TL;DR

Most executives think—they just don’t have time for ideation sessions, so comms teams end up ghostwriting bylines that read like anyone could have written them. The fix starts with finding the right face for the brand (it doesn’t have to be the CEO), then adding one small step to something they already do: meetings, Slack rants, sales calls, panels, podcasts. Without a system that connects it to earned media and measures what it moves, even great thinking goes nowhere.

Key Insights

• You have to have a thought to be a thought leader, and no comms team can manufacture it. Executives almost always have the thinking. What they lack is time and patience for anything that feels like homework.
• The face of the brand doesn’t have to be the CEO. Look for strong opinions, deep experience, a willingness to be quoted on the record, and regular time with customers.
• Don’t create a new process. Add one small step to an existing habit. One voice note per forwarded link turned an automotive manufacturing CEO into the name his industry knew, helped land multimillion-dollar deals, and got him on governors’ dockets.
• AI can turn a transcript into a draft in minutes, but it can’t add experience, expertise, people, process, or culture. AI-generated “experts” are flooding expert commentary, and journalists and AI are both learning to ignore them.
• Thought leadership becomes earned media, and earned media becomes the proof AI corroborates. That’s why trade publications, podcasts, and newsletters often shape how AI describes you more than national TV does.

Thought Leadership for Executives Who Don’t Have Time

For the longest time, I ran a PR firm with real paying clients who hung on every word we uttered and did everything we recommended.

Just kidding! That was in my dreams.

They didn’t always hang on our every word or do everything we recommended. Oftentimes, they fought us on doing things we needed from them because I really, truly believe most of them thought they’d hire a PR firm and leave us to our own devices to create all sorts of success for them.

Turns out you kind of need thought leadership and participation from your clients to position them for success.

One of the things we constantly fought clients on (and I’ll bet you do this, too, with either clients or bosses) is that they had to have a thought to be a thought leader.

We couldn’t manufacture it for them.

I know it’s hard. They’re busy, and they don’t always see the value in doing the backstage work that creates the kind of PR success they require. Heck, I hate to admit that I want to push off my team’s earned media requests sometimes because they divert my time and attention.

But if thought leadership isn’t prioritized, the comms team builds a calendar. Someone else sends the CEO a calendar invite for an “ideation session.” It gets moved. Then moved again. Then moved a third time, and the exec finally says what they’ve been thinking all along, “Can you just do it without me?”

So the team ghostwrites a byline from the last earnings call and a handful of talking points. Legal reviews it. Then the CEO’s chief of staff reviews it. By the time it’s through, it reads like something anyone could write. An editor passes, so it ends up on LinkedIn, where it gets three likes and a comment from the CEO’s mom.

I was recently on the BuzzStream podcast with Vince Nero, and he asked a question every PR pro has wrestled with, “How does a brand make itself newsworthy when ‘we launched a new service’ won’t get anyone to write about it?”

My answer was thought leadership. Real thought leadership, from a real human, with real opinions.

Not Every Executive Wants to Be a Thought Leader (and That’s Fine)

Plenty of leaders want to stay behind the scenes. They want to run the business, not build a LinkedIn following. Some of them are introverts. Some of them have watched a peer get torched for a bad quote. Some of them think it’s a vanity project.

Don’t fight it. You’ll lose, and you’ll burn a lot of goodwill in the process.

The good news is the face of the brand doesn’t have to be the CEO. It can be the CTO who explains the product better than anyone in sales. The head of research who has data nobody else has. The practice lead who’s been in the trenches with customers for 15 years and has opinions about all of it.

Finding that person is job one. And it’s the step most teams skip, because they assume the answer is whoever sits at the top of the org chart.

When I’m looking for the right face, here’s what I look for:

• Strong opinions. If they never disagree with anything, they won’t say anything worth quoting.
• Deep experience. Not years on the job for its own sake, but because they’ve seen things go wrong and know why.
• Willingness to be quoted. By name, on the record, without six rounds of approval.
• They talk to customers. That’s where the good thinking comes from. The people closest to the customer know what the market is actually worried about.

That’s your first assignment. If you don’t know who it is, start asking around until you get a short list. Then schedule 15-minute intro convos and get to work!

The CEO Who Wouldn’t Stop Sending Links

Years ago, we worked with the CEO of an automotive manufacturing business. He was my kind of client. Really smart, super snarky, and a voracious reader. He constantly sent me articles, and then we would debate their merits, sometimes just for sport.

He would text me the link without comment or context. Just the link so he could get my unvarnished opinion. And we would each take a side and go at it during our weekly meetings. It was super fun, but I also realized I could use it for a bigger purpose. 

He was providing me a window into what he was paying attention to. But, until we started to debate it, he wasn’t telling me why. He was just sending me the link. 

So I made him a deal. “I’ll read them, and we’ll talk about them,” I said. “But when you send me a link, send me an audio note about why you want me to read it.”

His response? “This is stupid.”

I know he wanted me to give him my direct thoughts, but I wanted to use it to create thought leadership for him. 

He finally did it, begrudgingly, and what came back was gold. His thinking, in his words, about the things he was already paying attention to. What a story meant for his customers. What he thought someone in his industry got wrong. Where he thought things were headed. 

I turned those voice notes into articles. And this was before AI, so I had to, gasp!, manually do all of that work. 

They were compelling because they were his. Nobody had to invent a point of view for him. He already had one. He just needed someone to catch it.

We worked that way for years.

Even though it took away some of the fun we had in working together, it ended up making him famous in his industry. Not “has a nice LinkedIn following” famous. The name people knew. It helped the company secure multimillion-dollar deals. And it gave him the credibility to get on governors’ dockets in states where the company was considering building plants.

That’s what thought leadership is for. Not likes. Not impressions. Deals and a seat at the table.  

Add Yourself to What They Already Do

The lesson from the CEO who wouldn’t stop sending links isn’t “use voice notes.” It’s not to create a new process. Find an existing habit and add one small step to it.

Executives aren’t short on thinking. They’re short on time and patience for anything that feels like homework. A monthly “thought leadership interview” is homework. A 60-second voice note attached to something they were going to do anyway is not.

So look for where the thinking is already happening. 

There are a few things you can try:

• Meeting recordings. If your exec is already on Zoom or Teams all day, the recordings exist. And if they’re not one-to-ones or HR conversations, you can probably get access to the transcripts. Think town halls, live events, group Q&As, and even earnings calls. 
• Rants in Slack or Teams. Every leader has a channel where they let loose. When they write three paragraphs about why the industry has a problem, that’s not a Slack message.
• The questions they answer on sales calls. Customers ask the same five questions over and over, and your best people have sharp, practiced answers to each. Get the call recordings. 
• Panels, webinars, and fireside chats. Any time they speak, someone is probably recording it. And the prepared remarks are usually the least interesting part. The unscripted answer to the tough question from row three? That’s where the real opinion lives. Get the recording, pull the transcript, and mine it.
• The email they send the team after reading something that annoyed them. You know the one. “Did you see this? This is exactly what I’ve been saying.” Ask to be cc’d.
• Podcast interviews. This article is proof. When I recorded the episode with Vince, I took the transcript, pulled out every idea worthy of content, and walked away with six of them. I did the same with my conversation with Tara McDonagh a few weeks ago, and it became our content on why women who admit to using AI are trusted less. Your executives are already saying smart things on other people’s shows. Don’t let those conversations disappear after the episode drops.

One small extra step beats a big new process nobody keeps. Every time.

Let AI Write the First Draft, Not the Thought

What took me hours of transcribing and drafting for our former client now takes minutes. There are about 30 apps that will turn a voice memo into a blog post. Use them. Seriously.

Here’s a prompt to start with. Paste in the transcript and go:

You are an editor helping an executive turn their own spoken thinking into a byline. Below is a transcript of a voice note. Write a 700-word draft that keeps the executive’s opinions, word choices, and phrasing as close to the original as possible—do not soften their point of view or add opinions they didn’t express. Then, separately: (1) flag every claim that needs data or a source before publishing, (2) list the questions the draft leaves open that I should ask in a five-minute follow-up, and (3) suggest three trade publications, podcasts, or newsletters where this argument would land. Transcript: [paste here]

That second list is the secret weapon. Five minutes of follow-up questions is the kind of conversation an executive will actually have. A blank page is not.

But here’s what AI can’t do: add the experience and expertise.

That’s still E-E-A-T, and it isn’t the line in the author bio that says “25 years of industry experience.” 

Putting years on the job in a bio is not experience. Experience is the specific story, the hard-won opinion, the thing that went sideways in 2019, and what they learned from it.

It’s also people, process, and culture—the things no competitor has and no AI can generate. 

AI can draft. It can’t bring your people, your process, or your culture to the page. That’s where the expertise actually comes from. 

And one warning: AI-generated “experts” giving AI-generated quotes are flooding expert commentary right now. Journalists see dozens of them a day. They’re getting very good at spotting them and very good at ignoring them. 

So is AI, which is increasingly looking for the experts it can corroborate across multiple sources—not the ones who appear out of nowhere with a perfectly polished quote about, well,  everything.

If your exec’s thought leadership reads like everyone else’s, you haven’t done your job. 

Where Thought Leadership Goes After It’s Written

Once you have the thinking, the instinct is to aim for the New York Times and The Today Show. I get it. That’s the hit everyone can see.

But think beyond that. Trade publications. Industry podcasts. Newsletters with smaller, more devoted audiences. The LinkedIn voices your customers actually follow. 

Keep in mind that our former client’s fame came from his industry, not from national TV.

Those outlets are also what shape how AI describes you. As I wrote in Earned Media Isn’t Disrupting the PESO Model® the sources AI trusts aren’t always the biggest ones. They’re the ones that are specific, credible, and consistent. 

Thought leadership becomes earned media. Earned media becomes the proof AI corroborates.

You Might Be Here If…

• Your executive bylines read like they were approved by legal, because they were.
• Your “thought leadership calendar” has been at the ideation stage since Q2.
• Your CEO sends you articles with no comment.
• Your expert commentary pitches sound like everyone else’s, because AI wrote them.
• Nobody on the team can name the one person who should be the face of the brand.

If you nodded at more than two of those, you’re not alone. Trust me.

The Thought Is the Easy Part

Here’s what I’ve learned after doing this for many executives over many years: they almost always have the thinking. The CEO who thought voice notes were stupid had more opinions than I could write up. That’s not where it breaks.

It breaks in the system around it. Nobody owns the extraction of the thinking, so it lives with whoever has a spare afternoon (nobody). It never gets connected to earned media, so a great byline sits on the company blog and goes nowhere. And nobody measures whether it moved anything—whether it landed a speaking slot, shortened a sales cycle, or changed how AI describes the company.

That’s not a writing problem. That’s a PESO Model problem. Thought leadership is owned media that has to be built to become earned media, amplified through shared and sometimes paid, and measured against the business. 

Without the system, you get a pile of well-written articles and no results.

How We Help Teams Build the System Around the Thinking

The automotive CEO is where I learned how to do this, but it’s not how we work anymore. We don’t ghostwrite bylines or pitch reporters anymore (hence the reason I said I “used to run a PR firm.”) What we do now is build the system around the thinking, so teams can run it on their own.

That means figuring out who the face of the brand should be (and who it shouldn’t), setting up a way to capture their thinking that doesn’t feel like homework, connecting what comes out of it to the trade publications, podcasts, and newsletters AI actually reads, and measuring whether any of it moved the business.

If your executives clearly have the thinking and nobody owns getting it out of their heads and into earned media, I’d love to talk you through how to achieve that. 

I still think about that CEO every time someone sends me a link with no comment. (It happens allllll the time!) He was right that the voice notes felt a little stupid. He was also right about nearly everything he said in them, which was the whole point.

Your executives have the thoughts. Find the habit, add one small step, and catch them before they disappear.

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