More and more these days, I am seeing people on the Internet who are being referred to as “thought leaders.” I’m not real sure what a thought leader is, but I really like the sound of it. So I was thinking of maybe becoming a thought leader myself. But then I started thinking about what it might mean to be a thought leader.
For one thing, if we were to be taken over by hostile power, you can bet dollars to doughnuts that the first people they will haul into the town square and execute would be the thought leaders. Of course, now that I think about it, that doesn’t seem to be very likely, at least not in the immediate future.
The next problem, of course, is how to officially become a thought leader? This is kind of tricky, because apparently, so far there are no training or certification programs for it . . . the only way to do it is for someone else to designate you as such. So as I think about it, there may be a fabulous opportunity here for me to offer the service of designating other people as thought leaders, for the low low price of just $500 a throw.
Of course, when you think about thought leading, well, the very term of “leader” implies that there would have to be a fair number of “thought followers” in the mix somewhere. Frankly, I’m not sure I would want that responsibility. I mean, are you legally liable for anything a thought follower does if they say they were following your thought leading? The insurance premiums would be through the roof, I’m sure.
The next puzzlement is, what if you have more than one person in one category vying for the role of “thought leader”? Having too many leaders is always a recipe for disaster, so we would have to have some way of determining which one should be the actual thought leader. This gets difficult. I suppose we could have some sort of “thought leader smackdown,” and as I think about it, I bet we could sell tickets to a “thought leaders steel cage death match,” but then we run into trouble. If you have two wannabe thought leaders in some sort of arena, how can you really tell who is out-thinking whom? And the real problem is, if history is any indication, if someone is truly visionary, the rank-and-file thought follower is not going to readily perceive the value of the most advanced leader's vision. I suppose we could just agree that the person who is hardest to understand is the winner, but of course that opens the door to all sorts of hanky-panky.
Hopefully, someday there will be a national association of thought leaders, who will get together and agree on a set of standards and practices that will make sure that all thought leaders deliver the same consistent degree of thought leadership. Until that happens, well, I am not sure what to think.
© Justin Locke
Justin Locke is an entertaining speaker. Call him at 781-330-8143 to discuss having him appear at your next event.
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