Hear from the people whose ideas shape the business world. Learn what their public stories leave out. Our beat: the business of thought leadership and the people who take ideas to scale. Fortune 500 CEOs. New York Times bestselling authors. Thinkers50 honorees. NSA Hall of Fame speakers. Top business school professors. First-time authors. Emerging keynote speakers. Their support: publishers, speaking coaches, PR experts. We ask thought leaders to share generously. And they don't hold back. How…
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"Personal brand" might be the most cringe-inducing phrase in business vocabulary. Say it out loud to a room of accomplished professionals and watch the shoulders tense — it sounds like self-promotion, follower counts, and algorithm-chasing. Vanessa Errecarte , Founder of Marketing Simplified , the UC Davis Graduate School of Management lecturer who built one of the nation's only for-credit MBA…
Every founder-led advisory firm knows the feeling: business comes in waves. Referrals and word-of-mouth are lovely — until the pipeline goes quiet for three months and nobody can explain why. In this episode, Mark McIntosh , founder of RevGrow , joins the show to break down why that unpredictability isn't a mystery to solve, it's a system to build. A CPA by training, Mark spent years watching…
"We hated your books." That's what a European competitor once admitted to Ivan Misner — years after trying to build a rival networking organization and watching his own members ask, "How come we don't have books like BNI's?" It's a story that gets at the heart of this conversation: sometimes the most competitive thing you can do is give your best thinking away. Bill Sherman sits down with Dr. Ivan…
Here's an uncomfortable truth: most people will tell a total stranger about their weird rash before they'll tell their best friend how much debt they're carrying. That contradiction sits at the center of this episode. The guest is Carrie Joy Grimes , founder and CEO of WorkMoney — a nonprofit she describes as "the AARP for everyday people's money." She built it in 2020 after years as a union…
Book the podcast. Do the interview. Move on to the next one. That's the default playbook for most podcast guests — and according to this week's guest, it's leaving most of the value on the table. Dustin Riechmann , founder and CEO of 7 Figure Leap , and host the the 7 Figure Leap Podcast , has spent the last four years helping coaches, consultants, and agency owners turn podcast guesting into a…
Why do we size up a rude stranger in seconds and decide they don't belong in our "tribe"? Dr. Benjamin Granger has a term for it: the evolutionary hangover — his phrase for the cognitive biases our brains evolved for savanna survival and never quite retired. As Chief Workplace Psychologist at Qualtrics , Granger spends his days distilling billions of data points on how employees and customers…
What happens when the person telling your success story wasn't actually in the room? That's the moment that pushed John Winso r — Founder and Chairman of Open Assembly , Harvard Business School executive fellow, and author of six books including the bestselling Open Talent — to write a widely discussed piece questioning the entire thought leadership industry. In this conversation with Peter…
You just spent two years writing a book. Now what? That's the question at the center of this conversation about book publicity, expectations, and the long game of building a body of work. Bill Sherman sits down with Sandy Smith , CEO of Smith Publicity , to unpack what a smart book launch actually looks like — and why most of the excitement (and anxiety) authors feel in the 60 days around…
What happens when the metrics you were taught to chase — title, bonus, prestige — stop adding up to a life that feels good? In this episode, Peter Winick sits down with Rand Selig , a Stanford MBA, former Wall Street investment banker, and founder of The Selig Capital Group , to trace his path from a jarring first job at Lehman Brothers to a self-defined version of success built on peace,…
What happens when a software CEO stops thinking like a marketer and starts thinking like a thought leader? You get a content flywheel that ranks #1 on Google, ChatGPT, and Claude — without hiring an SEO firm. Ghazenfer Mansoor , Founder and CEO of Technology Rivers , didn't set out to become a thought leader. He set out to grow a business. But as referrals gave way to inbound and conference…
This episode is a companion to the upcoming Thought Leadership Handbook — part of a series where Bill speaks with exemplars featured in the book about how they actually practice thought leadership. There are plenty of books explaining what AI is. This one is about the person who decided to write a book that tells you what to do about it instead — and who's spent 25 years turning disruption into…
