Too many cooks spoil the thought leadership broth

By Edward Haigh

As I leaf through page after page of thought leadership during the peak-times of our analysis I often find my myself concocting fantasy awards in my mind: most off-putting opening paragraph; most underwhelming survey finding; most curious use of a photo of someone playing basketball against the backdrop of a sunset, in a report that has nothing to do with basketball playing at sunset.

The other day I came up with a new one whilst reading a piece by McKinsey: highest ratio of authors to words. A new direction in Chinese banking has three authors and is 165 words long, giving it an authors to words ratio of 1:55. I'd leave that award in my mind, for my own private enjoyment, but it turns out there are actually quite a few reports from other firms vying to beat it.

Is this a problem? I think it might be. There's nothing wrong with having multiple authors in itself, of course, at least not in theory. Indeed, where a report is enhanced by the input of more than one person - and certainly where it's actually written by more than one person - then it's perfectly fair that everyone involved is credited. But some things worry me:

• I suspect that some reports are being credited to multiple authors simply to give the firm an excuse to put profiles and contact information for multiple people (more importantly in multiple locations) on the same page. Which feels unconvincing. Which one of them really wrote the piece? Where's the real expertise?
• We haven't yet attempted to examine the relationship between the quality of a piece and the number of authors it has, but I expect if we did we might find a correlation. I expect we might find that having multiple authors puts you on a fast track to the middle ground: safe, perhaps even more resilient (co-authors are unlikely to allow one of their party to air opinions that aren't backed up by research, because there's a danger they'll be mistaken for being everyone's opinion), but generally dull (precisely because the opinions are missing).
• Bad pieces look worse. It's one thing producing a piece of weak thought leadership, but most readers understand that you get the odd dud, and even that there's the odd person who probably shouldn't be writing thought leadership. That's not to say they won't be put off by reading something bad, but they're likely to attribute some of the poor quality to the individual. Whereas a bad piece with three names next to it starts to look a lot less like a rogue: three people looked at this, three people signed it off. Quite apart from the impression that you couldn't even produce a good piece of thought leadership with three leading minds on the case (or that it took three McKinsey consultants to write 165 words), the more serious point is that it starts to look a bit like the firm rather than an individual. And readers are likely to find that harder to excuse.

There's irony in this last point, of course, partly because firms are often keen to hide the light of an individual under the bushel of the brand in order to protect, rather than expose, themselves, but also because one of the opportunities that having multiple authors presents is to add a layer of quality assurance where there might otherwise be none. It ought to increase the chance that one one of the authors says "you know what, guys? This really isn't good enough, is it?"