The Rise and Fall of Thought Leadership and Those Who Dare to be Wrong
Dare to be Wrong: The Only Edge Thought Leadership Has Left
Thought leadership isn’t broken because people forgot how to think. It’s broken because ubiquity breeds safety, safety kills nerve, and without nerve, there’s no insight worth remembering.
Thought Leadership, Everywhere and Nowhere
Thought leadership is so ubiquitous that it’s in every principal strategist’s toolkit. Leaders know it; boards expect it; the press release practically writes itself. None of that is good or bad—it’s just where we are in the cycle of a maturing craft.
Plenty of savvy marketers point out the obvious: the “thinking” is missing in bad work. True. But the chase for more thinking misses the better question: why does the tactic fail the moment the thinking goes away?
The Maze, But Backwards
People eat up thought leadership because everyone wants an edge. If you can’t study everything, you look for the person who did. That’s the premise.
Ubiquity, thought, breeds complacency. Here’s the maze metaphor I love: start from the finish and work backward. It’s easier that way. But if all you see are victory laps—the winners’ circle, the parade—you get the wrong impression about how brutal the maze actually is.
From that vantage point, thought leadership becomes a tidy I-told-you-so as if you alone discovered the path. The catch: to arrive there, you must be certain your journey ends in success. Certainty invites safety. Safety kills exploration.
Hot Takes, Cold Porridge
Safety still hungers for status, so we reach for bold claims and spicy soundbites. Trend-setting without toe-stepping. And then we sent it to the alignment committee, which, too often, confuses alignment with universal agreement.
Too many cooks start with a spicy garlic soup and end up serving a cold, bland, subtle porridge.
“Real thought leaders aren’t chefs or restaurants. They’re the adventurers who dive into unknown regions, try what the locals try, and report back to us watching on the sofa. The “soup” is just a blip on the path to a good time.”
Good Times Are Relative
A mentor once told me, success has many paths. There’s no single methodology that guarantees your outcome. Strategy is a great teacher; study the plays, yes, but keep the application of them loose. The world contains more variables than any playbook can hold. Don’t get saddled to a singular thread of thought; you must remain flexible.
Why do we like leading thinkers? We don’t follow them because they’re always right, but because they’re bold, different, and visionary—and they spark our own creative thinking. Are they wrong? Not usually for them, but that isn’t the point.
What Good Thought Leadership Actually Does
Good thought leadership comes from entities unafraid to be wrong. They connect dots others won’t, step out on a limb, and accept the exposure. From that position, two moves ahead, they wager on time.
They’ve given themselves a temporal advantage: extra runway to figure out something that works. When it does, it works for them first. Pioneers seldom do things amazingly; they do amazing things first, and just good enough to survive it.
The takeaway here is to listen to the wise marketers who say thinking is missing in bad thought leadership. But the real lesson isn’t simply to think more. It’s understanding why thinking is valuable: it licenses risk, creates temporal advantage, and keeps you far enough ahead to learn in public without being paralyzed by being “right”.
If you won’t risk being wrong, you’ll never be interesting. And in a market of perfect sameness, interesting is the only edge left.
