Startups possess all the key ingredients of thought leadership: big ideas, disruptive perspectives, outrageous talent. But with time devoted to product iteration, market analysis, investor pitches, and strategic planning, it’s not easy to spread the genius behind your innovations.
What strategies can you use to become an innovation evangelist for your brand and ideas?
今天，我将分享三个（经常被忽视的）关键，供那些对通过思想领导力发展业务感兴趣的创业者和投资者参考。
These three insights emerged as I scaled my startup,乐动体育足球从一个SoloPrineur到五个全职员工和一个全国性的承包商网络。在Untald，我指导我们的写作专家团队帮助思想领袖讲述难忘的、有影响力的、研究驱动的故事。换言之，我们将科学家、医生、工程师、创始人和技术极客转变为创新的传播者。
以下是我学到的一些经验教训，这些经验教训是关于如何同时扩大初创企业规模和追求思想领导力。
Key #1: Develop a Productive Startup Content Strategy
我们的快速发展在很大程度上得益于一种清晰而系统的方法来规划和跟踪我们花在思想领导工作上的时间。
Most entrepreneurs give a lot of thought to their business vision, core products, and management structure. However, a strategic approach to thought leadership isn’t always prioritized in the beginning.
但这是必须的。与初创公司的创新者和创新产品进行交流对公司的成功和发展至关重要。
The challenge is that thought leadership work is directly linked to human input and output. Time is always a challenge for leaders and team members alike. Add the need for highly creative, deeply researched deliverables to the mix, and you see how challenging it can be to scale the workflows required for mind-bending work like deep thinking, researching, ideating, writing, revising, and communicating your startup’s innovations.
There’s a dance we play as startup leaders to balance thestoryof our innovations with the actual生产of our innovations.
识别和分享你的创业故事意味着你必须在创造性思维和写作上投入一致的、战略性的时间。新闻稿、一页纸、观点文章、社论、采访、博客内容、社交媒体互动、会议演示和演讲机会都需要时间。
By carefully planning the number of hours each of your team members devotes to thought leadership each month, you express organization-wide commitment to the pursuit of sharing your startup’s story.
Our strength with team collaboration and time planning recently allowed us to scale beyond one-to-one services and create robust professional development courses likeWordsmith：为忙碌的专业人士提供语法和风格的更新。现在我们的见解可以由professio实现nals everywhere who want to level up their professional game through more effective, impactful writing and communications.
Key #2: Get Strategic about Startup Content Creation
内容营销在成功创办公司和发展狂热粉丝社区方面起着至关重要的作用。为了持续地分享创造性的想法、电子邮件见解和社交媒体信息，你需要建立a robust library of content ideas在一个有组织的编辑日历中计划他们的创作。
A key insight we discovered over the last year is the strategy of selecting an annual theme, and building monthly micro-themes and content deliverables aligned toward that larger vision. For example, last year’s theme waspublic intellectualism.Each month, we read, researched, discussed, and wrote about one key aspect of what it means to be a public intellectual. We chose our monthly mini-themes during our winter retreat. Our current theme is #untoldinnovation. We’re inviting thought leaders to share their innovation stories using this hashtag. (You canjoin our communityof thought leaders to make sure that you don’t miss an innovation story).Thought-based work like this requires institutional commitment, including time dedicated for reading, writing and collaborating.
Creative exercises like those we guide our clients through duringldsports乐动体育 help energize and activate new ideas. Beyond strategy and ideation sessions, you should commit to bettering your writing skills. Professional development should happen not only outside of work, but as an integral part of our team’s growth and collective development. This, of course, relates back to Key #1 because it requires a careful dance in time management—a negotiated balance of creative thinking and Lean process efficiency.
Key #3: Devote Time to the Work of Thinking
如果你对创新是认真的，那么你的组织应该把持续的时间投入到思考的工作中。对于像我们这样精干的初创公司来说，这不是一个容易的承诺，他们在管理我们的时间时必须时刻保持警惕。在每周和每月的基础上，我们分析和反思我们如何花费时间的当前和潜在的未来价值。我们在节目预告中把时间追踪到15分钟的间隔，这样我们就可以分析趋势，更好地理解写作等高度创造性活动的时间劳动。
我们采用的另一个有用的策略是，对每个人每月投入内容和思想领导力的时间进行严格选择Our editorial calendar is structured around our capacity, and then strategically aligned with our annual theme. It is a privilege to make time for growing your team’s expertise and thought leadership. And yet, it is critically important to the world that more and more experts make the timeto translate what they know。They just have to do so in deeply reflective, highly intentional ways that harness productivity and maximize time management.