Elevating Thought Leadership in Any Size Organization | Dr. Karthik Nagendra

You need top talent to start a thought leadership function in your organization.
But what if that talent already exists in your org? 

Whether you are responsible for starting a thought leadership function at a startup, or at a large company, you need to have the right talent, the right org support, and the right metrics to define success. In today's episode, we're chatting with Dr. Karthik Nagendra, Founder and CEO of ThoughtStarters, the first thought leadership marketing company in Asia. He's also the author of The Thought Leader Way: Leading Your Business with Thought Leadership in an Altered World, which details his experience and journey as a thought leader, and offers mental blueprints for helping new thought leaders and their teams excel.

Karthik takes us back to 2007, when he first started doing thought leadership at a startup in an emerging field. He shares how an assessment they created boosted the profile of the organization, and shaped the engineering industry as a whole.

Moving onto larger corporate thought leadership roles, Karthik shares how he helped stand up thought leadership as a research wing. He worked to identify internal subject matter experts and help them "come out of the shadows" and share their knowledge and passion. This partnership led to co-created white papers and other content that elevated organizational awareness while increasing their credibility.

We also discuss category creation and the need to continue to look forward, finding new ways to solve old problems. Karthik discusses how we often keep doing things the same old way, even if that way might not be as effective as it once was.  He explains how he's helped take salespeople down a journey of exploration and experimentation, to a point where it influences their peers to seek newer methods as well.

This episode tackles thought leadership from both a large and small scale, and offers advice for leaders, sales teams, marketing, and researchers alike!

Three Key Takeaways:

*  When starting a thought leadership function look internally for experts who are eager to share their knowledge and passion.  Then give them a platform to do so.

*   The buy-in from senior leadership is key when starting thought leadership.  If they don't believe in working for the long game, then thought leadership won't be effective.

*   If you are asking poor questions you are going to get poor answers.  And if you are creating thought leadership from those answers, people are going to think you're a poor thought leader.