Thought leadership

The narrower your focus, the bigger your audience: it doesn’t sound right, does it?

Accustomed to the idea of mass-media, we assume that material with the broadest appeal will be read by the most people.  But the internet and social media may invert that relationship: because people can pick and choose what they want to see, they’re more likely to look at material which focuses on their interests than at more generic content.

In the BBC’s The Life Scientific professor and physicist, Jim Al-Khalili, quizzes scientists about their backgrounds and about what spurred them on to success, often in the face of ostensibly insuperable odds.  It would have been very easy for these to be fairly anodyne conversations, but Al-Khalili doesn’t duck the difficult issues, as when he asks Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell what it felt like to miss out on the Nobel Prize many of her colleagues thought she deserved: “It wasn’t fair was it really?” he

For a while now we’ve been sending out summaries of what we think is the best thought leadership on a given subject.  Leafing the newest selection, I was struck by material which, although aimed at client organisations, should also be required reading for consulting firms themselves.