Thought Leadership is a declining art, slowly losing the battle against casual blogging and internet minimalism. Desperate for likes and retweets and a higher Klout score, mediocre writers artificially wave shiny objects above the fold, rather than meaningfully advance the intellect of our industry.
Until a couple of years ago, our best minds seemed capable of gathering their thoughts into compelling narratives that helped reframe our perspective into their way of thinking. Trade publications had no shortage of insightful articles and op-eds.
Then came the Top Ten List – brilliantly funny for Letterman, and now the so-called Thought Leader’s default in an internet age that fears structured prose.
But is this a structural bandwagon we all need to be on? Every day? All the time? Can no one actually write an article that’s actually… an article?
Here are 10 reasons the madness has to stop:
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- It’s overused. Literally (and I’m one of those people who uses “literally” when I’m being literal) I see three or four articles of supposed thought-leadership EVERY DAY that use this cheap and shiny lure. Today I’ve had seven, and frankly, I’m not following that many feeds. Imagine if the trend were “If your topic were an animal, which animal would it be?” Every day. Every article. All the time. Would you be tired of that device yet?
- It reveals right away that you aren’t that creative. How much creative stock can you put in someone who defaults to the easy device? If you were asked to write poetry and decided to just knock out a limerick, we’d know that’s partly because you couldn’t be bothered to develop a unique, compelling structure. You’d rather just fill in the blanks.
- It means nobody reads the text. There might actually be some nuanced ideas developing there in those few sentences that follow your bullets. But you’ve let people assume that it’s only the headings that matter.
- Curating is not thinking. Often these lists are published when the “author” has collected a suitable number of thoughts from others, and repackaged them as their own profound collection. That doesn’t count. Reminding us of that time Shakespeare wrote “To be or not to be” doesn’t make you a good writer. It’s still him.
- Bulleted ideas are shallow ideas. By definition, little bullets of wisdom aren’t much of a deep dive. And superficial thoughts aren’t leadership. Sure, occasionally someone manages to radically rethink complex ideas in a profoundly simple way, but not often. I think E=MC2 was the last good one.
- When you dumb it down, you narrow your audience to just dumb people. Sometimes simplification is profound. In advertising, simplifying a client’s message to its most resonant is what we do. But when you trade nuance for simplicity, you remove the intellectual value for those who are truly engaged.
- A checklist doesn’t make you a good pilot. Memory aids aren’t knowledge. Bullets of wisdom might help eliminate typical mistakes, but they fail to address the most-significant aspects of the job. A checklist will help you remember to put the gear down and switch on the landing light, but it won’t help you learn how to land the plane!
- Bullets are actually LESS memorable. The assumption is that glib headings make your ideas more memorable. Just read the chapter titles of Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, and you get the gist of the content, right? Wrong. Unless the reader dives into the thoughts represented by each bullet, and truly internalizes them, the list is just as easily forgettable.
- It’s a gimmick. And did I mention it’s an overused one? Numbered lists use layout trickery to suggest your content will be more readable. Try actually making it readable.
- List-padding makes the list less meaningful. Isn’t it amazing how many lists coincidentally work out to an even 10? That means there are probably a couple of duds added in to make sure we hit a nice, clean total. Seriously, did we need number 8 & 9?
For the record, yes, I’ve done it before myself. I’ve been part of the problem. But the first step in any 12-step program (see what I did there?) is to admit that you have a problem. I would argue I did it a year and a half ago, before the problem got this bad. But yes, mine still came 29 years after Letterman started doing it, so I was hardly one of the originals.
