If our findings are intriguing to you, we invite you and your colleagues to attend a free webinar series we’ll hold this year on the research.
In these one-hour sessions, we’ll answer questions and provide advice based on our research about how to elevate thought leadership.
In addition, we will bring in distinguished thought leadership professionals as guest speakers to talk about how they elevated their firms’ thought leadership programs. For example, in our first webinar (Jan. 30, with 30 attendees), we interviewed Accenture’s head of thought leadership research, Francis Hintermann. (Note: If you didn’t attend, you can view the recording. Details below.)
We’ll hold four Webinars through September.
The Webinar Series: The Whole Will Be Greater Than the Sum of the Parts
As you’ll see in what follows, our webinars will be in the order in which companies create and market thought leadership content. We did this because thought leadership professionals today need to view their work as an end-to-end process. Those who understand the upstream and downstream pieces can better manage their piece of the process.
As such, we encourage you to sign up for the entire series. If you can’t attend a session, you can watch a recording of it after it ends. To sign up for the webinars, email Bob Buday at Bob@budaytlp.com. Tell Bob which webinars you’d like to attend.
Here is the webinar series. We will firm up the dates of the April, June and September sessions by the end of February:
- Webinar No. 1 (Jan. 30): Investing in Thought Leadership
This was led by Bob Buday, Alan Alper and Manie Bahl, and featured Francis Hintermann, head of Accenture’s thought leadership research group. (You can watch the video replay here. Passcode: B21!?HoR
- Webinar No. 2 (mid-April): Designing Thought Leadership Research
We’ll explain effective approaches to deciding on what topics to research, scoping topics (i.e., given the limitations of time and budget, determining which issues can be explored well), and choosing and designing the optimal research tools (online survey, phone survey, case study interviews, generative AI, secondary research, etc.). Our guest speakers will discuss how they design their studies.
- Webinar No. 3 (mid-June): Developing Groundbreaking Ideas
We’ll review effective techniques for, as we put it, “selecting and connecting the dots.” By this, we mean coming up with a highly counterintuitive, overarching insight from your survey statistics, case study interviews, generative AI output, and secondary research. Our guest speakers will explain how they created their big ideas.
- Webinar No. 4 (late September): Creating Compelling Narratives
Coming up with groundbreaking insights is not enough. A research team must turn these insights into a compelling narrative – a powerful, easy to grasp argument about some problem in the world and a superior way to solve it. We’ll lay out the narrative process that has shaped dozens of research reports, more than 50 Harvard Business Review articles, and hundreds of Forbes.com contributor articles. Our guest speakers will talk about their own methods for turning big ideas into illuminating prose.
Outthinking the Competition 