The Case for Thought Service

Why your thought leadership program is ass backwards. Start with the thinking problems people want solved, not your need to have a mic strapped to your cheek.

Thought Leadership is Doomed From the Start

Thoughts are more valuable to Google than a salesperson’s knowledge of a product, comms or execution speed. And yet it can’t say clearly what a thought leader is.

There’s really no other interpretation from a Change.org petition in support of a former Googler who says they got laid off because they weren’t enough of a thought leader.

A full-time employee (“Plaintiff”) was ordered by his company, Google Japan (“Company”), to participate in a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP), and although the original goals outlined in the PIP were met, the company then added an abstract and vague section, “thought leadership”, and then terminated the Plaintiff’s for failure to achieve the “thought leadership” target with a reason being “for grossly poor working condition or motivation and unfitness for duty.”

Plaintiff had shown improvement in “communication, work execution speed, and product knowledge” as directed in the first PIP. However, the company invoked the second PIP and then terminated him for “lack of thought leadership,” which was subjective and abstract. Plaintiff was a very diligent worker, and his performance figures were excellent. The Plaintiff could hardly be called “grossly deficient”. The company only describes thought leadership as a “holistic and complex capability” and to this day there is no concrete, clear explanation of what thought leadership means.

The language of the complaint gets to the core of the problem: everyone knows that ideas are valuable, but no one knows how to assess what they’re worth, or even the rubric for a good idea.

Thought leadership is not a helpful term in figuring this out. It is definitely a “holistic and complex capability” but then so is my ability to flick my underpants from the floor into my hand, then three-point them into my laundry basket. You might call me a laundry leader, but my clothes don't get cleaner. Sharing ideas on a big stage that no one wants to hear is like peeing in a blue velvet suit: it gives you a nice warm feeling, but no one notices.

Thought service is the program you were looking for. It's a change in mindset that will ensure your idea will actually do all the things you want it to do. For reasons I will go into, there will always be an oversupply of thought leadership. People who supply thought service are rare, but they’re the ones you all think of as true thought leaders. They provide a simple service: they make you feel smart, they curate the information you didn’t know you needed, they label things you knew to be true but could not name. Even easier than taking candy from a baby is giving candy to a child. Thought service is the latter. It’s mind candy.

The Veblen Good of Ideas

At the turn of the century, Thorstein Veblen wondered why some goods sold for prices far beyond their objective value.

The classic modern example would be a mechanical watch that tells the time less well than a digital watch, but costs 1000 times more. And Veblen decided the explanation for the high price was that the price was the point. Some luxury goods signalled status, and, boy, status feels good.

Even if Thought Leadership has a practical sales value, it also provides that satisfying rub of atatus. Shareholders subsidize regional leads’ dreams of being pictured on stage with a mic stuck to their cheek. They benefit if the exec’s resulting boost in status gets them more meetings with key decision makers. But this benefit is small compared to the other one: thought leadership is designed to make you FEEL AWESOME.

Someone hands you a stock deck. You CTRL-H replace “the world” for “Japan” and “people everywhere” for “the awesome Japanese” and memorize the speaker notes. There’s even an awesome 3-minute video that you haven’t made. You show up at a conference. The video makes everyone cry. They applaud. You update your LinkedIn with a photo of you and that sweet, sweet cheek mic on your face. Nothing quite like it.

It’s a form, in fact, of vanity publishing. Which is a legitimate business. Except vanity publishers don't serve readers. Their clients are people who want to feel like authors.

A depressing sight

Hell, look at me, my incremental revenue on this newsletter is nothing and I know half of you don’t read it beyond the first 5 paragraphs. Yet here we are.

Thought leadership’s spa-like ego boost for its practitioners forces a permanent imbalance in the market for business ideas: there will always be overproduction of thought leadery things. For every person mildly curious about marketing trends there are 900 people waiting behind bushes with a marketing-trends newsletter. For any given topic, in fact, the supply of thought leaders will always outstrip the demand for thought leaders. See also, in other contexts, poets, jugglers and a capella groups.

A New Deal: Thought Service

But thought service? Ideas designed to help you think? There’s a massive shortage of that — and any time someone focuses on the concept, they run rings around the competition.

Good ideas, because they’re made of nothing, tend to seem cheap compared to, say, billboards. Ideas cost nothing to carry around. Marketers in particular tend to see ideas as the final step in a campaign, since they seem to demand so little budget to transmit. But like any product, ideas need to be useful to work, and they need to be in demand.

Whenever you solve a big problem simply, you find the demand takes care of itself.

Thoughts and ideas obey these laws as much as a can of cola, and designing the right ideas and the right way people can express them takes the same hard work as getting the recipes to somehow match the decor in a restaurant.

Here is the difference between thought service and thought leadership.

Thought leadership is about you feeling smart.

Thought service is about making someone else feeling smart.

Thought service:

• Save time with a name: Names something that everyone has struggled to articulate

• Shows a path: Helps people plan and look forward in their own lives

• Fills an information gap: Shares information that is as useful to the audience as it is to you

• Makes other people feel smart: you want your charts to be easy to fit into a deck at the last moment, your phrase-making should stick in the brain.

This is your check list for designing an idea that spreads.

Turning millions in cost into billions in impact

The high-end media obviously survives because they provide a thought service. And most owned-channel efforts fail precisely because they don’t provide an equivalent service.

The Economist works very hard to make you feel and sound smart on a wide range of topics, while demanding very little effort on your part. If you read enough of it, you might survive sitting next to Henry Kissinger on a TransAtlantic flight. That’s a great service. By contrast, most thought leadership programs involve saying what you think needs to be said, then shoving it down its throat. Brands compete with this as if they thought every article in the Economist was a variation on “Here’s how people and nations benefit when they read more of the Economist.” Instead of crafting the key talking point that convinces people, thought service programs identify the information needs of their main audience, and see where it intersects with their message.

How $11 million convinced senators to rewrite the entire US tax code

My favorite example of thought service working better than thought leadership is Sean Parker spending $11 million of lobbying money and within 4 years convincing legislators to create a totally novel (if, ultimately, awful) tax policy worth billions of tax cuts.

Sean Parker, the GOAT of tax lobbying and also quite a good Facebook investor.

That compares to the thought leadership impact from the Heritage Foundation. For two decades, it has spent at least ten times that much pushing for a flat tax. You don’t know what the flat tax is? Well there’s a good sense of the Heritage Foundation’s success in helping people think about taxes. (Project 2025, on the other hand? Yeah, that was thought service).

What did Parker get so so so so right? He made his idea amazingly easy for others to express as their own idea, based off their own experiences. David Wessel’s anatomy of the campaign around Opportunity Zones called “Only the Rich Can Play” is one of those books that is both an indictment of everything wrong with policy formation, and, on the other, an amazing guide to how to get very stubborn people to do things differently.

It was a model of thought service. Parker’s goal was to get boost inward investment in America by creating zones within which capital investments would be taxed less. The idea was that American venture money going to high-growth, low-income countries like India at the time would be just as impactful being spent within America. The idea made total sense in a well-meaning tech-bro way — “impact investing on steroids” — but no one had proposed anything like it before. Everyone told him it would take decades to make the change. He did it in years.

First, save time with a name

I once watched Prannag Roy give a short and fascinating talk about the geopolitics of Southeast Asia where the words he said more than trade, “industrial policy” or even “China” were “or what I like to call…” As in, “We need a new kind of approach to influence through a new framework focused on where your target audience wants to think more clearly, or what I like to call thought service.” The naming of things was the first power granted to humans in the Bible, and it remains one of the most effective ways to share your idea. Treasure your name.

The most effective piece of thought service I was a part of literally worked because it named and identified “a Southeast Asian e-conomy” — this upended a solid tradition of local people in Southeast Asia saying that Southeast Asia did not exist. This was of course true enough, but it caused a ton of problems when it came to arguing that Thailand and Vietnam were worthy of the kind of capital that China and India attracted. By naming and identifying a distinctive Southeast Asian Internet economy that had broad rules, growth and attributes across borders, everyone began to use that report to sell their company to VCs or compare different economies. The concept of BRICs is another example of a name launching an entire theory of global economic growth.

Sean Parker and his EIG think tank zeroed in on “geographically uneven recovery” as their name for the problem — a sense that after the financial crisis of 2008, some parts of America were booming while others seemed stuck. This evolved into the concept of “zip code lottery.” As Wessel points out, a lot of governments have set up “enterprise zones” to attract investment in areas, but this is usually seen as the result of big economic shifts. The classic economic zone is Canary Wharf in London, which was hollowed out by deindustrialization to such an extent, that it was cast by Stanley Kubrick as the bombed-out city of Hue in “Full Metal Jacket.” Thatcher’s government provided a ton of incentives to anyone who would set up apartments and offices geared towards the emerging services sector of the 1980s. Economists still debate if the approach really works financially, but it certainly works visually. The twist Parker added with his name was the idea that there is some level of zip code luck. It seemed like some neighborhoods were just stuck in the crisis of the 2008.

Second, show a path

A lot of thought-leadership programs will tell you everything about how great the sponsor is, and very little about what people should do with the information beyond avoid nasty regulations. Information is infinitely more useful when it comes with a clear action. Parker and his team never argued explicitly that the tax break was necessary in the early days. They focused entirely on the issue of unequal capital investment that seemed to have nothing to do with inevitable wider economic forces. The path they consistently showed that what America’s poorest communities lacked was capital investment. And intuitively their argument made sense: it is always a bizarre feeling to cross a street in San Francisco or New York and feel the net worth plummet as you hit the other sidewalk, and then to feel it rise again five blocks later. The donut hole of poverty feels arbitrary, and Parker’s team always linked that weird feeling to a clear path: a massive infusion of capital would turn all those people stuck in the donut hole into the same kinds of small-business owners, coffee-shop dwellers and church-attending do-gooders that thrived. Thought leadership is almost always about what the company wants others to do to benefit it. Thought service helps others see a fresh and intriguing path that would benefit them. As Goldratt says “information is the answer to the question asked.” Thought service always answers this question “What should I do with this data point?”

Third, fill an information gap

There was literally no easy way to prove their point with the public data to hand. So EIG didn’t just put together a report, they created an entirely new database that mapped almost every data point they could find to a zip code, far beyond their main message about capital investment. Seeing their own struggles with compiling their data, they made it simple for anyone else to get a whole range of data about their zip code. The more data they added, the clearer the essential truth of their name and their path became: some zip codes just seem cursed and others seem blessed, and often they share a street. Redressing these imbalances, surely, could not be that hard. Thought service always seeks to build flexible information that others can use for their purposes, while subconsciously promoting the core concept that helps you.

The way people at tech companies say they love each other, is to forward a deck by Mary Meeker and Benedict Evans to each other with the words “lots of interesting insights here.” Even if the recipient doesn’t read it, or even the sender, both will, in a panic, return to that deck in a panic when they have a presentation that seems very small. The thought service Meeker and Evans provide is 60 slides that can usually be made to be the opening of literally any deck and provide the context for your frankly small-bore sales pitch.

Fourth, make other people feel smart

Parker and EIG opened up their database to the media and Washington think tanks knowing that both politicians and local newspapers are starved for big chunky stats about their own districts or neighborhoods. The idea of a “zip code lottery” really took off when local journalists realized they had an instant think piece on their hands by showing the wide gulfs in income within even a small area. Local politicians had to hand proof of their own district’s unique needs, and a fast way to generate an eye-catching stat that served their purposes. The resulting flood of coverage and citation in the speeches depended very little on direct pitching. They had created something like a story machine. Within a mere year, nearly every think tank at every geographic level had in some way adopted the concept of the zip-code lottery, simply because it was a compelling and fascinating story that they could easily fit into their narratives. Parker and EIG’s team had supplied everyone with all the stats and charts you might need to show wealth-gaps (and unmet needs) across any given geographic area.

Thought Service always asks: how do we help other people tell their most important stories better?

Finally, it’s effective and not boring

By helping others tell their story you can be sure you’ve not added to the sum total of boredom in the world. And you win.

If you’re curious to know how Parker’s amazing piece of lobbying turned out, you just have to go to the edge of any rich neighborhood in America and see a sudden burst of hotels and offices, before the poor neighborhood establishes itself. It didn’t work at all. Billionaires used the tax break to invest in real-estate concepts that would not have been possible to build within a rich area, but became wildly profitable by being built just next door to it.

So the policy was useless as a solution, but the problem it addresses — the zip code lottery — is still in use today, precisely because it is such a useful idea.