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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How to Scale Executive Coaching Across an Entire Organization | Billy Hoogterp | 742
<p>Ask professionals at the world's biggest companies whether they have a plan for their own learning and growth, and Bill Hoogterp says the answer is almost never yes. He built LifeHikes around that gap, and in this episode he shows how a happy accident turned into a scalable model.</p> <p>Bill's career reads like a series of rivers rather than a roadmap: a decade of living cashless and keyless, nonprofits that mobilized over a million student volunteers, an internet company that grew into Raptive, and, 12 years ago, a pivot into training and coaching. Peter presses him for the...
How to Stand Out When AI Makes Content a Commodity | Jack Myers | 741
<p>What if the one thing you've spent your career building, your expertise, is about to become the least valuable thing you own?</p> <p>In this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, Peter Winick sits down with Jack Myers, a media ecologist, futurist, and author of Your Third Brain: Powering a Future of Unimagined Possibilities. Jack launched The Myers Report as a fax newsletter in 1984, founded MediaVillage, and has spent decades watching each new medium reshape the people who use it. The two have known each other for more than ten years. Peter's focus is how to scale, leverage, and...
Building Trust Between Humans and AI in R&D| Jayshree Seth| 740
What does it take for a corporate scientist with zero direct reports to land on a list dominated by business school professors and bestselling authors? That's the question Jayshree Seth had to answer for herself when she was named to the Thinkers50 Radar in 2025 — and her answer became a framework. In her third appearance on the show, Jayshree Seth, 3M's Chief Science Advocate and now-published trilogy author, returns to catch listeners up on a remarkable stretch: a Thinkers50 keynote, a panel alongside Amy Edmondson, an HBR collaboration on trust and AI, and the release of her third book, The Heart of...
Why Your Book's ROI Isn't Book Sales | Zach Kristensen | 739
<p>Here's an uncomfortable truth for anyone thinking about writing a book: the profit from the book itself is usually a rounding error. The real return shows up somewhere else entirely — and this episode, featuring publishing strategist Zach Kristensen, is about figuring out where.</p> <p>Zach has spent 15 years inside the thought leadership publishing world, first at FranklinCovey helping build out titles like The 4 Disciplines of Execution, and now running his own publishing and author-coaching practice, Juxtabook. His new book, Trust Me, I'm an Author, distills what he's learned working with over a hundred nonfiction authors, and the central id...
Translating Academic Research Into Real Business Impact | Nathan Bennett | 738
What actually happens when academic research meets the boardroom? Peter Winick sits down with Nate Bennett — professor of management and faculty director of the Executive MBA program at Georgia State University's J. Mack Robinson College of Business — for a candid look at the gap between what business scholars know and what business leaders actually use. Bennett has spent his career straddling three audiences: students preparing to lead, practicing managers looking for answers, and fellow academics who reward each other for depth over accessibility. He explains why so much scholarly work is, by design, written for a room of a handful of o...
Leading Through Uncertainty: What Crisis Really Reveals | Tom Kolditz & Mariana Khomitska | 737
<p>What separates a leader from someone who just holds a title?</p> <p>This episode goes looking for the answer with two people who've watched that question get answered under real pressure: retired Brigadier General Tom Kolditz, who spent 40 years building leaders at West Point, Yale, and Rice, and Mariana Khomitska, a Ukrainian leadership development expert who has spent the last several years watching leadership get tested in wartime.</p> <p>Their new book, Against the Storm: How True Leaders Prevail When the World Shakes, comes out September 15 — and this conversation gets at the "why" behind it. Mariana makes a...
Rivers, Rocks, and Rubies: A New Career Model | Dan Pontefract | 736
Here's an uncomfortable question: if you replaced "Gen X" with a racial or ethnic label in a hiring conversation, would anyone tolerate it? Dan Pontefract — leadership and corporate culture strategist, six-time author, and former Chief Learning Officer at SAP and TELUS — thinks the answer says a lot about how casually organizations discriminate by age. In this conversation, Dan traces the arc that led to his sixth book, The Future of Work Is Grey — from a "reverse ageism" encounter as a 26-year-old college administrator to a career-defining moment when, at 51, a longtime speaker bureau dropped him because they were "refreshing the roster...
How Career Pivots Really Happen | Mary Olson-Menzel | 735
<p>What does it actually take to build a coaching methodology that thousands of people rely on? According to Mary Olson-Menzel, Founder and CEO of MVP Executive Development and author of the national bestseller What Lights You Up? Illuminate Your Path and Take the Next Big Step in Your Career, it wasn't a strategic plan. It was fourteen years of watching. This episode traces Mary's career from local TV news reporter through executive recruiting to founding her own coaching practice, one built on pattern recognition rather than a whiteboard plan. Mary describes herself as a kind of "business anthropologist" — someone wh...
The Difference Between Opinion and Real Thought Leadership | Lisa Bodell | 734
<p>She was skeptical about writing a book for years. Not because she lacked ideas — because she'd watched too many people write books for their ego rather than for their reader.</p> <p>In this episode, Bill Sherman sits down with Lisa Bodell, CEO of futurethink and bestselling author of Kill the Company and Why Simple Wins, to talk about what actually happens between "I should write a book" and "I finally did." It's not the tidy origin story most authors tell.</p> <p>Lisa walks through the real arc: the excitement of a new idea, the trough of doubt th...
Why Personal Branding Isn't About You At All | Vanessa Errecarte | 733
<p>"Personal brand" might be the most cringe-inducing phrase in business vocabulary. Say it out loud to a room of accomplished professionals and watch the shoulders tense — it sounds like self-promotion, follower counts, and algorithm-chasing. Vanessa Errecarte, Founder of Marketing Simplified, the UC Davis Graduate School of Management lecturer who built one of the nation's only for-credit MBA courses on the subject, thinks the term isn't wrong — it's just been hijacked.</p> <p>Her argument is simple but reframes everything: a personal brand was never about you. It's about intriguing people with what you know. Errecarte walks through how she teac...
