Thought leadership

A thought leader is an individual or firm that is recognized as an authority in a specialized field and whose expertise is sought and often rewarded. The Oxford English Dictionary gives as its first citation for the phrase an 1887 description of Henry Ward Beecher as "one of the great thought-leaders in America." In a 1990 article in the Wall Street Journal Marketing section, Patrick Reilly used the term "thought leader publications" to refer to such magazines as Harper's. In the previous decade the term was revived and reengineered by marketers to emphasize an intangible quality of products and brands.

The term is sometimes used to characterize leaders of service clubs, officers of veterans' organizations, of civic organizations, of women's clubs, lodges, regional officials and insurance executives.

Despite being conceived as a laudatory description, the idea of thought leadership is seen to be inherently contradictory. Since the Enlightenment thinking has been taken to an autonomous activity, relying on logic and not on external authority. Max Weber noted in his studies on vocation that scholars and experts are not necessarily good leaders. Recently (2017) political scientist Daniel W. Drezner contrasted the thought leader to the public intellectual. According to his view intellectuals cultivate opposing views and ambiguities while thought leaders "develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot".

In business and marketing 'thought leadership' usually refers to a potentially winning strategy. It is seen as a way of increasing or creating demand for a product or service. High tech firms often publish white papers with analyses of the economic benefits of their products as a form of marketing. These are distinct from technical white papers. Consulting firms frequently publish house reports, e.g. The McKinsey Quarterly, A.T. Kearney Executive Agenda,Strategy&'s Strategy and Business, or Deloitte Review where they publish the results of research, new management models and examples of the use of consulting methodologies.

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