In the last month, the largest 25 consulting firms in the world published almost 500 new books and articles. Collectively, their websites have more than 16,000 pieces of thought leadership.

But does any of it do any good?

Research we’ve carried out with clients suggests that thought leadership does have an important role to play, particularly at the early stages of a client’s decision-making process. Long before they start thinking about which firm to use, they try to weigh up whether a problem / opportunity they face is something worth pursuing. Finding evidence that other organisations have pursued it massively increases the probability that they, too, will do something.

But they’re only likely to do something if it’s relevant to their business, which is why (being devil’s advocate) we could discount the 62% of thought leadership which doesn’t focus on a particular sector. From the remaining 38%, we could then subtract:

• The 82% of material that isn’t eye-catching or topical enough to attract a client’s attention in the first place.
• The 74% which that doesn’t say something sufficiently new or different to hold that attention for any period of time.
• The 85% which is not based on enough hard data to convince a client to take it seriously.
• The 99% of material that doesn’t create an effective link to the firm’s consulting services.

By our calculation, this means that there’s just one piece of thought leadership out there that’s really effective. Unfortunately, we don’t know which one, and with 16,000 articles to look through, looking for a needle in a haystack would be easy by comparison.

You can see this as either a problem or an opportunity. The glass-half-empty approach would suggest that only 0.00006% of thought leadership is worth writing. The glass-half-full one would argue that there is plenty of scope for doing things better.
How do we know all this? Because we developed and tested our criteria and ratings with clients, and because we’ve read a lot of it.

7th July 2010