, structure, and commercial impact.

Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you’re joining us on the podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Martin Perelmuter, and he is an unapologetic idealist. He’s passionate about people and ideas. He’s been in the speaking business for about 30 plus years. He was a co-founder at Speaker Spotlight. Before that, he was a corporate lawyer, but we’ll let him get away with that. He’s got interesting views on the speaking industry and is a past president and served on the board of governors of the International Association of Speakers Bureau. So here’s somebody that sits sort of at the center of what’s going on in the speaking world. So glad to have you board today, Martin.

Martin Perelmuter Peter, thanks so much for the invite.

Peter Winick So I’ve got so many questions, and I’m gonna just fire away if I could. So as you know, you probably know better than I, there’s so many people out there that say, hey, I wanna be a speaker, right? And sometimes it’s because their Uncle Melvin told them they’re so funny and they do great wedding toast or whatever. What does it really mean to be professional, to practice the art, the craft, to make a living at speaking? Obviously, there’s the stage piece, but what are the… Give me sort of the totality of what that world actually looks like.

Martin Perelmuter Yeah, I mean, there’s so many parts to it and there’s different types of speakers. You know, there are those who maybe accomplish something great, they won an Olympic gold medal or, you know, climbed the Mount Everest or whatever it is. So they have something that they’ve done that… An Olympic…

Peter Winick An Olympic gold medal like the kid like the American hockey players just

Martin Perelmuter No, we’re not going to go there. I’ll just say, you’re only supposed to have six skaters on the ice, right? Five skaters on the goalie. So when you put seven or eight on it, it doesn’t get called. It’s a little upset. We won’t go there, OK? So there’s people who have some people playing the fame, a platform that gives them the opportunity to speak. But for most mere mortals, it may be thought leadership. It may be experience that people have in their professional careers that. Give them that platform. And people get invited to speak at conferences all the time, as you know, you know often within their job, and those might not be paid events. So yeah, they’re there acting on behalf of a company that they work for. But to go out and speak and charge fees and do that, you know is a different animal. And so, you know obviously you need to be a great speaker and great on stage. You need to have deep subject matter expertise. But there’s other factors as well, you now like any business, you need be able to market what you do. And There’s different pieces to that that, you know, if you want, we can unpack some of that. But yeah, so let’s talk about them.

Peter Winick Because I think everybody and I’m not downplaying the importance of the stage presence but frankly that’s table stakes right if you’re not good if you don’t have a story to tell if there’s not a lesson to be learned yes let’s move on right but the marketing piece is I think we’re a lot of people struggle because a you’re selling you right you become sort of the product and yeah how you position yourself whom in the marketplace your position to yourself Pricing is so weird, right? Because if you and I were to go shopping today and I was to say to you, oh, well, what’s your budget? Right, that’s gonna dictate where we go. But with speaking like, you could have an amazing speaker that’s 10K and someone that’s not as great of a stage president as a multiple of that. So talk about the marketing pieces. If I was starting out today, what would you be advising I think about?

Martin Perelmuter Yeah, I mean, so just take a quick set. I so like you said, the thing you really need is you need to be great on stage. So, so it is table stakes, but it can’t be overstated. How important that is, because I think some of those people think I’m just going to create some great marketing and I’ll figure out the speaking side of it later, you need, you to be. Great. And a lot of speakers, I know have gone out and done dozens, if not hundreds of free engagements just to get their, their reps and right to really hone the craft, but once you’ve got that, once you feel like you’ve got something that’s really excellent. Yeah, if people don’t know about it, it doesn’t really matter. So the most important thing is video these days. That is the most important marketing piece. So, you know, give an example, you know, of clients that I’ve worked with in some cases for years, even decades. And, you know, they trust us. And if we say, hey, you know, this person is great, they’re going to do a great job. They’ll be like, look, I trust you and I know you wouldn’t steer me wrong, but I have a board of directors or I have a committee that I have to convince. And I can’t just say that this guy that I know, you know who we’ve worked with says he’s great, I need to show them something. So having a really strong video presence is super important. And to me, that means, you know, you have a speaker reel. So that might be like three, you know, three minutes long, maybe, you know, 3-4 minutes with just some highlights. It basically tells a little bit of story kind of. It’s sort of like your business card and audition tape rolled into one. Sure. Right. So, and then, you know, having other clips from different talks is helpful too. But without having video footage of you actually on stage delivering a talk, doing what you do, it’s really challenging unless you, you know…

Peter Winick So let me ask you a couple of things about that because over the years there have been various, let’s call them templates that people have followed for the speaker reel, right? Open with you opening, show you how it goes, audience reactions, somebody smiling. There was sort of the piece now. How are you thinking that’s changed as of all post-COVID given that when we talk about speaking. 30, 40% of that might actually be done remotely today. How does a speaker convey, I could do this remotely and do it well, not just the stage stuff?

Martin Perelmuter Yeah, I think, you know, I see a lot of reels these days where, you know, you’ve got some clips of the person on stage, there’s also some of the virtual yet Hawks. Well, and you know that’s important if you, you know, like I’m looking at your background right now, like you have a, a set there, like people have a studio, home studios. And so, you know, being able to show people again, this is my, my remote set up, but we’re, you know, we’re finding about 80, 85% of events are in person now. So, so in person on a stage is definitely the most important thing. And, and, um. You know, having really good quality footage of talks that someone’s done is great and having different talks. So one might be in front of 2000 people and one might be in a smaller board room in front of 20 executives. Like if someone has that versatility, it’s good to, it’s not just about having huge.

Peter Winick Stay there a minute, because I think a lot of speakers get enamored with big, how big the audience is, and clearly, it’s a skill, right? To be able to garner the attention of people and, you know, 1,500 people, not everybody can do that. Right. But, you, know, to what you said was really interesting, showing them flex in a small audience because it might be an executive offsite, it might a VIP event or something, And it’s a different skill to be able to. Because sometimes when it’s like 1,500 people, the audience are almost objects, right? But if you’re in room with. Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s right. So I want to go now. So OK, so we’ve done the marketing. We’ve done. The wraps. We’ve got it all down. Where I see a lot of thought leaders and the speakers sort of miss some opportunity is not having the playbook that says, OK, here’s the here’s the gig. It’s going to happen in such and such a city in such a such a time. What am I doing? 30, 60, 90 days before. What am i doing on site? And what am I. Doing post. Not just to be a great speaker, because again, you have an obligation to do that for your client, but to thread in there ways to grow your business, which may include things that are not just speaking, advisory, consulting, learning, et cetera. So how do you advise a speaker to sort of map out those various touch points?

Martin Perelmuter Yeah, I mean, you know, I come at it from a unique or a specific perspective, which is, you know, we’re really focused on like we’re providing a client with a speaker for, let’s say, a keynote for an hour at a conference. So our whole focus is everything we can do to make sure that that hour is as good as it can possibly be for the audience, for the client. So in terms of the prep, I mean, we obviously that you do pre event calls and so forth. And, you know, there’s a speaker, we work with Peter Katz and he has a saying that before the first pre-event called the client, he says the gig starts now, like that, right? It’s not like when you show up on site, it’s like you have that first event with that client, you don’t do it, you know, running through an airport like on a cell phone or whatever. It’s like, they’re starting to form impressions of you at that moment where you have the first interaction. So, you now, I think it’s really key that every touch point with the client is really high, is high quality as possible. So that by the time you show up on-site they’ve gotten to know you a little bit. Thanks.

Peter Winick Stay there a minute, there’s so much good stuff in that. I think thought leader, you know, listen, they’re on the run, they’re in airplanes, they’re running through there, whatever. It shows a level of, I don’t know, maybe it’s lack of respect on not being professional, whatever, where you’re doing a pre-call, you’re like, hold on, I’m going through TSA, give me a minute. It’s like, wait a minute we’re paying you a lot of money, can we have your undivided, like it’s, if it was a job interview, it’s not a job interviewee, but you’re not making them feel like the most important thing in the world to them, right? And you’re not? Conveying, I’m here to make you, Mr. Or Ms. Client, as successful as you can be, tell me what I need to know because showing up and sort of throwing up, like just doing the same old show, it’s not about the speaker.

Martin Perelmuter Yeah. And that’s the thing. I mean, I think that the, you know, taking the time in those pre-event calls to take the care, to listen, to understand what their needs are, their objectives, and making sure that you’re aligning your message is key. So, you, know, everybody’s busy and has things to do. But if you’re just kind of doing it like on the fly, it sort of sends the message like, yeah, yeah. This is just sort of a necessary evil. I have to do this pre-events call with you. And, that’s not what it is. It’s really that’s where the valuable information comes out so that by the time the speaker shows up on site, they’re really well prepared. So, you know, I think that that’s a really important part of it. You know, if you have, if your thought leader and you have other services, you provide consulting, training, coaching, whatever it is, you know, my, my this is just my perspective is if you deliver an amazing keynote, those opportunities will present themselves afterwards, right? You want people like after an hour going, wow, that was amazing. What else do you do? Because an hour wasn’t even enough for us. We want more of what you do. Let me push on that though, because I get it.

Peter Winick Coming at it from the Bureau’s standpoint, that makes total sense, right? But I think there’s this phenomenon that happens where up to the point of the event, the client always makes the time to talk to you, to speak with you, why? Because the event’s coming up. And then the day after the event and it’s not a reflection on you or your performance, your personality, your ego, whatever, they’re onto the next thing, right, they’re planning the next things. So even just getting a, hey, can we get a debrief call set up within two weeks of the events? I want to get the feedback. How did I do? How did that resonate? Whatever. Those are harder to get. But if you start earlier, from a process standpoint, say, hey, would you like me to create a little two minute video to send out to the participants in advance to set a tone? I can send out an online. Like, there’s some other little goodies and treats that you can do that are value-ed.

Martin Perelmuter Absolutely. The thing I guess that I’m, I would be weary up is, you know, I’ve known speakers who we’ve got a keynote book for them and they want to get on the phone with the client beforehand. The client’s all excited because they’re like, great, we’re going to talk with events and they’re actually trying to sell them other services. And it’s like, Hey, we haven’t even done the keynote yet. And you’re already trying to kind of upsell me. Maybe that’s not fair, but that’s, I think the way it can be perceived. So yeah, I think value added things like the video messages and things like that are great. But if there’s other things that you can provide beyond the keynote, I just think the important thing is just nail the keynote. Do that as well as possible. It can possibly be done and then you will have… Some speakers almost look at it as almost like a paid audition to do other things. I don’t necessarily see it that way, but it’s true. We’ve had speakers who have gone and delivered keynotes and it’s turned into large opportunities that have rolled out over a year. But it all started with that first event. So that’s, to me, that’s where all the focus.

Peter Winick And doing the work where I think the worst thing a key nerder could do would come in and, you know, the basics. They use a term customer when the client uses client. Right, they say, you know. Hey, the insurance industry is great but they’re in front of financial advice, like.

Martin Perelmuter Yeah. Yeah. Understanding that common language is so important, right? And, you know, if it’s credit unions, right, they’re members, they are not clients or customers. And if you go and speak to a group of credit unions and you’re like, you’ve lost them already, right. And you may have amazing content and amazing message for them, but not having that shared understood language is, is so critical. So yeah, getting you know those questions that you ask in those pre-event calls are critical to really understand. What the objectives are, what organizations going through, and then, yeah, are there things to steer away from and not to mention, are the things to really focus in on. So, you know, the keynote, I think, is often broken before it even happens in the way that the speaker prepares for it.

Peter Winick So I want to get your reaction to a trend that I’ve seen over the last, I don’t know, five, six, seven years, whatever, and it’s less, right? It’s, it used to be the standard keynote was 45 minutes to an hour, maybe an hour and 10 Q and a like, whatever. And I could recall not that many years ago, clients calling me freaking out going, Oh my God, they, you know, they only, they’re only giving me 30 minutes, they’ve only given me 30 minutes, only give me 20 minutes. And I said, okay, well, hold on time out, let’s take a deep breath. Like you’re getting the same fee. In most world, getting paid the same to do less people would celebrate. It’s harder to get it there less, right? If you’re used to having a certain cadence to build up the storyline or use this favorite piece of yours, whatever. But I think there is a trend where, you know, you’re not gonna get an hour on stage or you’re always gonna get that hour. And how could you be punchy and effective? What are you seeing there in terms of that trend?

Martin Perelmuter Yeah, I think it started with Ted Talks, right? Ted Talk is 18 minutes. And I think until then people thought 18 minutes maybe wasn’t enough to deliver a talk. And then people obviously consume a lot of Ted Talk and they start getting used to the fact that, hey, a talk should be 18 or 20 minutes. So we do have some clients, but the majority are still in the 45 to 60 minute range. And I saw someone did a post a while back saying like the 60 minute keynote is dead. And I think it was just supposed to be some type of hot take to get reaction. Cause certainly from what we’re saying, it is not dead. Um, it’s alive and well, but I think the key is, you know, as a speaker, you got to be able to hold the audience’s attention for whatever amount of time you’re given and you know frankly, some are better at it than others. But, um, you it’s funny. We have all said clients are like, oh, we only want 30 or 20 minutes. So they want to reduce fee. And it reminds me, I think there’s an old story, but I think its Mark Twain, right? Who said. You know, I was going to write you a short letter, but I didn’t have enough time. So I’m writing you a longer one. Yeah. It’s like, it’s almost easier. You know if you’re used to doing a 60 minute talk, that’s easier. If you got to turn it into a 30 minute talk. You got to start taking things out. And it’s actually more in some ways more challenging to, I think, to deliver the message in a shorter period of time, but it’s doable. And as a speaker, you know, within reason you do what the client needs you to do. And so if they only have 20 minutes on the agenda, if you don’t think you can do a good job in 20 minutes, you shouldn’t take the gig. But if you take it, then then you do it. And, you know, and then the key thing is you’ve got to take things out. Because I’ve seen speakers go, OK, only have 30 minutes. So I’m just going to talk twice as fast. Right. And they try to cram an hour into 30 minutes and it never works. So you got to be really deliberate. And if you got three main points in the block, maybe make up one or two and you figure out what the most important things are.

Peter Winick So the answer is not to have five red bulls before you get on stage and try to plug. That’s right.

Martin Perelmuter Okay, exactly. Probably not good. Yeah.

Peter Winick So I want to talk a little bit about there used to be sort of a, it was a rule or just sort of happened where if you’re a speaker and then you were a speaker that had a book out and then you’re for speaker that a book that was, you know, a claim New York on bestseller or whatever, there was a direct and almost immediate connection to your fee. And I don’t know, I’m not so sure that holds true to the degree that it once did. How do you respond to.

Martin Perelmuter I think books are still important, and as a big reader myself, I like to think so. And certainly getting on New York Times or Wall Street Journal bestseller list can help, but it’s not like, oh, I’m on this list, now I can charge X. I studied economics in my undergrad, which was a long time ago, and I don’t remember much about undergrad or economics, but I remember the supply and demand curve. And I always think like, you know, in terms of pricing… If someone’s really busy that they’re basically having to turn down work and they’re doing more than they want to do, that’s probably a good indication they should increase their fee, but you know, if someone’s not as busy as they want to be just because they have a book out now, it doesn’t mean they should increase the fee because it’s probably not going to make them busier. In fact, it’d probably be the opposite. So I think you should let the market dictate what you should charge. And you know I know some fantastic speakers who have not even published the book and are charging really high fees and I know bestselling authors who. Are not charging huge fees for whatever reason. And it’s a number of factors, obviously. And fame is one of the factors of fees, without a question. Best seller list can add to fame, but at the end of the day, to me, it’s all about value. And are you delivering the value that people are paying for? All right.

Peter Winick All right, so as a fellow undergrad economist, that sounded like on the one hand, on the other hand, I forgot who was the quote of get me a one handed economist.

Martin Perelmuter That’s right, that’s right.

Peter Winick As we start to wind down here, any other thoughts or things for folks to consider that are either in the space or thinking about being in the space, or you also find the longer you do this that sometimes there’s people in the in the spaces that they’re like, I’ve lost my mojo, what can I do to remain relevant? Any final thoughts?

Martin Perelmuter Yeah, that’s a tough one. I mean, it’s, you know, I always say to speaking industry, it is a really easy business to get in because there’s no barriers to entry. Anybody can sign their speaker or an expert and whatever, but it’s a really difficult business to stay in and to, and to endure over years and decades. And so, you, I think constantly just refreshing your material, your content, your delivery, constantly renewing yourself is really critical. Cause if, and if you’re speaking on the exact same thing you were speaking on five or eight or 10 years ago, there’s a good chance you’re going to get bored of telling the same story, you know, for the 400th time. And certainly, if you’re bored of the story, the audience is going to be bored. So it’s just a matter of just staying relevant, staying on top of trends, understanding like what is going on in the world, what your expertise is, and how it relates to whatever happens to be the current situation. Things are obviously changing really quickly between technological changes in AI, geopolitical changes, like the world is really. Changing now rapidly. And as a speaker, you know, and as a thought leader, obviously you’ve got to stick to your core expertise, but be able to apply it to, you don’t rapidly change the world.

Peter Winick Yeah, I think that’s a great point because I think every thought leader has embedded in their work you sort of evergreen principles that are the same regardless of what the stock market did today, what’s going on in the world today. But then to stay relevant, they might have written a book 20 years ago, so I’m just making this up on trust, right? Well, we didn’t have AI then, we didn’t have remote work then. So how do you bridge the things that are people staying up today in a way that says, well, actually the principles that I wrote about X number of years ago Here’s how that connects to a remote workforce, or here’s how it connects to feeling threatened that AI is going to eat your job, or whatever the case may be.

Martin Perelmuter Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s the key. And it’s just, and that, you know, it makes it more, the work more interesting for you too, right? Like, you want to be able to, to me, you know, staying current and trying to anticipate where things are going and understand where, how your expertise can help whatever, you know, the organization or company you’re speaking to is in the context of what happened, what’s happening right now is, is really interesting. So I think that that’s it, just staying relevant, constantly learning, constantly looking for ways to improve and renew yourself and refresh what you do. Is the key. And there’s speakers who have done that really well. And they just, you know, it doesn’t matter. Age is a number, right? Like it’s, I know people who are, you know, 30 years into their speaking career and they’re as relevant now as they ever have been because they’re tuned into what’s happening in the world.

Peter Winick Love it. Well, I appreciate it. I appreciate your time and so much good stuff there. Thank you, Martin. I appreciate.

Martin Perelmuter Thanks Peter. Yeah, great chatting.

Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter at thoughtleadershipleverage.com, and please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.

The post Why Great Speakers Need More Than a Great Talk | Martin Perelmuter | 712 appeared first on Thought Leadership Leverage.

How Retired Executives Can Turn Experience into Enduring Ideas

This episode explores how executive experience becomes thought leadership, why leadership is a way of being, and how books, platforms, and institutions can help ideas scale beyond a single career.

What happens when a global executive finally has the freedom to say what matters most?

In this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, Bill Sherman sits down with Ahmet Bozer, former global business executive and author of Soulgery, to explore what comes after a career of leading at scale. Retirement gave Ahmet something rare: time, perspective, and the freedom to turn decades of leadership experience into a deeper contribution.

Ahmet shares why writing a book was not a vanity project. It was a commitment. A way to distill what he had learned about meaning, resilience, contribution, human connection, and lifelong growth. For him, leadership is not a title. It is a way of being.

Bill and Ahmet dig into the discipline behind turning hard-won experience into thought leadership. Ahmet explains the quality standards he used for his book: useful, legitimate, action-inspiring, clear, fluid, and accessible. The result is a leadership philosophy built to serve real people in real life.

The conversation also explores what many retired executives discover: writing the book is only the beginning. Ahmet is now thinking about platforms, partnerships, apps, institutions, and education. His goal is not simply to sell a book. It is to help ideas live beyond him.

This episode is a powerful look at executive thought leadership after the C-suite. It is about contribution, scale, humility, and the courage to let an idea leave your hands and take root in the lives of others.

Three Key Takeaways:

• Leadership is a way of being, not just a role. Ahmet Bozer argues that true leadership starts with self-cultivation: meaning, contribution, human connection, resilience, and continuous growth.
• A book is only the beginning of thought leadership. For Ahmet, Soldry is not just a finished asset. It is a platform for impact through an app, institutions, education, and ongoing conversations.
• Ideas need both courage and humility to scale. Thought leadership requires sharing hard-earned insights clearly, usefully, and accessibly—while accepting that the idea may evolve and eventually belong to others.

If this episode got you thinking about how leadership can live beyond one person, listen next to our conversation Thought Leadership for Building New Leaders with Tom Kolditz.

Both episodes explore how we create more leaders—not just better executives. Ahmet Bozer focuses on the inner work: meaning, resilience, human connection, and contribution. Tom looks at how institutions can develop leaders at scale.

Together, they connect personal leadership growth with systems that help leadership spread.

Transcript

Bill Sherman What do you choose to say if, after many years, you finally have the freedom to say anything? After decades as a global business executive, Ahmet Bozer retired. He had reached a moment in time where his voice was his own. But instead of stepping away, he stepped forward. His thought-leadership journey emerged from years of questioning leadership. From the inside of organizations. And now retired, he made a decision to turn that reflection into contribution. Ahmet is now the author of the book, Soldiery. In this episode, we explore how Ahmet moved from leading organizations to shaping ideas that can outlast him. I’m Bill Sherman, and you’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Ahmet. Thanks for having me, Bill. So I’m excited for a number of reasons here, and this is part of what I would describe as a recurring series of business executives who, after they retire, realize that that space allows them to say something that is important to them. And so… My question for you is – you wrote a book you didn’t have to, after retirement? Why did you do so? And did you ever think you were going to write one when you were an exec.

Ahmet Bozer Yeah, that time that you mentioned is indeed very, very precious, especially if you’re fortunate to feel healthy, vibrant, and you feel you can still contribute. So when that time came for me, I tried to approach it with great care to make sure that I do what really matters most to me, as well as the biggest contribution I feel I can make. Based on my experiences. This idea of writing a book didn’t just emerge at that time. It really was an extension of my sort of continuing curiosity about leadership that led me there. And I went through a number of phases of that. Leadership was my position at work. Uh, for decades, I’ve been in leadership positions. It was also a fascination to figure out what makes it good, you know? And, and throughout this process, I was looking for gaps. So in myself, so that I can fill those gaps. And, um, I came to realize that we don’t develop ourselves or other leaders. We don’t develop the foundations of this leadership. And what I mean by that. A sense of meaning or a preference for prioritizing the contribution or the difference you will make genuine, authentic human connections, building your resilience and no matter your age status, wherever you are growing, continuously growing. Those were I sort of identified those as the foundations of leadership. That are never, that are talked about a lot, but really never developed to the way that I thought for myself had to be developed. So as I kept diving deeper and deeper and into all of these, I sort of met some of the basic human qualities that make these things happen. And I realized nobody can teach us these. Yes, our family influences that, our upbringing, our experiences at work, in the community, all of that influences that. But really embedding those foundations or building those foundations in a robust way requires a lot of self-cultivation of them.

Bill Sherman So let, let me jump in here because you’ve given us a lot and I want to start teasing pieces apart. So the first thing you said that I want go back to is time is precious and it’s precious in different ways when you’re an executive versus when you retire, right? So as an executive, you’re required to speak. You’ve got meetings, you’ve got town halls, you’ve gotten internal meetings, external. There are things where you have to speak on behalf of the company. You have a smaller window, I would say, of discretionary speech. 80%, maybe 90% is required. 10 to 20, if you’re lucky, is discretionary. And then when you’re retired, you have more freedom. But you also appreciate the limitedness of time and health. Right? And so I want to go back to when you were leading first at the very large beverage company, and were you doing this work for yourself? Were you creating the space for others to do the work on leadership and self-awareness while you were leaving? How did you use that discretionary time?

Ahmet Bozer You know? It is somewhat discretionary while at work, while in this role, but it depends on how you view your job. If you see this as critical to your own performance in the job, you prioritize it and work on it. And the beauty of it is because I believed in this, I believe in a couple of things. My most important role as a leader is to create the environment in which others can thrive and I thrive as well. But it’s in my, I’m in the position to influence that environment to a great extent. Well, for me to influence the environment, it starts with me. I cannot say something that I don’t live. So there is a synergy in this when you talk about, are you doing this for yourself or for others or how you have approached it? Well, I’ve approached it as a requirement of my job to be this way. And the beautiful synergy of it is because of the belief that if I live this, this will cascade. So I sort of killed two birds with one stone. That’s um…

Bill Sherman And then if I build from that, you get talent that starts looking and going, Hey, what is on it doing? I want to understand, or I want it to be on his team because I like how he leads. And that gives you as the leader, people who are interested in following and learning themselves on the journey. So there’s there was probably a self-selection process.

Ahmet Bozer I experienced that, it was more I would word it as, I hope this, by the way, this is my interpretation of what’s happening, is people want it to be in that environment where they can really flourish, they can try different things. If they make mistakes, it’s not fatal. As long as they keep learning, they remain constructive. So people who really like to be in that environment enjoyed working in our group. And it also sort of, sometimes the business world has these straight lines, business and friendship and all of that, yes, and I understand all of them. But there is huge value to the human connections that you make. We connect with each other as a supervisor, boss or peer, whatever. But… Keeping that human connection alive as part of it doesn’t mean you are giving up anything on the business side. You’re doing both. I think that also makes the environment better because I really see business as a, as the, as one of the social platforms that we get that what do people do when they retire? You know, you’re not in that social environment anymore where you work with people and all of that. That’s one of biggest differences. When you retire, when you work on your own, and there is huge benefit and reward by being in that social environment. So why not make that social environments, human, lively, fun? So yeah, that’s how I would express it. I think people and not everyone, but a great many people enjoyed being in. So then, let’s move to retirement.

Bill Sherman Like many retired execs, you have options. You could serve on boards, you could play golf, you could travel the world. There are many opportunities available. Was writing a book the first on your list? Were you ready day one to do so or did you have to think about it? You know.

Ahmet Bozer As I was, while I was at Coke, you know, we know that your time can come there or in any company to an end at any time. So one of the books I’ve read from Peter Drucker was talking about second career. Back in, I read this like in early 90s, I think, or mid 90s. This is a book old. So that second career idea had been in me. And then this writing a book was always an idea. But when I retired… I said to myself, okay, this was the idea when I was in Coke, but let me experience this being out of an executive role and within this environment, let me reconsider whether this is what I want to do. In the meantime, I did a number of boards and I’d say I was working full-time hours, 75% of which was in boards. So I kept questioning myself. I said, Ahmed, you wanted to do this. Did you not? You know, this was, you like thought all these years. And I kept, yes. And I said I can do everything just like a business exam. I could do the boards. I could this. I could that. And I spent a good four years. Spending only 10 to 15% of my time, maybe 20, on the book, and about 75 to 80% on the boards and all these other things. I was still working. But I was sort of this nagging thing. You wanted to make this contribution, and it’s been four years. You know, you haven’t progressed enough. Are you really serious? You wanna do this? And it’s hard when you come from 33 years of business. It’s hard to sort of shift and say, I’m going to put, you know, 75% of my time on this because there is demand for your work. That’s good. And that makes you happy. You get back into business. These are all great stuff. It’s you’re doing things that you’re more familiar with.

Bill Sherman Exactly. You have muscle memory. You’ve developed your skills where you haven’t spent a career writing a book.

Ahmet Bozer Yeah. Yeah. So I decided to allocate more and more time to it. And, you know, in the last four years or the four years after that, I started realizing how a good decision, decision that was 50% of my time on producing soldiery and that path was also just like any other, even if you think of it as building your business. Like building a business, a lot of ups and downs, a lot self-doubts, what am I doing? You know, is this right? Am I writing the right things? Who’s gonna read this? All these questions go through your mind. But then you experience days that you feel like you’re flowing, man, you’re just creating incredible stuff. So it was just like a business journey in a way where, you know, same human dynamics, self-doubts and inspiration. All happening at the same time. The key was to keep at it, to keep it.

Bill Sherman Well, and if I pause there for a moment, you reached a moment where you said, okay, am I serious around writing this book? And you gave yourself a period of time just to make that decision, right. And say, if so, then I need to execute at a similar standard to what I’ve held myself to before. And I think you mentioned when we talked last time. You had a set of words on style and content that you sort of, that helped guide you on that. Can you share that? And how did you come up with, okay, I’m doing this and I’m going it to this level. And you have

Ahmet Bozer brilliant memory, thank you Bill, for remembering that. Yeah, coming from the business world, you sort of produce things up to a certain standard. If it doesn’t meet that standard, you don’t serve that product. So why should that be any different in writing your business? By the way, I’ll sort of do a precursor to my answer to this is that I’ve made a very conscious decision to prioritize quality? Over meeting deadline. See, in the business world, you have to, like you were saying, you have get to that next speech and do all of that. I said, time doesn’t matter. I’m going to put out the best quality. So if I’m gonna put out to best quality, what is that quality standard? And so I’ve defined three words for the content and three words, for the style. And the content words were, it’s gotta be useful. MEANING When the reader reads this, they can do something with it that helps them. Second one I said was legitimate. How did I define that? Nobody knows exactly.

Bill Sherman That’s exactly my question, so please.

Ahmet Bozer Yeah, nobody knows what, by the way, I served these, I shared these standards with my coach and I asked him to review against these standards as tough as he could. So on Legitrix, I’ve said, if as a reviewer, whether I’m reviewing it or somebody else review. When you read what I wrote, you say, yeah, I think 90% of the people would agree with this. That checks the box. If you don’t think that’s the case, look for a conscious, humble effort to try to convince the reader to the legitimacy of what I write. That was the legitimacy standard.

Bill Sherman Well, and what I liked there is there are certain things that are valuable to share, which can be provocative. They’re not conventional wisdom. And you have to say, okay, how do I persuade a reasonable person? You can’t persuade everybody. Everybody. No.

Ahmet Bozer No, exactly. So it gives us that it just, that standard turns me, turns us inward to what we’re doing to convince the reader. The reader may not be convinced still, but at least have we done our best.

Bill Sherman Him. And then it’s rhetoric and argumentation and knowing that some people respond to data, some people respond to a story and you’ve got to meet the reader where they are, rather than your default mechanism for making an argument. I’m sorry, please continue with the third.

Ahmet Bozer The third was inspiring action. Did what I write inspire action? So Mr. Reviewer, as you read this book, do you think the reader would want to do this, would want do what the book is asking them to do? So it’s useful, yeah, but does it inspire action and is it legitimate? So those are the three for the content. And I wanted to keep it simple. And then the style, it was very good. Is it crystal clear? And is it fluid? So does it flow as you go through it? And then is it accessible? Because soldiery gets into a lot of deep concepts like meaning, love, wisdom, character, you know, all these things at the same time, it gets into things like performance and challenges and all of that. But, and it’s sometimes, if you are a philosophical thinker, you could put something out that’s not really accessible to anyone. Young, old People in Asia, people in Europe, people in America, people in Latin America. So is it accessible to the human beings? That was the third one, clear, fluid and accessible from the style standpoint. And we went back and forth and back and forth for years until we all felt now, then we had an editor that gave in before the formal edit. We also gave an editor the same task. Look at it this way.

Bill Sherman That’s why it took me 8 years to finish it well and there’s attention there right so on the content side you’re saying useful and legitimate of two of the three right you’re also saying clear useful and legitimate sometimes leads you to those deeper questions of what are we doing here what matters what is my least in the world, as you said, more philosophical? And Philosophical. If you’re trying to be helpful and clear it’s a tough balance to strike.

Ahmet Bozer Absolutely. One of the other ways I talked about this book is that it just tries to fuse a lot of things. One is fusing being philosophical and practical at the same time. I didn’t want to put something out there that’s just philosophical, but I don’t know what to do with it because that doesn’t make it useful. Right, right. So yeah, and yeah, all of these balances and sort of combining that with seemingly contradictory. In a fluid way, gave me a good standard to aspire.

Bill Sherman Well, and the book that we have coming out, the thought leadership handbook, as I was writing and exploring certain things, like why do some people spend large chunks of their lives trying to communicate an idea to strangers, right? And who may, they may only interact with for 90 minutes for a keynote or, you know, at a book reading, whatever. Why are we trying to do this? That pulls you into the philosophical very fast. And at the same time, then trying to figure out, okay, how do you explain this in a way that if someone who just is like, I’m stuck here, I need an idea to move forward, put the philosophy on hold right now, help me with today’s problem, right? And how do you serve, not just different audiences, but the same audience, sometimes on different days and different moods?

Ahmet Bozer Yeah. And this is where almost like staying true to the properties of your product. So, for example. You know, if you’re selling Coca-Cola, you’re not being everything to everyone. You can’t even have a sense for what you are, who you are. You are a delicious, refreshing drink that you can consume in this occasion, that occasion, and you stand for these values that defines who you. So soldiery, the name of my book. The nature of this is it’s building yourself holistically throughout your life. Now, that, but the model is set up in a way that it’s not something you do for years and decades and then you see the benefits later, no. The model is constructed in a ways that every little improvement you make within this model actually gives you benefits back. Now, those benefits aren’t necessarily you make more money because of this one little change you’ve made. It may be that because of this one, little change, you made, you landed a job. You know, I don’t know what happens in that job. Or it may just mean that because of this change made, you feel some weight lifted off you. You feel more free, you feel more creative. It’s a matter of recognizing that change. So. Yeah, try to define what your product is. I decided mine was a lifelong guide to building yourself as a human being that makes you more effective, more resilient in every role you play in life. And it is such an approach that if you follow it, follow it and stick with it, you will start seeing the differences in your life. Those differences aren’t always material. Although the longer-term building has a better chance of getting the material things that you look for. Now, there are also all sorts of trade-offs. I won’t get into those here unless you want to talk about them. But that’s how it is. And that is something that applies to every human being. It’s a matter of whether the human beings decide this is a good approach for them. But I’m not going to change my approach to be everything to everyone. I’m going to try to communicate that approach for those who would find it beneficial.

Bill Sherman Well, this resonates with one of the ways that I define thought leadership, which is creating impact at scale, and that if you have insights, imperfect truths, you have a duty to speak and share it with other people. You shouldn’t stay silent and just live a good life. The world is too noisy with junk and AI slot that people with good ideas have to speak. However, like you said, your ideas may not be for everyone. They have the right to go. Yeah, that’s not for me. They can stand up and walk out. They can read the first two pages of the book and put it down. They could turn off this podcast. All of those things require us when we practice thought leadership to earn our audience. And the only way I know how to do that. Is by narrowing my audience and say, I’ll try to be deeply relevant to a small percentage of the world’s population. 0.00001% is big enough for me.

Ahmet Bozer And that is so true, this was exactly the motivation that I had when I decided to put the four main beliefs that were at the foundation of this model. Maybe the second page of the book, like very first chapter, I made it very clear that four beliefs that I have about what accelerates your growth in life. Now, if you read those beliefs, at that time, if it just doesn’t resonate with you, there’s no point in reading them.

Bill Sherman Right. Please stop here, thank you very much. Exactly. Well, and I want to ask you because we’re now drifting into the conversation of thought leadership, I know when we talked, you raised a little bit of an eyebrow at the term. So how do you define thought leadership given that you have spent a lot of time thinking about leadership itself?

Ahmet Bozer And by the way, thank you for, for that earlier conversation, which sort of made me think, you know, what is my own philosophy of thought leadership? Because anything we do in life, I believe we’ve got to have a personal philosophy about it, because when you call yourself a thought leader, which I don’t, or if I do, I’ll do it with this, um, with this definition. In the society is sort of seen as it’s someone who influences others, influences, and those are all right. But what it means to me is, you know, in a very short phrase, it’s contributing to the emergence of a more accurate truth in an area, whatever area you choose. Now, it’s not a final truth. It’s something closer to it. And the term leadership, I don’t see that as a position of influence, I see it as doing the hard work, first of all, of reflecting on your experiences, distilling insights from them, and sharing them with both courage and humility. So that’s how I see the leadership part of thought leadership. And I basically landed on this, you know. It’s a form of. Carefully prepared expression of a self. That’s ever-evolving, because I’ve found… I express something as based on my experiences at this point in time three years later, I may find that maybe there is more nuance to what I’ve expressed earlier, and that’s okay so I Think of thought leadership as that if somebody calls me a thought leader as I said with you That’s the way I- the leadership part of it.

Bill Sherman So much to explore there. First of all, I agree with you on the distinction between thought leader and thought leadership and the term that I wind up using is those of us who try to put ideas out in the world are practicing a skill called thought leadership. The world can decide if they want to follow thought leaders or not. Honestly at the end of the day don’t care, right? It’s not the material. Are you bringing those little tea truths into the conversation, either shining a spotlight on something that nobody’s talking about, but needs attention, or advancing the conversation beyond conventional wisdom and saying, no, let’s go deeper. There’s a better way to think about this, talk about this do this. And it doesn’t matter if your expertise is in accounting. If it’s in leadership, whatever that is, we need voices showing a better way. And one of the things as you were talking about, you use the word influence, right? As I think about the leadership side of it, and I’d be very interested in hearing your response, leadership is often defined positionally or by role.

Ahmet Bozer And towards an outcome. But leadership with thought leadership is leading.

Bill Sherman Authors through ideas to a different place. And so many organizations use the term people leader to mean, okay, you have a direct reports, right? Thought leaders don’t have direct reports. They don’t. I have that structural piece. And so here, your tools for leadership are limited to the ideas that you have. And the value that other people see in them, right?

Ahmet Bozer I actually try to resolve that in my own mind by prioritizing leadership definition as a way of being rather than status. Because I’ve seen people in what people call leadership positions, people leaders, as you say, who don’t demonstrate that way of thing. And then I see people in a leadership role and they’re lousy leaders. They don’t demonstrate that way of being. And, and there are people who are not in formal leadership positions who do. So for me, it’s more important to. And define for yourself, I mean, I have my own definition, we can talk about it, which I’ve counted like some of the foundations of it. Trying to develop yourself in that way of being, making that the way you live in your life, whatever your position is. That is a more growth-oriented approach to leadership than thinking about it as, so when you do that, it applies very easily to thought leadership if you think of it as a way of being.

Bill Sherman Absolutely. And you use the word I believe earlier of sharing courage, humility, we might add service in there as well. If the focus is on yourself, you’re going to get tired real fast, either as a leader or if you’re practicing thought leadership. Because not only the idea needs to sustain you, but you have to be driven for impact for others and benefit. And that comes out from your useful and accessible and clear priorities. I want to turn to, let’s jump forward in time. The book is done. And you were thinking. About OK. Now that I’ve got this asset, I want to get it out in the world. And you crafted a strategy around that. And you told me, Hey, I’ve gotten four pillars of a strategy for what I’m doing with the book and why. Which is different than I would say most authors who I’ve spoken with, certainly first time authors. What were your four pillars and how have you gone about them?

Ahmet Bozer Yes, and this speaks exactly to the addition you’ve made, which was service. I called it contribution, like being contribution-oriented is one of the pillars of leadership. So I naturally… You know, coming from the business world. I’m used to the joy of seeing the effects of your decisions or your work in the marketplace.

Bill Sherman Like to go to you can get weekly if not quarterly data and know what’s working and what’s not

Ahmet Bozer or you can actually go out and meet these retailers, meet the consumers and hear from them and all of that. So whatever job I do, somehow I don’t feel complete until I see this work in reality, in the marketplace, if you will. So I embraced that as the ultimate goal. Therefore I said, writing the book is just step one. You know, my goal is. More and more people consider the soldiery approach, take parts from it that resonate with them, and reflect it into their lives. So for that, I had, I, by the way, I’ve evolved my pillars in a different language, which since we spoke, same things, but I communicated to myself in a much more compelling way. So I say to myself- I want soldiery to live on certain platforms that goes beyond my lifetime. Well, how are those platforms? The book is out. It’s written. Done. Okay. Maybe there are opportunities to make it international. And I’m working on, there’s a lot of stuff there. Well, the second one is an app. So soldiery, I’m on an app which uses an AI based app, of course, in our time, which uses soldiery to provide life coaching with soldiery fundamentals. And if the app is developed and it’s embraced, Soldiery lives there. That’s the other platform that it lives. I wanted to live on a number of institutional platforms. So if there’s a training course that people take about Soldiery for leadership development and all of that, that’s the third, institutions. The big one, the big one I’m toying with right now is… Is there’s gotta be relevance of this to our educational system. And boy, if I can make, you know, baby steps, some small steps towards that, that somehow some of these concepts finds them meaningfully in maybe in a private school or something somewhere. There’s a lot of work to be done there, but we are already doing some work so that we produce something that’s distinctive of value. So that’s my goal. And those are the pillars. NOW! There’s the, whenever there are these pillars, there’s a foundation. And the foundation is maintaining this kind of communication, whether it’s in social media, blogs, podcasts, newsletters, websites. And that’s the foundation, just to keep the conversation live about soldiery, but let it live sustainably on these platforms. And then from each of those, there are projects that are already identified. I’m now working harder than I did when I was writing the book, because it was clear to me that writing the Book was just the beginning.

Bill Sherman And this, I think, is one of the advantages of when I talk to retired executives, Fortune 500, and they’ve chosen a topic to speak on and really take these ideas, not so that they’re just a conversation today, but they’re lasting and produce impact, leaders at that level, whether you’re a mid cap CEO or a Fortune 500 executive know how to use others skills to amplify and create philosophy, right? So that you don’t have to do it all. A lot of people in thought leadership look at it and say, I can write more, I can speak more, I’ll travel the world, I’ll do more. And they wind up on whether you call it the Red Queen’s race from Alice in Wonderland or no, through the looking glass or it’s Sort of the hamster wheel effect where you’re running faster and faster, trying to reach 8.5 billion people or something. And the only recipe is exhaustion. Right. As an executive, you’re looking and say, who has audiences who needs this? How do I partner? Just like, you know, as a beverage company, how do we find distributors? How do we find channel partners? You don’t try to do it all. You’re looking for people who are closer to the consumer or in your case, the intended user of the ideas and that understanding of system velocity is almost the superpower in thought leadership of a retired executive. They know those letters. So well said. Now I think.

Ahmet Bozer I look at my sort of organization of my files, there are just so many stakeholders already in trying to do this. A number of institutions, academic institutions, agency who does this foundational work, my writing coach, the software developer, the digital advertising person, and you know, it’s a team. The only difference is like… This team is not in one organization. These are subject matter experts. You still, as a leader, have to explain what is your dream, what’s their role, how can we do this together, and all of that. So you’re trying to mobilize this team towards this vision of making your ideas live on different platforms.

Bill Sherman Absolutely. And when you get to, like you said, looking at education and institutionalizing that, whether it’s within academic institutions or K through 12, wherever, that is when ideas find home. Even some of the big consulting firms too. I mean, you look at an idea that lands there and stays. How do you leverage people who are in the process of delivering ideas to people? That’s really what education’s about.

Ahmet Bozer Yeah, yeah, and there’s a lot of sort of serendipitous stuff in this when you embark on this this kind of journey You just tend to sort of the people meet, they show up because you just meet people. Yeah, you just, you meet someone, you are actively going after talking about what you’re trying to do. You’re networking, you’re collaborating. If you feel passionate about what your doing, the person that you’re engaging with starts thinking, you know, I know someone here that you keep following up on that. I just say the universe conspires to help you. Now, there’s no guarantee that what you’re doing, you’re going to reach all of your goals, but the joy is in the process itself. Oh, absolutely. You get you get better.

Bill Sherman Results than you thought you were going to get. Well, and you’re applying personal effort to create velocity, priming that pump so that others can make that introduction and it’s easy, or they say, oh, that could fit into this event or we could partner here and the more, the way that I look at velocity of ideas is very simple. There’s only a certain finite amount of time an individual can put in, right? Whether we measure that at days, years, or a lifetime, the rest of the energy needs to come from not you, right. And so you said you’re working harder than you did with the book, but at the same time, you you’re going to be exceeded if you have a hundred people working a fraction of that energy. Right?

Ahmet Bozer Exactly, it’s the catalyst mindset you have to keep. Totally. And you can try to catalyze this from a number of different angles, meet with a lot of people. Just, this is just like business leadership, you know, it not any different. You know, you only, you have the same 24 hours and you have choose what you’re gonna focus on. You have to choose the way you’re going to make an influence and way you are going to activate. And it’s the same.

Bill Sherman Well, that’s one of the points that I was making is that executive mindset of what do I delegate? What do I let go of becomes powerful. The other thing that I want to call out for listeners here who can’t read your nonverbals, but hopefully can hear it in your voice is there’s a joy as you’re talking about this work. And I am certain that when you’re doing the work of sharing this that joy radiates. And that’s one of the powers that gets people interested. It helps sell the vision. It gets them curious and wanting to know more. And so I love how you’re approaching this on. I think you’re doing a fantastic job. And more importantly, it’s important work that’s needed to be done.

Ahmet Bozer Thank you for that Bill and I try to hold myself accountable to what I wrote. If I don’t come up authentically inspired by what I’m doing to others, then I’m not following what I’ve written.

Bill Sherman Right, right. If our ideas are putting us to sleep, and then we got a problem trying to persuade anybody else they’re excited. Exactly.

Ahmet Bozer Thank you very much for that. Very kind recognition.

Bill Sherman Thank you So I’d like to wrap up with a final question, where do you see this going? And what do you, what is your hope? Five, 10 years from now, flash forward into a future either once you have set this work down or maybe even after you’re gone.

Ahmet Bozer Yeah. So we live in a time where solving our problems can no longer be done with powerful leaders and top of organizations. We need what I call distributed leadership. People with a leadership way of being at all sectors. All levels at home in community. So my goal is that soldier becomes of the tools where we increase the number of people around the world with that leadership way of being. I am realistic to think that maybe, I’d say, the majority of the people, a lot of people, won’t be, this approach may not be resonating with, and that’s okay, because at the end of day, it’s a critical mass that creates a change. So my goal is to build this critical mass of people with a leadership way of being, living leadership every day in their lives. If I was in the business world, you’d put numbers to it. Maybe in two, three years time, I will get to that point by looking at various KPIs, how many people are using the app, what they’re doing with it. Yeah, I’d like to get to that point so I can say here is a more objective goal.

Bill Sherman But then I was touched is very objective on its own.

Ahmet Bozer Yes, yes, but I’m also more interested in, okay, if I’ve touched somebody’s lives, what did they do? What changed the day of? You know, what did the final end result in terms of making life better for more people?

Bill Sherman Are the second and third order effects.

Ahmet Bozer So that’s the vision. And my vision is if I can make these ideas live on these platforms, and these platforms are self-sustaining, and they are governed in a way that they continue, I’d like it to live way beyond me and evolve. And I don’t want soldiery to be mine. I want soldier to be people’s and I want people to modify their model if they need to. I just want it to evolve and live. That’s my dream. Not to say, oh, I’ve left a legacy or something like that. That’s just what makes me motivated. It’s what makes be inspired just for the sake of it. That’s.

Bill Sherman That’s it. I think that’s a great place to end is the ability to let go of an idea and let it fly and live in the hearts of the people that find it useful. Amit, thank you very much for joining us today.

Ahmet Bozer Thank you, Bill, it was a joy having this conversation.

Bill Sherman Okay, you’ve made it to the end of the episode, and that means you’re probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are three recommendations. First, check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game in thought leadership, as well as just starting out. Second, subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership. And finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights take them to scale through the practice of thought-leadership. Maybe you’re looking for strategy, or maybe you wanna polish up your ideas. Or even create new products and offerings. I’d love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.

The post From Executive Role to Leadership Philosophy | Ahmet Bozer | 711 appeared first on Thought Leadership Leverage.

Lessons in speaking, sponsorships, coaching, and the power of being memorable

This episode explores how thought leaders turn personal brand, speaking, books, events, and coaching into connected revenue streams.

What happens when positivity becomes more than a personality trait—and turns into a business asset?

In this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, Peter Winick sits down with Ramon Ray, founder of ZoneofGenius.com, author of The Celebrity CEO, How Entrepreneurs Can Thrive by Building Community and a Strong Personal Brand, speaker, event producer, business coach, and advisor to small business brands.

Ramon has built his thought leadership around a clear market position: helping entrepreneurs grow with energy, clarity, personal branding, and practical business strategy. His work spans speaking, live events, content, sponsorships, coaching, and community.

But the real lesson is not “be more positive.” It is sharper than that. Ramon shows how a distinct personal attribute can become a business advantage when it is connected to a real audience, real value, and real revenue.

Peter and Ramon explore how speakers and thought leaders can avoid getting high on their own supply. The job is not to be the star. The job is to serve the client, understand the room, and create value before, during, and after the engagement.

They also dig into the business model behind thought leadership. Events can feed coaching. Content can feed sponsorships. Books can feed relationships. A keynote can open doors. The pieces work best when they are connected by a clear brand and a consistent promise.

Ramon also shares why books are more than products. They are gifts. They carry authority. They create memory. They keep working long after the launch window closes.

This conversation is a practical look at how to turn expertise, energy, and audience trust into a durable thought leadership platform.

Three Key Takeaways:

• Your personal differentiator has to connect to business value. Ramon’s positivity and energy are memorable, but the real power comes from tying those traits to clear outcomes: better events, stronger client relationships, brand sponsorships, coaching, and community growth.
• Thought leadership is a connected ecosystem, not one product. Speaking, books, events, content, sponsorships, and coaching all reinforce each other. Each channel can create trust, generate leads, and open the door to another revenue stream.
• The best speakers serve the client first. A keynote is not about ego. It is about understanding the audience, making the event host look good, and delivering value that extends beyond the stage.

If Ramon Ray’s episode got you thinking about how speaking, content, relationships, and personal brand become real business value, listen to Peter’s conversation with Jill Schiefelbein next.

Both episodes explore how thought leaders turn expertise into revenue through visibility, service, referrals, and smart positioning.

Together, Ramon and Jill offer two practical models for building a thought leadership business that is clear, credible, and commercially viable. Listen to Jill’s episode here.

Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast, which is leveraging thought leadership. Today, my guest is Ramon Ray. He is an author, a speaker, an advisor, a guru of sorts to entrepreneurs. And he’s been in this space for quite some time. So I’m honored to have him on today. So welcome aboard Ramon.

Ramon Ray Hey, Peter, glad to have you. Thanks for having me. Let me have some value for your audience and thanks for the amazing work that you do in the world to make the world a better place in some way, shape, or fashion. So glad to be here.

Peter Winick Thanks. Appreciate that. So let me start with one of my favorite questions, which is sort of, how the heck did you get here? Right. Like what was the, cause I’m always fascinated with the journey, with the path, with the serendipity of it all. Like how did, how did this happen?

Ramon Ray Sure. I mean, I think like many stories, we already know, you know, uh, how they, how they built it and stories of Wal-Mart, I’m not there at all, but meaning those stories that we know that have an affinity for us low, consistent work, cause I know, so well, and the bottom line is who I am today. As you said, yes, I am the founder of zone of genius.com. We help thousands and thousands of small businesses grow and start their businesses as a event producer, uh, genius talks as a business coach and more. And how I got there, uh the sort short of it is spent many years working at the United Nations. How I got, there was a lady in my church said, Ramon, you know, they hire extra people during the general assembly in the fall where all the heads of state come in, why don’t you apply and get some extra and get some work and get money and I applied there and I was there for over 10 years while there, Peter, I got bit by the entrepreneurship bug, you I discovered for me the internet and bulletin board and prodigy and all those kind of things and the two pivotal moments I can remember somebody asking me Ramon can you speak for us somewhere this was years later and I said yes to that and there got my professional speaking and then other thing was that hey Ramon, can you do some things for us and let us sponsor your brand. So the short of it.

Peter Winick Back that up a little bit. So when somebody doesn’t just randomly come up to, you know, an introverted actuary and say, Hey, can you speak to us? My friend, what was it about the things you were doing, your reputation, personal brand, like why would of all the people at the UN right there say, ah, this young fellow would be great at that.

Ramon Ray Yes. Good question. And again, that was a separate context. But I had my UN and then I had my quote unquote side hustle. So who got it?

Peter Winick We got it. Okay.

Ramon Ray Yeah, but um, but really a friend of mine and another tip lesson of the day is build good relationships a friend Of mine alone. I know you I know the work you do. I can’t be somewhere as I recall Can you speak on my behalf and okay my place and so I spoke and that was just one of many You know, it doesn’t happen overnight But you do that kind of thing over and over again and there goes your line of business as a speaker so that’s kind of how it started somebody who knew me saw value kind of like me and you let’s say and They opened the door for me and 20 something years later I’m an in-demand motivational keynote speaker.

Peter Winick Love it. Love it so break apart then your, let’s start with your work in terms of the, the gist and the essence of your book, your thought leadership and your content, and then I want to get into sort of the business side of that. So what is it that you’re mostly known for? When people think about you and your brand and your stuff, they say Ramona is the X guy. What, what do you hope access or where do you think access?

Ramon Ray What I hope it is and what it is could be different.

Peter Winick Well, yeah, yeah. It’s in.

Ramon Ray It’s in my subject line I think is probably the most thing I hope is unapologetically positive and a cousin to that is he’s high energy. Now does that that doesn’t translate into money off hand but honestly I think that’s what most of my professional friends will say Ramon made us deal good. Ramon was positive he was a dose of goodness in our life so that’s one. How does that translate I think?

Peter Winick But wait, wait, stay there. Cause that’s a personal attribute. I’ll attest to that because in every touch point you and I’ve had, I’m like, this is just a positive guy, right? Like, so that’s one of the takeaways. Now that being said, you know, in the course of my work and such, I don’t know that anyone’s calling me saying, Hey, Peter, do you, you know, a positive guys that I could send, spend a lot of money with, right. So connect the dots there for me.

Ramon Ray Absolutely, so when it comes to the three things I do, which are brands working with me, who are looking for influencers, that’s one line of work, two, those who want me to help them grow their business, or three, those who have come to the event that I produce, that ties in, because hopefully Peter will think, you know what, I remember, that’s right, this guy, I forgot his name, Ramon, he was just a great guy, don’t know exactly what he does, maybe, maybe he’s not a fit for you, but he’s easy to work with, he’s a nice guy, and he’s in the space in some way. I have a conversation and Peter, that’s all I need. I may not be the right fit for somebody to introduce me to, but the lesson learned for all, not just me, but to teach, to help others learn, is that I think that you’re right. It’s a personal attribute, but you can leverage the one or two unique gifts that God gives us all for a business. Peter, you may be a more stoic guy, as an example, stoic, more serious minded, but you may great with numbers, like that’s your special sauce. People may not remember you as the fun guy. It’s okay. They may say, but you know what, Peter? We gave you this problem. He like got to the problem quickly. That’s your gift. So stay.

Peter Winick There for a minute, because I think that, you know, part of your world is the world of a speaker. And I would say, most of my clients speaking is one of the bullet points on their resume, if you will, it’s something they do to some, it’s the top line item on their P&L. To others, it is an occasional thing. And, I think they often forget because it’s such a weird business in that, getting paid a ton of money for everybody to pay. Absolute attention, fly all around the world to see you. You’re treated like gold. You get the big suite in the hotel and blah, blah, blah, bla, bla. Right. Well, not all. Yeah. Well, we’ve all done the gig in Poughkeepsie and whatever. But my point is a lot of speakers get a little bit high in their own supply and forget that they’re in, they’re in the business of serving the client. Right. And the fact that the client got a hundred or a thousand or whatever, many people to show up and hear them speak. It’s not really about them. And I’ve seen some, some folks get so ridiculous in their demands or their this or their, you know, what they’re looking for, or I’ll do this and I won’t do this, and instead of a really good speaker does their homework and figures out, Hey, I’m here to serve you. What are the things you want me to say? What can I do? What can they do to make you look good? Oh, miss or miss or mister, whoever hired me. Right. And I think they, it’s not about you. And I think that’s an important piece for speakers to remember.

Ramon Ray I love that. And I think you’re right, Peter. No, if all of us are serving each other, if I’m serving the client, if I am doing the best I can, you’re 100% right. Then we would do, and I hopefully by God’s grace that it’s something I don’t forget. I mean, I have my issues I can improve on, but I definitely remember, and it’s not about me yet, but I want to get paid. I want it to be compensated. Of course, yeah. And so eventually it’ll turn back to me, but if I take care of Peter, Peter, okay, you invite me to think about Peter. Who’s coming? Peter, remind me what you do again so I can shine the light on you as I close and say, go see Peter. Yeah. Peter’s gonna be like, dang. Come to one of my events if you’re shining the light on me and we’re eating together. That’s how you

Peter Winick So you’ve got a couple of distinct lines of business, right? There’s the event piece, the speaking piece, the community piece. How do they, how separate are they?

Ramon Ray And how connect. Yeah, they’re introspective to some way, because I produce so much content, but the event businesses in my email newsletter and other publications that I have, people sign up and people are going to the unapologetically positive endear themselves like what Ramon has. I thank God for that. So that’s one aspect. And we want to come to Ramon’s event. We know it’s going to be fun and informative. First fun. And if you happen to learn something, that’s a bonus. So first fun, second informative. So that the event line. As they come to the event one, I can say, Hey, listen, Here’s what I’m doing. If you like this, if you want to work with me, do X, Y, Z. And so that will lead to the coaching side and the brand sponsorship. That’s a kind of a separate area because that I work with. There are other Oasis’s, but it’s somewhat connected because they’re seeing my content. They see Ramon out there as somebody who is a influencer. Like Mr. Beast, the super vocal he had with Salesforce. They saw him. He’s not in their demo, but they’re like, dang, this guy reaches hundreds of millions of people. How can we work with him? So that’s the center there.

Peter Winick Got it, so how. You know the barrier entry in some of these businesses is fairly low, right? A lot of people you go to an NSA conference or something like that. And there’s a lot of people that have dreamed of being a speaker because their friend told them when they gave a wedding toast to their brother-in-law, Oh my God, you’re so awesome, whatever, you know, nobody tells their friend you would be an amazing dentist and then they go to dental school, right. Like, wow, the way you floss is like no other, like you’re just the best flosser, you should really go for that, right, but. Some people, whether it’s charisma, whatever, and people push them to do that. What is it that you’re doing, have done, and will continue to do to stay on top of your game?

Ramon Ray Yeah, I think that a few things and one is opportunities like this. I say, yes, if I can add value to someone like Peter and I can, I can have a conversation with him, a smarter guy than me in many areas, it’s a yes. And that’s one saying, yes. Number two is I think to add value and to hone our craft. I’m on clubhouse quite a bit. The social audio app people have thought it was.

Peter Winick Okay, yeah

Ramon Ray But I’m there so much you, you can’t mess me up with a mic dropping screen out working a baby screaming, you just can’t, it’s, I’ve done it so much. And again, everybody has different expertises. So don’t everybody say, I want to be a speaker, but if you want to be a Speaker, the more practice you’re at it, you get the humor, you get, the line, you, get the serendipity, you get the, when the moment, when the pause for effect, all that stuff. You hone your skills, the more and more.

Peter Winick You do it. Right, right. That’s interesting. Where do most of your engagements originate? And I want I want to get into sort of, you know, industry specialization or geographic specialization? Is there a pattern of organizations that bring you on more than others or organizations, maybe the other side of that, that would ask you to come on board and say, you know, I’m probably not the fit for you. My friend, so and so would be better.

Ramon Ray Yeah, for the brand sponsorship side, it’s definitely those larger brands, usually the global brands that have a distinct line of business for small business, whether that’s a five million, 50 million, which is huge for this tiny businesses, whether it’s two, three, four, 10 million in sales. So that’s they have a some SMB component in their line item. Hey, work with you to be our flag bearer, my client, Bit Defender, they’re big, big as India security company. So that’s one. The other bucket, I think could be of So that’s a large B to B brand. Those who hire me to speak at events, uh, that’s usually a trade show and association, a conference like that. They may have smaller budgets, but they’re looking for a speaker. They may not all be able to hire Damon John. And to the point, the place that Damon John is at Cody Sanchez, uh many of the sharks, uh Simon Sinek and others, they may say, Hey Ramon, yeah, we, we hire these big dogs, but can you come in and host the event for us? Can you be added a plus one to maybe speak ahead of them? That’s where I shine.

Peter Winick Got it, got it. So it’s sort of in that space. Sometimes it’s interesting to realize who the, the six-figure version of the five, you know, figure speaker is and say, Hey, there’s a lot of people that can’t afford Simon or Damon or whatever, and park your ego. You can make a great living being in the sort of aftermarket for that. Or the, yeah, bring, bring it on. Right. Like, you, yeah.

Ramon Ray Live for 7,000, 10,000 25,000 all day or have Damon, but now you need a few others to sprinkle in. Hey, Damon is 150 is a hundred, whatever he is pay me 15 K 20 K. We’re good. I’ll see you next week.

Peter Winick Now, do you do a lot of your own negotiations or do you have people that handle that for you? Because that’s a tough issue for a lot folks.

Ramon Ray Yeah, generally I do it. My business is small enough to right now. I have a good friend of mine, Lee Hayes, and she’s a speaker wrangler to negotiate the deal, especially when you have good inflow, since mine are not so much, you know, eight times a year, 15 times a years, depends on what I want. Easy enough. And usually people come in if they’re the right company. Ramon, what’s your fee? 20, 25,000. We don’t have 20,000 we have 19. Is that okay? Yes, done. I’m gone.

Peter Winick Give me 19,000 and a bagel, right? Like, there you go. So I want to, um, send away a little bit into your thoughts on the publishing landscape, so tell me about your, your last book, how you chose to publish it and what the Delta is between what your expectations were and, and how it landed.

Ramon Ray Sure. I think if Seth Godin says books are a gift is how are they a gift to the gift to, the person who’s reading it because it’s something tangible could be digital, but something they can hold in their hands. They can remember, which is the emotional connection and the very few people read it, but that’s something from you they can get and, or the few percentage that do open it that may read it from cover to cover. They can learn my latest book celebrity CEO. People can download free stuff on that from celebrity CEO dot com. People have shown it to me with bookmarks. Said Ramon, this is a simple book that helped me to understand the power of personal branding. So I think Seth is right. It’s a gift to people and if you do it right, it’s a give to yourself that keeps on giving because yes, you may wanna sell your book, but I’ll tell you the little secret, not a secret. Me, I have hundreds of books in my garage. When I go to speaking events, I give them away. Now, A, hopefully sign up to my email list to get the book, that’s your car. And or Maybe I work with the event host and they pay me a little more, figure it out and we give it away and I get some amazing pictures and video.

Peter Winick Yeah, yeah

Ramon Ray Next event.

Peter Winick Yep. Yep. And I think the other thing that people don’t realize with a book, no pun intended, is it’s got a long shelf life, right? So you’ll probably, and you’ve experienced this, getting a lead from a gig you did five years ago. You’re like, I don’t remember being like, oh, that thing. But they held the book. Like I for one feel guilty throwing the book away, right. Like there’s just something bad. Like you don’t do that. Like it’s whatever. So it might be sitting around on your shelf and, and, you know, the whole book industry runs around. Launch date and release date and 90 days after and all that sort of stuff. But like a book, like you said, it’s a gift. It’s a personal thing. I like the framing of that. And then giving it away when you actually, the author hands a book to someone, whether they paid for it or not, there is this sort of psychology that goes there like, wow, Ramon went through all this energy and he gave it just to me and he maybe scribbled his name in it with a little smiley face or, you know, whatever, like that, like, I’m not gonna throw that out. That’s kind of a neat, I don’t have zillions of those things. That’s a different sort of thing. So, so what’s, what’s next for you? So we’ve got, you know, everybody’s wrestling with AI and what it’s doing and how you’re using it and all that. And this isn’t really an AI question, but what are you thinking about and hoping for the next 12 to 18 months in terms of what we, what what’s going to be the same in your business? What do you hope might be a bit different?

Ramon Ray Yeah, I have three or four people that are my North stars. One is Tyler Perry, Tyler Perry producer. He produces events. He has all kinds of things he does working with partners and he also acts in his own experiences. So Tyler Perry is one. Kevin Hart many people know he’s the comedian. He has a talent and he have other things that he does in movies and acting and producing, et cetera. Other person I’ll give an example to is Hala Taha. You’re gonna know her look of Hala Taaha. She’s an amazing YouTuber. One of the biggest podcast people around. So I say that, Peter. Because for Ramon Ray, it’s very simple. I will continue to be the talent, the show of being showing up unapologetically positive with a smile and fun, making people feel great happens to know the lens of that is going to be through business and those will fester into our foster into live events, in-person experiences, bringing people together. Number two, our online content podcast, live video and more. And then third coaching saying, Hey, if you want some of this I can help you or referring them to people like Peter and Peter works for you to help it do your thought leadership better That’s where Ramon’s going.

Peter Winick Love it. Love it. And maybe give an example of something you were excited about and didn’t work. So for example, when you talk, when you said clubhouse, I’m like, geez, I remember that during COVID. It blew up like nothing I’ve ever seen before. And maybe something was in the, you know, we weren’t leaving our house. We were, we were taking shower. Like the whole non-video thing was sort of interesting. And then I like, frankly, I haven’t heard that term in years, but you found a platform that you like. What are the things have you experimented with that maybe didn’t work and why.

Ramon Ray Oh, so many things in the past two, three, four years, Peter, post COVID, especially it’s been brutally tough for me. It’s been really tough to know who am I and what am I doing? Uh, so I’ve tried a number of things. I tried in fact, coaching before I had a community. I built it on mighty, mighty network, which is a great network, but it just wasn’t a fit for me is a bit too big for me, so I just opened up a school group. But the point is I’m going back into coaching. So I have a community, it’s recurring revenue. And sometimes Peter, you do things on the first time it doesn’t work out. But you keep at it, you innovate, you change it. Know it’s in the right direction, but maybe what’s right. I’m the right way you do it again. And so now I’m doing coaching and I’m loving it.

Peter Winick Yeah. What is it that you love about coaching? Is it the immediate sort of impact you can see? Or because there’s a self-selection piece, right? Like most jerks don’t want to be coached, right? Sometimes I would argue that those that need it the most are the least likely, but what is it? That you enjoy about.

Ramon Ray Sure. I think two things. One, I must say, I like the recurring revenue as a business. People’s 49 a month, it’ll go up to 149 a month. That recurring revenue is one part I wanted to do as a Business Thinking because I didn’t want to be beholden waiting for a brand sponsor. So this is very, I have to figure out how to break into coaching for recurring revenue. That’s one. But number two, Peter, seeing that people are really saying they enjoy it, they’re learning, they’re excited. It’s now invigorating.

Peter Winick Me. Oh, that’s cool. And you’re also, as a thought leader, learning from, I think a lot of times, whether it’s advisory or consulting or coaching, it feeds the brain in terms of, oh, there’s something people are thinking about. If I was only on the stage, I wouldn’t really know about that because they’re saying this to me, you know, privately. And then you hear it once, you hear twice like, okay, there is something in the zeitgeist now that people are anxious about this or excited about that or bored with this. Cool. Well, this has been a lot of fun. I appreciate your time. I appreciate your energy. And for those of you that can’t tell, it’s like the positivity is certainly contagious when you have a conversation with remote. So reach out.

Ramon Ray Thanks for having me, Peter, appreciate you.

Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter at thoughtleadershipleverage.com, and please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.

The post Turning Positivity Into a Thought Leadership Business | Ramon Ray | 710 appeared first on Thought Leadership Leverage.

How personal brands become scalable thought leadership platforms.

This episode explores how clear messaging, audience focus, and real market pain turn personal expertise into scalable thought leadership.

What makes a thought leader’s message impossible to ignore?

In this episode, Peter Winick sits down with Kait LeDonne, a personal branding expert who helps aspiring thought leaders sharpen the message behind their work. Kait’s view is clear: without radically clear messaging, everything else becomes a house of cards. Content, books, speaking, social media, and sales all weaken when the core idea is fuzzy.

Kait breaks down why so many experts struggle to explain what they do. They go too broad. They try to serve everyone. They talk about problems in language their audience would never use. The result is technically accurate messaging that fails to move the market. Real thought leadership starts by knowing who you serve, what pain you solve, and how that pain sounds in the buyer’s own words. Peter and Kait explore why pain is not fearmongering. Used well, it is empathy. It says, “I see you.” It pulls someone out of the noise long enough to pay attention. In a crowded market, the right message does not just describe an idea. It creates recognition.

They also dig into the role of personal brand in thought leadership. Kait makes a powerful point: the personal brand can be the Trojan horse for the IP. The person creates trust. The idea earns traction. Then, at scale, the thought can become bigger than the thinker. That is when a platform starts becoming transferable, teachable, and commercially durable.

This conversation also looks at where thought leaders have permission to play. Trust is specific. An audience may follow you deeply in one lane, but not in every lane. The strongest platforms know their boundaries. They know what the market wants from them. They know when the founder should be the star, and when the IP needs to take center stage.

For authors, speakers, consultants, founders, and experts building a thought leadership business, this episode is a reminder that clarity is not cosmetic. It is strategy. The sharper the message, the stronger the platform. The stronger the platform, the easier it becomes to create revenue, scale impact, and build something that can outgrow the individual behind it.

Three Key Takeaways:

• Clear messaging comes first. Without a sharp message, content, books, speaking, and sales efforts become unstable.
• Pain creates relevance. Strong thought leadership names the audience’s real problem in language they would actually use.
• Personal brand should lead to scalable IP. The person builds trust, but the goal is for the idea to become teachable, transferable, and bigger than the individual.

For a deeper dive into personal branding and thought leadership, listen to our conversation with William Arruda. Like this episode, William’s conversation explores how clarity, consistency, and focus turn expertise into a recognizable brand. Both episodes look at what it takes to move from being known for what you do to being known for the value of your ideas. Together, these episodes give you a practical look at how to sharpen your message, build trust with the right audience, and create a personal brand that supports a scalable thought leadership platform.

Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, welcome this is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage and you’re joining us on the podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today my guest is Kait LeDonne and Kait is a personal branding expert for aspiring thought leaders, which obviously caught my attention, and she’s got lots of other sort of cool, interesting things going on that we’ll get into as well. So welcome aboard, Kait, how are you?

Kait LeDonne I’m good, Peter. Thanks for having me.

Peter Winick So what does a personal brand expert for aspiring thought leaders do? What is that? That’s one of those jobs that we didn’t look at when we were in college to say I want to, you know, on career day.

Kait LeDonne Yeah, if somebody ever told me I’d be making my money doing this, I just would have had a blank stare on my face. Yeah, well, you know, it really depends on the day of the week, but I’ll say it like this. 90% of what I do is helping people figure out their messaging, because if you do not have that down and it is not radically clear, everything else you build on top of that. Is just a house of cards.

Peter Winick So stay there a minute because it just seems so obvious. Right. But in practice, it’s not right when you look at some of these thought leaders are out there, aspiring followers are out there. You know, I look at it on a continuum, you know, on one side of the continuum, like here’s 87 things I’m really good at. And I’m like, okay, I’m really confused. I don’t know. And then the other it’s, they can’t get it down crisp and tight, so that it resonates with who they what they do, what the outcomes are, and what the benefits and why them are. So where do you start in your process working with folks?

Kait LeDonne Well, it’s OK. Now we’re going to double zoom into what the latter part of what you just said, who they are, what they do, who they help. There’s so many components of a good message. And it’s funny because when you look at a good message, you’re like, that is so simple and concise and clear. And within that, there are probably 10 different variables that are a trap door to go wrong. Number one, you just haven’t gotten the target audience of the message clarified well enough. Maybe you’re too broad. Maybe you are picking the wrong people that don’t have the right pain that you are really helping. And so usually I start with, okay, well, who do you want to serve? And if somebody says, “I mean, theoretically, everybody,” I’m like…

Peter Winick That’s my favorite worst answer.

Kait LeDonne Yes, yeah, it’s really it’s really great. And so that is the first trapdoor. The second trapdoor is understanding the real pain you’re trying to solve, because I heard a quote once and I really need to remember who I’m attributing this to, but it was such a great quote. And it is pain pushes until vision pulls. I think a lot of us aspiring thought leaders are thinking, all right, well, I’m just going to have this beautiful message and it’s going to call people forth into action. And I don’t want to be a fear monger. But the reality is that people are more. Act to act if they’re being negatively motivated and marketing tests prove this again and again and again, people are going to respond. Yeah.

Peter Winick Yes, stay there. So there’s fear-mongering is extreme, right? Hey, if you don’t hire me by tomorrow, the world will end, you’ll be bankrupt, homeless, and living in the streets. Like, that’s fear mongering. Yes. I think that’s one way to do it, not a way I would recommend, but I think the reality is, when we think about it, your first job as a marketer is to get people out of the trance, because I think we create these sort of visions and these platforms and such. In a quiet time in a thoughtful time and wherever I’m like, okay, well, when are we going to break through to somebody? Well, the reality is they’re standing at Starbucks, it’s really loud and noisy, and they’re skimming through tick tock. And you need something that’s going to grab their attention to at least get them to pause for two seconds and go huh, right? Like, that’s just the world we’re living in is it’s noisy, it is crowded, it is fast, it s this and that. Like, how do you shake people out a trance and there’s only a few things that really do that effectively.

Kait LeDonne Yes, yes. And I would say that pain is one of the better ones. Now, that doesn’t mean you lead with pain, but it does mean if you fundamentally don’t understand the pain you’re solving, any message you put on top of that just isn’t gonna click for somebody. Not in the way that, to your point, is really gonna shake them up and get them into action. So if you think about, you know, really sticky messages, we’ll go back to… Let’s take the one that’s in the zeitgeist now, like Mel Robbins let them. Yeah, sure. Theoretically, it’s very Peter’s eyes just went so wide. Theoretical, theoretically it’s very motivational, you know, let them acceptance stoicism. But underneath of that is the pain of you are feeling more and more out of control in a world that you desperately want to control. Right. And that’s why we hear it.

Peter Winick But what let them signals is, wow, that’s a great way that I could choose to release this whatever it is. My sister-in-law drives me nuts, my coworker spits sunflower, whatever it is. Yeah It’s sort of universal. So the way I sometimes like to think about it is one way to connect to a pain point or by properly connecting to a painful point, it shows empathy. It says, I see you. Like, hey, you’re an author. I work with a lot of authors. One of the pain points that authors have is they get really depressed 45 days after a book comes out because all this like, and they look and say, oh my God, no one’s articulated it in those words, but that’s exactly where I’m at. Right? So pain, I think, when it’s smart, is a signal of, I get it, been there, done that, I see you, I got you, let’s talk. Right?

Kait LeDonne That’s correct, that’s correct. So figuring out who you’re helping, the pain that they’re dealing with, but then, you know, and I’m sure you see this all the time, Peter, within the pain, there’s then a few other trap doors. Are you saying one thing in a way that they would never say it? So for example, I was working with someone, and she was saying, well, my target audience, they get really stuck on decision making and I need to talk about decisions. I’m like, is that what they’re saying at 3 a.m. To themselves? Are they saying, wow, I’m having a hard time making decisions. Is that really? How they’re identifying and relating to the pain, I would venture to say, no, that’s never something I say to myself at 3 a.m. Like, wow, I can’t make a decision. I would say, I’m plateaued, I’m not getting recognized at work, I am freezing on the spot in meetings, I am embarrassing, it’s only a matter of time before people find out I’m now qualified to do this. That’s what they’re saying to themselves

Peter Winick Yeah. Love it. So let’s go to a little bit meta here. So your expertise is this lane of expertise, right? And then you’re helping people do their thing. Talk about your path as a thought leader.

Kait LeDonne Um, like many great entrepreneurs, it was ass backwards and building the plane on the way down in so much that I was working in corporate in a marketing department and we were swallowing up companies left, right, and center. I mean, we were really on an M and a path. And when you are on that, you get a really quick training on how to fold brand stories into one another, because you have to get a whole new portfolio of clients to understand what the brand is. So I did that, but I wasn’t passionate about the service. No offense to anybody that’s in finance. And so I started taking that methodology and helping smaller businesses in and around Baltimore where I started my business. Well, when I was doing that and working on the corporate brand side of things, we found that the fastest way to get people to buy into a brand was putting their founders front and center. And one of my favorite examples of this was a quick growing. Bagel chain that had a very loyal following. They were in a college town. It was like the hangover spot. Everybody went there after to get the bagel and it, it was good, but they had these three young ready for this Italian brothers, not Jewish Italian brothers, like that was the first bagels. Yes. Ellen bagels, um, and they were really, really recognizable. And so we put their story as three cousins who came over from Italy. And took the art of Italian bread and really immerse themselves in the world of bagels in America and started this whole thing of like the Italian Brothers Bagel and people really bought into that. They were like, wow, I mean, we’re on board. And so within every other company I was really developing, naturally, the founder would take front and center. And it all came to a head when one of my clients who was an engineer and inventor capital, she was in her fifties, got a license for a marijuana dispensary. And we thought that was the most hilarious thing ever, just like a suburban mom peddling pot. Right. But it was a burgeoning industry and she thought I could, I can really, you know, become the voice of this industry and talk about where it’s going from a medically ethical standpoint. And so we wrote a book, they got on the Today Show, the book went well, the website crashed because of all the traffic and then they started headlining industries whereas two years ago, they would have been like, you shouldn’t be at these industries, you haven’t grown pot, you haven’t understood all of it. But when you get that… That pathway from a thought leadership perspective and you really find your lane and own it. And for them, it was, hey, if mom says it’s okay, it’s good. And we’re approaching this from the medical side of things. If you, you know, are dealing with having seizures, you should come look at this. Then it felt safe and it was a lane they could own and own confidently.

Peter Winick Well, and that’s interesting because the connection to a mom in their 50s versus a college kid getting weed from a dealer in a dark alley. That’s right. Made a little autobiographical for me back there. Back in the day, okay, there was a reason that someone’s parents might say, well, I don’t trust the product that kid’s giving you. I don’t trust the intention. I don’t trust the integrity of it. It’s, you know, like that’s different, right? I want to flip that a little bit because in a lot of the work that I do with thought leaders and authors and keynoters and all that, I’m sort of breaking what you’ve built from I just can’t put it saying, okay. This entire thing is about you. Your name’s on the cover of the book, your website is your domain name, whatever. And ultimately, for a thought leader, that’s good until it’s not. Meaning, hey, they built a great practice, but ultimately, if you think about sort of a maturity cycle of a thought leader’s business, right? It’s moving it from a practice to institutionalizing it and making the IP the star. So it’s like, it almost goes from, it’s the Kait show, to powered by Kait, and the dream should really be, who the hell’s Kait? Like, we’re not really there. That’s, no, and you know what? That’s damaging to the ego, because like, I’m so important, right. But it

Kait LeDonne Yes. And if somebody understands that three phase from the beginning, they’re all the better suited. Your personal brand is a Trojan horse for a successful exit of IP. So, you know, you get in there, everybody loves to follow a person. But then ultimately, let’s take the case of five dysfunctions of a team and Pat Luciani, because you and I have talked about that offline. I venture to say a lot of people who read that and know the five dysfunptions and the pyramid model that came from it, if I said. Well, I really love following Pat Lanchione on LinkedIn. They’d be like, great, who the hell is that? Exactly. But they know the five, the five lovers of pyramid. But that’s a compliment. Yes, and it’s the ultimate compliment because you have come up with an, you were the face, you were thought leader, then the thought became bigger than you, then the though became franchisable and instillable and you quietly exited. Great, you know what that means? Now you have capacity to bring another one up. I mean, you- Yeah. Well, now that I think are familiar with let them. Know that it was the three second rule or the five second rule before that.

Peter Winick Yeah, yep, yep.

Kait LeDonne And that’s good. I mean, exit the three-second rule that’s well enough known, separate from her, that people can instill that even if she didn’t come up with these things. And then she has room to now make her face and her voice and her podcast, the conduit of let them and then back out of that one. And you’re right. That’s the dream.

Peter Winick But go backwards. So go backward on Mel. So that’s on the consumer space, which is a bit different. She knows who her market is. Right and she’s really smart and really talented and I’m sure there are 10 other things that she could have come up with that are as good as insightful as let them but then she had to put it through a filter which a lot of thought leaders don’t say but what does my market really want right who is my market it’s mostly female of a certain age of a certain education of a certainly demographic financial you know ethnographic whatever oh this is It’s definitely first world problem, but if I position this in such a way, right? So is it a chicken and an egg, right, like was that designed to meet the audience? Then you say, oh, is it pain point they have? And then why the hell would they listen to me? Because if I were to flip those two and say, let them, which is, you know, runaway bestseller, seven million copies sold, whatever, and the author was Pat Lencioni? Like, you’d be like, what? Some old white dude that’s a business author wrote this. Why would I believe that now? So true, right? But so I think it’s where it comes from Yes, there is as well as a thought leader. I think that’s what happens with certain thought leaders. It’s like, wait a minute, the world has or a subset of the world that matters to you really, really deep trust in you for a thing, right? And that thing is really, really narrow, right. And when you go outside of that thing, you can go maybe one concentric circle a little bit out. But if all of a sudden, like, you know, again, not to beat up on palette and Sony, because that’s not the intent. He came out with a line of, you know, I don’t know, whatever, thousand thread count bedsheets. Huh? Like Egyptian cotton and Pat like where did where did that right? And you think about like her Martha Stewart did that because that makes sense, right? Like she’s someone that you allowed her work to be in your home and in your kitchen and you know your bedroom and you know, like whatever. So where do you have permission to play? Is it in the relationship space on the consumer side? Is that in leadership? Is a management? But you know going back to

on five dysfunctions in 20 years, I believe that will still be taught in 30 years in the marketplace. Why? Because it doesn’t matter if he’s dead at that point. That’s right. Or old or not didn’t grow up in social media. There’s 100 things that don’t matter. But it’s like, is it still relevant? Is It still ever great? Did you know we’re never going to cure these functions we’re always going to identify them in our teams and in our organizations. That’s right.

Kait LeDonne Yeah, absolutely. It’s also interesting because we’re talking about this from in the hypothetical example of pad there, you know, then launching Egyptian cotton sheets.

Peter Winick And by the way, if you do that, Kait, we want a royalty, you heard it.

Kait LeDonne Yeah, it started here. We’re on record. It’s interesting though, and I’m sure you see this a lot too, the inverse of that, right? So let’s take an example. Andy Dunn, the founder of Bonobos. He, you know, exited Bonobo quite well. Walmart acquired them, does not own them anymore, but that happened after his time. And then he is a serial entrepreneur. He’s an entrepreneur’s entrepreneur. Monica and Andy spin off all these other consumer product brands. And so then you have the lane of thought leadership where they had product companies and were known in that, but then want to own a cause on the other side of things. And so for Andy, that was burn rate and how I built a business and almost lost my mind and talking about mental illness and entrepreneurship. And so I think the, we, you and I probably trade in and deal with a lot of thought leaders who the brain is the tool and the idea is the thing, but it’s also interesting to me when you have. Consumer product good and more of that traditional like B2C company and you’re like, you know what? I’ve been growing this company. I’ve been behind this company for a while, but there’s something else that I have to say. And I love seeing the inverse of that too. And I’m delighted more and more of those. I’ll say like consumer product, good CEOs are stepping out and thinking about that too

Peter Winick Yeah, I think two things on that for thought leaders. Number one, many of them said to me when we really get into it, sort of I wrote the book I needed, I guess, right. And I need to read. And the fact that I wrote it, mission accomplished. Then it went on to be a success or whatever the case was. Right. And I think that’s really important. Right? Like, you know, and then the other is in many instances, it’s without saying it out loud, it’s their own stuff. Right, yes. It’s their own journey. It’s their own whatever it was. And they realize, get over yourself. You’re not that you’re not that unique, right? When you think about it, that’s your syndrome or you can go on and I name dozens of them for you. Well, I had that. I didn’t know it was a thing. Yes, I’ve created a model and frameworks and definitions and then realized because we didn’t talk about it out loud, a lot of people.

Kait LeDonne That’s right. And that’s it was so funny you say that because his book starts with him punching his mother-in-law in the face I mean complete manic breakdown

Peter Winick That’s a mother-in-law. Did she strike first? I don’t know. I don’t just say it.

Kait LeDonne Um, I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing him and she seems like a lovely lady. He was in the middle of a panic episode.

Peter Winick I think I just had the pleasure of punching my mother-in-law in the face.

Kait LeDonne Yeah, it’s a hell of a way to start a book, though. And, you know, miraculously, he’s still married and like all. Everybody has a great relationship there.

Peter Winick Oh, what’s a few restraining orders over Thanksgiving Day?

Kait LeDonne Yeah, it’s the hatchet is buried. But all that to say to your point, I’m sure when you’re in the middle of a manic episode, you’re locked up at Bellevue, which is what happened to him. You’re thinking this is the scarlet letter I can never talk about ever, ever, ever, every, ever. Like, if people found out about this, they wouldn’t invest. They wouldn’t buy blah, blah, and then you move far away enough. You’ve moved far enough away from it. And to your point, you realize over years in the more Confident and vulnerable you get like, oh wow. No, a lot of entrepreneurs have mental illness issues, and I have this story and I should share because it’s my stuff. I would have loved to have read a book that said hey, you’re not I mean

Peter Winick Well, and I’m an entrepreneur, I’m competitive. And it’s like, oh, you’re depressed, huh? I was institutionalized like, yeah, right. You know.

Kait LeDonne I’m always gonna be the best at what I do.

Peter Winick Yeah, right. I don’t I don t do anything halfway. Like I didn’t just, you know, not get out of bed one day. I was institutionalized, like, yeah, hold my beer.

Kait LeDonne Yeah, no, he literally said he thought he was like Batman or something. I don’t forget the particulars, but it was like full on mania. And he’s such a thoughtful and grounded and mindful person. But you’re you know what, Peter, you’re absolutely right. He realized this thing that felt so isolated to me and stigmatizing. It’s actually not just my dirty laundry. Like my version of it is really extreme. But a lot of entrepreneurs feel this way. See you next year. Spot on when you say it’s really those two things when you get a founder who then says you know what? I’m ready to start to beat this this drum and talk about this

Peter Winick Yeah, and you realize there’s a market for it. Well, this has been a lot of fun. This is I didn’t know. I never know where these things are going to go, but I certainly.

Kait LeDonne Punching mother-in-laws in the face, that if there’s one thing to take away from today, it’s if you wanna become a thought leader, start there.

Peter Winick Well, there’s the clip. You put it on your site first, and then we’ll follow up and promote it. I appreciate your time. Thanks, Kait. This was great.

Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter at thoughtledershipleverage.com, and please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.

The post Building the Personal Brand is the Trojan Horse | Kait LeDonne | 709 appeared first on Thought Leadership Leverage.

How practical leadership content becomes books, speeches, coaching, and scalable thought leadership offerings

A practical conversation on turning expertise into thought leadership, building multiple revenue streams beyond books and keynotes, and aligning evergreen ideas with shifting market demand.

What does it take to turn deep expertise into a scalable thought leadership platform?

In this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, Peter Winick talks with Paul Falcone, bestselling author and leadership expert, about how practical ideas become powerful market assets. Paul has built his body of work around hiring, performance management, leadership development, and workplace ethics. His edge is simple: he does not deal in theory. He teaches leaders how to handle the conversations and decisions that define management.

This conversation focuses on the real engine behind Paul’s thought leadership success. He explains how decades of frontline HR experience became articles, books, speeches, workshops, and executive coaching offerings. His work stands out because it translates complex people issues into usable frameworks. Not just what leaders should do, but how to do it when the stakes are high.

Peter and Paul also explore the business model behind strong thought leadership. They discuss why authors should think beyond books and keynotes, how to diversify revenue streams, and where the biggest commercial opportunities often hide. From management training to conference speaking, coaching, facilitation, and advisory work, Paul shows what it looks like to turn expertise into a durable portfolio.

A key theme in the episode is market relevance. Paul shares how evergreen ideas stay valuable, but demand shifts with the moment. Topics like crisis leadership, hybrid work, workplace disruption, layoffs, ethics, and employee isolation rise and fall based on what organizations are facing right now. The lesson is clear: great thought leadership is not only built on strong content. It is strengthened by timing, positioning, and responsiveness to what the market needs most. This is a smart episode for anyone building a platform around expertise. Especially those wondering how to package knowledge, expand offerings, and keep their ideas commercially relevant over time. Paul brings a grounded, field-tested perspective on what makes thought leadership useful, credible, and worth paying for.

Three Key Takeaways:

• Thought leadership grows from applied expertise, not abstract ideas. Paul’s work is valuable because it is built on real management challenges leaders face every day. His strength is translating experience into practical guidance people can actually use.
• A strong thought leadership platform needs multiple revenue streams. The conversation makes clear that books and keynotes are only part of the model. Training, coaching, facilitation, advisory work, and other offers can all turn expertise into a more durable business.
• Market demand changes, even when your core ideas stay relevant. Evergreen topics like hiring, feedback, crisis leadership, and ethics do not disappear, but different themes rise in importance depending on what organizations are dealing with in the moment. Smart thought leaders pay attention to timing and position their ideas accordingly.

After listening to Paul Falcone, keep the momentum going with Episode 101 with David Benjamin. Both episodes explore the same core challenge: how to turn deep expertise into thought leadership that the market will actually value, buy, and act on. Paul focuses on packaging practical knowledge into books, speaking, training, and coaching, while David digs into how to create demand for your ideas and capture attention even before buyers fully understand they need your solution.

Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, Welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage and you’re joining us on today’s podcast which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today my guest is Paul Falcone. He’s a recognized expert in hiring, performance management and leadership development. He’s the best-selling author. He now works directly with organizations of all sizes offering customized programs that range from keynote speeches and webinars. And he’s got a ton of experience across the Fortune 500. He’s written five going on six books, I believe, so he’s pretty proficient. And here he is, welcome aboard, Paul.

Paul Falcone Thank you, Peter. It’s a nice intro. I kind of liked it. But it’s 17 books, not that we’re counting.

Peter Winick Oh, 17. Okay, yeah, I think my other glasses.

Paul Falcone No, it’s fine. They came out in different batches and I advertise them different ways, but they were all with the American Management Association and or HarperCollins leadership. So, cool. Wow.

Peter Winick Wow, I think many people I know have not read 17 books, let alone written 17.

Paul Falcone Yeah, I don’t sleep at night a lot, but that’s okay, that’s fine.

Peter Winick Yes. So let me show. I’ll ask you one of my favorite questions is how do you get here? Like, how did all this happen? Because I would doubt that a young 10 year old Paul, while his friends were playing baseball, said, I’m going to write 17 books and be a speaker. And like, how did this all come to be?

Paul Falcone A little bit by accident. I didn’t know what I was gonna do when I grew up. And so I went to UCLA, I studied German, which is a long story because I’m Italian, but I ended up getting my master’s degree. Didn’t know I was going to do. Went to a recruiting firm and said, can you help me? And they said, well, why don’t you work here? So I said, fine, what do you do? And I stayed there for about six years and became the director of sales training. And eventually went in-house with a client company. I ended loving HR, because there’s such a people element to it. But because I had the master’s degree and I didn’t go for the PhD, there was still that biting piece in me, Peter, I wanted to publish. I always wanted to see my name on an article or a book. The bottom line was I ended up living two dual lives. It’s like I’ve worked during the day and I’d write about it at night. So I became a columnist for SHRM, the Society for Human Resource Management. I wrote for them for 20 years. And I was also writing for the AMA, the American Management Association. They had a book publishing division. Yep. Pitched the idea and that was the first of what’s now 17 books. So lucky for me. I’m where I am now and three years ago

Peter Winick So this is like a nights and weekends thing, mostly a nights in weekends. So what happened to this? So I’ve seen that movie before where it’s a passion, it’s calling, I kind of do it over here, and then that thing blows up. How much overlap was there between the night stuff and the day stuff? Were you getting sort of fodder ideas, whatever, from the day’s stuff that fed the night? Because they’re probably not totally a wall between the two.

Paul Falcone People would say, where’d you come up with the content? And I’d say, believe me, I’m not that creative. The content finds you when you’re in human resources. It’s like he did Wyatt. And there was a cycle to it. I ended up taking what I was seeing in real time and turning it into articles for Shurm. And then when I had enough articles for shurm, I had had enough content for a book. And it just kept going and going and go. And I would change the names to protect the guilt. But I was lucky where the companies that I worked were very supportive of my writing. Whether it was Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon, NBC Universal, City of Hope, you know, they were all like, fine, Paul, just put a little disclosure in the air that these are your ideas, and they’re not tied to the company. They don’t make it our company to be that kind

Peter Winick I think there’s a lot of frustrated folks in the corporate world that have other creative outlets, whether it’s music, whether it art, whether it writing, whatever. You’ve got the CMO that’s in a punk band or whatever that might be. And I love the idea of you having the courage to talk to the folks at work saying, hey, I’m gonna do this, are you cool with that? And not only do they say they’re cool with it, but there’s encouragement, right? Which probably wasn’t your expectation when you first did that.

Paul Falcone Well, some companies I don’t think would take too kindly to it. One time I interviewed with a company and I disclosed it right up front. Sure. And they said, well, are you an HR guy or do you want to be Mark Twain? No, seriously, that’s what the person said. And I thought, OK, that is not going to work. It’s not going work for everybody. And there were some organizations, I’m sure, that would say, nope, when you work for us, you don’t do extracurriculars. Thank God. But I knew that in advance, Peter. That was part of my interview. That was my onboarding. If that wasn’t going to, I am sorry, this is a critical part of who I am. And I just wouldn’t stay with a company that said no to it. I just explored it in the interview process at first.

Peter Winick So at some point I’m imagining there’s a fork in the road, if you will, right? Is that the twain? Is there a twain quote there? No, that’s not a twaine quote.

Paul Falcone I like the metaphor, stay with it, I’m good. I can hold, yes.

Peter Winick There’s a fork in the road, and you’ve got to say, huh, do I stay on the corporate side or this thing’s big enough to really support me and give me the things I need? Tell me about those decisions and how you got there.

Paul Falcone It’s again, I was the chief HR officer for the motion picture and television fund, which is the healthcare nonprofit. It’s the retirement home for the people in the entertainment industry. When I got that job, it lasted about five years. They wanted someone with healthcare, and they wanted someone from the entertainment background. And I was the candidate because I had worked at City of Hope. I’d worked at Viacom, Paramount, Nickelodeon, whatever. So I thought it’s healthcare in a retirement home. How busy can be.

Peter Winick Yeah, right, right. This will be easy.

Paul Falcone Until COVID hit. And it turned out to be the hardest job I’ve ever had, probably the most meaningful. The CEO and I were connected at the hip. I will say this objectively, I think we did a great job getting the organization through that time, but we buried employees, we buried residents. It was a really heartbreaking time. When we were getting out of it in 2022, you could see kind of the light at the end of the tunnel. I gave my four months notice, found and trained by replacement, no drama. But what I realized was life is too short. I love teaching, I love training, management training, keynote speaking, coaching. This is kind of what I wanna do and I realize life is too short.

Peter Winick So stay there, because I want to talk about the journey of, OK, so now you decide, because you thought you had this job that was probably a little more cushy. You did a terrible job of planning and predicting COVID. So you had to deal with that. And it’s literally, all HR jobs, literally life and death if it’s a retirement home where elderly people are alive. That’s an awful thing, right? That’s not a phone it in kind of, oh, now we get to work from home thing anymore, right. So… What does it look like now, now that you’re on the other side of this and have been for a while, what’s the good, the bad, and the ugly? Because sometimes people, they’re afraid to make the leap because it’s that matrix of the unknown unknown. So if somebody’s on kind of where you might have been a few years ago, what would you be telling them to think about before they make the leaps?

Paul Falcone I was terrified to make the leap, full disclosure. I mean, you come off of a W-2 with benefits and whatnot, and then it’s like, okay, now I eat what I kill, and how much does that private policy cost? It was, it was, okay, three and a half years later where I am now, it’s the best decision I ever made. I’m only doing the stuff that I love doing and I’m lucky because in a way, yes, I was jumping into the unknown but I really had been preparing for it for the prior three decades with all of my writing. It does help to come out when you’re author of bestselling books and whatnot. So I’ll give you that. But it was still very hard for me and it takes a change in mindset and there is a risk that’s associated with it. My wife was the one who said, I was 59 at the time. Which he said. Honey, do it now. Don’t work till you’re 65 or 67 and then start. Because she said, you’re going to want to work till your 90. You love doing the part that you love. Use between now and 65 to kind of build your pathway, build your client base. And I married up. She was smart. And she called it. And it really did work out well for me. I mean, we’re also living half the time in Chicago, half of the year, where our kids are. So I’ve got the flexibility to do that as a consultant, what I couldn’t do if I were in a full-time role.

Peter Winick Right, which is great. So give me a sense of what the portfolio, what the mix of the services, the offerings, what’s the, what does it look like? Who gets, who’s paying you to get what done? Cause you obviously have books, it’s speaking, give me a sense, the variety of things. So sometimes people aren’t even aware of what is the life of a thought leader look like. What are you charged for? What do you do? Who do you it for?

Paul Falcone Yeah, I think the idea is you got to have A, B, C, D plans, you know, there’s your primary, but to the degree that you can diversify the better. So for me, what I love doing when I spend most of my time doing is management training. Companies can be fortune 500 could be startup can be whatever. But a lot of times the managers don’t understand how to do things. They know what to do. They just don’t know how to Do it. And if my books had filled any kind of gap out there, Peter, it was that it taught people how. The how is what’s important, how to hold the tough conversation, how to do the documentation, how to interview a salesperson versus a C-level person versus a recent college grad, just real practical stuff. And that’s the stuff that I can bring out there now. The second piece of it was, I speak at all the conferences because I’ve been doing that through SHRM, and that just kind of lent itself. And that that’s my biz dev funnel, right? Because people see me speaking. The third issue is the executive coaching, the one-on-one piece where I get to either work with an individual CEO or C-level. And or their senior leadership team. And that’s a combination of training and one-on-one coaching. Now, I also diversify. I’ll say if you need HR advisory services, I don’t get a lot of that, but it’s there. If you need expert witness testimony, I have that there. I don’t get much of that. But to me, the idea is don’t go in with only one. What made more sense to me was kind of like my books. You know, my books were on hiring, they’re on performance management, leadership development, ethics. I like writing about the full scope of whatever my discipline is, and I would recommend that for people.

Peter Winick But I like a lot of what you said. One of the things I want to expand on is most people, when they’re making that transition, they say, oh, I’m going to be an author and a keynoter. Because those are the two obvious ones. I will write a book, and then someone will bring me in and pay me to speech. But things like expert testimony, even though you don’t do a lot it, that’s interesting. So I think that what people need to be thinking about is, OK, I’ve got this stuff. Here’s the cupboard, and here’s all the ingredients. How might I format that? Because I would argue that Sometimes when somebody’s brought in as an expert witness, they’re really regurgitating something that they wrote in a book or whatever, but the value that that hiring agency is paying on you for the expert witness is crazy, right? Like it could be, you know, whatever, 50K a day or something. It could be even multiples of that because the stakes are really high and they’re bringing you in and they, you, you know whatever it is. And you look at that and go, yeah, I kind of did that for like, 12 minutes on a workshop the Tuesday before in Cleveland and got paid you know a couple thousand bucks or something is that is that an interesting way to sort of think about who places the most value on the ideas at a moment.

Paul Falcone It is one client had said to me early on, Paul, we’re going to do a corporate offsite retreat, would you facilitate it? And I was like, I mean, I’ve been to corporate offsite retreats on the receiving end. Never thought of something. I was like, sure I could do that. And you know what I mean, it’s this kind of thing. It turns out that NYU, there’s Stern School of Business, has a whole program on event planning and these kinds of things, and it’s like I had access to tools. So the funny thing to me, Peter, the way I look at it is be open to this stuff. And go to ChatGPT or Google Gemini and say, this is my background, this is what I’ve done, I’m thinking about opening my own practice. What are some of the funnels out there? What are the disciplines that I should consider that I can monetize based on my experience? Enter. And it all comes out and you’re like, I didn’t think of that. So it’s funny how a simple search on chat GPT or whatever your AI large language model is could open up things that you never even considered.

Peter Winick That’s amazing. So talk to me a little bit or about 17 books under your belt. What has changed evolved? What’s so different today when you’re writing? And when I say writing, I also mean the publishing promoting, you know, launching a book today versus five years ago, 10 years ago. 15 years ago

Paul Falcone That’s a really good question. I just feel like there’s so much more competition. There’s so much more space. I mean, there used to be the big five publishers, and now there’s the big six because of Amazon, that people are self-publishing out there. And, you know, there’s a lot of volume. It’s just a lot volume. Now, in full disclosure, I always let the publisher, like HarperCollins or the American Management Association, do the publicity. I was working full time. I didn’t have time. And even now, the only real thing is every once in a while, post on LinkedIn just as a reminder. You know, I’ve got toolkits on my website, or I’ve these books that you might wanna look into as a book of the month selection, or, you know, for your high potential emerging leaders. Yeah. Right.

Peter Winick So you’re writing on, you know, a lot of your topics are evergreen, right? Yeah. So if you’re talking about giving feedback, we could update that, tweak that in the age of AI or in the Age of Hybrid or something like that. But the core principles are the same and to some degree timeless.

Paul Falcone Yes, so one little tweak. So one of the books that I’m best known for, it’s kind of my flagship book, is called 101 Tough Conversations to Have with Employees. It came out like in 2008 when I was working for Nickelodeon. Yeah, publisher made the book Orange to kind of correlate with the Nickelodeon theme, right?

Peter Winick Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Falcone Second edition came out in 2019, right before COVID. I just finished the third edition. So it’ll take till probably fall of 2026 to come out. But if you think what’s changed since 2026, you’ve got, wow, we had COVID, we had the adrenaline rush, adrenaline junkies because of everything with COVID. This idea of managing compound volatility and disruption is now one of CEO’s top five priorities, depending on what you’re looking at. Now you have this constant, the hybrid than your remote work. All union rise. Wait a second, we think we’re our employees are going to form a micro union. Listen, however you feel about unionism. Yeah. As an employer as an HR person, you don’t want to have Right, you got to handle that and represent the company, but so many of these changes, the isolation of the Gen Z Zoomers, the 27 and under crowd, they keep testing out as the loneliest, most isolated, most depressed generational cohort on the planet, more so than the retirees in retirement homes. What is our obligation as the elders, as the managers? What is your obligation to pass wisdom to the younger Gen and get them, they missed their most, their best years, they miss either their high school years or their college years. Or they miss their first years in employment, which for me was all about making friends and having mentors, they miss that and they’re not even aware of what they missed. You know, what is our obligation to help with that? There’s so much new stuff out there, it was very easy to come up with new content for the new edition.

Peter Winick So, interesting. So what are you thinking of next, not necessarily in terms of a book, but think about from the business standpoint, hey, I’d like to do more of this or less of this, or I’d to learn more about, you know, put on your Paul the CEO hat, not Paul the author hat, and say, what are, what do you looking at for the next, I don’t know, six, 18 months?

Paul Falcone Well, two answers to that one, Peter. On the one hand, there’s so much out there in terms of turn your course into a workshop or a class. Eventually, I think I do want to do that. But that’ll be right before I retire, right? Because then you can monetize this thing and repeat yourself even though you’re not working. Sure. But I don’t want to that now because I want people to hire me, not my video. It’s exactly that.

Peter Winick I think it’s an end, not an war. I don’t think there’s cannibalization. I think they’re different markets at different price points. So you say, if I bring Paul in, it’s gonna cost X. If I license Paul’s online course, it’s going to cost Y. And on a per capita basis, those are very different numbers. And I think actually feed into each other. My two cents.

Paul Falcone No, no, totally agree. I totally agree in the short term So if that’s the longer term goal, like I’m thinking about how can I make this thing live on beyond because I’m a one-person LLC I don’t want employees. I just want to do my own thing But in the shorter term, I’m thinking about, you know, what is the new content out there? So for example, one of the things I’m being asked to talk about now is leading through crisis and disruption. And it’s like, well, good, I’ve got a book on that came out two years ago. That’s the hot topic because people are like, how do we do this? We’re building the plane while we’re flying it. And like, How do we keep our marbles in place like in our heads and what do we do with employees who are suffering from this and what’s our obligations for that? There’s a lot there.

Peter Winick So stay there for a minute, because I think that’s the point that you’re bringing here. I think about that a little bit differently in that every thought leader’s got their stuff. Here’s what I’m known for, right? And then there’s a temptation to go a little beyond that. But let’s just say, here’s my stuff, right. And then you say, this is evergreen, right, like, so that book that came out two years ago was just as in vogue when it came out, right it’s universal, the principles are universal. But then what happens is there are factors beyond our control that happen in the marketplace that say, ah. Right now, crisis is more in vogue. I remember the 2008 crash, right? And right before 2008, so if you look at 2006, 2007, going into 2008, there was this wave of happiness books in the business world, right, why? Well, everybody was getting second mortgages and driving big cars and you know, they were living these large lives. So the feeling or the emotion or the whatever that was in the water was wow, we must all be happy because we’re getting all this stuff, right. Then… Market crashes. Now it’s like a bad country song. I lost my dog. I lost my wife. I lost my home, right. And the next wave of content was resilience. Now, it wasn’t like we had to create all this new resilience stuff. It was always out there. But the demand for resilience based on what was going on in the market, went through the roof, right, and the happiness stuff went away because it was almost in poor taste to be to be embracing happiness in a period when your friends are foreclosing on of losing it like it’s it was kind of not what one did. That’s like, okay, at an organizational level, how do we get people to be more resilient? How do we suck it up and get through this or be more gritty became a thing. So I think people, and not a lot of thought leaders are aware of the external factors that say, oh, there’s something going on here that’s making my stuff decreasing the demand for my stuff right now. And it doesn’t mean I’m out of style, right? It’s just, that’s the market, right. Well, for everything that goes down, something goes up. So what’s out there in the marketplace now that someone needs help on? Like. There’s always been books on remote work. Guess what? In 2020 through 2023, the demand for those went through the shelf because it went from a theoretical to a plotting, like at a lightning speed. So it sounds like you’re doing that, whether you’re aware that you’re doing it, I think you’re that nicely.

Paul Falcone Peter, the funny thing is when I switched from corporate to having my own practice, what my concern was, my biggest concern was if I’m not in the trenches, I’m gonna have content to write my articles, to write blog, to write new books.

Peter Winick Well, except you got 25 years of stuff.

Paul Falcone Well, this is true. This is true, but the funny thing is, now that I go into all these individual companies, nonprofit, public sector, Fortune 500, man, I’m getting earfuls. There’s so much content I’ve got coming at me. It’s like, it’s actually a good time to be a writer. And so some of the things that where I can see the need is when I will write one of the books I taught for years at UCLA extension on ethics, it was a mandatory course. And I like to teach the ethics class for the people getting their certification in human resources management. But there was never a book. You had to borrow articles and piecemeal stuff together. So I decided I’m writing a book on it and it’s called Workplace Ethics Mastering Ethical Leadership and Sustaining a Moral Workplace. And it’s all about managerial ethics and employee relations, fine. But it’s not the time for that right now. I’m sorry, no one’s really at the level where ethics are important. There may come a time though. But the pendulum always swings. And so my point is the diversification is critical. The book on effective hiring makes sense, but probably not right now. The book, on documenting discipline and structuring terminations and layoffs, that one could be a little bit hotter right now because companies are a bit of a downsizing mode.

Peter Winick More recently, DEI, there was so much great stuff out there on DEI. And then, like just the climate changed, right? So if you know, that was your space. And if that was what you were known for, the demand just went down without getting the politics and all the craziness of it. The demand just got cut period for stock, right, like, nobody’s buying, you know, purple socks anymore. If you’re in the purple socks business, you’ve got a problem, right. So that’s it’s part of the game. Interesting stuff. This has been a great conversation, Paul. I appreciate your time and sharing your experiences with us.

Paul Falcone Me too, Peter. Thank you. I’ve always admired the work you do. I love your podcast. To be part of it is quite an honor. So thank you for inviting me.

Peter Winick Oh, then we have plenty more time to tell me how great I am. No, I’m kidding.

Paul Falcone At least another 10 minutes. Yeah, keep going.

Peter Winick Thank you so much, Paul.

Peter Winick My pleasure, Peter.

Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter at thoughtledershipleverage.com, and please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.

The post Building Thought Leadership That Sells | Paul Falcone | 708 appeared first on Thought Leadership Leverage.

Turning crisis, resilience, and hard decisions into a practical leadership framework

A conversation on character-driven leadership, resilience under pressure, authenticity, trust, and how defining life experiences can be turned into a practical framework for leading yourself and others.

What does it take to turn crisis into a leadership framework others can actually use?

In this episode, Bill Sherman talks with John Lentini, Founder and President of BOLD Training Corp and a partner of Crestcom International, about how defining moments can become disciplined thinking, practical models, and a mission that is bigger than one person’s story.

John’s path to thought leadership did not begin in theory. It began in high-stakes moments. He reflects on surviving 9/11, leading through the Fukushima crisis, and learning firsthand that character is not an abstract idea. It is revealed under pressure. More importantly, he argues it can be built with intention.

At the center of the conversation is John’s six-dial framework for what he calls engineering character, which can be found in his upcoming book Engineering Character: Six Dials to Build Better Leaders releasing March 2027. He explains how discipline, mindset, and resilience help leaders lead themselves first. Then integrity, empathy, and influence help them lead others in ways that build trust.  The result is a model designed to make character practical, teachable, and repeatable.

This episode also goes deeper than framework talk. Bill and John explore the personal cost of leadership, the difference between good leadership and bad leadership, and the tension leaders feel when corporate expectations collide with personal values. John is candid about where he got it right, where he got it wrong, and why those lessons now shape his work as a speaker, facilitator, and leadership thinker.

There is also a powerful thread on authenticity. John shares why he ultimately chose to step outside corporate life and use thought leadership to express ideas more fully and more honestly. For him, this work is not about visibility for its own sake. It is about impact. It is about getting a message into the world that helps people lead with more courage, more empathy, and more character.

Listeners will also hear John talk about the writing journey behind his forthcoming book on engineering character, the emotional work of putting real life on the page, and why he chose a hybrid publishing path. No previously published book by John is named in the transcript, but this episode clearly positions his upcoming book as the foundation of his thought leadership platform and future speaking work.

If you care about leadership under pressure, values in action, and the challenge of turning lived experience into a message that scales, this conversation delivers. It is honest. It is practical. And it shows how thought leadership is often built not from abstract ideas, but from moments that test who we are.

Three Key Takeaways:

• Character can be built on purpose. The episode centers on the idea that leadership character is not just innate. It can be developed through intentional habits like discipline, mindset, resilience, integrity, empathy, and influence.
• Crisis reveals what leadership really looks like. High-pressure moments expose whether leaders act with preparation, courage, empathy, and trust. The conversation shows how extreme events can shape a lasting leadership philosophy.
• Authenticity matters more as leadership grows. A major theme is the tension between corporate expectations and personal values, and how thought leadership can become a way to express ideas more honestly and create broader impact.

If John Lentini’s episode made you think about how character is tested in moments of crisis, then “Thought Leadership for Crisis Management | Helio Fred Gracia” is the perfect next listen. Where John explores leadership through resilience, integrity, empathy, and trust under pressure, Helio extends that conversation by showing how leaders can prepare for crises before they happen, protect trust when things go wrong, and respond with clarity instead of emotion. Together, the two episodes create a powerful one-two combination on crisis, character, and the disciplined leadership choices that matter most when the stakes are high.

Transcript

Bill Sherman How do you turn life’s most defining moments into a framework that others can use? For John Lentini, the journey to thought leadership didn’t begin with a model. It began with lived experience. From surviving 9-11 to leading through global crises, John spent decades navigating moments where character wasn’t theoretical. It was tested. Over time, his experiences evolved into a system, a language, and now a book focused on one idea that character can be built intentionally one decision at a time. I’m Bill Sherman, and you’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, John. Thank you, Bill, it’s a pleasure to be here. So I wanna begin with a question and attention. Your book, which is coming out later this year, is about engineering character and really character as revealed in difficult moments, right? How do you put those choices into a framework, let alone a book? How do make characters something that you can teach, communicate? Rather than because I’m sure some people would say, well, that’s what you’re born with, right?

John Lentini Yeah, absolutely. I compartmentalize into two different segments. You need to learn to lead yourself before you can really take on the privilege of leading others. So I’ve conceptualized that into what I call a three-dial system of discipline, mindset, and resilience to essentially lead yourself and achieve determination, to achieve your own outcomes, to lead your self, not necessarily to other people. But then once you’ve achieved those outcomes, a different onus of responsibility comes into play, and you need to learn to lead others. And that’s where my second set of dials to build out the full six-style framework comes in. And those are integrity, empathy, and influence, which yield trust. And together, the six-dials build character, which I feel is a dwindling resource in our society, so I felt there’s an opportunity to give people a system to build it. So talk to me about the six…

Bill Sherman Styles. When did they come about? And when did you sort of start seeing them, using them? Because some people scratch out frameworks and say, Hey, I’ve been using this for years. And others, as they write the book, the framework becomes clear for the first time.

John Lentini What was the experience for you? Yeah, there’s a kind of few factors that organically developed this whole concept for me. Firstly, I certainly believe in thought leadership, but I feel many of us are really thought in the space of thought-buildership, right? Because there aren’t too many brand new ideas. We often build on ideas. So the initial concept, the Discipline, Mindset, and Resilience was introduced by a mentor of mine within the Crestcom network. As the three things you need to navigate your business. And it immediately resonated with me and I was working with that. And that drove success through a very dark period. I founded my business just before COVID, which was very challenging to be starting something. I’d just really gotten off the ground in February of 2020 and everything came to a crashing halt. So those three elements of discipline, mindset and resilience in concert with each other. Were really what enabled me in real life practice to see my way to the end of that dark tunnel to the light. That ultimately led to a TEDx talk. So I delivered a TEDX talk in June of 2025 that essentially focused on that first component of three dials to lead yourself. That’s where the framework started to crystallize. And I, of course, have a corporate history in leading large organizations. So I’ve seen.

Bill Sherman And I want to get into that in a moment, right?

John Lentini Yeah, so that it out of the back story.

Bill Sherman Okay, so it’s been in an evolution process and it sounds like you had forcing mechanisms such as the Ted talk where it’s like, okay, these are things in my head. How do I communicate them in a way that’s clear and the framework becomes a tool, right? Now, you talk about leading an organization, so you’ve led through and been in some… Very difficult times. That’s right, yeah. Are you comfortable sharing some of that context and how that impacts…

John Lentini Why you do the work you do? Oh, absolutely. I mean, there’s a few elements that led to the space I’m in now and more of an entrepreneurial thought leadership space. And certainly a lot of it was for it to do crisis, real world crisis. And I was involved in some historic crisis. The biggest, please. Yeah, the biggest, most prominent of course is I’m a 9-11 survivor. So a plane went through my desk on the 80th floor of 2L Trade Center. Literally, my seat was three feet from the window that the plane entered on Tower 2. So it was a very challenging period for me, to say the least. I lost about 40 people that I knew, some of them very close to me. It was a dark tunnel back then for two years, I’d say. It was bit of a blur, but I didn’t really talk openly about it for about a decade. It’s only recently that I’ve come to grips with it’s shaped who I am in so many ways, I need to stop hiding from it. So that’s the first component, 9-11, clearly a big story, which is part of my TEDx talk, certainly part of my forthcoming book. Um, another- you know, historic event, which I was involved with managing teams in Asia was the Fukushima nuclear event. And I had a team on the ground in Tokyo, and I was at odds with my senior leadership and how to navigate some of the individuals who were adversely impacted, having learned from 9-11 in a way that others had not. And that certainly informed a lot of my model. And I want to stay there.

Bill Sherman For a moment and sort of sit in the moment here right. You talk about character and you’re talking about serious moments that are often short both shorthanded by dates in their respective cultures 9-11 and 3-11 Right. So those moments. Did you think about character in those moments or is it the processing afterwards? How do the pieces come together? Because I genuinely believe that when it comes to thought leadership, our lives, our identity, our defining moments really push us as to what we’re passionate and talking about. So I want to give you the space to say, how did those shape you? Bolt in, leading, and then choosing to speak about ideas.

John Lentini Yeah, I think the term character came later as I put together my six style model. I saw the result as a leader of character. That just organically came to me as a natural outcome of what would happen if you navigated these six attributes properly. Really the precursor was having seen what bad leadership looks like in corporate life. I’ve certainly had the good fortune to work for many good leaders, fortunately Many of them early in my career, which had a very positive developmental you know, impact on me. But I’m also extraordinarily grateful for many of the very bad leaders that I work for, quite frankly. And a lot of the poor leadership attributes, behaviors, decisions, and frankly, not blaming individuals, the culture that rewards the wrong behaviors in corporate life, certainly in the investment banking industry I came from, inform me as to what I think is needed to build a better brand of corporate leadership, which is really what I’m trying to drive with the mission of my model. Let’s circle here for.

Bill Sherman If you talk about bad leadership and good leadership, going to 9-11, what leadership did you experience in that crisis?

John Lentini So that’s an interesting story. And it’s the open of my book. You know, I had leadership, I should say there’s a strong Japanese theme throughout my work. And that came to me as I started to really draft my book, I didn’t realize how many of the dots were connected through Japan. The bank that I worked for in 9-11 was a Japanese bank. The five senior executives who were all lost, evacuating our floor, were all Japanese nationals. As Americans in an American subsidiary, we often felt a very real frustration of how the Japanese approached banking business. You know, very much zero tolerance for imperfection. It seemed to be teetotaling at times, lacked practical application. So there was constant friction about their approach. You know what we saw as, you know, penny rich for pound poor sort of thing. So that was constant. But on 9-11, I learned the real value of their culture of preparation. You know, we had. Taken on a very severe and, and, you know, a clear approach around response to disasters because we’d been a tap in 93 in the trade center prior to my time joining the firm, but we had that legacy history. So everyone in our organization had an emergency grab and go bag in our desks as a constant reminder of what was at stake. Our fire drills were always conducted with military precision. They were never treated as an unwelcome distraction. And people understood the need. You’re on the 80th floor of a tower that had been attacked not too long ago. So our senior leadership took this very seriously and ingrained in us in that Japanese way, zero tolerance. When it comes to life and human capital, which as it turns out, believe it or not, even in banking is our most precious asset, not the financial capital we’re chasing all day every day.

Bill Sherman It’s not the deal itself, it’s the people behind the deal, right?

John Lentini There’s no deal without the people, right? There’s not firm exactly. So on 9-11, many people were lost. Many of them I know because it was announced in the building, false information, a small Piper jet had hit the other tower. It’s safe to return to work. My senior leaders, I was on the street. I hadn’t gotten up. I was running a bit late from the gym. My senior leader’s evacuated everybody without pause. While many others were lost because they were listening to this false information. But they took their approach, which on a daily basis may have caused frustration. When it really mattered, I learned what Simon Sinek meant by leaders eat last. And tragically, they were all lost that day, but they died as heroes in my view.

Bill Sherman And that’s a powerful story. And one, I genuinely appreciate you sharing on vulnerability. Um, I want to take a step forward then 3 11, instead of someone being led, you’re now in the role of leader. How does that influence your actions? Consciously, unconsciously.

John Lentini Yeah, this is where I think the evolution of corporate politics impacted me adversely. I ended up kowtowing or I’d say acquiescing to senior leadership views. I had a brand new hire on the ground in Japan from New York. It just landed months before that. Now, I don’t know if you have any experience in Japan but experiencing your first earthquake there can be pretty unnerving to say the least, right? So those are veterans who were born there her ex-bats have lived there for years are used to it. There’s some, you know, bedding down of the anxiety. But if you’re brand new and you never experienced an earthquake, and then all of a sudden you have the worst earthquake in recorded history, you can imagine the response of terror that you’ll be feeling. So I had an individual who was new who wanted out of Japan. He was terrified and there were real risks. This wasn’t just overreaction. We had a nuclear reactor that was now, you now, sending radioactive materials into the environment. So we didn’t know where this might end.

Bill Sherman My sister was in Tokyo doing a studying program there on language fluency on 311.

John Lentini Oh wow. How do you like that? Incredible. Very, very traumatic for a very long time because he didn’t know what the long term.

Bill Sherman And you’re watching the news as an outsider, not knowing what’s going to happen, right?

John Lentini Yeah, and the reality was this one individual wanted to get out of there. And my view was I should cater to that. Now, I understand corporate protocol, you can’t allow mass evacuation, there’d have to be protocols with disaster recovery. Certainly understand that element. I understand the business reasons to want everyone to behave in the same way. But there was a level of empathy for a situation and a real level of liability because there were potentialities that were out of our control at that point. Now, coming from the place I did, where I’d seen 24 people from my previous firm and close to 40 people perish on 9-11 due to decisions that were or were not made by my leadership and others, I had some experience that you can’t play games. And if somebody felt that their life was at risk, and there was certainly real reason to believe it could have been, you needed to cater to that. But I played the hard line. He ended up flying out of Tokyo against orders, essentially, at his own dime. Uh, met up with me in Hong Kong where I was on a business trip. I should say I was actually, I was living in Singapore at the time I was in Hong Kong on a bussiness trip. I was due to leave for Tokyo that morning, the next morning. I was, I’m away from Hong Kong to Tokyo. And then when this earthquake happened, of course, my travel plans were canceled. So that was, I was essentially settled down in Hong Kong. I didn’t cancel my trip to Tokyo because of this, managing my team remotely, because I had teams around the region. But, when I look back… I wish that I had stayed true to my personal values and integrity and toed the line of what was right. And this is where experience matters. There aren’t too many people, and it’s not a pride thing, it’s a braggadocia thing, but aren’t so many people who’ve lived through loss of life on the job in that industry. I was probably the only one, at least the only that I’m aware of. In hindsight and even at the time, I think I would have appreciated some more know, deference to someone who’s been there and done that rather than this is the BPM, you know, listen to your chain of command. And that is a lot of what informs my model of integrity, empathy, and influence. I saw a bit of a lack what I consider pure integrity, lack of empathy, certainly for this individual, and from my standpoint, a weakness in influence, to influence what I thought was the right approach. And, that’s largely where the second set of dials was grounded.

Bill Sherman So John, we’ve started a journey that’s leading towards thought leadership in a book, right? You’ve experienced exceptional leadership on nine 11, right. You faced your own test on three 11 and had to navigate corporate and individual sort of, you know, character tension, right, You could have continued to lead in investment banking. You could even been a leadership coach or facilitator, right? Something caused you to want to speak up about character and to give that idea voice in this space. Why? Didn’t have to.

John Lentini Yeah, it’s a fair point. I did continue to lead within banking for years thereafter. I moved to Poland, back in New York, the industry changed. That was a big component of it. The banking industry, you know, really continued to consolidate and became far less inspiring and the post Lehman fallout, which continues to this day in many respects. I ultimately felt that I could be more effective developing leadership from outside of corporate life and I felt I was able to from inside. The more senior you get in those organizations, which is part of my motivation for this model, the more it becomes about leading up and less about leading the people within your charge. It’s more about appeasing the people who are at charge. And I just felt I could be a better coach, mentor, and leadership developer from outside of corporate walls and inside. But…

Bill Sherman What makes you write a book? When did you realize, hey, I’m being pulled into the world that many would call thought leadership, right? That’s a choice to speak on a different level. And my question is why? What lights you up and what motivates you to do so?

John Lentini Yeah, and I think this stuff is innate for those of us who like to do these sorts of things. And for me, it probably dates back, the earliest place that I could probably pinpoint would be my eighth grade American history class, where I had a teacher who was probably one of the most impactful of all the teachers I had throughout college and MBA. I had him again for AP American history in senior year of high school. So I had them twice and he forced me to look through the lens of American politics and history. Very much through a political science lens of John Locke’s and Thomas Hobbes. And I carry that conceptual lens with me today through everything in current events and life. So I always found myself to be very conceptual, which I think is a big piece of all of this. So that conceptual piece was always there. I’d say I probably wanted to be a history teacher originally, and my book does incorporate a lot of historic biographical supporting narratives, which scratches that itch. Moving into the space of leadership development training, which I do, training and facilitating. Scratches that itch to some extent. So I’d say inorganically, I landed back where I probably would have gone. You know, I ended up in banking because I landed a internship in the World Trade Center through serendipity through my network the summer after my freshman year of college. I switched from a history major to, you know, a number of times to ultimately switch from liberal arts to business school. Graduated as a finance major, worked in banking for over 20 years. That’s a huge switch. It was, and you know, I’m not a left brain thinker. I am not your typical finance guy. In many ways, it’s how I thrived because I was the right brain think or had creative ideas and could coach and mentor and inspire large organizations. And that’s where I found my passion ultimately was leading large organizations, I managed groups of hundreds of people across Europe, Asia, and the U.S. And the people leadership became the… The passion point for me, the derivatives, which I mostly worked in and the financial and operational elements became far less interesting, the more senior I got, the politics became very uninteresting, which is really one reason I decided to, you know, go out of my own and try to impact the world with my own worldview rather than trying to plug into someone else’s, if that makes sense.

Bill Sherman So John, you’re in the process of publication. You’ve turned in manuscript, right? And you have a pub date coming ahead either later this year or early in 2027. What does that look like for you? What do you want to happen with this book?

John Lentini Oh, the book kind of unveils my soul of what I think good leadership should look like. The real premises that I feel character is a diminishing resource that we haven’t acknowledged is dwindling. And I’m hoping my book gives everyone a mechanism to rebuild character. I believe that character was organically developed in previous generations through what I call fountains of formation. Through military and community and religious institutions, a lot of that has been degraded over the generations. And with it, we’ve lost a lot character. You know what Tom Brokaw may have framed as the greatest generation in his book, right? And to get back there, I think we have to do with intention. It’s not going to happen on its own. And it’s my hope that my sixth style model inspire people to develop themselves and to lead others with greater character. So the more people obviously the book gets into, it’s a mission-driven concept. Then the greater character will be driven in our society.

Bill Sherman You use two words that I want to return to. It reveals my soul. Right. I think personally, I look at books and grew up with books. My dad was a librarian and I read plenty of books. Those words really wouldn’t have landed with me in the same way until I went through the writing process and realized how much of yourself you have to put into the book. And it requires sort of Facing at least for me my own demons and trying to find meaning That’s not just me But what do I know and how can I share it with others? Talk to me more about that writing and revealing your soul process. I’d love to sit there for a minute.

John Lentini Well, it’s interesting, because people will often ask me, how long did it take you to write this book? And the true answer is my entire life, because this book is cumulative in so many ways. And I don’t want to reveal all of it. It’s actually a twist ending. It’s a leadership book with an M. Night Shyamalan twist ending of sorts. So it’s very personal. So many of the figures that I profile, I’ve sort of been digging into as a private scholar of sorts my entire lives. So that’s why I picked some of the characters that I did to profile in part three of my book. But in earnest, it took me probably about two years to write this. You know, it’s a myriad of things and, you know, we’ll see how it plays out because you know if everything’s a priority, nothing’s a priority, where is the focus? But you know the, the first three dials are essentially a self-help book. The second three dial is essentially a leadership book. The book is part personal memoir. There’s a lot of personal stories and pretty vulnerable stories. And there is a, were those used to write?

Bill Sherman Or…

John Lentini Were they horror? Easier than I thought, I would say. You know, I threw an act. Because you don’t know until you start. And I had the ideas of which stories, and other stories came to mind as I went through it that I would pepper throughout the narrative. But, you know, those core stories of 9-11, you know certainly drafting the script for my TEDx talk gave me a big jumpstart on that. I didn’t know how the Fukushima story would play out because there’s some sensitive, you now, kind of… Political and corporate questions. Right, right, right. Right or wrong, and I hope that it came across that I am not pointing fingers. I tried to take ownership of where I failed in all cases because I did fail in all places. There’s two sides to everything that goes wrong. So I don’t want this to ever come across to me pointing fingers at look at the bad leaders I could have done better because that is not my view at all. A lot of this is what I’ve learned and what I could’ve done better. And I took pains to hopefully achieve that in the way that I delivered the messaging. But, you know, when you’ve got something that is so, you know personal and emotional, I think the words sort of flood out of your fingertips in some respects. And it flowed a little more naturally than I might’ve expected. And it required some revisions of course, but we’ll see how it’s received. So far, you now that the actual people have read it, the feedback has been quite positive. The editor’s feedback’s been very positive, so we shall see. So you’ve talked about teaching. Thank you very much.

Bill Sherman Leadership, you’ve written a book, you’re done a Ted talk, right? Where do you go from here? And what’s the next hill you want to climb?

John Lentini Yeah, I have a second TEDx talk planned. It was originally going to be later this year. It still may be, but it may make sense to push that to next year for a host of reasons. I have second concept for a book, of course. So, you know, that’s what happens when you start one, I actually have concept for two or three more books, but I know what the next two will be. So I’ll always be writing. Um, I want to do more speaking. You know, I’ve done a lot of speaking throughout my career, both when I was in corporate and since, and I obviously still facilitate with Crestom International in the leadership development space. But I am a member of the National Speakers Association and looking to build out more of a keynote with my own intellectual property. This book will be the primary foundation for that and there’ll be a lot to build on. So I’m working on a number of assets to support this six-dollar framework and this concept of engineering character and my own kind of profile as a leadership engineer. And a lot of that, I should say, comes from my father who passed last year. I found out he passed the morning of my TEDx talk. If you watch my TEDX talk, you’ll see that. I had to live my framework in real time on the stage. I was informed that day as I entered the stage and my father was an engineer by trade. He left engineering early in his career, which turned out to be a massive mistake, but he had the DNA of an engineer. To be perfectly frank, I did not in that way. I didn’t inherit that from my father, but much of the engineering concept is a bit of an homage to my father whose passing was a pivotal moment in my transition with the TEDx talk and a lot of the inspiration for the book. And the concepts.

Bill Sherman I have a question I want to ask. The question I wanna ask John. So you chose to do a hybrid approach for publishing. What were you looking for in terms of working with a publisher and what was important to you in making that choice?

John Lentini Yeah, it’s an interesting journey because I knew nothing about it going into it. Many may have more insights than I had. Um, but I. Almost every author is at least once a first time off it, right? I imagine that must be true. So I looked at all three components, all three elements of self publishing, hybrid and traditional publishing. I was very, you know, it was very easy commute to zero and then hybrid publishing offered me the sweet spot. You know, gives you the support you need. It certainly gives me the distribution because I’m working, arguably the top hybrid publisher with four front books out of Nashville who has, you know, real gravitas and distribution channels through Simon and Schuster, but I also maintain all ownership of my intellectual property, full control of it. Um, obviously you invest to publish rather than getting paid and getting paid is always nice up front, but, I can retain the earnings. So I’m more motivated to continue to make sure this book sells because I retain more of the royalties on it. Not that I expect the money from the book to be the prime, you know, a real financial driver. No, but it’s…

Bill Sherman It’s a door opener, it’s a conversation starter, it is an opportunity creator and it’s a capital asset that you’ll use for five to seven years rather than being part of either spring or a fall catalog, right?

John Lentini That’s exactly right. And the other factor, which is, is critical, uh, with hybrid versus traditional is I have control as to when the book is released. If traditional is a very, very long lead time, which is out of your control. A lot of what you’re writing about could even become obsolete by the time it comes to market. So that was critical ownership of the IP, you know, greater retention of long-term royalty to a lesser extent, frankly, but the, um, certainly the opportunity to control when and how the book is released was, was a critical factor in my decision-making.

Bill Sherman So last two questions, what has most excited you about practicing thought leadership? What charges you up and makes you wanna do this, right?

John Lentini Well, this word has been getting a lot of grief for being overused, but I’ll use it anyway. And if there’s one word that just…

Bill Sherman It’s the name the field has, I would wish I had a magic wand to change.

John Lentini No, I don’t mean for leadership. I mean, the word I’m about to say, which sprang to mind when you said that. The word that came to mind immediately is authenticity. I felt within corporate life, as much as there’s a lot of pride in being a senior leader in a revered organization and, you know, the business card, the LinkedIn profile, and, there’s, a lot a pride of connecting yourself to an outside organization. What I felt was missing was my ability to be fully authentic. And in some ways, as a Gen Xer, I think that sets me apart because I think where Gen Z is. I think, that’s part of the challenge we’re navigating. The younger generation refuses to align with corporate values that don’t match their own personal values. My generation, the boomer generation, we were used to that. You knew that you had to leave a part of yourself at the door when you went to work each day.

Bill Sherman You put on the team colors.

John Lentini Exactly, and I was comfortable doing that for decades, but you reach a certain point, the more senior you get, the more political it gets, and you feel that some of this stuff starts to feel a bit meaningless, and you can’t really impact the world the way you’d really want to if you were to exert your true authentic self. And if I were to narrow it down to anything, I think that’s what drives me. And then I’m gonna ask the counter of that question.

Bill Sherman What is it that you wish you had the magic wand to either understand about how all this works a little bit better or that you could change? Because if authenticity is the driver, what’s the thing that’s sort of the challenge?

John Lentini Well, I’m working with a brand builders group, if you’re familiar with them, an excellent organization. This is an unpaid plug. But Rory Vane is their founder. He’s a great thought leader and public speaker himself. He talks of something called She-Han’s Wall that he named after a previous influencer for him. And this is essentially about a tipping point. You know, how do you break through She-han’s Wall? Because the whole point here is not to become rich and famous, but to get your message out to the world because you have a true belief in your mission. It’s impact. This is what it’s about. So the question is, how do you penetrate Xi Hen’s wall to the other side of where your message actually starts to break through to the public domain? That’s the big challenge, that’s the secret sauce I think all of us are looking for, but the journey is fun. I always focus on the journey, map the destination, but I do look forward to penetrating in whatever degree I can Xi Hen wall and getting my message out to as many people as it can positively impact.

Bill Sherman So John, thank you for joining us today for the conversation. Good luck on the book launch, and we look forward to hearing more from you, not only on character, but authenticity and the leadership journey. Much appreciated, it’s been a pleasure.

John Lentini Thank you, Bill.

Bill Sherman Okay, you’ve made it to the end of the episode, and that means you’re probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are three recommendations. First, check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game in thought leadership, as well as just starting out. Second, subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership. And finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights take them to scale through the practice of thought-leadership. Maybe you’re looking for strategy, or maybe you wanna polish up your ideas. Or even create new products and offerings. I’d love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.

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