Thought Leadership Taken Seriously
After quite some time blogging, I’m now pretty comfortable with it.
So I can see no further excuse not to get this blog onto its topic, which I have neglected for a while.
The premise of “The Alpha Mind” is that thought leadership needn’t always remain a nice-sounding, meaning-free buzzphrase. Quite the contrary, I believe it is worth taking very seriously, which means it is worth defining.
It makes sense to say that a thought leader leads thought. Fair enough. But, as we normally use the words, there’s already an inherent contradiction, or at least a tension.
Our normal thinking about thinking is that it is an individual endeavor. Our normal thinking about leadership is that leaders lead more than one person at a time—that is, leaders lead groups. Then the phrase “thought leader” seems to depict a person who leads a group in a process that is an individual not a group process.
Then the key to taking “thought leadership” seriously, and to understanding it, is to start thinking of thinking as a social activity. It has taken me only a few minutes of this effort to realize that, while we’re unused to conceiving it that way, thinking is a social activity. This is so in two ways:
First, even individual thought is informed by one’s social environment, and in fact a great deal of human thought is about how to negotiate the social environment.
Second, every act of communication between people is an act of corporate, communal thinking.
Clear as this seems to me as I write it, still the prejudice against seeing thought as anything a group can do is deeply held. It’s embedded in our language—notice we have a word “groupthink” which denotes flawed thinking. When we use this term, we use it in some assurance that groups cannot think.
Ah, but there’s precisely why I think the effort I’ve embarked on has begun to look valuable to me.
Because groups really can’t think.
And yet they must.
And so “thought leader” must morph from meaning someone who’s publicly opinionated and who wields opinions as a tool for self-advancement, to someone who is undertaking one of the most crucial human endeavors.
I named this blog a long time ago, so you might guess that I’ve done more thinking about this than I’ve posted. And I have. And tomorrow I begin sharing it.
I’m writing a book called Thoughtcraft. Tomorrow its chapters will begin appearing serially here on the blog.
I hope for feedback.
And I hope you enjoy the book.