Leaders in Need of a Good Idea

From the Financial Times, German Edition, by Lucy Kellaway

"It's all very well using buzz-words and slogans like "thought leader" to describe new innovations, but what do they actually mean? After a bit of investigation, the concept seems to boil down to this: "thought leader' is simply a new and unhelpful way of saying successful.

First we were employees, plain and simple. Then we were knowledge workers. After that came "Brand Me" and the notion that we were all CEOs of Me, Inc. Now our taste for hyperbole in describing our place in the economic order has become still more rarefied: what every modern worker aspires to be is a thought leader.

The blame for this latest craze rests with the editor of Strategy and Business, a management magazine. In 1994, he needed a name for a new interview slot and came up with "Thought Leader'. Back then it seemed a forgivably pompous title for the pompous thoughts of management gurus. Thirteen years on, it has come to be a much less forgivable name for any old fool in possession of an ego and a blog.

The title offends for three reasons, and pomposity is the least of them. It is inappropriately Orwellian: in free societies, thoughts can be provoked or stimulated or gathered. But not led. Worse still, no one seems quite sure what "thought leader' means. You might think that to qualify as a thought leader you needed to have a thought (preferably a new one) and be able to influence other people with it. Yet mostly when the term is used there is no sign of any thinking or leading going on at all."

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