Thought Leadership & Executive Ghostwriting

Thought leadership needs a thought

There’s already quite a lot of content. Every day brings another avalanche of articles, posts, opinions, predictions and “five things every business leader needs to know”. The world probably doesn’t need another one.

Good thought leadership starts somewhere else: with something worth saying. An observation other people have missed. An informed opinion. An uncomfortable question. A lesson learned through experience. Or simply a better explanation of something important.

I’ve been writing professionally for 30 years, as a journalist, government speechwriter and commercial copywriter. I help business leaders and subject-matter experts find the ideas worth sharing and turn them into intelligent, credible content that sounds like them.

Because being an expert and having time to write about it are two quite different things.

Knowing something isn’t quite enough

Expertise is the raw material. Thought leadership requires something more.

What have you learned that other people in your field might find useful? What do you disagree with? What’s changing? What are people getting wrong? What have you discovered from doing the job rather than merely talking about it?

You don’t need to manufacture a controversial opinion every Thursday morning. Sometimes the most valuable contribution is a new connection, a clearer explanation or an experienced perspective on something everybody else is discussing.

Different is useful. Deliberately controversial isn’t necessarily.

The interesting idea may need finding

Some clients arrive with an argument already worked out. Others have a subject. Some have little more than the feeling that there’s something interesting in there somewhere.

That’s fine.

I’ll research the subject and interview you or your subject-matter experts. The conversation isn’t simply a way of collecting enough information to fill 1,000 words. It’s how I find the observation, anecdote, disagreement or unexpected detail that gives the piece a reason to exist.

My journalism background helps. I know how to prepare for an interview, ask questions, listen to the answers and, importantly, recognise when the useful response is another question. Often, the best material is something the expert didn’t realise was particularly interesting.

They know it because they’ve been doing the job for 20 years. Everyone else doesn’t.

Your name. Your ideas. My keyboard.

There’s nothing particularly unusual about executives using ghostwriters. The important distinction is between helping somebody express their thinking and inventing some thinking for them. I won’t manufacture opinions, experiences or expertise and attach your name to them.

The ideas have to be yours. The writing doesn’t necessarily have to be.

I can work from interviews, conversations, presentations, research, notes, existing material or the collection of half-finished thoughts currently living in your head. Then I’ll find the structure, sharpen the argument and write the finished piece.

Good ghostwriting shouldn’t make an executive sound like a copywriter. It should make them sound like themselves on a particularly articulate day.

An opinion still needs something to stand on

Having a point of view doesn’t exempt it from scrutiny. Strong thought leadership combines experience and opinion with evidence where evidence is needed.

That might mean research, industry data, examples, customer experience, observations from your work or acknowledging evidence that complicates the argument rather than conveniently ignoring it.

I’ll research and interrogate the subject as well as write it. If a claim needs supporting, I’ll flag it.

If an argument has a hole in it, I’d rather find that before somebody reading the finished article does.

Credibility is rather difficult to establish and remarkably easy to lose.

One article won’t make anybody a thought leader

The term itself is slightly grand.

Publishing an article doesn’t suddenly confer thought-leader status any more than buying running shoes makes somebody an athlete. Reputation develops through having useful things to say and saying them consistently.

For ongoing work, we can identify the subjects where you have genuine authority and develop several strands of ideas around them. Individual articles can respond to developments, explore different aspects of those themes or gradually build a recognisable point of view.

The aim isn’t to say the same thing repeatedly. It’s for people gradually to understand what you know, what you think and why your perspective is worth listening to.

Thought leadership writing services

Depending on what you’re trying to achieve, I can help with:

executive and CEO ghostwriting;
thought-leadership articles;
bylined and opinion pieces;
LinkedIn articles and executive content;
industry commentary;
speeches and keynote content;
research-led articles;
white papers and longer-form insight;
interviews with executives and subject-matter experts; and
ongoing thought-leadership programmes.

I can work directly with an individual executive or alongside your marketing, communications, PR or content team.

Journalism. Speechwriting. Copywriting.

The three strands of my career come together rather neatly here.

Journalism taught me to find the interesting part of a subject and ask questions until I understood it.

Speechwriting taught me how to express somebody else’s ideas without making them sound like mine. Copywriting taught me never to forget the person on the other side of the words. Thirty years later, those are still the questions I ask.

What’s interesting?

What do you actually think?

And why should anybody else care?

Got something worth saying?

You don’t need to send me a finished article. In fact, if you’ve already written one, I’m probably arriving rather late. Send me the idea, the subject, some notes or simply tell me what’s been occupying your thoughts. We’ll have a conversation. I’ll see if there’s something in it.