What makes thought leadership great?

It’s 30 years since Joel Kurtzman, an American economist and one-time editor of Harvard Business Review, coined the term “Thought Leaders”. His goal was to share insights on the future of business by interviewing the best CEOs in the field. At the time, the notion that businesspeople could be thinkers as well as doers was not widely explored. Today, it’s almost a requirement for the job.

That means there is a lot of thought leadership out there, very little of which is memorable. When done well, however, it is still a powerful business tool. Research suggests it can generate a return on investment of 156 per cent, 16 times more effective than traditional marketing approaches. And a survey of more than 1,000 business leaders found that 80 per cent said the quality of a company’s thought leadership influenced their decision on where to award deals.

Four principles of great thought leadership
Here at FirstWord, we are regularly asked to create insightful thought leadership content that showcases expertise or offers solutions to complex business, technology or societal problems.

Great content can be packaged into a variety of formats: a 6,000-word white paper, an 800-word op-ed, a 400-word LinkedIn blog, a 30-second video or an eye-catching infographic. It all depends on the topic and the audience you are trying to reach.

While the subjects and formats may differ, they will all have key building blocks in common. That’s because we believe there are four basic principles at the heart of every piece of great thought leadership. Each should:

1. Offer new insights: whatever the subject or form, it should always bring a different lens or point of view to an existing industry or societal conversation
2. Be based on deep expertise: it needs to come from a place of knowledge and expertise, with proof points, to justify the reader’s time
3. Add to the conversation: it should not repeat whatever is already out there, but offer something fresh or more up-to-date
4. Be well presented: it needs to be packaged in a compelling way that grabs the audience’s attention and keeps them engaged.

Making an impression
Companies are naturally well-placed to contribute to the first three of these principles. They are experts with deep knowledge of their field. They study their markets for trends and to keep ahead of the competition. And they often carry out research that may be of interest to a wider audience.

Where corporate thought leadership often misses the mark is in knowing how to communicate this expertise to a target audience.

Dull headlines, dry delivery and a tendency to get bogged down in minutiae are common failings. Too often, thought leadership content overpromises – think of the number of articles you’ve read that pledge to explain the challenges of artificial intelligence, but leave you none the wiser. Conversely, bland content, with no point of view, will leave the reader unimpressed.

Or it might simply be too long. Thought leadership needs to be packaged into different formats to suit differing attention spans. That might mean creating a blog rather than a white paper, or one informative infographic instead of endless graphs.

That’s why we always recommend serving up your material in multiple formats, tapas-style.

Keeping the audience in mind
Whatever the format, thoughtful thought leadership – as with all content – needs to answer three key questions:

• Why am I reading this?
• Why am I reading it now?
• And why am I reading it here?

That means addressing these questions hard and early to grab your audience’s attention. It means laying out the context about why your issue matters, and then proposing potential approaches or solutions, with proof points that showcase your knowledge of the subject.

We like this piece on The State of Aviation 2025 from consultants McKinsey. It’s a state-of-play report for the aviation sector with clear story themes and beautifully presented data.

In a year when President Donald Trump’s often erratic actions have dominated the news, financial services firm J.P. Morgan aims to help readers stay abreast of changes with a clearly-titled rolling blog featuring short analyses from its leading economists: US tariffs: What’s the impact on global trade and the economy?

And here’s something Capgemini, another consultancy, has co-developed with United Nations agency Unicef, bringing voices to the climate conversation that the corporate world doesn’t often hear from: Youth perspectives on climate: Preparing for a sustainable future. It’s interesting and informative, combining a survey, report and infographic with interviews with seven young climate leaders from the Global South.

Finally, here’s a cutting-edge report we’ve created for Swiss fintech company NetGuardians: The top banking fraud types to watch in 2025. Insightful, impactful and readable, it gives the lowdown on 10 financial scams everyone needs to be aware of, offering a concise guide to the world we’re in.

Leaning on external expertise
This last example underlines that fact that understanding the principles of good thought leadership can be one thing, but creating it is entirely another.

In practice, it often takes a journalist’s expertise to pull out the most interesting details from interviews with key experts about ideas that they believe could make a difference to the wider world and then shape these into a compelling narrative.

That’s why more than 250 companies in 19 countries have already turned to FirstWord and our team of elite journalists and editors to help them do just that.

Regardless of your industry or area of expertise, the message for all thought leaders who want to be great is to spare a thought for your audience – and make sure your presentation is as powerful as your ideas. Otherwise, you risk failing to hit the mark and your prized insights might sink without trace.