Enough of Thought Leaders: In Praise of Thought Followers
Things They Forgot To Tell Me In Business School

Perusing my feed of business press this week, and swiping over the umpteenth article extolling the importance of thought leadership in establishing my personal brand, I couldn’t help but think that – in addition to these terms being annoyingly overused and long past their sell-by dates – what may be aspirational for the individual is hardly a recipe for success for the organization. 

Personal thought leadership is a flexible concept, often self-declared, that relates to establishing oneself as an intellectual authority in their field by demonstrating uniquely creative, innovative, and/or ground-breaking thinking. It is, we are assured, an integral component of our personal brand which is the ensemble of our image as portrayed in person, online, or in the media, be it carefully managed and curated or randomly assembled. Both are old ideas freshly clad and tailored for the diverse platforms of this digital age, where so much of our existence is publically accessible. They also reflect a focus on the individual not seen since the 1980s. Team work out, me work in.

While useful props for the supersaturated and faddish environment of online self-help and self-promotion thought leadership and personal branding conveniently ignore the reality that while anyone can, with some effort, highlight themselves as distinctive, most of us have never had an original idea in our lives and likely never will. Nor will we somehow rearrange existing knowledge in a truly novel and unique fashion. The reality is that while we all may aspire to be stars most people will spend their careers as useful and valuable supporting cast members. And this is as it should be.

Large-scale success is too often attributed to the contribution of single individuals. Simply because someone has a great initial idea does not in any way guarantee a successful outcome. In the product chain, invention, development, and commercialization are different stages requiring different skill sets but similar levels of commitment. Complex business wins are hard-fought and delivered by teams operating at some level of synchronicity within and among themselves. It really does take a village.    

When building a team, having creative doers in the right positions is absolutely critical, but so is recognition that they are just links in the chain of success. What one doesn’t want are layers of wild “out of the box” thinkers trying desperately to demonstrate just how unique and creative they are as part of their personal brand-building exercise. Total chaos. 

What organizations need in addition to a few necessary thought leaders are intelligent, responsible people capable of taking an existing idea, product, or process and further developing it according to their individual roles and expertise. What organizations really need in abundance are thought followers, people neither too proud nor too dull to take an existing idea, adopt it as their own, and help it reach its full potential. 
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