It’s Impossible To Be A “Thought Leader”
…if you’re not thinking of anything particularly interesting.
This is not being a “thought leader”: “We will be the leading supplier of integrated solutions for innovative web marketing.”
Thought leaders:
Make you think - in new and sometimes uncomfortable ways.
Will change things (or die trying.)
If the main motivator of a start-up founder is to be a Harvard Business School case study or “profiled in Forbes, or “on the cover of Inc” - then he or she will likely not make the long run. (Back in the late 70s, early 80s, I worked in a wild company started by an obnoxious screamer whose BIG ambition was to be a HBS case study. He ended resigning in disgrace…and one of his co-founders ended up in Forbes all right - being exposed as a sleazeball con man.)
If the main motivator is to change the world and have some fun doing it - then you could be talking the next Google.
What do you think? Leave a comment below!
Tags: thought leaders, entrepreneurship, entrepreneur sanity check
View the Blog Roll
March 4th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
My immediate reaction was “Just like the CEO’s who focus on Share Price and send the company itself broke”; and then read your next posting about exactly that!
BTW? What?!?! No opportunity in this posting for a photo montage/mashup of Mary doing a Thinker, Seth Godin style?
For shame.
Cheers!
- Mildly Evil Steve
March 4th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
“Thinker pose” -
maybe next time!Oh, all right! Good thing I’ve got that handy-dandy camera in my MacBook…girls and their toys…