Stand Out: How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It - Softcover

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DORIE CLARK is a marketing and strategy consultant and frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur, and Forbes. She consults and speaks to a diverse range of clients, including Google, the World Bank, Microsoft, and Morgan Stanley. She is also an adjunct professor of business administration at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Her first book was Reinventing You. You can access more than four hundred free articles on her Web site, www.dorieclark.com, and follow her on Twitter @dorieclark.

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Introduction

You have something to say to the world. You have a contribution to make. Each of us has ideas that can reshape the world, in large ways or small. It might be developing a new business process, creating a new literary movement, or finding a new way to deliver humanitarian aid. It could be changing how the world looks at a political cause, or how students are taught, or how the corporate world should handle work-life balance. Whatever your issue, if you really want to make an impact, it’s important for your voice to be heard.

Yet too many of us shrink back when it comes to finding and sharing our ideas with the world. We assume the leading experts must have some unique talent or insight. We assume that our own ideas may not measure up. We assume that working hard and keeping our heads down will be enough to move our careers forward. But none of those things is true. Most recognized experts achieved success not because of some special genius, but because they learned how to put disparate elements together and present ideas in a new and meaningful way. That’s a skill anyone—with hard work—can practice and learn. And more and more, it’s essential. In today’s competitive economy, it’s not enough to simply do your job well. Developing a reputation as an expert in your field attracts people who want to hire you, do business with you and your company, and spread your ideas. It’s the ultimate form of career insurance.

It’s overstating the case to claim that there’s a surefire formula for becoming a recognized authority in your field. But are there patterns? A common set of principles that almost every respected leader follows, consciously or unconsciously? Without a doubt. With hard work and smarts, almost any professional could become a thought leader in his or her company or field. Few ever try—and that’s your competitive advantage. If you’re willing to take the risk of sharing yourself and your ideas with the world, you’re far ahead of the majority, who stay silent.

You were meant to make an impact. Now is the time to start.

BECOMING A RECOGNIZED EXPERT

Let’s get clear on definitions. In this book, I’ll be talking about how to become a recognized expert—a thought leader—in your field. First, if you are a thought leader, you’re known for your ideas. If you have celebrity without intellectual content backing it up, you might as well be a reality TV star. Kim Kardashian, whatever her other virtues, is not a thought leader. Second, you must have followers in order to be a thought leader. Being an expert is great, but it’s not sufficient—it merely implies you know what you’re doing. Thought leaders strive to make an impact, and that requires them to get outside the ivory tower and ensure that their message is accessible and actionable. It’s also important to note that you don’t need to be the world’s leading authority on a subject; you can be a thought leader in your company or in your community as well.

Recently there’s been some cultural blowback about the concept of “thought leadership” itself (a term coined in 1994 by Joel Kurtzman, then the editor in chief of Strategy + Business magazine, regarding thinkers whose ideas “merited attention”1). In a Harvard Business Review article, Sarah Green pushed back on the notion, asking, “Don’t we have enough ambitious workers leaning in so far that they’re toppling out of their desk chairs? Enough ‘thought leaders’ selling dubious credentials and platitudinous advice? Do our workplaces really need more ladder-climbing, cheese-moving self-promoters?”2

The underlying assumption seems to be that aspiring to the creation of new and important ideas is somehow sleazy, or a form of strategic puffery. Admittedly, some advice on thought leadership is vapid and banal, just as some advice on marketing, or strategy, or finance can be. But sharing your ideas with the world—when done right—is a far more meaningful act. Often, it looks like bravery.

When Diane Mulcahy was hired by the $2 billion Kauffman Foundation to manage its private equity and venture capital portfolio, she realized something was wrong. The foundation had invested in more than one hundred VC funds over two decades, but as a former venture capitalist, she realized the returns were far less than they theoretically should have been. Figuring out what was going wrong was important for the foundation’s finances, but also for its mission. If venture capital was broken, the Kauffman Foundation—which focuses intensively on supporting entrepreneurship—needed to understand why.

Mulcahy began investigating, and the numbers weren’t pretty. “Venture capital has had poor returns for over a decade, and the analysis we did on our own portfolio showed VC returns had not beaten the public markets, which is a terrible thing to have to say,” she recalls. “Venture capital promises to beat the public indexes by a fairly high margin—that’s the only reason you’d invest in a private partnership that ties up your money for a decade and charges high fees. It was a very big deal to come out and say, with a lot of data to back it up, that venture capital doesn’t deliver on its promises.”

Mulcahy’s report didn’t name names or criticize specific VC firms. But it laid bare Kauffman’s own investment portfolio, a striking move in an industry that’s generally opaque. She took on the sacred cows of the industry, highlighting the overly generous terms VC firms negotiate for themselves. “VCs go around talking about what great investors they are,” she says, “but in actuality, they’re paid on fees regardless of how good an investor they are.” Indeed, VCs running a $1 billion fund make $20 million a year from fees, even before a single investment is made.

She started facing resistance even before the report was published. “I had at least a handful of people say to me during interviews, ‘Diane, why are you doing this? You’ll never work in this industry again.’ Some people said it in a genuinely personal, caring way, and others said it in a mildly threatening way. There was a sense that if you’re going to write things like this, reports that are provocative and go against the accepted narrative, your career in this industry is over.”

Once the report was released, the firestorm intensified. Her report was widely discussed by industry blogs and in the news media, but it didn’t make Kauffman, or Mulcahy, popular in some quarters. Some asked why they were “killing venture capital” or trying to “make it harder for entrepreneurs to make money.” Others questioned whether Kauffman’s poor returns were the result of flaws in the venture capital system, or just its own bad investment decisions.

Mulcahy, who subsequently wrote about her findings in Harvard Business Review, believes the report started a productive conversation in the industry, but she warns potential thought leaders that shaping the dialogue in your field can be a fraught process. “I received a great piece of advice from somebody on my investment committee,” Mulcahy recalls. “‘This is going to be emotional,’” he told her, “‘and you need to be prepared for that, and for the possibility that this could get personal.’ That was a real eye-opener, and he was right: people in the industry reacted emotionally.”

When you’re a true thought leader, it’s not about advancing you—it’s about...