Leveraging Thought Leadership
Hear from the people whose ideas shape the business world. Learn what their public stories leave out. Our beat: the business of thought leadership and the people who take ideas to scale. Fortune 500 CEOs. New York Times bestselling authors. Thinkers50 honorees. NSA Hall of Fame speakers. Top business school professors. First-time authors. Emerging keynote speakers. Their support: publishers, speaking coaches, PR experts. We ask thought leaders to share generously. And they don't hold back. How did they get here? What nearly stopped them? What did they learn? And what keeps them going? Your co-hosts, Peter Winick and Bill Sherman of...
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Turning Unpredictable Referrals Into a Predictable Pipeline | Mark McIntosh | 732
Every founder-led advisory firm knows the feeling: business comes in waves. Referrals and word-of-mouth are lovely — until the pipeline goes quiet for three months and nobody can explain why. In this episode, Mark McIntosh, founder of RevGrow, joins the show to break down why that unpredictability isn't a mystery to solve, it's a system to build. A CPA by training, Mark spent years watching talented advisors get referred business only when it happened to occur to someone else — because their expertise "lived in someone else's memory." His answer was to build a repeatable playbook: get ruthlessly clear on who you help...
The Business Case for Giving Your Best Ideas Away | Dr. Ivan Misner | 731
<p>"We hated your books." That's what a European competitor once admitted to Ivan Misner — years after trying to build a rival networking organization and watching his own members ask, "How come we don't have books like BNI's?" It's a story that gets at the heart of this conversation: sometimes the most competitive thing you can do is give your best thinking away. Bill Sherman sits down with Dr. Ivan Misner, founder and Chief Visionary Officer of BNI (Business Network International), to explore how a mindset of generosity — not scarcity — fueled BNI's growth into 11,000+ chapters, 355,000+ members, and 41 consecutive years of growth...
The Business Model Behind a Financial Movement | Carrie Joy Grimes | 730
<p>Here's an uncomfortable truth: most people will tell a total stranger about their weird rash before they'll tell their best friend how much debt they're carrying. That contradiction sits at the center of this episode. The guest is Carrie Joy Grimes, founder and CEO of WorkMoney — a nonprofit she describes as "the AARP for everyday people's money." She built it in 2020 after years as a union organizer, watching thousands of people wrestle with the same financial confusion she'd faced growing up in a household where money was never discussed. The conversation opens with a poker metaphor that ends up do...
Turn Podcast Appearances Into a Referral Flywheel | Dustin Riechmann | 729
<p>Book the podcast. Do the interview. Move on to the next one. That's the default playbook for most podcast guests — and according to this week's guest, it's leaving most of the value on the table.<br /> <br /> Dustin Riechmann, founder and CEO of 7 Figure Leap, and host the the 7 Figure Leap Podcast, has spent the last four years helping coaches, consultants, and agency owners turn podcast guesting into a genuine growth engine — not just a lead-gen tactic. His argument: in a "trust recession" flooded with AI content and social media noise, the real currency isn't reach, it's trust. And trus...
Building A Leadership Framework Backed By Data | Benjamin Granger | 728
<p>Why do we size up a rude stranger in seconds and decide they don't belong in our "tribe"? Dr. Benjamin Granger has a term for it: the evolutionary hangover — his phrase for the cognitive biases our brains evolved for savanna survival and never quite retired. As Chief Workplace Psychologist at Qualtrics, Granger spends his days distilling billions of data points on how employees and customers really feel, and in this episode he brings that same lens to his new USA Today bestseller, A Leader Worth Following. The conversation moves from the biological to the deeply practical. Granger traces human sp...
Why Thought Leadership Needs Real Experience, Not Theory | John Winsor | 727
<p>What happens when the person telling your success story wasn't actually in the room? That's the moment that pushed John Winsor — Founder and Chairman of Open Assembly, Harvard Business School executive fellow, and author of six books including the bestselling Open Talent — to write a widely discussed piece questioning the entire thought leadership industry. In this conversation with Peter Winick, Winsor traces his path from launching a regional sports magazine (sold to Condé Nast) through decades of building and exiting companies, to his current work at Harvard's AI Institute studying the future of work. Along the way, he unpacks a ten...
Why Your Book Launch Is Just the Beginning | Sandy Smith | 726
<p>You just spent two years writing a book. Now what? That's the question at the center of this conversation about book publicity, expectations, and the long game of building a body of work. Bill Sherman sits down with Sandy Smith, CEO of Smith Publicity, to unpack what a smart book launch actually looks like — and why most of the excitement (and anxiety) authors feel in the 60 days around publication misses the point. Sandy's first move with any client is to ask what success looks like a year out. That reframe — from launch week to long horizon — shapes everything else: how to...
The Marketing Dilemma Every Author Faces | Rand Selig | 725
<p>What happens when the metrics you were taught to chase — title, bonus, prestige — stop adding up to a life that feels good? In this episode, Peter Winick sits down with Rand Selig, a Stanford MBA, former Wall Street investment banker, and founder of The Selig Capital Group, to trace his path from a jarring first job at Lehman Brothers to a self-defined version of success built on peace, gratitude, and deep relationships. The conversation opens with an unusually candid account of what it was like inside a major investment bank in the early days of Rand's career — a place where...
Why Your Expertise Is the Only Content That Converts | Ghazenfer Mansoor | 724
<p>What happens when a software CEO stops thinking like a marketer and starts thinking like a thought leader? You get a content flywheel that ranks #1 on Google, ChatGPT, and Claude — without hiring an SEO firm. Ghazenfer Mansoor, Founder and CEO of Technology Rivers, didn't set out to become a thought leader. He set out to grow a business. But as referrals gave way to inbound and conference conversations evolved into podcast guesting, something became clear: the content he was putting into the world was doing real work — compounding quietly in the background. In this episode, Ghazenfer walks through how that...
From In-House Analyst to Independent Thought Leader | Charlene Li | 723
<p>This episode is a companion to the upcoming Thought Leadership Handbook — part of a series where Bill speaks with exemplars featured in the book about how they actually practice thought leadership. There are plenty of books explaining what AI is. This one is about the person who decided to write a book that tells you what to do about it instead — and who's spent 25 years turning disruption into frameworks other people can actually use. Charlene Li joins Bill Sherman to talk about her new book, Winning with AI, co-written with Katia Walsh, and why this one felt different from her...
