Thought leadership is a phrase that is overused in consulting.

I first encountered it at the Forum Corporation as a descriptor for the instructional designers that conceived of the idea for a training program and structured the research upon which the program was built. Later, at other firms, it became the descriptor of a different career ladder, i.e., you could rise to partner through service offering development as opposed to sales.

At Gemini, service offering development was controlled by the disciplines, strategy, operations, organization, etc. Some service offering development occurred as collaborations between disciplines. For example, I was on the post-merger integration team, that developed that service offering that was sold to many different industries. Gemini’s Business Transformation service offering designed by Francis Gouillart and published in his book written with James Kelly, Transforming the Organization, was an example of thought leadership.

Business Transformation was called thought leadership at the time. It was composed of an analytical framework, the transformation map that showed the current state of every discipline and part of the organization and the desired state of that vector. Plans were developed and actions were taken. The book used a Cigna project as a case example. The transformation map was used on the service offering description using the Leonardo Da Vinci Vitruvian Man, circle in the square, drawing in the center. Many at Gemini mocked the drawing calling him the ”naked guy.” Later it was the paperback cover.

When Gemini Consulting alumni gather, Business transformation is variously described as:

• “ Misguided. I never met a client who said their business needed to be transformed. This was the sole reason for the decline of Gemini Consulting.”
• “Brilliant, but misunderstood. Francis never said you had to or even could do everything at once. Gemini Business Development Executives just saw the dollar signs of ‘whale projects.’”
• “Ahead of its time. It forms the basis of ‘digital transformation’ today.”

By the time I got to Katzenbach Partners, thought leadership was a part of the performance appraisal discussion at most major consulting firms.

So perhaps it is worth talking about. There are a few true thought leaders in consulting firms, Francis Gouillart at Gemini, Tom Peters and Jon Katzenbach at McKinsey, Fred Reichheld at Bain. These folks and others do come up with service offerings, but they also write books and speak about their ideas. Most ultimately leave their firms, join a university or go out on their own.

In fact, being a published thought leader is the single best path to continuing to work as a consultant into you eighties and nineties.

However these cases are rare.

Thought leadership for the mid-career consultant or even the old hand means solving a client’s problem in a unique but replicable way. There are three parts to that:

Solving the client’s problem, this means that the client must be not just satisfied, but enthusiastic about the results, perhaps even to the point of wanting to co-author an article in the Harvard Business Review.

Unique, this means that the firm’s partners haven’t seen a problem solved this way before, and that most people think, “Wow, I never thought of that.”

Replicable, means that others at your firm can understand what you did and copy it. It must be therefore easy to explain and imagine how it might work.

Thought leadership is innovation in consulting. Like all innovation, it comes from seeing things in one context and transferring them to another, analogy. It comes from seeing a need that seems impossible and asking how could that work, visioning. It comes from one of dozens of ideation techniques, to arrive at an idea that is then tested and developed, and executed.

Thought leadership is not talking the most or loudest in a meeting, or using  fifty cent words and quoting obscure academic theories, hoping people will say “he’s so smart” when what they really mean is “I haven’t got a clue what he is talking about.

It definitely isn’t saying “here’s another idea” in the middle of a tight delivery. If is not a designation that one uses to self-describe (“I’m a thought leader.”) nor a defensive response, (“Hey, I’m just trying to contribute a little thought leadership here.)

But if you want to be a consulting thought leader:

Read a lot of business articles, trade press, and academic journals. I think all consultants should do this, but if you are going to be a thought leader, you have to be a researcher first.

Collaborate. There are people who invent things on their own in a basement, but they are typically not the type of people who become management consultants.  Collaborate with colleagues, with university and business school professors and with clients. Every Steve Jobs needs his Woz (Steve Wozniak.) Every Francis Gouillart needs his James Kelly. (Kelly was the president of Gemini, a salesman,  and was widely assumed to have simplified and clarified Francis’s ideas for the general market).

Experiment and find clients who will let you experiment, not with half-baked ideas, of course, but gathering data that you may publish or co-publish later.

Teach – the best consulting thought leaders refine their thinking and share their thinking by training other consultants and the world at large.

There are some who would say that the decision to become a thought leaders is a “Grow or go” decision at the partner career juncture, but I say this is something that mid-career consultants must decide much earlier. They must consider whether they want to continually sell as they progress or whether they want to develop client relationships through research and innovation reported and taught to others

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