Valuable Thinking

The theme of this Immersion is “Value” weaving together what we value, the value we create and deliver to the world.

Solving problems and creating solutions is valuable work. Understanding your value is an incredibly important part of being commercially smart.

As thought leaders, our job is to think, sell, and deliver. Three big jobs. Each of them requires time, effort, and energy. The ultimate skill is to be able to do them all together – at the same time!

My definition of a thought leader is someone who is leading the thinking in an area of expertise. Someone who adds value to a specific field, someone who deeply understands the marketplace in which they operate. You are a contributor. You have ideas, unique points of view, and offer insights on a particular topic.

We are sources of inspiration and innovation. It’s big work. The thinking alone could be a full-time job! Except that’s not very commercial. The way we measure your impact is in the amount of selling and delivery that you are doing. But not today – today, let’s focus on how you create value in thinking alone. To be an expert, you need to consume, capture, and contribute:

• Consume
  To take in knowledge and information. To be absorbent. To be teachable, open, and experiential. To be constantly learning, listening, and experiencing new ways of thinking. A healthy diet of inspiration is essential to develop our expertise. Surrounding yourself with clever people who question and stretch ideas is a wonderful way to build your brain.
• Capture
  To record our thinking – to use the curriculum to help us to stretch, explore, and deepen our thoughts. To make our intellectual property relevant, thorough, and ultimately elegant. To create a system where your thoughts and ideas are accessible and easily retrievable. Before I joined Business School, I had endless notebooks and paper and scribblings that were spontaneously captured but never developed into something that could be useful. I was working hard instead of smart, constantly redesigning, and creating presentations from scratch. Every single time. Not smart. Not commercial. The process of Pink Sheeting made me commercially smart. I no longer waste time looking for my ideas!
• Contribute
  To contribute to the thinking in an area of expertise. Contribute comes from the Latin word contribuere that means to bring together, add, unite, or collect. Creating movements around your ideas is the ultimate goal and a wonderful way to add value to the world.