On Thought Leadership (and vacuousness)

Vacuous words, phrases, and terminology abound on the internet, particularly on LinkedIn where this phenomenon is most pernicious, and where it happens that most of my writing has occurred since late 2024.

There’s one phrase in particular which has always sent me into a tailspin of ranting, complete with an amount of detail not unworthy of a Neal Stephenson passage, or the usual, unflattering denouncement of Prince George’s intellect by Edmund Blackadder.

In my late-teens, pretension, pretentiousness, and any form of passing off one’s self as another, was seen as a huge social faux-pas. If a solid ability to laugh at one’s self (and at other’s misfortune) formed the basis of social survival in 1990s England, then pedaling of the ideas, attitudes, and arguments of someone other than one’s self, was simply social suicide.

Before doing what I do now- while being no less analytical - I have mentally spat in the face of people referring to themselves as Thought Leaders. A seemingly American-borne saying, with its roots in some unfathomable part of digital business and management, about which I knew nothing, and therefore with no (apparent) basis in three dimensional space, or at least none in that part of said space in which I resided.

I hate myself for what I’m about to admit, but alas it must be done.

In order to do what I must - to further push the boundaries of “regular” product writing, beyond the US-centric and ChatGPT sanitised version of short-form content generated especially for X and LinkedIn, I must become that which I have hitherto loathed.

More than that, I must even try and embrace it.

If I could rename it to something less pretentious - “Actual Leadership”, “Ideas Person”, “Quite Interesting Chap”, I’d be happy to, but no-one would understand what I was trying to say. My writing would be uncategorisable. I’d have committed social media suicide by occupying a digital space populated by literally no-one else, all while hoping that having built it, that they would come.

So my list of vacuous internet derived terms is reduced by one.

Agh, so what? There will be others.