I read a lot of B2B thought leadership, most of it produced with real effort by capable people, and the overwhelming majority of it contains no thought. It summarises what the category already agrees on, in professional prose, with a conclusion nobody could object to. That isn't leadership. It's a well-formatted expression of the consensus, and the consensus doesn't need your help.
The disagreement test
Before publishing anything positioned as thought leadership, find someone credible in your category who would genuinely argue with it. If you can't think of anyone — if every reasonable practitioner would nod along — you haven't written a point of view. You've written a description. This test disqualifies most of what gets published under the label, including things I've written and later regretted.
Where real positions come from
Not from research into the category. From doing the work and noticing where the accepted wisdom failed. Every genuinely interesting position I've held came from watching something everyone recommends produce a bad outcome repeatedly. That's information nobody else has, because they weren't in the room. Your team is generating this material constantly and almost never writing it down.
- What advice do you give clients that contradicts the standard playbook?
- What did you believe two years ago that turned out to be wrong?
- What does everyone in your category do that you've stopped doing, and why?
- What have you watched fail repeatedly that people keep recommending?
The organisational obstacle
Real positions get sanded down in review. Someone worries about alienating a segment, someone else softens a claim into something defensible, and what publishes is the average of everyone's caution. If thought leadership goes through the same approval process as product marketing, you will reliably produce consensus. The fix is structural: attach it to a named individual with the standing to publish something the committee wouldn't have approved.
Being wrong in public is the cost
A genuine position means you'll sometimes be wrong publicly, and people will notice. That's the price and it's lower than it feels. In my experience being wrong and revisiting it openly builds more credibility than never having risked a claim — because it demonstrates you were thinking rather than summarising. The reputational risk of a strong position is consistently overestimated; the cost of publishing nothing memorable for years is consistently underestimated.
If nobody could disagree with your thought leadership, nobody will remember it either. Those turn out to be the same property.
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