Okay, now we're finally getting around to Cardinal Rule #2, first mentioned in the January 14th post. As a young consultant at IBM, the concept of thought leadership was beaten into our heads through endless repetition. According to Wikipedia, the term "thought leader" (TL) was first used by Joel Kurtzman of Strategy & Business magazine. Wikipedia defines a thought leader as:
"a buzzword or article of jargon used to describe a futurist or person who is recognized among their peers and mentors for innovative ideas and demonstrates the confidence to promote or share those ideas as actionable distilled insights."
When it comes to consulting, there are parts of this definition I agree with and parts I do not. First off, "TL" is jargon so refrain from using it around clients. Secondly, a TL is not necessarily a futurist, or not only a futurist, and I say this because I think consulting is more immediate and tactical than futurism. Three, innovative ideas - abso-friggin-lutely, although you may not receive recognition for generating them. (I often find that the true deep-thinking consultants get used and abused by their colleagues rather than rewarded. But that's another post for another time.)
Four, consulting is about sharing or better yet explaining innovative ideas, much more so than promoting. Good consultants convince the client of the rightness of their ideas with evidence. Lastly, "actionable distilled insights" is unnecessarily fancy language for tactical recommendations or action steps/items. There are two basic parts to any consultant recommendation: 1) the idea, and 2) how to make it real. They are equally important, and you cannot have one without the other.
To be continued in the next post............
No comments:
Post a Comment