Elevating Thought Leadership in Any Size Organization | Dr. Karthik Nagendra

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Transcript

Bill Sherman How do you use thought leadership to spark a conversation that really needs to happen within a community? Thought leadership often involves putting a provocative idea into the spotlight and then coming equipped with data to back your position. Only then can silence transform into conversation. So today I want to talk about this question with Kotak Mahindra, who spent nearly 20 years in the field of thought leadership technology, START startups as well as giants such as Wipro and Accenture. Kotak currently serves as fractional CMO for Startup Ventures with an emphasis on thought leadership. I’m Bill Sherman and you’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Karthik.

Karthik Nagendra Thanks, Bill. Really excited to be part of the show.

Bill Sherman Absolutely. So you and I both share a passion for thought leadership. And you’ve been working in this space in many ways in for many years. My question for you is a simple one. How did you get hooked into the world of thought leadership?

Karthik Nagendra That’s a long story and a story which I just don’t get tired talking about because, you know, I would say talk leadership is my first love. If you.

Bill Sherman I agree. I agree. Same here.

Karthik Nagendra And I think I got introduced to thought leadership marketing way back in 2007. So this this happened to be my first job. It was a startup, a category created which was focusing primarily into skill assessments, a company by name, metric track. And back then skill assessment in India was an emerging area. Not many organizations were looking into it. They were trying to speak to the leaders of a group like this to say why you need to be having the scientific approach to your entire recruitment process and how these assessments can help you find those candidates. And then you are actually interviewing only the ones that really matter. And because it was a category that had to be created and there was a lot of science and data behind this. The CEO back then said, you know, why don’t we create a report which for the very first time was quantifying the employable engineering talent pool in India. So back then, everybody says, you know, India has a rich pool of engineers and everybody has another great talent for something like this. But this was the very first time that somebody said, let’s quantify you and say what percentage of the population is actually employable as part of the benchmarks which are required. And that’s when India’s first engineering talent pool report was created by my ministry. And I think it was in association with McKinsey and I think also NASSCOM, which is its representative body in India. And the amount of buzzer generated, my God, I still remember my marketing head back then getting calls from some of the colleges and, you know, from a state down Southern saying, guys, you are not stepping into our city because for the very first time in that report, it said only 25% of the engineering talent pool in India is employment, just 25%. And clearly, Benchmark, which were the states which were doing good and which were the states which were not doing well. And historically, the ones which were churning out the bulk of these engineering grads fairly low in that regard. So it just created a flutter out there. Suddenly, a lot of the companies started talking to a drag, saying, you’ve been visiting that state for a long time. And according to the report, it says that that’s not a good quality. I should be looking at an alternate state. So, you know, let’s start talking. So that was the impact which this report created, both from the positive standpoint with the Agilent, the equipment, you know, started talking to us. And similarly, the negative fee audit also picked up. So that’s where I got to introduce the population.

Bill Sherman So there’s a couple of things that I love about this story. One, that it’s in 2007 using thought leadership as early as it did. Right to the story relates to a startup that winds up partnering with McKinsey, huge global consulting firm. Yes, huge association in India and engineers and decides to put out a piece of thought leadership, which is provocative, which gets your people to discuss debate and even pokes the bear just a little bit and is willing to stir the status quo. I think that’s a wonderful representation of a great way into thought leadership. And even more than that, a great way of how an organization which is a startup can punch well above their weight. Absolutely.

Karthik Nagendra Absolutely. Because I think back then there were only a very kind of psychometric assessments which were available, and these were from global players then. Nobody in India ever created anything in respect of skill assessment of the Indian assessments. And these were the first movers. Obviously, they were bootstrapped. So for them, the only way they could get attention was actually facing their expertise. And that’s what they had because they had a scientific approach to which they needed assessments. They were testing one job and you could actually get it to show that what they were claiming was actually right. So I think it was a very good value addition to the organizations has been to take a scientific approach to recruitment.

Bill Sherman So with that, let’s jump a little bit forward in your career, because I want to go from the start up to a large organization and we’re going a little bit historical here and we’re going to expand it into this. But I really want to lay the foundation. And how did you get passionate about the leadership? Because you’ve got a great journey. So after working with the startups, you wound up looking at the large world of thought leadership for large enterprise. Let’s talk about that.

Karthik Nagendra Yes. So I think by the end of this podcast, people know how they know how old I am.

Bill Sherman But you and me, both You and me.

Karthik Nagendra Yeah. So, yeah. So I think that’s the merit track is better. I got inducted into competition marketing and that’s spend the curiosity later on. How do we leverage this further? And from there on then I moved into Wipro, which was obviously a nod to Indian multinational corporation. But very interestingly, when I got into the group as well, they were looking at setting up the top leadership function. So I don’t know whether it’s destiny or, you know, because it was something that I really wanted it to happen, that the role was, again, to build their population function back then. If I remember looking at all the other ID services companies, which were definitely IBM’s and Joe’s, all of them were investing heavily in building corporation. They had. Like I remember IBM having sort of business value. Accenture had its research labs, even in places for that matter, which was a peer for improvement that even they had adopted. I should be called the SEC labs and in that 100 member team. So that really opened up my eyes to see I got this the kind of investment that people are making in leadership. And at Wipro, we’re just starting off on the journey. So how do we kind of you know, because those guys were already a bit ahead in the game and we were just starting off the absolute story that I would probably related to. So after a bit of research in the market, studying what these guys were focusing on, doing a bit of an internal research as well to see where do we stand, do we really have unique perspectives that we can talk about, ought to be investing in not ending, which we can focus, and who are the stakeholders that we could probably engagement? You know, I identified that the academic community was something which, you know, not many people are leveraged in that effect. So we are talking about the Ivy League universities and, you know, collaborating with them to come up with top leadership pieces because when the process of growing was known, but when we did our brand audit the rankings on thought leadership very, very low. So customers didn’t perceive they tried the talk either. They just looked at them as, you know, somebody was applying engineers to get the job done and we wanted to change that perception. So that’s where I also figured out that, you know, the IBM’s Accenture’s or any of the consulting columns that we do, they all have research wings, which for which drives stock leadership. And we didn’t have anything like that in the group. So that’s where I, you know, in consultation with the CMO, Jesse Paul back then created a liberal council for Industry research. So essentially what we did was branded the leadership function as a research. We identified some of the internal subject matter experts were there. So these guys were really passionate about this subject. It’s they’ve had two, three decades of experience in the in that space, but they’re not somebody who’s probably gone out there and showcased that expertise.

Bill Sherman So I think that’s the latent talent that is within an organization. But nobody except the colleagues who work with them know that this person is a genius in this area.

Karthik Nagendra Yes. Yes. So we put together a bunch of our many our people from different domains, different industries, and created this concept and on the other hand, identify universities and faculty who are focusing on some of these areas of research that we were investing in and kind of brought them together to create joint population pieces. So these were research reports that we did lot their joint white papers. We also got some of these faculty to write in case studies about some of the interesting delivery models that were created or innovation frameworks that we created. And once we did that and we took it to the market and shared it with the customers, suddenly all of them, you know, stood up and said, we didn’t know before. There’s been so much of innovation. We didn’t know Wipro was investing. And so with Prodigy, we didn’t know you had such interesting delivery frameworks. And because it had an endorsement of these bigger Ivy League universities as well, it automatically increased the credibility of what we were trying to see in it. So it was not just going and claiming that, guys, we have done this. We also had these experts collaborating with us and saying, Yeah, listen, Detroit is doing this.

Bill Sherman And what I want to pause here and interrupt for a moment was you didn’t have to go out and hire top talent from anywhere else. You just had to showcase the talent that was already within the organization. And that changed the perspective of clients and customers.

Karthik Nagendra Me Absolutely. Absolutely. And like I said, collaborating with the universities was not something which a lot of these other guys, when the vision, to the extent that we went there, you know, later we even won a lot of awards for this entire thought leadership model that I had created back there. And then subsequently it started reflecting on the brand audit rankings and, you know, the kind of deals that we started participating in. So I think that’s where, you know, there was the other chapter of what thought leadership can do and some of the learnings which I got from it.

Bill Sherman But in some ways there’s a little bit of bootstrapping that happens even with an organization like Wipro, for example. Right. And I know a number of people who are serving as head of leadership within their organization, whether that’s a SVP title or. Or a senior manager title. And they’re like, Yeah, I’m a team of one or maybe a couple of fractional people that I borrow. And rather than thinking from a perspective of scarcity, yeah, I love how you flip it on your head and say, okay, let’s create an internal council. Let’s pull some people from outside and showcase what we can do. And so there’s a scrappiness to it that I love.

Karthik Nagendra Absolutely. In fact, I still remember my immediate boss back then. He was always in top leadership. We are a team of one and a half people results. And I am just the opposite. This is juggling between this and the function that she was leading back then. So that that’s absolutely right. And while people maintain a large organization, they have bigger budgets and all that. But then I look at it from dysfunction standpoint and the challenges that were there, it was pretty much bootstrapped and something which I could build from scratch and scale it up and let a larger set up.

Bill Sherman And I would argue that from a perspective of improving brand recognition, brand health brand metrics, there are very few things that you can do with one and a half dedicated resources, plus a little bit of people here and there that will make as much of an impact on your brand scores. Right.

Karthik Nagendra That’s absolutely right. Absolutely.

Bill Sherman And as then you cycle there as that brand recognition, we didn’t know that you had this approach yet. We didn’t know. That leads to what really matters is which is the invitations to opportunities, the discussion of how we can work together, problems we can solve together, which makes life easier for both marketing and sales.

Karthik Nagendra Absolutely. Absolutely. And it definitely showed on some of these conversations which came into the build. The quality of conversations also started changing. People started having approaching us more as consultants and partners rather than just the software vendor that they were engaging with. So I think it did play a role engine. That was it.

Bill Sherman But let me ask you this question. Do you approach thought leadership and see yourself as a marketer, as a sales engineer? How are you wired mentally when you’re thinking around partnership?

Karthik Nagendra That’s a very interesting question. I think, you know, I would with multiple hikes. The way I would look at it. I saw one from a marketing go to brand specialist on how I would package this and that market program itself to present as a business case to, you know, getting the sales to where I need to pitch this to the CEO and say why they should be investing into this and the outcomes that it can get them to, you know, taking the role of a delivery or an operations and who’s kind of stitching the program together and implementing it. So, you know, I would look at myself wearing one of those acts and, you know, changing it from time to time, depending on who I’m talking to and what is the object of that.

Bill Sherman But what sort of problems are you working on today, and what is your current life in the world of thought leadership? We’ve done some history. Yeah. What what’s the recent engagement?

Karthik Nagendra So the current one presently associated with again, is a category creator where in the space of digital account management solution, it’s a SaaS company that I’m working with. Interestingly, know all the projects that I’ve worked with so far predominantly have been category creators. So, that’s one common thread that I see. Do you know, these are also organizations which believe that thought leadership is what can be going back for them as a brand, especially when they start having the enterprise level conversations. So the current project, again, the challenge is it’s a new category. People have been using essentially 12 points to prepare their sales plans. And for the largest arms, most of the knowledge is siloed with two or three star salespeople who are there. It’s not institutionalized within the organization itself. And there is also a lot more of data which is missing out, and hence they’re not able to identify better opportunities, they’re not able to leverage AI, which can give them more insights and nudges on how they can go about doing their job better. But again, it’s a mindset issue, which is that a lot of them say, you know, we’ve been doing this all these years, an excellent one. I think they’re good with that. They don’t see why they should be moving towards a digital route as that’s going to be an imperative for them and the benefits that come associated with that. So again, thought leadership is something which is very important, that maybe talking about trends, maybe are talking about best practices, maybe collaborating with influencers, maybe are doing a lot more of research, a lot more webinars, masterclasses, which kind of educate people on making that shift. So again, that’s a challenge that I’m currently and, and that partnership is, I mean, you.

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So let’s stay on category creation. And the example that you just gave I think really underscores something about category creation, which thought leadership is really well-positioned for. Yes, people have habits and have solved the problem in a past way, and they’re not looking towards the future because they’re just looking and saying, well, I’ve always done it this way, right? They don’t see the opportunity or the risk and thought leadership is making that opportunity or risk visible to them, and you have to challenge them in some ways and go that isn’t working as well as you think it is.

Karthik Nagendra Yes. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, like I said, a lot of the people that we talk to in this space, I’d say these leaders and these are science leaders with three decades of experience in sales, and they have done this using it as a about once and then no expert. Right. So it’s very difficult for them to say, okay, no, let’s drop it and let’s do this. So what we’re doing in that space is there are so few of these early movers who are there who want to explore and experiment the new things which are emerging out there. So we’re collaborating with such people on the practitioner front. We’re bringing together some of the analysts, the gardeners and forester of the world, and some of the coaches are sales coaches. It’s consultants and using these stakeholders to kind of co-create content that we’re putting out there, as well as creating some of these educational materials, using them to influence their peers. And that’s something that we are seeing. It’s starting to give us good traction. And if we look at it from a pipeline standpoint, most of the larger enterprises are now talking to us. Didn’t know it was predominantly the small and medium enterprises we were talking about. The pipeline of the larger enterprises to is increased and you know today they should definitely is the thing that.

Bill Sherman Well, And the example that you just gave really talks about the compounding effect of failed leadership, where you draw in some of the people who have already had success and you help them amplify their success and let them talk to their peers rather than, you know, sometimes people look at marketing and go, okay, you’re really just trying to sell me. But if I’ve known that person for five, ten, 15 years, maybe they work at a peer or a competitor company. Yes, but they’re saying it. I’m going to listen differently.

Karthik Nagendra Absolutely. And we’ve been doing a series of masterclasses that we’ve brought in some of the analysts and some of the customers to share their experiences. And incidentally, the product is just a means to what they’ve achieved, but it’s more of saying why they should be thinking on those lines and what other stuff that they should be doing differently. What are some of the mistakes which they did and which some of the other guys were? You know, the fence sitters was still trying to figure it out that it should be a trade. Not they know that these are some of the mistakes that they should learn and they need not be so dire. And those conversations are really endless. They’re bringing together their research, their conversations with a lot of the technicians over there and saying, hey, listen, you know, 70% chance you those are already going towards this. These are a few of the product ideas which are hoping that if you are planning to evaluate something like this, here’s an assessment that you should probably be taking to see where you stand and, you know, accordingly plan out your roadmap. So I think a combination of bringing these influences as well as the customers is really making an impact.

Bill Sherman And now this is tied to the audience that you’re trying to reach. Other organizations or different solutions have to approach it differently. You’re reaching a sales leader perspective, and sales leaders are used to very clear, concrete measurements. Yeah, the deal close. Did it not close? Are deals moving faster? Are they not faster? Are we hitting Target or are we missing Target? Those have concrete, measurable answers that allow you to link the underlying idea of the solution and the fall leadership to the outcome.

Karthik Nagendra Yes. Yes. No, that’s absolutely true. So, in fact, you got a lot of monster questions that we talk about as well, the clients, because we’re coming in there talking about the outcomes which they’ve achieved by taking this approach. So, you know, what’s the percentage of. Whitespace they’ve been able to identify which they didn’t know existed before. What was the increase in the upsell in Brazil opportunities, which they’ve been able to leverage by being a digital savvy, traditional group which did the following? I think even from a sales productivity standpoint, how is it save time on the sales salespeople site to focus more on building and nurturing those relationships than doing administrative work on expense shoots and PowerPoints?

Bill Sherman Right, Right.

Karthik Nagendra These metrics are, I agree, without metrics and say, yeah, this is nice to hear, but let’s talk numbers.

Bill Sherman Exactly. Exactly. So let’s elevate a little bit. You’ve talked about category creation in several different ways. You’ve talked about showcasing internal talent, academics as well as colleagues. If you were a younger version of yourself, what advice would you give to do this better? Because there are many people out there who are exploring or stumbling into the world of thought leadership based on what you know now. What advice would you give them?

Karthik Nagendra So in fact, that’s the whole reason why I wrote my book, the way in which I’ve kind of put together my journey, my learnings and the blueprint, which people who are planning to get into the ship can look into. But in simple terms, if we were to look into this inductees, I think it’s very important that you get in the buy in from the senior leadership first. Back then, you know, I was thinking, I can do all this and I can take it forward and implement it. But if you are head of marketing or your CEO is not somebody who believes in the long run, in the long game, car dealership will not want it.

Bill Sherman If they’re looking for results in 68.

Karthik Nagendra Short term lives. And the young ones are, you know I need X number of leads within three months. And by then, if this is not working and the population is not working for me, let’s stop it. So I think invest in building a strong business case for the CEO and the senior leaders who are there, have a bunch of advocates who can back you as then. Then you’re making this business case. I think that’s the other one. Don’t try to fight alone better there, because there again, if you do not have other people to back you, then again, it’s very slim chances that it’s going to work out for you. So I think identifying those advocates who can support your eyes and try and see how you can showcase some of your competitors work as well in this space and create that formal movement for your leadership has been saying if you’re not, you know, you’re going to miss the bus. So I think these are three things. If I were to go back, I would probably focus more on that. But to ensure that I’m able to, I don’t have to keep fighting and reiterating, saying no, why we should keep investing in this.

Bill Sherman Absolutely. Absolutely. I like that sense of urgency on that last one, too. If we don’t do this now, we’re going to be behind. Right.

Karthik Nagendra Yes.

Bill Sherman So I want to close with a question. As I said, you and I have been in the world of our leadership now nearly 20 years. And I want to play a game of where do you see thought leadership going in another 10 to 20 years? How is this going to evolve? Let’s look into the future thought leadership.

Karthik Nagendra That’s very interesting. And I think with the advent of generating I come into the church, I see a lot of things changing from that front as well. So back then, if I were to do this building program or do this research, the time it would have taken me. These are the leveraging these systems which are available out there to even ideate and come up with various limitations, combinations of what we would explore, areas which have not been explored before. So that can give me insights into things that I can focus on scale up on. I think that’s definitely going to be a huge role in how it’s going to shape up our readership. I definitely see more and more brands focusing on thought leadership sense because I think that’s where the key differentiator will like for a lot of them. Because increasingly, when all your solutions are getting productized, then how do you create that differentiation for your brand and that differentiation for your brand will come only the thought leadership. So the earlier the brands realize that and starting the testing unit, the better it will be and the guys will stay invested in leadership in the long run are the ones who are going to succeed. So there will also on the flip side, with the advent of the AI, you may also have a lot of people claiming to be partly has also recently begun taking on LinkedIn. If you were to go in search, talking to over 100,000 people profiles, we could show up as thought leaders. So it becomes all the more easier for them to generate content and start putting it out there. So that’s another challenge, so that you need to really cut through the clutter to see how you are the real leader. And, you know, it reminds me of that scene from Spider-Man movie where you have three spider-men from my people, and each one is like, Who’s the real Spider-Man?

Bill Sherman And they’re pointing at each other. Yeah, yeah.

Karthik Nagendra Right. So I would probably look at it, I think, who’s really talking there? And then everybody is pointing at each other.

Bill Sherman Well, and there’s room for thought leadership. I mean, we’re a planet of 8 billion people, so 100,000 thought leaders is not crazy as a number. Right. If you think about the whole range of human thought and the types of questions, but yet you have to be able to say what your a thought leader in the right. And if you choose a very broad category and you say I am a thought leader in all of marketing, for example, people are going to roll their eyes and go, No, there’s only a handful of people that are that well established and that creative across a broad field.

Karthik Nagendra Absolutely. Yeah, Absolutely. Yeah. So what I meant from the number was also that while if you were to actually go deeper and have those conversations with them, you will realize that almost 60 or 70% of them are not even talking as they just.

Bill Sherman Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And I’m plainly I agree. I mean, the curse of generative AI is that you can create a white paper or an article in just a couple of keystrokes, right?

Karthik Nagendra Yeah. Yeah.

Bill Sherman And then you shift the burden onto your reader for you to determine for them to determine if you know what you’re talking about or if you’ve just given them stuff that’s been said before.

Karthik Nagendra Absolutely. Absolutely. And I really love some of the tips that you share to your videos and what guys, I think people who really listen to them closely will know who’s the real leader so well. And you would think with a real thought, you’d be stand up. Well.

Bill Sherman There’s and I say this often, but there’s the easy tell for me when I’m talking to someone about thought leadership and their area of expertise. If their eyes light up, if you see the excitement and it’s almost that they can’t help but be excited to talk about the subject, didn’t watch it. They’re probably practicing thought leadership more than most, right? Because they’re willing to have the introductory conversations. It’s the professor who has the Nobel Prize who is still willing to teach introductory physics. Right. And who’s teaching it.

Karthik Nagendra Absolutely. And so like I said, when I started off as well. So that’s the story of how I got inducted into a doctorate. Does your thing I don’t know. I would have narrated the story a hundred thousands of times. But even today, if somebody were to ask me, I’m still equally excited to talk about that first project that worked and how it kind of telling impact and shaping my career and to talk leadership marketing and set.

Bill Sherman Well and shaping your career, shaping the fate of your. Station because that was transformative, as well as shaping how others talked about the idea, or in that first case, about the quantitative study of the engineers, how people were talking about engineering education. And so if we can make the invisible visible and even more, I think back to what my father was a librarian his entire career. He said, You don’t have to always know the answer. You just have to know how to ask the right question. And in the world of generative, I think the piece that’s going to fall on Paul’s leadership more and more is we need to ask smarter questions to produce better thought leadership.

Karthik Nagendra Yeah, so that’s very true. And because I’m Ivan Watson I have certified coach. So in coaching for us, asking the right questions is what does it’s like the Holy Grail that we would look at because asking the right questions gets those insights from the client. So similarly, what kind of questions that you might ask, what kind of prompts that you give to the generating the AI engine? The output would depend on that. You give a garbage question, you’re going to get a garbage response. You put up that garbage and you’re thinking, I’m putting up content every day. I’m a reader, I’m sorry, but most of them.

Bill Sherman You can catch yourself on the back if you want. Yeah, posting every day. But you haven’t advanced the conversation, you haven’t engaged with others and you aren’t moving ideas forward. You’re just saying new words. Are you saying the same words again and again?

Karthik Nagendra Absolutely.

Bill Sherman So Karthik, I knew that this was going to be a fun conversation and it did not disappoint. Thank you for taking time today.

Karthik Nagendra Thank you for giving me the opportunity in the update. And like I said, this is a topic which is close to both our hearts. So I think we can keep going on and on with this conversation and not get bored at all. But thanks once again. I really loved having this conversation.

Bill Sherman And I want to ask you one last question. If someone has listened to this podcast and they want to find you or follow you, how should they do?

Karthik Nagendra So yeah, they can find me on LinkedIn and talk about technology. India art, hitchhiking, engaging in drink, or they can visit my website, which would be part hyphen startups dot com or even on Amazon if they’re such that likely to read my book, that’s one of the ways where they can find Wal-Mart.

Bill Sherman Fantastic. Thank you.

Karthik Nagendra Thank you. It was probably.

Bill Sherman If you’re interested in organizational thought leadership, then I invite you to subscribe to the OrgTL newsletter. Each month we talk about the people who create, curate and deploy thought leadership on behalf of their organizations. Go to the website OrgTL.com and choose ‘join our newsletter’. I’ll leave a link to the website as well as my LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Thanks for listening, and I look forward to hearing what you thought of the show.

 

 

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