Leff’s take on what’s working in thought leadership
As some of you know, we’ve started a monthly feature,
the Gold Standard, highlighting strong pieces of thought leadership from professional services firms. The idea is to show what “good” looks like in the thought leadership market. With that in mind, we also plan to offer occasional dissections” of an article or report that show specifically why a piece hits the mark.
Our second review looks at a recently published article from Heidrick & Struggles, “Upending tradition: Modeling tomorrow’s cybersecurity organization.” I chose this piece because it’s a good example of authors demonstrating mastery of a subject through exceptional detail.
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by Allan Gold
Click on the icons to read Allan’s annotations
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The authors don’t waste any time letting us know what this story is about.
Nice summary of
the situation and the
high stakes.
In some cases, authors will elaborate on the forces at work in a background section following the introduction. These authors jump right into the subject matter.
The authors make it clear there aren’t easy answers to this business problem.
The authors summarize the prescriptions that
will be addressed later in the piece.
The introductions of many pieces end with
a call to action. That would have been useful here, if for no other reason than to help
the introduction end
less abruptly.
Early use of an example.
As you’ll see, this article incorporates quite a few,
which really helps to bring
the topic to life.
This is interesting from a
competitive perspective. The authors suggest they can do strategy and organizational consulting, not just executive search.
This a good example of showing rather than telling.
Describing these models is a great way to illustrate the story. It demonstrates that the authors know what they’re talking about.
I really like company examples where things don’t work out as intended. We don’t see that often in thought leadership from professional services firms.
Many pieces of thought leadership avoid discussions of challenges, perhaps because that approach
It’s great how the authors make clear through
the discussion of models that a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work.
More examples to illustrate the models.
More challenges discussed. The authors make it clear that these choices are not simple.
This section reinforces for
the reader how much the authors know about
this subject. The sidebars,
in particular, get down in
the trenches.
This is a solid closing
paragraph, reinforcing the message that hiring a CISO is not straightforward and likely leaving the reader contem-plating calling the authors.
might undercut the
message the authors are trying to promote.
“
Section 4
