The Art of Inspiration: Lead Your Best Story by Justina Chen

Author:Justina Chen
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2016-02-25T14:00:00+00:00

One Big Idea

(aka Thought Leadership)

What Is Thought Leadership?

Ever wondered what differentiated the TED talks that generated millions

of views and catapulted some speakers into superstar status? Check out Brené

Brown and her Power of Vulnerability talk, if you don’t happen to be among her

21.5 million viewers. Here is a professor who researched in relative obscurity until

she took the big stage to espouse an idea that completely inverted our perspective

and beliefs. Her incendiary worldview: Vulnerability is the seat of strength.

The popularity of Brené’s TED talk makes sense when you consider what

Jeremy Donovan, one of the TEDx organizers, discerned about the most popular

of the speeches. He explained, “If you had to say there was one magical element

74 | The Art of Inspiration

to the best TED talks, it’s that those speakers picked one really, really big idea.”

What TED calls One Really, Really, Big Idea, authors call worldview, academics

call sensemaking, and executives call thought leadership.

Whatever you name it, articulating a distinct point of view is one of the most

important jobs a leader has today. In fact, Peter Drucker, the management expert,

said that one of the most crucial jobs of a CEO is to go out into the world, filter it

through their worldview, listen to all the weak signals, and bring back those key

learnings in a distilled, understandable way.

Top 5 Questions Thought Leaders Ask

What do the market trends, the competition, the customers

and their changing needs mean for us?

What are the futurists and analysts saying?

What’s at stake? Why is this important now? Why should

we care?

After all that research, do you see a convergence of trends?

Can you drive that convergence into an epiphany, one that

is startling and fresh and carries huge implications?

The Art of Inspiration | 75

Distill the convergence of trends into One Big Idea, and that is your thought

leadership.

Take Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, CEO and co-founder of momsrising.

org. She is one of the top thought leaders on motherhood issues in

America. Here’s a snapshot of some of her thought leadership on

inequality: “Women without children make 90 cents to a man’s dollar,

mothers make only 73 cents, single moms make about 60 cents to a

man’s dollar, and women of color experience increased wage hits on

top of that. Mothers with equal resumes are hired 80 percent less of

the time than non-mothers and are offered lower starting salaries.”

What that all means is this: “Motherhood is now a greater predictor of

inequality than gender in America.”

Startling, isn’t it? She advances a provocative new way to look at a

longstanding issue. That is Kristin’s One Big Idea.

As a leader, what’s your One Big Idea?

Why Thought Leadership Matters

Your One Big Idea—thought leadership—isn’t specifically about your

organization, your product, or your campaign. It is higher-level thinking. It is espousing a worldview of the entire industry, issue area, or planet at large. It is

cartography where you are mapmaking the world of data, trends, and human

needs. As a mapmaker, you are drawing the clean boundary lines in a messy,

chaotic, uncharted world. And then as a leader, you are extracting the meaning for

the rest of us. You are saying, “Look. Here’s what I’m seeing. And here’s why this

matters for all of us now.

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