If our findings are intriguing, we invite you and your colleagues to attend our free webinar series this year on the research.
In these one-hour Zoom sessions, we’ll feature outside experts, answer questions and provide advice based on our research about how to elevate thought leadership.
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.)
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, go to our registration page and sign up for the sessions you’d like to attend.
Here is the webinar series:
- 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 (Friday, April 17): 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 speaker will be Scott D. Anthony, author of the acclaimed 2025 book “Epic Disruptions,” one-time research collaborator with legendary Harvard Business School Prof. Clayton Christensen (creator of the “disruptive innovation” concept), professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, and former managing partner of strategic innovation consultancy Innosight.
- Webinar No. 3 (Friday, June 19): 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 speaker will be bestselling book author and prolific author of Harvard Business Review articles, Thomas H. Davenport. He will explain how he’s created numerous big ideas about the business impact of digital technologies, including process innovation, competing on analytics, and AI.
- 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. Research study co-author Bob Buday will 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 how they’ve turned big ideas into illuminating prose.
Outthinking the Competition 