The Thought Leader Journey As Self-Discovery
Mohan Nair, CEO of Emerge Inc. Sought-after keynote speaker and author of Unreachable: How not to lose your mind in an AI obsessed era.
gettyI have worked as an innovation executive at the highest levels of healthcare and as a consultant and advisor. I now work as a full-time thought leader and the author of multiple books. I believe this path is the pinnacle of my hard work and dedication to the craft of innovation and transformation, especially AI transformation.
My journey was not predictable. Many thought leaders will tell you that their journey into leadership was uniquely theirs and that there are no patterns to follow. I would agree with this only to honor the struggle that many leaders go through, but I also think patterns do exist. Those patterns can help anyone who has an interest in entering the world of thought leadership.
As a thought leader who is proud of how far they’ve come, I wanted to share a few observations I’ve made in this industry and some advice for hopeful thought leaders.
As executives and experts, we like to share our ideas and new transformation models in the AI era, and we can’t hold back these ideas, even if that process comes with drawbacks.
There is a group of people in this industry that I like to call “idea vampires.” They will take your ideas or even your exact words and launch them farther and wider than you have the ability to launch them. You may find yourself being quoted and copied, but you shouldn’t let that hold you back. This is simply the journey of a thought leader.
If you take a longer time to develop your ideas, be sure to let those ideas develop before sharing them publicly or building the right apparatus to launch those ideas. If you are fast and thoughtless, you may end up stealing ideas yourself; but if you are slow and thoughtless, you may have to give up until you can find your own way.
Instead of either route, I want to be fast and thoughtful. With that mindset and approach, you must build a flywheel of ideas and the apparatus to launch them. Ask yourself: What is your plan for your launch pad? Without a plan, your ideas may rocket forward and crash.
Generally, ideas cannot be copyrighted themselves. So being an idea-creation machine can be fun but unproductive. The root word of “productivity” is “product.” Build your idea so that it can be consumed by an intended audience. Otherwise, you will end up waiting for someone to notice your thoughts.
I was this way for years, and I never realized that my audience continually asked me, “So, how do I implement this at scale?” My response was pedestrian and never took hold because I couldn’t help my clients turn my concepts into a full realization of their dreams.
As a thought leader, you need to build an idea alongside the scaffolding needed for others to climb it. In my recent book, Unreachable: How Not to Lose Your Mind in an AI-Obsessed Era, I reclaim my prior ignorance by answering how leaders can develop scaffolding in their minds and then build it into something others can climb.
A single idea can be written in 10 books across a thought leader’s repertoire. Leaders seem to find one kernel of great inspiration, but then they can’t move on beyond it. Strong thought leadership must move on to the next product and build a family of ideas. Those ideas can then be interchanged and interconnected depending on client need.
Ask yourself what your contribution to society will be and build curiosity into your work. Strong thought leaders must capitalize on their passion for a constellation of ideas and form those ideas into offerings that can coalesce into a body of work that others can recognize. It may feel like your ideas never end, but you’ve actually been building these ideas out long before you were ever recognized. Build platforms and portfolios, not just one idea on one platform. And don’t wait to share those ideas; just wait until you have the scaffolding needed to implement those ideas.
Have you ever had an original thought? AI agents and solutions run on combinatorial engines that make their thoughts seem original, but really those thoughts are just a soup of ideas pulled from other sources. That’s why we need thought leaders to practice and prioritize original thinking. We all want to implement our ideas and pursue them to their final resting place: an audience. If you practice your aha moments, you will never need machinery to generate your thoughts. Only then can you call yourself a thought leader.
Do you believe in implementing those original thoughts? If you don’t, and if you believe all thoughts are recycled, then you can go on as you wish. I don’t. I believe that all of us live for original thinking. We craft those aha moments, and we are only struck with those lightning ideas if we practice the art of the aha moment. Practice failing forward with ideas, even if they come with humiliation. One day, you will find a voice that will let you shatter ceilings.
My final lesson is this: The pursuit of thought leadership takes hard work, introspection and intellectual honesty. You need these things to know when you really have something versus when you have another recycled thought. The joy of thought leadership is in the work of discovery. The real gift is the ability to find what has been inside you all along: your innovation voice.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
