Bill Sherman, COO and Thought Leadership Practice Lead, Thought Leadership Leverage
Bill is a seasoned B2B thought leadership strategist who knows how to take good ideas to scale. Bill serves as the COO and Thought Leadership Practice Lead at the specialist consulting firm - Thought Leadership Leverage. Bill serves as a thought leadership consultant for clients who want to use thought leadership to get attention for their ideas, create impact, and generate revenue. Bill is the co-host of the podcast "Leveraging Thought Leadership", which interviews people responsible for their organization's thought leadership. Over his career, Bill consulted with Fortune 500 and Global 1000 organizations that wanted to achieve impact by communicating powerful ideas that get people to think and act differently. Use cases include using thought leadership for B2B marketing to fill the sales pipeline and internal organizational transformation. Very few people go to school to become thought leadership consultants. Like most thought leadership practitioners, Bill initially stumbled into the world in 2003 when a C-level exec at a Fortune 500 company asked him, "how can I take the ideas in the book to scale?" Bill quickly discovered that he loved the worlds of independent and organizational thought leadership.
What is your favourite social media platform, and why?
LinkedIn.
Tell us about you and your current role or area of interest.
Taking ideas to scale on behalf of individuals and organizations.
What do you like about your career or area of focus?
I'm the son of a librarian, so I've always loved to read and learn. Here, I'm continually doing deep dives on super-smart ideas. I'm helping people make sure those ideas reach their target audiences and make an impact. As a life-long learner, this sort of role is fantastic. I'm constantly exposed to new ideas. It's also a challenge to look at an idea and find the route that leads to impact.
What is the best advice you have ever received?
Personal - Don't fall in love with things that can't love you back. Professional - The day you stop learning is the day you start growing old.
What inspires you, motivates you, or helps you to move forward?
I run to live. I had heart failure in 2014. And now have complete heart failure. Which means I am fully pacemaker dependent. When I was diagnosed, I could barely walk across a room without being winded. Now, I'm training to run a half-marathon in early 2022. What motivates me? I have my heartbeat. I have my breath. Everything else is negotiable. But the world is wide and wonderful. And it's meant to be experienced. So, I'm going to make sure that I'm fully present and thriving in each day that I have.
What are you proud of in your life so far?
I've been trusted by smart and successful people to solve tricky challenges. That's the life of a consultant, I suppose. I haven't taken a formal business class in my life, but I reached the point where C-level execs at large organizations looked to me for advice. The roads to success are many. And it depends on how you define "success." No matter how many times I've stumbled, I've found a way to regain my footing and keep moving forward.
What is your preferred way to meet new people/network?
Any way works - online, in-person, dinners, cocktail parties, etc. People are fascinating. And I love a good conversation.
What skills or qualities do you feel have helped you?
Curiosity. Humility. Persistence. Generosity. Respect.
What do you wish you had known when you started out?
Almost everyone, even HBS grads and CEOs, occasionally have imposter syndrome. Get past it and move on to work at hand!
Who do you most admire in business, academic or creative circles and why?
Elinor Ostrom (academic). Her work on social capital and how ideas propagate within communities, and how they become self-sustaining has been absolutely central to my work as a thought leadership practitioner.
Outside of your professional/work area, what hobbies or interests do you have or what other areas of your life are of real importance to you?
Running, I run to live (see the story of complete heart failure on the previous question). Baking, a skill that I learned from my maternal grandmother, who lived with us from when I was four.
Has the pandemic had a positive or a negative effect on you and/or your business, and how have you managed it?
Initially, everything was in flux. Probably like almost every consulting business. For the past twenty years, I had been a road warrior spending one hundred to two hundred days on the road per year (working with clients). In March 2020, we had to learn how to do that work remotely. And we figured it out. Now, I don't expect to ever go back to that much travel again. This is the longest in my adult life that I haven't travelled. And I learned that I'm way more productive when I sleep in my own bed for weeks and months at a time.
I've used that extra time to create my own thought leadership assets. I took ideas that had been sitting in client decks and Moleskine notebooks and turned them into written form and videos. I've spent the past eighteen months podcast hosting. Amazing professional development experience. And the business has evolved and grown over the past eighteen months. We are quite different than we were at the start of the pandemic. And that's a good thing. We've all collectively grown. As for managing it, it's a process of trusting your team to sail through the storm in rough waters. Without them, we would have been sunk.
Do you have a mentor, or have you ever mentored anyone?
I have received advice from many but had few formal mentors. I've mentored several dozen people over my career.
What advice would you have for someone looking to get into the same area of work or interests?
1. Find your passion - learn what it is that you'll be happy to think about and talk about for the next 10+ years.
2. Take time to listen and learn. Approach the world with curiosity.
3. Start engaging in conversation with others. Dropping comments into conversations is a good place to start.
4. Seek out feedback from people. Welcome critical feedback.
5. Get over imposter syndrome. Join the conversation.
6. Learn how thought leadership works.
7. Identify a small target audience. Narrowcast to them.
What do you feel is the most common reason for people failing or giving up?
Lack of persistence/ impatience. A good friend of mine taught me that to do a thing (like a blog or podcast) the first time is good. But where you see value is when you do the thing hundreds of times.
Is there a phrase, quote or a saying that you really like?
"We are not now that strength which in the old days. Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts. Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - "Ulysses" Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
What companies, brands, or institutions do you like or do you think are getting it right?
For organizational thought leadership, here are two that I think are doing it well: Doerr Institute at Rice University; AARP.
How do you define success, and what lessons have you learned so far that you could share with our audience/readership?
Thought leadership is the art of being deeply irrelevant to most people.
🥱 99.99% of the world won't care about your expertise. It's not what they care about (or need).
🤩 But for that 0.01%, you can be deeply relevant. Thought leadership fails when it tries to be relevant to everyone. There are 7.8 billion people across the world. One good idea does not fit all. Focus on being deeply relevant to a few people.