There seems to be an obsession with the length of thought leadership today, to the point where it’s tempting to conclude that publishers see it as a panacea for all thought leadership ills. As if to reinforce the point this seems to work both ways–longer and shorter–but overwhelmingly the trend is to pander to notions of a time-starved senior executive and create bite-sized material. It also sounds perfectly sensible.

Along with terrible haircuts, padded shoulders, and beige, French post-structuralist critical theory was really big in the 1980s. Much of what was written about it (post-structuralism, not the 1980s or beige) was so impenetrable that you could win serious kudos for having managed to read a chapter of Jacques Derrida without having a nervous breakdown.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 1:9

We’re all used to the idea that you can lead a horse to water but can’t make it drink, but when it comes to their thought leadership, far too many firms aren’t even getting that far.

Key account management is more important than ever. The areas of highest growth in professional services are in multidisciplinary services—work that cuts across the traditional service lines most firms are organised around. Clients think that the range of capabilities a firm brings to bear plays a key role in its ability to deliver a better, more innovative solution. As a result, the quality of a firm’s account management, together with its breadth of capabilities and ability to innovate, are now three of the most important factors clients consider when deciding which firm to hire.

It’s easy to see why creators of thought leadership might not be fans of tables of contents: They invest thousands of hours creating hundreds of perfect pages, only to see their work summarised in 10 simplistic headings that give the reader a licence to jump straight to number seven. Or, simply, to decide that there’s nothing worth reading at all. Tsk.

When we run training sessions for creators of thought leadership, one query invariably arises: Have longer reports had their time and should we be focusing on snackable content?

Our answer is firstly that these options aren’t, and shouldn’t be, mutually exclusive, and secondly that both are important.

There are times when I’m more than happy to go with the flow—I’ll cheerfully stop for a chat when I bump into a friend, am happy to lose track of time when I’m engrossed in a good book, and enjoy exploring new places without a detailed itinerary. However, when it comes to my professional life, I’m rather more demanding: I want to see objectives and agendas, to know why I’m being asked to read a 30-page document, and to understand your expectations for that project you’ve just handed to me.