Thought Leadership That Moves Markets with Bill Sherman

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Welcome back to the show, everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach here with my co-host, Mike Liwski, and we've got a special guest who will introduce in a moment. So, every business, of course, has ideas and some ideas they live in slide decks, some live in strategy documents, some live in the mind of founders and executives and those who have spent years learning what works but not every idea creates impact. And for an idea to change how people think, it has to move, it has to be expressed clearly, carried by others, supported by systems, and of course offered generously enough that the right people can recognize its value. And today's topic is Thought Leadership That Moves Markets. And Mike, I know we're going to have a fun one today. Introduce our special guest.

**Mike Liwski** (1:08)
We are, we are Stephen, we are going to have a fun one. So with us today is Bill Sherman. He's the CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. He's as well the co-host of the podcast, Leveraging Thought Leadership. And as well, he's the lead author of the book, The Thought Leadership Handbook.
Now Bill has spent quite a number of years helping executives, authors, consultants and organizations to really turn expertise into ideas that, that scale. As the COO of Thought Leadership Leverage, he helps thought leaders really develop the strategies that can do amazing things. For example, create attention, impact and importantly business value, right? And together with Peter Winnick, Bill has co-hosted, check this out, more than 700 episodes of the Leveraging Thought Leadership Podcast. So there's a wealth of information and knowledge there for our audience to check out. And interesting is their work with thought leaders forms really a major foundation for their handbook, the Thought Leadership Handbook.
Now you'll love this idea. Bill's work centers around this really powerful idea, right? It's not really the expertise alone, that's not enough. Really, if leaders want their ideas to create change, they need to learn how to evaluate, systematize and then share those ideas in ways that, and this is a big part of our shows as well, right? Build trust and reach the people who need them. So with that, Bill, we are so looking forward to our conversation today. Welcome to The Bliss Business Podcast.

**Bill Sherman** (2:58)
Thank you, Mike. Stephen, great to be here.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:03)
Bill, so one of your topics is how ideas drive revenue, and you make the point that leaders should give their best ideas away so that they can grow their business.
I know a lot of organizations, to them, that feels risky. Why is that the way to go and why is holding back the bigger risk?

**Bill Sherman** (3:25)
So I think, especially in professional services and even in product development, there's a fear of giving away your crown jewels, the expertise that you know. And so the argument of, let me give my ideas away may sound scary at first. Let me give a few examples. First off, it's a way to attract attention for your ideas. You can change a conversation or you can elevate a conversation that isn't being had at the current time, right? So one of the people in our book, Kara Golden, Kara founded Hint Water, the fruit infused water company.
She was doing this locally in the Bay Area, and she was trying to figure out how do I scale this across the country? So she's reaching out through her network and realize she has a problem because Hint Water doesn't have preservatives in it. And how do you do fruit infused water without preservatives? And so she winds up talking to a Coca-Cola executive, and she's at the point where she believes in the idea enough that she's almost willing to give it away to Coca-Cola because she feels it's filling a niche, and she doesn't know how to scale it. And the executive looks and says, no, it can't be done. You need preservatives. And so for her, the story of how to create this, how to focus on a brand that is tied to health, wellness, not artificial flavorings, becomes the marketing piece. It gets people. And Kara tells a story all to us, and then it appears in her book that she was out in the world, and she overhears other people. They've got hint, one last about it. And she says, oh yeah, here's the story. The founder, she's really cool. She invented it in her kitchen and found a way to bring this escape.