Leveraging Thought Leadership

Peter Winick and Bill Sherman
  • 5.0 (42)
  • Marketing
  • Updated Biweekly

Hear from the people whose ideas shape the business world. Learn what their public stories leave out. Our beat: the business of thought leadership and the people who take ideas to scale. Fortune 500 CEOs. New York Times bestselling authors. Thinkers50 honorees. NSA Hall of Fame speakers. Top business school professors. First-time authors. Emerging keynote speakers. Their support: publishers, speaking coaches, PR experts. We ask thought leaders to share generously. And they don't hold back. How did they get here? What nearly stopped them? What did they learn? And what keeps them going? Your co-hosts, Peter Winick and Bill Sherman of Thought Leadership Leverage, bring two decades of experience working with thought leadership practitioners. We've woven stories from 700+ episodes, our frameworks, and the tools we use every day into The Thought Leadership Handbook. Learn how the experts take their big ideas to scale—and how you can too.

  1. 4h ago

    The Business Model Behind a Financial Movement | Carrie Joy Grimes | 730

    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 thousands of people wrestle with the same financial confusion she'd faced growing up in a household where money was never discussed. The conversation opens with a poker metaphor that ends up doing a lot of work: you play the hand you're dealt, but you can also change the rules of the game. That's WorkMoney's whole thesis — help individuals make the best move with what they have, while using collective bargaining power to get everyone better cards. From there, the discussion turns commercial. A nonprofit still has to think like a business, and Grimes walks through WorkMoney's five distinct revenue models — sales of her book "The Joy of Money", ethical sponsorships, a bill-negotiation product called Money Finder, and a for-profit enterprise arm designed to fund financial products that don't quietly profit off member debt. The host presses on the hardest part: how do you measure success when your mission is "financial security" and revenue isn't the real scoreboard? Grimes lays out three separate metrics her team tracks, including one that's surprisingly emotional. There's also a sharp aside on index investing — including a detail about Warren Buffett's will that reframes the whole "beat the market" industry — and a candid discussion of why WorkMoney deliberately avoids a pure B2C growth strategy. If you've ever wondered how a mission-driven business justifies its business model without losing its mission, this one's worth the full listen. Three Key Takeaways • A nonprofit still needs a real business model. Grimes runs five distinct revenue lines at WorkMoney — including book sales, ethical sponsorships, and a fee-based bill-negotiation service — because donations alone can't fund a movement at scale. • B2B2C beats B2C for mission-driven growth. Rather than acquiring millions of individual customers one at a time, WorkMoney partners with organizations that have already aggregated the audience it wants to serve — dramatically lowering acquisition cost and risk. • Success metrics get complicated when revenue isn't the goal. WorkMoney measures impact through self-reported financial confidence, actual debt/wealth changes, and retirement trajectory — because, as Grimes puts it, if members don't feel more secure, the work isn't landing. If today's conversation had you thinking about what it actually takes to turn a big idea into a sustainable business, you'll want to check out The Thought Leadership Handbook, co-authored by Peter Winick, Bill Sherman, and Naren Aryal. It's the playbook for shaping, packaging, and scaling expertise in a crowded market — exactly the kind of business-model thinking Carrie Joy Grimes brought to this episode. Learn more at thoughtleadershiphandbook.com, and order your copy today on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, or Amplify.

  2. 3d ago

    Turn Podcast Appearances Into a Referral Flywheel | Dustin Riechmann | 729

    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 — not just a lead-gen tactic. His argument: in a "trust recession" flooded with AI content and social media noise, the real currency isn't reach, it's trust. And trust, done right, scales. Peter and Dustin dig into what that actually looks like in practice. It starts with borrowing trust — the audience a host has spent years building extends some of that credibility to any guest who shows up and delivers. But the bigger opportunity, Dustin argues, is what happens after the mic turns off: the relationship with the host, the access to a guest list full of potential referral partners, and the content that can be repurposed for months. That's where the conversation turns pointed. Peter shares a stat that should make every podcast guest wince: only about 60% of guests actually share their episode after it airs, despite the host doing the legwork to book, produce, and promote it. Dustin calls it a strategic blunder as much as a hygiene issue — because the guests who do the simple things (leave a review, share the episode once, say thank you) become the ones hosts refer business to. The two also unpack the difference between hiring a podcast booking agency to check a box and building a deliberate, relationship-first guesting strategy — and why one podcast a week, done with intention, can outperform a hundred done without it. If you've ever wondered why some guests turn a single appearance into years of referrals while others get nothing out of dozens of interviews, this episode lays out exactly what separates the two. Three Key Takeaways: • Trust is the new currency, and it scales through borrowing. In a noisy, AI-saturated market, audiences no longer take credibility at face value — appearing on a trusted host's platform lets guests borrow that trust instantly, then build their own with the audience over time. • Sharing your episode isn't optional, it's strategic. Roughly 40% of guests never promote the interviews they're given, and that gap is exactly what separates a forgettable guest from the one a host refers to future opportunities. • The real ROI is relational, not transactional. A single interview compounds into referral partnerships, guest-list networks, and repurposable content — but only for guests who treat the host relationship as a two-way investment rather than a 20-minute box to check. Every guest on this show has wrestled with the same question: how do you turn deep expertise into lasting influence, not just a moment of visibility? That question is exactly what The Thought Leadership Handbook answers. Bill Sherman, Peter Winick, and Naren Aryal distilled patterns from more than 700 conversations on this very podcast into practical frameworks for building a body of work that scales — covering everything from your core ideas to the platform that carries them. If you're ready to move from insight to real impact, this is the field guide. Learn more and order your copy at thoughtleadershiphandbook.com.

  3. Jul 30

    Building A Leadership Framework Backed By Data | Benjamin Granger | 728

    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 episode he brings that same lens to his new USA Today bestseller, A Leader Worth Following. The conversation moves from the biological to the deeply practical. Granger traces human speech back only 100,000–200,000 years — a blink in evolutionary time — to explain why we still assume our texts and emails land exactly as intended, and why they so often don't. He and host Peter Winick dig into a favorite (and least favorite) example: the customer satisfaction survey. Whether it's a car dealership coaching you to "circle the five" or a flight attendant joking about the inevitable post-flight survey, Granger shows how well-established science like goal-setting theory gets bent out of shape the moment it collides with real incentive structures. There's also a candid look at what it takes to write a book while holding down a demanding day job — from years of scattered iPhone notes to a publisher's cold outreach that landed within days of deciding to write one. Granger and Winick talk through the tension every corporate thought leader faces: how do you promote your ideas without it feeling like self-promotion? Granger's answer — "I'm selling the message, not myself" — anchors a broader discussion of why academic rigor and real-world readability don't have to be at odds. The episode closes on a personal note: Granger's hope that more leaders will get comfortable with hard conversations with themselves, and a few concrete ways to start — from a two-minute daily reflection borrowed from Marshall Goldsmith to a monthly sit-down with your future self. If you've ever wondered why your best-intentioned message got read the wrong way, or why your company's survey scores don't tell the real story, this one's for you. Three Key Takeaways: • Our brains are running outdated software. Granger's "evolutionary hangover" concept explains why we instantly judge people as "abrasive" or "rude" — a tribal survival instinct that made sense on the savanna but creates friction in modern offices and customer interactions. • Good science can get gamed by bad incentives. Goal-setting is one of the most well-established practices in organizational psychology, but Granger shows how tying compensation to survey scores (like a car dealership's NPS rating) corrupts the very measurement it's supposed to improve. • Selling ideas isn't the same as selling yourself. Granger reframes self-promotion as message-promotion — a mental shift that let him push through years of book marketing discomfort because he believes the underlying research deserves to reach people. Ben isn't the only one turning years of hard-won research into a book built to scale. Bill Sherman, Peter Winick, and Naren Aryal have just released The Thought Leadership Handbook: How the Experts Elevate Their Big Ideas—and How You Can Too — a field guide drawn from more than 700 conversations on this very podcast, mapping out the frameworks and five "thought leadership avatars" that separate an idea stuck in your head from one that actually reaches an audience. If Ben's path from scattered iPhone notes to a USA Today bestseller has you thinking about your own expertise, this is the next book on your list. Get it at thoughtleadershiphandbook.com, or find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Apple Books, or Amplify.

  4. Jul 26

    Why Thought Leadership Needs Real Experience, Not Theory | John Winsor | 727

    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, Winsor traces his path from launching a regional sports magazine (sold to Condé Nast) through decades of building and exiting companies, to his current work at Harvard's AI Institute studying the future of work. Along the way, he unpacks a tension every expert eventually faces: when does an idea deserve a blog post, a keynote, or a book — and when is it just filler dressed up as insight? Winsor and Winick dig into what separates "thought leaders" from "thought doers," using everyone from Malcolm Gladwell to Domino's Patrick Doyle as examples of how firsthand experience — not borrowed theory — is what actually earns an audience's trust. They also tackle a question with real urgency for anyone building a business around ideas: if generative AI can produce a working website, investor deck, and full brand in a single prompt, what's left for humans to do? Winsor's answer centers on relationships, judgment, and the irreplaceable value of live, human-to-human experience — a case he backs with striking data from executive AI workshops at HBS. This is a candid, occasionally pointed conversation about ego, authenticity, and the mechanics of building influence in a market flooded with polished — but often hollow — expertise. Worth a listen for anyone deciding what to write next, whether to take the stage, or how to stay relevant as AI eats the easy parts of the job. Three Key Takeaways: • Experience should come before the platform, not after. Winsor argues that credible thought leadership starts with real, specific experience — "go have a bunch of really killer specific experiences" — rather than reverse-engineering content to match a trending topic or keyword. • AI is pushing execution toward zero cost, which raises the value of judgment and relationships. Winsor points to tools that can generate a full company's assets — website, investment deck, brand — from a single prompt in under two hours. What AI can't replace is the human trust required to sell, evangelize, and validate an idea. • Format should follow curiosity, not ambition. Rather than deciding upfront that an idea "deserves" a book, Winsor tests ideas publicly through Substack, HBR, and Forbes articles first, using audience response to gauge whether something is worth developing further — or whether it was only ever his own curiosity. Before you go — Peter has a new book. The Thought Leadership Handbook: How the Experts Elevate Their Big Ideas—and How You Can Too, co-authored by Bill Sherman, Peter Winick, and Naren Aryal, draws on more than 700 conversations from this very podcast to map out the patterns that separate thought leaders who build lasting impact from those who never scale past their own curiosity. It introduces five thought leadership avatars — Growth-Minded CEOs, Impact and Legacy Executives, Thought Leaders on the Run, In-House Experts, and Hall of Fame Thinkers — and gives readers the frameworks and tools to find their own path. Endorsed by Mel Robbins, Ken Blanchard, Stephen M. R. Covey, Marshall Goldsmith, and 50+ other leading voices, with a foreword by Lisa Bodell. Order now: Amazon Barnes & Noble Bookshop.org Amplify Publishing Apple Books Learn more at thoughtleadershiphandbook.com

  5. Jul 19

    Why Your Book Launch Is Just the Beginning | Sandy Smith | 726

    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. Sandy's first move with any client is to ask what success looks like a year out. That reframe — from launch week to long horizon — shapes everything else: how to define goals, how to find the right audience for a big idea, and why a book should be treated less like a product drop and more like a two-to-three-year (or longer) relationship-building asset. The conversation moves through sharp, practical territory: the difference between an audience that's ready for your message and one that isn't (yes, even when they need it most), how publicists match authors to podcasts, bylined articles, and expert commentary opportunities, and why revisiting an author's earlier books can sometimes be more valuable than pushing the new release. Sandy and Bill also talk through the emotional arc of a launch — the pre-launch momentum, the 60-day flurry, and the letdown that can follow once the initial push ends. Underneath the tactics is a bigger idea both return to again and again: books create relationships. They let readers spend time with an author's thinking in a low-stakes, high-trust way, and that trust compounds over years, not weeks. The episode also touches on what makes an idea worth an audience's attention in the first place, and why generosity — not ego — tends to separate thought leaders who build lasting influence from those who burn out chasing a moment. Whether you're planning a first book launch or trying to get more mileage out of one published years ago, this episode offers a grounded, experience-based look at what actually works. Three Key Takeaways: • A launch is a beginning, not a finish line. Treat the book as a two-to-three-year (or longer) asset rather than a 60-day sprint — the real payoff comes from what you do with it after publication week ends. • Define your goal before you plan tactics. Whether the aim is sparking conversation, building visibility, or attracting clients, that goal should shape everything from media targets to messaging. • Audience readiness matters more than audience size. The right strategy meets people who are already primed to hear your idea, then lets them bring others along — rather than forcing a conversation an audience isn't ready for. This episode landed right in the middle of launch week for The Thought Leadership Handbook — the new book from Bill Sherman, Peter Winick, and Naren Aryal — and everything Sandy Smith unpacked about goals, audience readiness, and building a lasting asset is exactly what's behind it. If you want to see those ideas in practice, head to thoughtleadershiphandbook.com for a free excerpt, your own thought leadership avatar, and tools to sharpen your strategy. Then preorder your copy today at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, or Amplify — and become part of the conversation this book is meant to start.

  6. Jul 16

    The Marketing Dilemma Every Author Faces | Rand Selig | 725

    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 deep relationships. The conversation opens with an unusually candid account of what it was like inside a major investment bank in the early days of Rand's career — a place where talent was abundant but the culture rewarded pushing others down to get ahead. That experience became a turning point, eventually leading Rand to launch his own firm, run on his own terms. From there, Peter and Rand dig into the origin of Rand's book, Thriving! — a project that started as decades of collected notes, quotes, and reflections never meant for commercial release, until early readers flatly rejected the "small legacy project" plan and insisted it reach a wider audience. That pivot raised a harder question: how do you promote something meaningful without it feeling like self-promotion? Peter pushes Rand directly on this tension, exploring podcast appearances, AI-assisted content tools (including his use of the platform Inkflare), and a growing circle of "collaborators" as alternatives to traditional marketing — and where that approach still falls short. Listeners get a real-time consulting moment too, as Peter reworks a piece of Rand's speaker bio live, showing how thought leaders can connect their message to concrete value for individuals, teams, and organizations — not just personal transformation. The episode closes with Rand's hard-earned lessons about the business side of publishing: the lack of transparency, the costlier detours, and the operators who prey on first-time authors navigating unfamiliar territory. If you've ever wrestled with putting your ideas out into the world while resisting the instinct to "sell" yourself, this one will resonate. Three Key Takeaways: • Redefining success is a decision, not a discovery. The guest describes consciously rejecting the industry's default definition of success — money, title, bonus size — early in his career, choosing instead to measure his life by peace, gratitude, and the depth of his relationships. • A "legacy project" became a book because trusted readers said no. What began as a private compilation for family and friends turned into a public release only after early readers insisted it had value far beyond his inner circle — a reminder that outside perspective can reveal a bigger opportunity than the one you set out to build. • Avoiding "marketing" and building visibility aren't mutually exclusive. Podcast guesting, AI-assisted content creation, and cultivating collaborator relationships let the guest grow his reach without the traditional playbook — though the conversation also surfaces where that passive approach still needs sharper packaging to convert interest into real opportunities. These two episodes wrestle with the same core question: what happens when conventional markers of success — a title, a bonus, a placement fee — stop being enough? Where Rand Selig found his answer after walking away from Wall Street's zero-sum culture, Gene Rice has spent a career inside executive search watching leaders hit that exact wall. If Rand's story of redefining success resonated with you, Gene's episode gives you the data and the executive-search vantage point behind why so many high achievers feel unfulfilled — and what actually fixes it. Listen to "Purpose Driven Thought Leadership" with Gene Rice.

  7. Jul 12

    Why Your Expertise Is the Only Content That Converts | Ghazenfer Mansoor | 724

    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 podcast guesting, something became clear: the content he was putting into the world was doing real work — compounding quietly in the background. In this episode, Ghazenfer walks through how that evolution happened — from the first blog post written just before COVID, to a podcast, to a book (Beyond the Download) that almost started as an e-book. None of it was planned. All of it was genuine. Peter and Ghazenfer dig into what makes that kind of content work, and why it's so different from what a hired marketer typically produces. When an expert writes about what they actually know — mobile apps, HIPAA-compliant healthcare software, AI-powered workflows — the depth shows. Readers feel it. Search algorithms reward it. Clients trust it. They also tackle one of the most pressing questions for any modern thought leader: where does AI fit? Ghazenfer's answer is nuanced and practical. AI is a great editor and organizer, but only if the raw material — the knowledge, the perspective, the real experience — comes from you. Garbage in, garbage out. Grade in, grade out. Perhaps the most useful insight in this conversation is about patience. Thought leadership doesn't pay off the way a campaign does. There's no 30-day attribution window. It's a long game — a flywheel that takes time to spin up, and then becomes very hard to stop. If you're a practitioner, entrepreneur, or expert who's been wondering whether to invest in content, this episode gives you an honest look at the payoff, the process, and the pitfalls. Three Key Takeaways: • Genuine expertise outperforms outsourced content every time. When a practitioner writes from real experience — not a marketer writing for a brief — the depth is unmistakable. Audiences feel it, and so do search algorithms. Ghazenfer's content began ranking #1 on Google and major AI platforms without any deliberate SEO strategy. • Thought leadership has a compounding effect, not a campaign timeline. Unlike paid marketing with a defined attribution window, content-based thought leadership builds slowly and then accelerates. Ghazenfer cautions against expecting quick ROI — and points to the flywheel effect that kicks in only after consistent, sustained effort. • AI is an amplifier, not a ghostwriter. The data still has to come from you. Ghazenfer uses AI to organize, clean up, and optimize the content he produces — but the knowledge, perspective, and specific expertise must be his own. Using AI on generic inputs produces generic outputs that no one will remember. If this episode got you thinking about the relationship between content and credibility, there's a natural next listen. Both Ghazenfer Mansoor and Stephanie Chandler came to the book-writing process the same way — as entrepreneurs who needed a better way to demonstrate expertise, not as authors chasing a bestseller list. Where Ghazenfer built his book from blogs and an e-book that outgrew itself, Stephanie has spent years helping nonfiction authors do the same thing: turn hard-won expertise into a book that actually supports a business. Hear her break down the promotion strategies most entrepreneurs skip, the product ecosystem a book should anchor, and why social media probably isn't where your next reader is coming from. It's the tactical counterpart to everything Ghazenfer shared about playing the long game. Listen to Marketing and Product Roadmaps for Entrepreneurs with Stephanie Chandler!

  8. Jul 9

    From In-House Analyst to Independent Thought Leader | Charlene Li | 723

    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 other people can actually use. Charlene Li joins Bill Sherman to talk about her new book, Winning with AI, co-written with Katia Walsh, and why this one felt different from her five previous titles. It's less an explainer, she says, and more a "doing book" — built for a moment when the case studies go stale before the ink dries. That tension opens into a bigger conversation about how ideas get made and shared. Charlene walks through the origin of Groundswell, the book that made her a New York Times bestseller, written entirely remotely with co-author Josh Bernoff while she was still an in-house analyst at Forrester. She's candid about what co-authorship actually requires — not just complementary skills, but real trust built over years, disagreements included. The conversation also digs into a business model question that shaped her career: when she left Forrester to found Altimeter, she gave research away for free, betting that value would come back around. It did — inbound demand from companies who'd read the free work and wanted the deeper conversation. Bill connects this to economist Elinor Ostrom's work on knowledge commons. Underneath it all is a simple throughline: frameworks outlast the moment they were built for. The "ladder of engagement" from Groundswell is still taught 18 years later — not because the case studies held up, but because the thinking did. If you're building a book, a body of research, or a career on ideas that might get overtaken by the next news cycle, this one's worth your time. Three Key Takeaways: • Co-authorship runs on trust, not just talent. Charlene describes working with multiple co-authors over her career and is clear that the deciding factor was never just complementary skill sets — it was years of built trust, the ability to disagree productively, and knowing when to step away from a deadline argument and come back with a clear head. • Give the idea away first — the business follows. At Altimeter, Charlene made research free when competitors charged for it, building an audience of 100,000+ readers almost overnight. The resulting inbound demand became the foundation of the business, illustrating a "blue ocean" alternative to the traditional pay-for-access analyst model. • Durable frameworks outlive their case studies. Charlene expects Winning with AI to need a new edition once roughly 20% of its examples go stale — but she draws a distinction between outdated examples and outdated thinking, pointing to Groundswell's "ladder of engagement," still taught 18 years after publication. If you enjoyed hearing Charlene Li unpack the thinking behind Winning with AI, go back to her first appearance on the show — episode 113, recorded back when she was preparing to launch The Disruption Mindset. Both conversations trace the same throughline: how Charlene builds frameworks that outlast the moment they were written for, whether she's leaving Forrester to found Altimeter or navigating a fast-moving AI landscape years later. Hearing the two together shows how consistent her approach to thought leadership has been across three very different books and two decades of change. Listen to "Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick — Episode 113" with Charlene Li.

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About

Hear from the people whose ideas shape the business world. Learn what their public stories leave out. Our beat: the business of thought leadership and the people who take ideas to scale. Fortune 500 CEOs. New York Times bestselling authors. Thinkers50 honorees. NSA Hall of Fame speakers. Top business school professors. First-time authors. Emerging keynote speakers. Their support: publishers, speaking coaches, PR experts. We ask thought leaders to share generously. And they don't hold back. How did they get here? What nearly stopped them? What did they learn? And what keeps them going? Your co-hosts, Peter Winick and Bill Sherman of Thought Leadership Leverage, bring two decades of experience working with thought leadership practitioners. We've woven stories from 700+ episodes, our frameworks, and the tools we use every day into The Thought Leadership Handbook. Learn how the experts take their big ideas to scale—and how you can too.

Information

  • Creator
    Peter Winick and Bill Sherman
  • Years Active
    2018 - 2026
  • Episodes
    729
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    Copyright © 2018 - 2026 Thought Leadership Leverage. All Rights Reserved.
  • Show Website
    Leveraging Thought Leadership

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