AI Can Create Content. It Can’t Create Thought Leadership

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1:20John Jantsch:Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jayas. My guest today is Peter Winnick. He is the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage, co-hosts the Leveraging Thought Leadership Podcast, and we're going to talk about his new book that he co-authored, The Thought Leadership Handbook, How the Experts Elevate Their Big Ideas and How You Can Too. So Peter, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, John. Appreciate it. So I had Keith Ferrazzi on this show. Believe it or not, I've been doing this show since 2005. I had Keith on when Never Eat Alone came out, and I know you have a bit of history with him.

2:00John Jantsch:Maybe let's start there. Yeah. So I started working with Keith in 2005, actually, when we launched Never Eat Alone, and I worked exclusively for Keith for three and a half years. So I was brought in to build out the training and development business, and I took over the speaking business. And this is in the stone ages, you know, before so many things, but it was an amazing experience. He's still a dear friend. And it really gave me the spark to say, you know what? Why be monogamous? Like there's lots of other thought leaders out there that could use help because Keith, as you know, is an amazing marketer.

2:37Most thought leaders, when you put on a list of paper, what they're really great at, marketing doesn't come up in the top 100.

2:44John Jantsch:Yeah. I can't tell you how many people have come to me with and thought leaders have written a book and they're like, what do I do to start marketing it? And it was like, well, that was about a year ago. Yeah. So you're absolutely right. So in the handbook, you actually introduced five avatars. There's one, probably the one that I thought was most intriguing, thought leaders on the run. So unpack that one for us. That's kind of the person that's too busy doing the work to even consider themselves a thought leader maybe, huh? Well, the thought leader on the run, when you break it down by the percentages over the five avatar is the one that shows up the most.

3:22Why? Because it's how they operate, right? So what does that mean? It means, and it's not that it's good or bad, it just is, right? That in order for them to get the idea out, primarily they need to be in the room or in the zoo. So they tend to live a lot in airports, right? They're going from event to gig and they put on the thought leader hat or the author hat or the keynote speaker hat more than they do the CEO hat, right? So typically when they come to us, the issue is, hey, I love my life. I'm blessed. This is amazing. I get paid the big bucks to go to be in Miami on one day and, you know, Arizona on another day, but I'm a little tired, you know, I'd like to sleep in my own bed.

4:03And from an impact standpoint, how do I get these ideas out to more people in more ways? and how do I balance my portfolio? So the revenue generated is not a function of how busy was I last week, last month, last quarter.

4:17John Jantsch:So one of the things that you, another phrase that stuck with me, ideas can't speak for themselves. You know, I wrote a book on referrals. So my second book was called The Referral Engine. And a lot of ways that was the premise of that. It's like a lot of, I think a lot of thought leaders, a lot of business leaders think, hey, I do good work. People will talk about me. You know, they'll talk about the great results. As opposed to doing anything intentionally around sort of amplifying the fact that they are referable. So how do you actually get people to start thinking in terms of, like, that ties to that ideas can't speak for themselves.

4:51John Jantsch:How do you get people to actually start spreading that idea that intentionally that they are worth referring? Yeah, so I think there's two questions there. I hear that as two different or two slightly different things. Usually there's six questions. Yeah, right. One is there are the ideas piece is how do we get the ideas out to the most people, the most relevant people most often? So to me, that's typically a function of format and all that. Right. So, you know, a book is great. People don't read. I mean, that's a general statement, but like a book is not today is not what a book was. Video is awesome.

5:30But if you're reluctant to get on video, you're missing opportunity. There's short form. There's long form. whatever. So one is where do your ideas live and how does that align to where the folks that you're trying to reach and connect with consume that information? That's the first piece. The other piece in terms of the ideas not speaking for themselves is what I would think about as velocity, right? So there's personal velocity. You and I are talking right now, so I can't be talking to someone else right now. Or if I was, that would be pretty rude or whatever, right? So there's a limit to that.

6:03So my personal velocity is how I choose to spend my time to get the word out and get the message out. Now, this is more velocity than you and I just having a conversation, although we've done that and that's great. We're recording this. It's going to be on your podcast. You know, lots of people hear it. That's pretty cool. The system velocity really thinks, so personal velocity is pretty straightforward. What is it I, the thought leader, can do to get my ideas out on a consistent basis? The system velocity, what are the other ways it could go that's not dependent on me, right? Me as the human, right?

6:33Me as the person. So there's lots of other ways ideas get out in the universe. And are you choosing to participate in the right ones to meet your business objectives, which is your strategy? Yeah, and one of the challenges

6:48John Jantsch:is there's so many things we can do, so many things we're told we should do. And so I think one of the greatest skills possible is developing focus and discipline. to save just what you said, to stay focused on the few things maybe that you should do? Well, I would say yes and, right? So the yes and is the focus and discipline is great as long as you're focused and disciplined on the right things in the right sequence to get the outcomes, which is strategy, right? So that to me, my clients, and you know this better than I do, thought leaders that we all know, they're not lazy, right? They're working really hard.

7:25They're passionate or evangelical in terms of what it is they're doing. but you know activity is not productivity and i think that's a trap that a lot of thought leaders fall into i'll just get up you know i'll work harder do it faster i'll get 25 hours in a 24 hours day and it's like well if you have 98 plates spinning in the air you know is that really good you know as opposed to you know your point on the fewer but it's the right few well sure right yeah

7:50John Jantsch:that was hopefully that was implied so one of the things one one common thing that i've heard over the years, whether they're a thought leader or just a business owner, even, you know, that it's like, oh, I don't want to tell them how to do my secret thing that I do, but then they won't need me. And, you know, I've, I know you take the opposite view of that. And so do I, I mean, I've always felt like they don't want to know how to do it. They want to know that I know how to do it. Yeah. I mean, I think there's one word for that. And quite frankly, it's stupid, right? So So like when Stephen M.

8:24R. Covey wrote The Seven Habits, it wasn't, well, we'll just publish five of them and you want the other two, you got to send us some money. That's just stupid, right? And I think the way it works is we put 20 years of models and methods and frameworks into the book. And exactly the argument you just made, oh, but if you put it out there, why do they need you? More people will need us at a higher price point as a result of that. The subset of people that buy the book and read the book and do it yourself, that's awesome. I love that. If we can help those folks, I never could have helped them. You know, they just can't be clients right now.

8:54Now that might change down the road. And I think that's really the piece. And, you know, if you think about it from a keynoter standpoint, you and I have both seen$50 ,000,$100 ,000 keynoters and you get their stuff on YouTube. So you'd say, well, why would I, anybody pay to bring them in the room? Well, there's a difference of, that's a totally different experience than watching a YouTube video.

9:13John Jantsch:You mentioned the thought leader on the run was maybe the most prevalent. Who do do you think has the most unrealized potential now? Is that same group or is there, is that a different avatar? You know, that's an interesting piece. I mean, I would say they all have potential because of the different things that we have available to us today. Yeah. Right. Whether that's, you know, the technology, the AI, the learning, you know, as a thought leader today, you know, 20 years ago, we were talking about this, you know, two old dudes sitting here talking about 20 years ago, the typical model for a successful thought leader was to publish a book every 18 months.

9:50John Jantsch:Yeah. Right. That was the, your publisher put the gun to your head, 18 months, 18 months. Now. It was very effective as a matter of fact. And it worked until it didn't. No, it worked until it didn't. Now the reality is it takes the average author two, two and a half years to write a book. How can you get one out in 18 months? There's a negative math problem there. So new was a relative term. So I think now there are more options, more choices, more ways to get your stuff out. I do think that there are a lot more impact and legacy executives, right? So these are folks that have had great success, typically commercially, whether they're C-suite and a Fortune 1000, or they built up a business and sold the business.

10:29And they're at a stage in life where they're like, you know, I've done the money thing, you know, checked all the boxes there. That's all good. But what I'm really passionate now at this stage of life is X, whatever X is. And I want to do that. And I want to spend more time doing that. And I want to understand what that is. And the way I measure my success might not be, you know, dollars generated or a number of keynotes, a number of books or whatever. But how many people are starting to think about my ideas? Are they being introduced as part of the vernacular in the business community, whatever communities I serve?

10:59There's a lot of that going on now. Because guess what? The old days of retire at 62 and be dead at 65, you didn't have a lot of runway. Played shuffleboard for a couple of years and then good night, Charlie. Right now, you got 20, 30 years to figure out what you want to do. Yeah.

11:13John Jantsch:Yeah. And it's going to be really painful 20, 30 years if you don't, right? Yeah. I think a lot of people are coming to that realization. I mean, I can't, like we've gone 11 minutes. This might be a record when I haven't mentioned AI yet. And talk about how, I mean, AI is just flooding the thought leadership, you know, category, if you will. Yeah. How does somebody actually, so to me, a thought leader, you know, originally was you had a framework, you had a couple of original ideas. You could put 67 ,000 words, you know, into a document. But today, anybody could do that in about half a day, right?

11:50John Jantsch:So what separates real thought leadership from just, I don't know, semi-smart sounding people? Yeah, I think, you know, you could fool some of the people. So I'll tell you bad ways or things that are not helpful to you, your brand, your growth as a thought leader to use AI and things that I've seen that are cool, creative, interesting, whatever. So bad ways are, you can pick up a tool and say, give me 40 ,000 word book on this and this in the style of that, this and the other thing. And it'll get something out. Now, anybody, you know, with any sort of IQ that's in the three digits will look at that and go, there's no there, right?

12:30Like, there's no there, right? There's like, okay, that's a lot of words on a page.

12:34John Jantsch:That could have been a 700-word blog post. Yeah, or a pod or, you know, whatever. So I think, you know, just because you can create a lot of stuff. Now, I think actually where you can create it, and you know this better than I as a marketer, content marketing, I think AI can do some really good stuff. from thought leadership, I think you have to say, okay, what is it good at and what is it not good at? So good at examples. I've seen lots of keynoters say, you know, I never spoke to this type of group before, you know, newly minted IT professionals. Let me push my stuff through there and say, give me a few examples that would resonate most with this audience at this company today.

13:10So that's research, right? I think for us, we did something that I think was kind of cool, but I'll let you weigh in on that, right? The genesis of the book for us was a couple of years ago, I started playing around with AI and chat and all that. Why? Because everybody else is doing it. I'm like, I got to play with this thing, right? And what I knew was we had a bunch of models and methods and frameworks. And I knew that would never be a book, right? That would be an IKEA manual that nobody would read. Models, methods, right? Like maybe there's a subset of the universe that loves that stuff, my dear friends, the engineers, but like that would not be something I would read, right?

13:45But I knew that we had this podcast. And at the time we had 650 episodes and we had transcripts. So I said, hmm, let me take 30 transcripts. And they were all categorized to a similar theme. And I threw it into chat and I played with it for hours and hours over a weekend. And what it taught me was, one, my memory is terrible. Because if somebody asked me, what were your favorite, most memorable things from the podcast you've done? I would answer a few. But if you ask me the same question a week later, I might answer differently. you know, but it gave me themes and it gave me patterns and it gave me things to look deeper on.

14:16So what I did was what every sort of ADD CEO does on a Monday morning, they call their much smarter process-oriented analytical COO. And I said, Bill, Bill Sherman, Hey, I got this idea. You know, we've like talked about writing a book. We don't want to write a book, but like I played with Chad over the weekend. I think we can knock this thing out in like, I don't know, a month, maybe two, you know, and here's why. And he did the, you know, almost like somewhere between a therapist and somebody knows you've gone off the deep end? And he said, well, maybe, which is the non-committal, let's go check it out.

14:46Well, fast forward, 650 episodes at the time was 2.3 million words, right? So if the average business was 50 ,000, that's a lot of books. And Bill was able to come up with some real tools to be able to pull those patterns. And then we always went back to the tapes, right? Many times we'd go back to the thought leader and say, you might not remember this conversation. And actually we took it a little out of context, but I want to talk to you about this vignette here, you know, this little story that you told. Can we talk about that? Cause we're writing a book that gave us brilliance. And to answer your AI question, that would have taken us years and six grad level interns and they like pizza and beer and to get paid every Friday.

15:23So that to me was a smart use of AI in terms of for us to get to the book where we wanted it to be. So it is a good book for those that we wrote it for.

15:34John Jantsch:Yeah, I, you know, I've never done that with my podcast. I've done about 2 ,200 episodes now. There might be a vignette in there too. I mean, I probably should do that. I mean, I've had guests on three and four times or more. I think Seth's been on five times probably. And I'm sure there's something in there that would be really interesting. And that's my favorite use, frankly, of AI is analysis. It's just so much richer than I would ever come up with, even if I spent 100 hours on it. So talk to me a little bit about one of the things that I know, I mean, this was part of Keith's framework, and I'm sure you've built it into yours to this idea of impact equation, like getting into rooms that you maybe don't know how you're going to get into.

16:21John Jantsch:So talk a little bit about how that idea influences some of the thought leaders you work with. Yeah. So I think every thought leader wants their work to have impact. Yeah. Right. They just do. Like we're not writing this for ourselves, although sometimes we are at a moment in time. But the impact equation, it was a way for us to say, how do you do this? Like, because Keith's secret sauce is the power of developing relationships. That's his secret sauce. Right. And Never Read Alone and a lot of his other books were sort of what that looked like. And then he's evolved into sort of some different thinking today.

16:52So we looked at the impact equation because equations are cool. Right. like they just are and said, here's how, what it looks like. Number one idea, simplicity. You got to get it down to its molecular. Now that sounds obvious and easy, but ask an academic that spent 25 years as the top of their game or world-class at whatever, tell me the gist of your work in two or three sentences. Most can't do it because it's been beaten out of them. It's not how they're trained. It's not whatever. And if you can't make it like simple, then it's not accessible. So there's no point there. The next is the relevance to the audience, right?

17:27So you might have something that's really simple, but if you gave me the simplest way to knit a blanket, it has no relevance to me. I'm not someone that knits. Now, somebody else that might be, oh my God, that's a hack that I'll use every day. But like, what's the relevance to me? And then the next is this, the velocity. We talked about velocity before. What are you doing to get it out there? And then what is the share of audience? And I think the share of audience piece is interesting. You know, if this was a startup, we'd be talking about total addressable market. But one of the most freeing things for me and that I try to share with my clients is, guess what, John?

17:58You're irrelevant in 99.99 % of the people on this planet. And that's an amazing thing, right? Because all you need to do now is say, what can I do to be as relevant as possible to that 0.01 % that matters most? And maybe it's 95 % or whatever. But like, for the most part, you know, you're irrelevant, right? I'm irrelevant. And the beauty of that is I don't have to spend my time chasing my tail, right? Like, I know that I want to talk to people like you. I don't want to be on a podcast for, you know, I don't know, stay-at-home moms in Iowa. Bless their little hearts. But look, those aren't my peeps.

18:32John Jantsch:Yeah. That's one of my favorite lines from Sandler. I had David on the show a couple times, you know, over the years was just, you know, the best thing you can get is fast nose. You know, the idea of the people that are like, the worst thing in the world is maybe because now you got to worry about it for the next six months and send 87, you know, follow up emails. Yeah, exactly. You know, but for somebody to go, no, you're not for me. You know, and obviously that's in a sales environment, but as a thought leader, clearly understanding who's for you, who's not for you and communicating that. So people sort of self-select whether or not they want to be in your universe.

19:09John Jantsch:Right. I mean, that's part of the equation, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. And you don't want to be in the conversion business, right? If you spend a lot of your energy and effort, you know, it's a great business model for the Mormons to work for them. Like it's really expensive to try to convince someone that your way is a better way, that your way of thinking might help them. You can do a little bit of that, but if I got to spend, like you said, you know, 10 phone calls trying to show you that my way is better than yours. Why wouldn't I talk to someone that's already sort of absorbed some of my thinking and said, you know, I kind of dig what you say and I think you could help me.

19:40That's just a better place for both of us to be.

19:42John Jantsch:Yeah, 100%. I'll ask you directly, and I think we're going to be on the same page on this. What's the biggest benefit of being seen as a thought leader, even if it's in a tiny pond of your city? Yeah, so I'll tie this back to marketing because it's what I believe, right? So every one of us, I don't care what business you're in, whether it's product, whether it's services, professional services, selling consumer package, because we're all being commoditized. That's not a good thing, right? Right. So if you're being commoditized, what does that mean? Downward pricing pressure, lack of distinction between you and somebody else, this, that, and the other thing.