The Case Against "Thought Leadership" (And for Actually Leading Thoughts)
I was at a marketing conference last year when a man in a blazer took the stage and introduced himself as a "thought leader." He said it without irony. He said it the way you'd say "dentist" or "plumber," as though it were a profession with licensing requirements and a professional association.
I looked around the room to see if anyone else found this strange. Nobody did. They were all nodding and taking notes. I wanted to raise my hand and ask what a thought leader actually does all day, but I was in the fourth row and I'd already eaten the free croissant, so it felt rude to cause trouble.
Here's the thing: I don't have a problem with leading thoughts. I have a problem with "thought leadership." The former is an act. The latter is a label. And somewhere along the way, the label ate the act, and now we have an entire industry of people who call themselves thought leaders without ever having had a thought worth leading anyone toward.
How thought leadership became a genre
At some point in the last decade, "thought leadership" stopped being a compliment other people gave you and became a content category you assigned to yourself. Companies started putting it on their content calendars right between "product update" and "customer spotlight." Tuesday: blog post. Thursday: thought leadership.
And the content that emerged from this category looks remarkably similar across every company that produces it. You know the formula:
- Start with a sweeping claim about the state of the industry
- Reference one or two well-known trends (AI, remote work, sustainability)
- Offer three to five bullet-pointed insights that are true but not interesting
- End with a call to action disguised as wisdom
The result reads like a LinkedIn post that got too long and fell into a blog. It's not wrong, exactly. It's just not anything. It's the content equivalent of a firm handshake and a "great to connect." Technically competent. Entirely forgettable.
Most "thought leadership" isn't. It's thought followship. It's saying what everyone already believes in a slightly more polished way.
The problem with the label
I've been editing other people's writing for long enough to know what happens when you tell someone to write "thought leadership content." They freeze. They become performative. They start writing for an imagined audience of Very Serious Business People and strip out everything that made their thinking interesting in the first place.
The personal stories? Too informal. The self-doubt? Too vulnerable. The weird analogy about sourdough bread? Too quirky. What's left is a piece of writing that could have been authored by anyone, about anything, for no one in particular.
I mentored a writer last year who was brilliant in conversation. She'd tell me about things she was noticing in her industry, connections she was drawing between seemingly unrelated ideas, questions she couldn't answer. It was fascinating. Then I'd read her blog drafts and they'd be completely lifeless. All the electricity had been smoothed out.
"I'm trying to sound like a thought leader," she told me.
"Stop," I said. "Sound like yourself thinking out loud."
She looked at me like I'd told her to go to a board meeting in her pajamas. But she tried it. And the essay she wrote that week was the most-shared thing her company had ever published. Because it actually said something. It had edges. It had a point of view that you might disagree with, which is the minimum requirement for something to qualify as a thought.
What actually leading thoughts looks like
The people who genuinely influence how I think about marketing have something in common: none of them set out to be "thought leaders." They set out to figure something out, and they shared what they learned along the way.
Ann Handley didn't brand herself a thought leader. She wrote a book about writing because she'd spent years watching people struggle with it and she had useful things to say. Bernadette Jiwa didn't launch a thought leadership platform. She started a blog about story and strategy because the intersection fascinated her. Seth Godin didn't call himself a thought leader. He just published a blog post every single day for twenty years because he couldn't stop thinking.
Here's what they all do that "thought leadership" doesn't:
They start with a genuine question. Not "what should I write about to position myself as an expert?" but "here's something I don't understand and I'm going to think about it in public." The humility of not-knowing is infinitely more interesting than the performance of already-knowing.
They're specific. They don't write about "the future of marketing." They write about one email they received, one conversation they had, one thing they noticed at the grocery store. Specificity is where insight lives. Generality is where it goes to die.
They have a point of view. Not a contrarian take manufactured for engagement. A genuine opinion that comes from doing the work long enough to have earned one. You can disagree with Seth Godin. That's the point. If nobody can disagree with you, you haven't said anything.
They're generous. They share their best ideas for free. They don't gate their insights behind a "Download our whitepaper" form. (The best marketing feels like a gift, not a transaction.) They give because they're excited about the ideas, not because they're building a lead funnel.
Real intellectual leadership doesn't announce itself. It just keeps showing up with something honest to say, and eventually people start listening.
A modest proposal
Here's what I'd love to see: a moratorium on the phrase "thought leadership" in every content brief, every marketing strategy document, every LinkedIn bio. Just for a year. Let's see what happens.
Instead, what if we replaced it with something simpler? Like "thinking." What if the brief just said: "Write about something you've been thinking about. Something you're genuinely curious about or disagree with or can't figure out. Write it in your voice. Make it specific. Be honest about what you don't know."
I tried this with a client once. They were a mid-size consulting firm that had been publishing thought leadership content for three years with steadily declining engagement. I walked into the kickoff meeting and said, "Tell me something about your industry that you think most people get wrong."
Silence. Then, slowly, one of the partners started talking about a misconception she'd been fighting for a decade. Another jumped in with a frustration he'd never put into writing because it felt "too opinionated." A third told a story about a project that failed and what it taught her.
That meeting generated six months of content. Real content. Content that had heartbeat and spine and something to say. None of it matched the previous "thought leadership" template. All of it outperformed it.
Lead a thought. Just one.
You don't need to be a thought leader. That's a made-up thing. You need to have one genuine thought and the courage to share it.
Not a repackaged trend. Not a summary of what three other people have already said. Not a "Five Things I Learned" post that you could have generated by skimming someone else's article. One real thought that comes from your actual experience of doing the work.
It can be small. In fact, it should be small. The best ideas usually are. They're observations that start with "I noticed that..." or "It's strange that..." or "Nobody talks about the fact that..."
Put it out there. In your voice. With your rough edges and your specific examples and your analogies that probably involve cooking because apparently that's what we all do now.
You don't need the blazer. You don't need the stage. You just need a thought worth sharing and the willingness to share it honestly. That's not thought leadership. That's just thinking. And the world could use a lot more of it. (If you need permission to start, read How to Write When You're Not a "Writer".)