Although the phrase itself is only a few decades old, thought leadership has been around for millennia. There’s the Bible, for example. But when Joel Kurtzman coined the phrase in 1994, it was from the perspective of business leadership – he being the founding editor-in-chief of Strategy+Business magazine.
He defined a thought leader as an industry expert who shares their expertise for the purpose of educating, improving, and adding value to the industry as a whole. Others assert that the true value of thought leadership lies in providing trustworthy insights and perspectives gained from the thought leader’s expertise and experience.
Thought leadership, then, has tremendous value. After all, who doesn’t want to be guided by renowned experts – to gain knowledge and to make better, and better-informed, decisions?
But with great power comes great responsibility.
The responsibility to be honest, truthful, accurate, and (surely) if the piece is published in your name, for the words to be yours. You – the expert.
The problem is, they often aren’t.
Of course, thought leaders are not necessarily great writers. Turning to a copywriter to edit and hone a piece for readability seems perfectly reasonable. It’s just polish. But if someone other than the named author actually writes the words, and the ‘expert’ simply rubber-stamps the piece, that’s a different matter. At best it’s just lazy, and at worst it’s probably a disingenuous attempt to disguise content as genuine thought leadership.
Worse still, much of what gets passed off as thought leadership is actually produced by AI. This is where the waters get really murky. People read it because, according to the attribution, it’s been written by a leading expert in their field. We want and value that person’s insights. We want to benefit from that person’s unique experience and expertise. But if those thoughts and insights are instead just a mush of generalisations and other people’s ideas, judged by AI as relevant, how should we feel about that…?
Someone posted the following on Linked-In recently, and it had me nodding in approval: “If you can’t be bothered to write it, why should I bother to read it?”
But I think it goes deeper than that. Surely ‘thought leadership’ that’s attributed to an expert who didn’t actually write it has little or no value, and that expert (or the organisation they represent) does not deserve their readers’ trust and respect.
Many online and offline publications obviously agree. Responding to the sheer volume of AI slop making it onto their pages, a large number of them – including national newspapers, consumer magazines, and industry publications – have banned AI-written content. Some are even slapping long-term publishing bans on contributors who break the rules. LinkedIn, too, has responded to the abundance of slop by giving readers the power to call it out.
Vive la révolution, I say!
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve grown to like AI. I find it incredibly useful for all sorts of background tasks. But returning to Joel Kurtzman’s definition of thought leadership, AI is not an industry expert – a thought leader – and to substitute it for one is to devalue the concept. AI provides production-line content, not unique perspectives that reflect authentic personal experience and expertise.
LinkedIn is a natural medium for the keen insights of industry leaders and experts, and their thought leadership is as valuable today as it has always been. I’m grateful to those who take the time and effort to share theirs.
As long as it’s the genuine article.
