Many of the people who are talking about it the most are the ones doing it the least—whatever it is.
There are thought leaders and thought blatherers. I see it often in the world of content.
Sweeping statements about what content is may sometimes contain a kernel of utility. But for the most part, they are positioning without much standing behind them.
Sorry to tell you, but most of what you hear about content has little to do with what you need to do to do thought leadership.
People who have time time to preach and ramble about content mostly just want to sell you seats in their church. In reality, they haven’t worked through the theological issues. They haven’t wrestled with the hard texts.
What I can tell you is that few of them are doing the hard work. They aren’t sharing a passing thought worth considering and then going back to deep craft.
They aren’t going from their digital pulpit back to their digital desk to work through exactly how pending changes to the EU securitization framework will change loan markets or affect how Europe finances its climate ambitions.
They aren’t making sense of how mechanisms added to the Investment Company Act of 1940 over the past 60+ years have made it easier for investors to access private opportunities and various asset classes.
They aren’t figuring out how to help hedge funds rethink their tools for calculating delta, theta, gamma, and vega so they can seamlessly rebalance portfolios.
They aren’t thinking through what institutional investors need to fold cryptocurrencies into their portfolio construction in ways that are safe, reliable, and serviceable to their end investors.
That’s the big difference between the shouty extemporization you see and the legitimately hard work a thinking partner does in thought leadership and, in my case, in institutional finance. And most of the time, you can’t just ask your clients to give you the answer and write it down for them. You have to work through it with them. They can tell you what’s part of the context, but you then do the work of making it relevant.
I’m sure there must be some exceptions, but I’m also not seeing much evidence that any of the content specialists (or rather content genericists) are doing this hard work.
