Bob Buday is an experienced thought leader and author of the book "Competing on Thought Leadership." With 36 years of experience in the field, Bob is considered one of the pioneers of thought leadership and has been in the profession even before the term was coined.

Episode Highlights:

• How unexpected disruptions, such as a power outage, can lead to deeper connections and meaningful conversations among conference attendees.

• Learn from Bob's experiences organizing B2B events for thought leadership marketing and networking, focusing on helping clients improve and featuring speakers and thought leadership practitioners.

• Learn how the content distribution method for thought leadership has evolved over time, specifically regarding channels such as internal publications, prestigious management journals, and public speaking and running conferences.

• Learn how management consulting companies can use thought leadership, such as creating high-quality content through a publication, to position themselves and justify charging premium fees.

• Learn how to create a successful business book by starting with an outline, finding a book agent and publisher, avoiding skipping the structured outline stage, and using prose to develop an argument.

• Learn how to leverage a published book to expand your event marketing program and pitch to well-known publications such as Harvard Business Review to increase reach and interest in your book.

• Learn how to evaluate and improve thought leadership content by following the criteria of relevance, clarity, rigor, and evidence and structuring the argument efficiently for the average business executive to understand and follow.

Connect with Bob and Steve on LinkedIn.

Steve Goldhaber: Hello everybody. Welcome back to Studio 26. Today I am joined by Bob Buday. He's the author of Competing on Thought Leadership. So great to have you on the show. Welcome, Bob. 

Bob Buday :Thank you. Great to be here, Steve. 

Steve Goldhaber: All right, cool. So before we get into stories, just give us a 60-second background about who you are and what you've been up to.

Bob Buday : Let's see, who am I? I'm 67 years old and I've been in thought leadership for 36 years. I started in thought leadership, the profession, even before there was this term thought leadership to designate people who are in the profession. Some people have actually been in it longer than me, not many who I know, but somehow.

Steve Goldhaber: That just screams experience to me. Experience is good. All right. So we're gonna start like we always do with some stories, and the first one you're gonna share with us is related to conference marketing and I'm excited to hear the story because something very bizarre happened in the middle of this conference that led to something good happening. So take it away, share the story.  

Bob Buday: Sure. So we ran a three-day conference in November of 2022. It's our sixth conference called Profiting from Thought Leadership. We had about 55 people in the room and another 55 or so, watching virtually. So in the room on day two, there was a power outage in this hotel in Southern California and Dana Point, California. The hotel was out of power for about an hour and a half, and we thought the attendees were going to complain to us looking at this hotel power outage. How come they don't have backup power, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it actually turned out we didn't get one complaint. In fact, a number of the conference attendees said that was great. I got to spend another hour and a half with my peers that I wouldn't have had there not been a power outage. So what that said to me, this tribe of people in thought leadership, it's a terrific tribe of people who are passionate about it and just as passionate about meeting others. Who are in similar roles across sectors and the people in that room at the conference came from across B2B sectors, management, consulting, IT services, venture capital, private equity architecture, and engineering firms. There's somebody who runs marketing in a big engineering company and other B2B training and it was a place for people to find the tribe.  

Steve Goldhaber: It's funny when things happen like that. I mean, usually events or meetings are so well orchestrated. It reminds me of a story back in the day I was presenting to a client, a big presentation, 2020 people in the room, and we're 10 minutes into this hour long presentation and the fire alarm goes off and this was up in Minnesota in the middle of winter and we all had to go outside and stand in the cold and we just continued the conversation and it was very funny how something like that's so disruptive makes your senses are just at a different level and you just have more meaningful conversations. So it's funny. Tell me more about the conference. Like what was the goal of this? Is it mostly networking, I assume sharing. The irony of sharing thought leadership at a thought leadership conference is kind of another topic, but like, tell me more about the conference. 

Bob Buday: The conference has been in motion since 2016. We and a partner company called Rattleback have put on this show for people in thought leadership and in 2020 when the pandemic set in, it had to be a virtual only event. And we skipped 21 because we wanted to do an in-person event and didn't feel we could get enough people at that time. So we rolled the dice and did a virtual and in-person event. And we did it not in Boston. We did it out in a different part of the world. We wanted to test that, and so we did it in Dana Point, California, which is in the southern part of Orange County, and it's a conference like all marketing, all B2B, all thought leadership marketing that is there to help our clients get better and hear from some other really good practitioners of thought leadership. So we let clients in for free every year, so it's a client kind of give back on one hand, but it's also obviously a good way to meet new companies. And they include both companies that provide speakers who are “practitioners of thought leadership” as opposed to thought leaders themselves, famous people known for some expertise. It's a marketing event, but it's also a client, you know, “Hey, we love you” kind of event. 

Steve Goldhaber: Who's the most interesting speaker you've seen over the years there? 

Bob Buday: Oh boy, that's a great question. Most interesting speaker. One of our best speakers has been a gentleman named Bill Chander and he is an expert in data visualization, especially for B2B companies and especially for thought leadership within B2B companies. Bill is an educator. He teaches courses on LinkedIn and he's just very good on stage in explaining what is a very complex topic and how ordinary people like us who do not think visually at all or much less visualizing data about how to make people like us more literate around this topic. He's just a very engaging presenter. Bill is super. But there are others. We've had speakers from McKenzie have talked about their publishing operations. Fascinating to see this publishing machine, thought leadership publishing machine. We've had speakers from Harvard Business Review who explain why they approve and reject articles. In enlightening, we had somebody from November, her name was Mia Lobell. She worked at Pushkin Industries which is Malcolm Gladwell's Podcasting Company. Which produces Michael Lewis's podcast among others. And, and of course, Malcolm Gladwell's podcast. and she spoke about the keys to doing great business podcasts, so she was riveting. 

Steve Goldhaber: It's got to be interesting because you've been doing thought leadership for a long time, and I would assume when you got started, it's essentially like, you're gonna write a book or you're gonna write a piece that gets published in maybe a trade publication or a magazine. I mean, talk about the difference today as it relates to content distribution, 

Bob Buday: So when I started in thought leadership back in 1987, and in a management consulting firm, my boss had several channels. One was an internal publication that we sent out to our clients and to prospects. So that was pre-web, right? So you had to print stuff and send it in the mail. And Harvard Business Review was a big target for us as well as it was for many other management consulting firms back then, and to this day, it's been a target for McKinsey, even though McKinsey has a Harvard Business Review quality publication of its own. They all wanna be in Harvard Business Review because it's by far in my mind and HBR will tell you this. It is the most prestigious management journal in the world. It really is, if you look at its circulation compared to the number two management journal published by a university, the number two publication, which is also very good in terms of circulation, is far behind. So, HBR is the premier. Um, yeah. Can you get us not to denigrate this number two or number three or number four publications. There's some great management journals in more specialized areas. But HBR is critical. The third piece of the marketing mix that my company, that company that I worked for at that time used was somewhat innovative at the time for consulting firms, and that was public speaking and running our own conferences. So, When that company sees the index, circa 1995 was about a 200 million company. 30 million of that 200 million was a research and advisory business, kind of like the corporate executive board was in a subscription based annual research, but also it had an event, a marketing events business. So that company I worked for had a lot of that 30 million in revenue, came from clients who wanted to play golf at Pebble Beach, another resort around the country, and listen to great speakers, and it was a management consulting firm that had a conference, which had a thought leadership research function. That was world class at the time on the topics that we were focused on and it was certainly world-class event marketing. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. It's fascinating. Management consulting companies and thought leadership are such a good fit. Someone recently asked me, tell me about a brand that you really like and I had two different answers. One of my answers was McKenzie, when it related to thought leadership, and I said, you know, the business justification for their thought leadership machine over the years, it's very simple. It justifies the highest rates in the industry. That is why they're doing thought leadership is it helps them articulate who they are. It positions them, but to me it all gets down to are you gonna pay McKenzie the ridiculous fee that comes with their reputation? It would be hard for them to charge those high fees if they didn't have some supporting marketing asset. And that I've known people who've worked for that publication over the years, and it is so good. They're really good at creating content and it's almost in its own category. It doesn't even seem to be a brand, it's kind of like it's on the side next to their own corporate brand. All right. But I digress. I'm taking us off topic now. So I'm gonna bring us back and we're gonna jump into story number two. And this story has to do with you helping a client put a book together. So, Tell us about that journey with that client. 

Bob Buday: Right. So the year is 2015, and one of our freelance writers comes to me and says, Bob, I have a client and they wanna write a business book. I don't do business books. I do articles. Bob, are you and your company that my company at the time was a Bloom group? Are you interested? I said, who's the company? He told me the company's name and I said, sure. Introduce me to them. And so what I learned was this company's a mid-size management consulting firm, global. They had been working on a book internally and they didn't get very far. They had an internal writer who had apparently met a bunch of internal obstacles and writing a good business book is extremely difficult. Writing a great business article, HBR article is extremely difficult. Writing a book is that times 10. So , I talked with this firm and read what they had produced and I said, what's your goal? And they said, our goal is to be seen as the leading expert on this topic around the world and they had, and still do, have a lot of competition from much bigger management consulting firms. And I said, well, if you want this book to, you know, you're gonna need to find a book agent  and that book agent is going to need to find a publisher and to get a book agent, you're gonna need a book proposal. And so they hadn't considered a book proposal before, and we produced a book proposal, which got them an agent, which got them a publisher, and they came to market with the book in 2016. Another thing that they didn't realize was in the development of the content for the book, the manuscript that they shouldn't use what I call the prose generation process of producing thought leadership, which is stated simply two or three people say, oh, here's our idea for chapter one, you spend an hour or two with them and they say but can you give us a draft of the chapter? A week later, they look at the draft, they dump all over it, and they say, this is not really what we wanna say? Well, it is what they said, but it's really not what they wanna say because they see gaps in their thinking and statements that are highly arguable and so gaps in the logic, et cetera. So I said to them, every good piece of thought leadership content starts with an outline. At least the type that we produce starts with an outline and sometimes the outlines are there to iron out the logic, to understand the narrative structure of the argument, to create your argument. And until you've created your argument through a structured outline, not one word of prose should be written because if you skip this structured outline stage, go right to prose, there's a good chance you'll be two months later on version 15 and with all parties not liking us and so the problem with using prose to develop an argument is it's a very inefficient process. So I had to learn the hard way early in my career not to use prose to help people think better to capture their ideas in an outline and use the outline and go back and forth on an outline to nail the argument before a word of prose, i.e. manuscript copy in this case is written and so that book, using that process we wrote, we ghost wrote that book for them in about five months with five ghost writers working on 10 chapters, but starting with building the outlines and yeah. Assure you that book, had we gone straight to prose for each of those X number of chapters, that book would not have taken five months or if it did, it would not have been a very good book. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, I'm gonna follow up on one part. It's the first I've heard of five ghost writers contributing to a book. Tell me about, How do you manage those ghost writers? Because you have to have some commonalities to whether it's storytelling or structure. How do you manage five ghost writers on the same project? 

Bob Buday: Well, we filled the role of  we're helping the client develop the argument through the outline process. Ghost writers often sit in on those meetings so he or she can hear firsthand how the argument's developing. We will have secondary research done to find stats where we need stats stories sometimes where we need stories and we'll interview our clients to get more stories or other companies that may not be their clients, but before our ghost writers, they have a very detailed outline in front of them, and so it's not painted by numbers, but it's close. The outlines are up to the writers to turn the prose into enjoyable prose and that's more of a writing skill, I would argue, than an argument development skill. And our best writers can do both. But it's rare to find a business writer who can work with a set of, or even just one expert on a topic who often has a big ego. It's rare to find a writer who can work productively with an expert to push his or her thinking and to put it in an outline. And not to  insult the intelligence or bruise the ego and then write powerful prose against an outline that the writer has helped construct. Those two skills are typically not found in the same person in our experience. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yep. That makes sense. So, keep on telling the story of this client. So take us to, after the book is published, what happens? What's the business impact? 

Bob Buday: Ah, so the business impact, this firm already had an extensive event marketing program in place in Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, where it has offices. And so the authors of the book became one more set of speakers to put on their marketing events. And after the book was published, we said it's time to pitch Harvard Business Review. See if we can take some of the content in the book, write it, pitch it, to HBR and see if they'll run it. So in fact, HBR ran two articles in their online edition that were not cut and paste drops from the book. They had to be written from scratch, but they were of course, based on the case examples in the book and the logic of the book and all that, the key messages in the book. So that helped a lot. That helped propel interest in the book with HBR. I forget how many online readers I have. The readership back then, 3 million stewards, doesn't mean 3 million are reading this article or that article, but it's a much bigger audience I can guarantee you, than this consulting firm had at the time, reading, going to its website or much bigger audience than just about every management consulting has going.

Steve Goldhaber: Tell me about it, so now I'm intrigued by the HBR processor. What is it a phone call? Is it an email? Tell me about, as you learned that and as you shared it with your client, like how does that all go down? 

Bob Buday: So we have helped clients publish more than 50 articles in Harvard Business Review over the years and that's going back to my early career at the consulting firm I mentioned at the outset there, which was a company known as CSE Index. It was known for Business re-Engineering. So my first experience with landing Harvard Business Review articles was with CSC Index, and that goes back to 1988. You have to have a counterintuitive idea. It has to be extremely well written. They have a couple dozen editors there who often rewrite articles that they get where they see there's a lot of merit in working, developing, and helping the author develop. The companies that I have worked with typically have never been authors in Harvard Business Review, and so they don't have the street cred. An HBS professor or a University of Chicago professor, or Northwestern professor or Stanford or whatever professor,  M I T Professor Business Sloan School of Management professor has. And so we have to send HBR copy that doesn't need a lot of editing, and has to be extremely well written. Had a former HBR editor who had the thankless task one year being the person who, and this is when most submissions came on paper, who would take home the had to write the rejection letters. Who are the 98% of the authors, and that is their rejection rate. 98% of rejection rate of unsolicited manuscripts. She said, and I'll never forget this, she said many times I can't even figure out what idea these people are trying to explain. She could, she 

Steve Goldhaber: Should have used that for inspiration in the, in the letter. We have no idea what you were trying to do. . 

Bob Buday: Yeah. Well I guess she wanted to keep a good written record. HBR likes to keep good relations. And some of these are very impressive people who just can't write very well and who do have expertise. And sometimes it's counterintuitive. Sometimes there may be a big idea. In fact her direct quote is, I'm now remembering it, and this is 10 years ago, at least “Sometimes there might be a big idea in there, but I can't puzzle it out. I just can't understand what they're talking about.” 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, you get so close to when you're writing something, you're so inside of it and it really is fascinating how someone can spend a minute, three minutes reading a piece and just have that moment of clarity to be like, this isn't making sense. Or you can see the struggle the writer's having, right? There's four different things happening. They're kind of related, but not really. That's the biggest struggle I've had, when I've written something, is you can't have an out-of-body experience to be fair to the idea or the style of writing. So it's fascinating. Someone else who has no context can just go in and say, well, here's what you're struggling with. Here's what needs to be tweaked or polished.  

Bob Buday: There are a couple ways to evaluate those kinds of submissions or any article. The first way is to hold it against what we look at is nine criteria of thought leadership content that would, for instance, Pass with Harvard Business Review and those things like novel solutions, do you have a very different solution to the problem at hand? Relevance, is this a problem you're writing about that you're gonna have to convince the target audience is a real problem, or they pretty much accept this is a really serious issue for some companies. Clarity, rigor, evidence, that's often the key thing that's missing from articles, which is there may be a novel solution, but there's no evidence that the solution has actually worked anywhere. And so if you lack the evidence, you don't have the Harvard Business Review formula if you need to provide case examples, preferably not disguised, meaning you're mentioning the name of the companies and you're explaining what they did and the impact of it. And the impact has to be pretty sizable. So to me the evidence is among the most important of the nine criteria. There's lots of interesting ideas, lots of interesting theories, but if it's not been proven to work, it's just a nice theory. It's elegant. It might be an elegant theory. So that's the first set of criteria. The second is let's say the elements are all there, right? We have case examples and big results, and it's a relevant issue and it's a very different solution than others have said. Okay, great. Terrific. Has the article been written in a way that the average business executive can understand and follow the argument. And that's about the structure of the argument. So that's the work well, let's first start with the problem, the audience and the problem that they have in the world, and let's prove that in fact this is a problem. And let's talk about the structure of the argument. Let's talk about why existing solutions have fallen short of solving it. What's your new and better solution? and demonstrate that it's worked at a number of companies and talk about the benefits and what are the barriers to adopting your new and better solution and how do you overcome them. And then the final part of this, what are you saying companies should do to move now if they are bought in by that point? This is a new and better solution. How do I begin to do things like how do I get other people on the management team who's buying? I have to move in this direction. And that's a standard argument structure that we use in everything from blog posts to books and that second set of things is you have to be able to explain things. If you have all the goods, you have to explain things in  a way that the audience can grasp and many articles skip over the problem, probably assuming everybody knows what it is and go right to the solution. And then skimp on the here's how you do it and hear the barriers you'll face with the authors believing we don't wanna reveal too much. The more we reveal about how to solve this problem, they're not gonna call us. Well that doesn't work in Thought leadership. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, it's interesting it's when you talked about the importance of the craft of communicating the idea, it reminds me of would Simon Sinek be where he is today without the Golden Circle visual that was featured in local Ted talk that turned into, God knows how many millions of views, but it's that ability to grasp it. You don't even have to hear him talk, but when you read it, it just distills it and things click and I think there is something to be said for that ability to do that in words or visuals. It is so powerful cuz that's when I first saw his talk, you see it and you're like, that just makes sense. And the visual representation of his thinking adds to that framework. 

Bob Buday: Frameworks are crucial. Jim Collins the hedgehog concept, the three circles that overlap at some point and he has used that to explain corporate strategy and also personal development. What careers people should be in. Do something you're passionate about. Do something that you're really good at, and where there's a market need. And that's a simplifying framework. We had one in our re-engineering days, the business system Diamond, Michael Porter has had frameworks have.

Steve Goldhaber: He was five forces. Right. If I remember. Back. 

Bob Buday: And the value chain. 

Steve Goldhaber: All right. So now thanks for sharing both of the stories. We're gonna get to know more about you. Tell us about your first job in the B2B space. 

Bob Buday: So you could say, my first job in B2B was working at a newspaper as a business reporter in Orange County, California, the Orange County Register. So I had been a sports writer before that for a year at a smaller paper out in Orange. And at that point I was a good sports writer. I was not great and good sports writers were a dime a dozen. Lots of journalists wanna write about sports, so bad sports writers are about a dime a dozen too. But good sports writers, there's a lot and I thought two things: I had a child or my first child on the way, and I thought, well, I am good. I'm not a great sports writer. I'm gonna be on the road if I get really good, you know? Cause you're gonna be covering a professional team and I don't wanna be on the road. I don't want to see my kid. Half the year I applied for business writing. Job at the Orange County Register in 1980. And actually I had first applied for a sports writing job at the Orange County Register in early 1980. And they said, we don't have any, well, we do have an opening on the business section, which was a small business section that ran mostly stock tables and press releases. So , which a lot of big city newspapers believe it or that was the state of business sections back then. They were not like the Wall Street Journal back then. They were not like the New York Times business sections back then. They were like PR outlets for companies. And so they said, are you interested in this business writing opening? I said sure. So I took the job. They brought in a new business editor, a new editor. They became a very respectable business section. They hired a couple people who went on to one, worked for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and so they became a very respectable business section. So, but I was there for three years and then I got bored and I launched a healthcare industry publication out of my home. And I lasted seven issues before I ran outta money. And I think I invested 15,000 in and so another, a big healthcare publisher said, we'd like you to come work for us and we'd like to buy your publication. And they erased the $15,000 debt I incurred from that publication. All right, nice. And I worked for them for a year. Great company, but it was a long commute from Irvine, California to West LA. It took two and a half hours to get back. This is 1984, 85, 84 was the La Olympics. So you can imagine with traffic, I said I can't deal with it. So I got a job working at an IT industry IT sector publication called Information Week, published by a long gone company that sold for a billion dollars back in the early two thousands CMP publications. I worked for them for two years. They transferred me to the New England office because they needed a reporter in New England, an editor and reporter, and I worked for them until 1987. And I jumped into the thought leadership world in 87, joining this management consulting firm, CSE Index.That was a 40 million or so management consulting firm focused on helping CIOs, chief information officers at big companies manage functions much better. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. What are you looking back over, or your different experiences? When you're having the most fun, what types of things are you doing? 

Bob Buday: What am I doing? I'm doing research, I guess. I'm helping clients and I'm doing research and my clients develop ideas that they want to be known for and that kind of research I enjoy the most is talking to people that one set of companies that have done things very well, and another set of companies that have not done things nearly as well, and trying to understand what are the differences between best and not so best practices. That's where I get my jollies. I get my jollies less from so I get my jollies, I guess more from research on topics that are important to me and which new ground needs to be broken and helping a group of people generate the dots and then connect the dots in terms of insights on that topic.

Steve Goldhaber: I can relate to the research being fun. When I wrote my book, what's your problem? I did a lot of research on different techniques. One of them was root cause analysis, and there was a lot of root cause analysis done on the Titanic. What's fascinating is we all grow up knowing the story about an iceberg that sank the Titanic. And we all think that's what happened. But when you researched it, there were like 5, 6, 7 other contributing factors that you just don't really learn about going down to like the week leading up to the voyage they had there was a shortage of coal, so they used to keep the engines going, but then it was like that burned hotter than it needed to, which could have loosened the hole so that if it wasn't if the heat had not gone so high, maybe it could have with the impact of the iceberg. So that is fun research. When you find these things, you just kind of take your limited knowledge of something and it expands in that you don't know. And that's the excitement too for the reader, right? When you're able to present that research, they have a similar moment. 

Bob Buday: Yeah. It's great to feel like you're on the cutting edge of something on a topic that you're passionate about, let's say, and to see practices that perhaps nobody's captured before, and to be able to understand what the commonalities are among those practices.

Steve Goldhaber: I would, I'll add one other layer to my Titanic story. This one person put together this theory about the coal and the wood being used, and he said, if you look at this picture on the day, they boarded the opposite side of when people were getting on it. You'll see black marks on the lower part of the hole. And the reason why that happened was because they didn't wanna board the normal way, because they thought all these affluent guests were like, what kind of a ship am I getting on? Right? So they had to look at how it stock. They were hiding all the burn marks. And it's just, and you kind of go, all right, well he could be onto something here like, that is strange. Why would they dock not the normal way? But anyway. All right I wanna have you talk a little bit about your book. I've got it. You sent me a copy. Thank you. Tell me about one theme in your book that you've focused on. Tell me about, tell me about what you're trying to document in the book.

Bob Buday: The most important theme in the book as I look back on it, is this actually the shortest chapter and this theme gets back, connects to the point of thought leadership is not just about marketing, thought leadership in B2B services. Companies are also about needs to be and  about service innovation and scaling up innovative services. And when people think about thought leadership, they immediately go to thought leadership marketing. And that's one of the ways I think thought leadership differs from content marketing. So I don't think thought leadership equals thought leadership marketing. Certainly marketing is part of it. The delivery, but scaling up the expertise that has been gained by doing primary research of the type that has led to big concepts over the last 40 years. Business re-engineering, disruptive innovation, Clay Christensen, the Challenger Sale Corporate Executive Board. Big ideas that changed the way people in business thought about operating their businesses. That thought leadership research, primary research. Obviously needs to feed the marketing funnel with Harvard Business Review submissions and presentations at marketing events and self-published white papers and all that stuff. But as important, it has to feed service delivery in these firms. And that, by the way, is the reason that the firm I worked at many years ago went from 40 million to 200 million in eight years and to zero five years later because it did not spend as much money and as much time on scaling up the quality, the supply and quality of consulting services to quote unquote re-engineer companies. And I see this mistake made repeatedly that you can help a company become a leader on whatever the topic is through a bestselling book and a Harvard Business Review article and this and that. But if you can't scale up your firm's ability to deliver that expertise beyond the authors, if you can't, if the people you send out in the field that clients have said we wanna do this when can we start? The people who are doing the Can do it at a level of quality as the quote unquote thought leaders, the authors, let's say. Then you'll wind up creating a market for your competition that can scale up expertise and ex and and scale up very well and quickly, like the Accenture of the world and Deloitte's of the world who invest millions of dollars in methodology development and in internal training and development in addition to recruiting. To scale up high quality services. Yep. The most important chapter in my book is what I call the supply side of thought leadership, which is one of the reasons I say in the book that thought leadership research should not report to marketing because the delivery part of a consulting firm or a law firm, or accounting firm or whatever firm, the people who deliver the services, if thought leadership research reports into marketing, the perception is unfortunately, oh, this is more marketing fluff. This is more marketing. Content. Right? So head of thought leadership research. At Accenture, for instance, reports up to the top of the company, and that's a McKinsey Global Institute reports up to the top of the company. And if you're going to use thought leadership to create new expertise or to renew existing expertise in a big B2B services firm, you have to be able to scale up those big ideas. And otherwise you will wind up making promises to the market that you cannot fulfill. 

Steve Goldhaber: All right. Awesome. Bob, I've really enjoyed you sharing your thoughts today on the podcast. Tell people where they can find your book.

Bob Buday: So they can find the book on amazon.com or Barnes and noble.com. They can also find out more information about the book. If they want to learn more about it before they purchase it at budaytlp.com , you'll see a section about the book.  

Steve Goldhaber: All right, great. Thanks again, Bob, have a wonderful day, everyone. Take care. 

Bob Buday: Thanks, Steve.

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