Making the Business Case for Thought Leadership | Kimberly Ellison-Taylor | 381

While thought leadership has been around for a long time, it's only recently started popping up as a topic of discussion in major boardrooms. Company executives and board members want to know the ROI and KPI of a thought leadership investment. So how do you quantify thought leadership's impact and worth?

To help me add up the numbers, I've invited Kimberly Ellison-Taylor to join us in this episode of our podcast. Kimberly is a thought leadership practitioner, an experienced accountant, an active board member and the CEO of KET Solutions. She has the perfect balance of knowledge to assess the usefulness and impact of thought leadership at the highest levels.

We discuss thought leadership's impact within the executive suite, and how it can help prepare someone for a board position. Find out what the executive team of any organization should be thinking about when they begin a thought leadership journey; from roll out to measuring impact on a wide scale. Kimberly shares the reasons that an organizational thought leadership role is critical to the client-value proposition, and how great thought leadership can set your organization apart and push it toward greater levels of success.

Kimberly understands the need to include diverse groups of people in your organization's thought leadership, to ask the questions that might otherwise be missed. She also celebrates the next generation of thought leaders, and talks about drawing attention to the time and focus that people put into attaining their professional goals.

This is an exciting conversation for board members, executives, and thought leaders, focused on truly understanding how the power of thought leadership goes beyond the spreadsheet and into the core values of an organization.

Three Key Takeaways:

· Don't assume executives have a lot of bandwidth for research. Be sure to discuss with them, rather than asking them to investigate on their own.

· Thought leadership is about peering around the corner into the future. Investing in thought leadership ensures that your organization is at the forefront of change.

· You need a network of leaders and executives you can rely on, to help answer questions, solve problems, and discuss current topics of thought leadership.