Thought leadership should be fun, fast, and fearless. You tap into excitement about new ideas and advocate for something better. That’s the mindset behind The Idea Sled. Projects glide forward gracefully. It’s the momentum of commitment. This newsletter shows you how.
Hope feels unjustified lately. A mad emperor wants to drag the U.S. to the edge of chaos with incessant jibbering cruelty. His court of fools cheers him on, seeking favor and plunder, leaving the world to founder. AI threatens to swallow human meaning, work, and culture into an involuted vortex.
But we cannot afford the luxury of despair. For us to make our way into the future, progress demands an active investment in the possibility of change.
Investing in innovation provides one way to yield returns in hope because every innovation is predicated on an idea about change.
While most people associate innovation with commercial outcomes, innovators often find more motivation because they believe in a vision for better. They imagine opportunities for improving outcomes or creating newness.
In the world of capital markets, newness may relate to a narrow set of use cases such as compliance management, risk analytics, trade settlement, securities issuance, payment flow, or fund administration. Yet work done to improve these areas can result in greater efficiency in the global financial system, increased wealth, higher levels of well-being, or other positive outcomes.
The idea may seem utopian and over-enthusiastic, but I see it time and again with leaders of innovation efforts. The thrill of the idea and its impact inspires them more than the dollars of revenue it may yield. Their motivation is hopeful and hope-fueled.
Innovators are often driven by visions of improvement, their enthusiasm fueled by hope—a crucial precondition for commercial success. Even the most transformative innovations risk being ignored without a way to articulate their vision.
This passion for change sits at the heart of effective thought leadership, a crucial strategy for communicating the value of any business innovation when buying decisions have high stakes and high information density. It acts as a binding force that fuses optimism for the future with tangible revenue opportunities.
Helping innovators communicate better allows them to champion their ideas in the market more effectively. Such thought leadership helps them advocate for the change they believe in. It also helps them crystallize and clarify their ideas about what’s possible and how to deliver it.
In other words, thought leadership doesn’t just describe change. It helps make it happen. But the way it is practiced matters. Thought leadership helps make change happen by articulating and propagating it.
I have often written about the value of thought leadership as a form of decency. Unlike tactics designed to capture and extract attention, thought leadership treats the audience with respect for their intellect and time. It acknowledges the stakes of complex relationships, as in institutional and capital markets contexts.
My additional point is that the future orientation of thought leadership corresponds to innovators’ desires to offer improved methods and outcomes. It presumes optimism, not only in the sense of a positive outlook but also as an organized, disciplined belief in “better.”
We are now undergoing a moment where economic or geopolitical efforts toward the better may seem unrealistic and futile. But pessimism is more than the despair triggered by worsening conditions. It is also a doctrine of preferring worse outcomes to better.
Thought leadership alone cannot reverse the tide of pessimism on the world stage, just like it cannot halt indecency, but it can chip away at it. In an era of chaos and technological upheaval, it plays a part. As innovators and communicators, we cannot reverse the world’s course, but we can uphold our values, rejecting complacency and complicity.
Thought leadership, at its best, is a strategy of hope that circumstances force us to pursue. Our only choice is to believe the future is still ours to shape, lest we lose it entirely.
Three Grace Notes
“It is crucial to learn hope. Its work does not renounce” —Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope
“If anything, we just dully expected that next year was going to be worse, and the year after that worse still, and so on. If I think back now to the end of 2019, I remember a weary sense of inevitability, as if disillusionment had fully impregnated the cerebral tissues of everyone on earth.” —Paolo Giordano, Tasmania
“Genius in understanding corresponds to genius in creation” —Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method
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