Leveraging Thought Leadership

"We hated your books." That's what a European competitor once admitted to Ivan Misner — years after trying to build a rival networking organization and watching his own members ask, "How come we don't have books like BNI's?" It's a story that gets at the heart of this conversation: sometimes the most competitive thing you can do is give your best thinking away.

Bill Sherman sits down with Dr. Ivan Misner, founder and...

Here's an uncomfortable truth: most people will tell a total stranger about their weird rash before they'll tell their best friend how much debt they're carrying. That contradiction sits at the center of this episode.

The guest is Carrie Joy Grimes, founder and CEO of WorkMoney — a nonprofit she describes as "the AARP for everyday people's money." She built it in 2020 after years as a union organizer, watching thousa...

Book the podcast. Do the interview. Move on to the next one. That's the default playbook for most podcast guests — and according to this week's guest, it's leaving most of the value on the table.

Dustin Riechmann, founder and CEO of 7 Figure Leap, and host the the 7 Figure Leap Podcast, has spent the last four years helping coaches, consultants, and agency owners turn podcast guesting into a genuine growth engine &md...

Why do we size up a rude stranger in seconds and decide they don't belong in our "tribe"?

Dr. Benjamin Granger has a term for it: the evolutionary hangover — his phrase for the cognitive biases our brains evolved for savanna survival and never quite retired. As Chief Workplace Psychologist at Qualtrics, Granger spends his days distilling billions of data points on how employees and customers really feel, and in this ...

What happens when the person telling your success story wasn't actually in the room?

That's the moment that pushed John Winsor — Founder and Chairman of Open Assembly, Harvard Business School executive fellow, and author of six books including the bestselling Open Talent — to write a widely discussed piece questioning the entire thought leadership industry.

In this conversation with Peter Winick, Winso...

You just spent two years writing a book. Now what?

That's the question at the center of this conversation about book publicity, expectations, and the long game of building a body of work. Bill Sherman sits down with Sandy Smith, CEO of Smith Publicity, to unpack what a smart book launch actually looks like — and why most of the excitement (and anxiety) authors feel in the 60 days around publication misses the point.<...

What happens when the metrics you were taught to chase — title, bonus, prestige — stop adding up to a life that feels good?

In this episode, Peter Winick sits down with Rand Selig, a Stanford
MBA, former Wall Street investment banker, and founder of The Selig Capital Group, to trace his path from a jarring first job at Lehman Brothers to a self-defined version of success built on peace, gratitude, and ...

What happens when a software CEO stops thinking like a marketer and starts thinking like a thought leader? You get a content flywheel that ranks #1 on Google, ChatGPT, and Claude — without hiring an SEO firm.

Ghazenfer Mansoor, Founder and CEO of Technology Rivers, didn't set out to become a thought leader. He set out to grow a business. But as referrals gave way to inbound and conference conversations evolved into p...

This episode is a companion to the upcoming Thought Leadership
Handbook — part of a series where Bill speaks with exemplars featured in the book about how they actually practice thought leadership.

There are plenty of books explaining what AI is. This one is about the person who decided to write a book that tells you what to do about it instead — and who's spent 25 years turning disruption into frameworks o...

Most professionals who make the leap from clinical therapy to the corporate world stumble on the same obstacle: they speak the wrong language. They know the science cold. They understand what's happening beneath the surface in any dysfunctional team, toxic culture, or burned-out leadership group. But if they can't connect those insights to the metrics that actually keep executives up at night — retention, productivity, profit...

What happens when you're wildly successful at a life you didn't consciously choose?

Wani Iris Manly, Esq., grew up groomed for one thing: the law. She did the work, built the firm, drove the Porsche. And then, on New Year's Eve in 2010, she sat alone and took an honest look at the gap between the life she had and the life she actually wanted. What followed was one of the more audacious pivots you'll hear about — sell...