Thought leadership has long been identified with the artifacts it produces — the book, the whitepaper, the TEDx talk, the article, etc.
I think that’s partly because people struggle to articulate what a thought leadership strategy is (or what it looks like).
And so, it’s easy to focus on creating more artifacts.
Let’s write another book, whitepaper, etc.!
Let’s speak at another conference!
Let’s host another webinar!
Let’s tweet more often!
But these are all activities.
They’re not thought leadership.
Here’s the trap.
At best, each of those activities are empty containers — places that you can pour your thought leadership insights into.
Imagine what would happen if Amazon thought its purpose was to ship boxes 
to every house in the US.
And they set out to maximize the # of boxes shipped.
It wouldn’t matter if:
many of the boxes were empty.
some of the boxes had weird, random stuff in it
very few boxes contained what people actually ordered.
They just set a stretch goal to achieve the most # of boxes shipped.
Our hypothetical Amazon employees would be incented to “ship more boxes no matter what!”
Sounds insane, right?
Without a strategy, you tend to focus on creating more artifacts of thought leadership.
Rather than focus on the practice of thought leadership.
Are you focused on producing the artifacts of thought leadership? (Shipping more stuff — whatever it is!)
Or are you focusing on the practice of thought leadership?
Ask yourself, “why am I creating this [asset]”? If you can’t answer that question, you may have fallen into the asset-production trap.
You may be shipping empty boxes.
And pretending you’re delivering thought leadership.