The Elements of Exceptional Thought Leadership: A Conversation with Robert Buday

Robert Buday is a world-renowned expert on thought leadership publishing.

Over the past 35 years, he’s helped professionals from a wide range of industries write bestselling books, publish more than 50 articles in Harvard Business Review, and author hundreds of articles for top-tier business publications.

He recently codified everything he knows about thought leadership into an excellent new book, “Competing on Thought Leadership: How Great B2B Companies Turn Expertise into Revenue.”

Bob joined me on Write With Impact for an in-depth conversation where he breaks down thought leadership into its essential elements. He shares some of the frameworks and strategies he uses to help his clients develop their ideas into publications that build brands and attract new business.

To find out more about Bob, his work for clients, and his new book, visit his website here .

Below are two short video clips from our interview. In the first clip, he introduces his 6-part narrative structure to developing exceptional thought leadership ideas. In the second clip, he describes his 80-20 rule for using this narrative structure to outline and develop an idea before sitting down to write.

Click here or scroll to the bottom of this post to watch the entire video conversation with Bob.

And if you're a podcast-listener like me, you can enjoy the complete conversation on Apple Podcasts while taking a power walk in the park, breaking a sweat on the treadmill, or washing the dishes:

The 6-Part Narrative Structure for Developing Exceptional Thought Leadership Content

Glenn Leibowitz: Great content, I believe, starts with very good writing. You described the element of exceptional content as clarity. I couldn't agree with you more that the clarity of ideas, of the thoughts that you're sharing, is absolutely essential to having impact. And that leads to the writing process. So why don't you take us into your thought leadership studio and explain your writing and editing process.

Bob Buday: This is the narrative structure where I believe 80 percent of the work is involved in developing exceptional content—that is also extremely well-written—but the 80 percent is getting the argument or narrative structure right.

Part 1: What is the problem?

I use this six-point narrative structure that starts with: What is the exact problem in the world of the target audience that a group of people or one person is writing about? What is that problem? Who has that problem? What is the magnitude of the problem? Do we have evidence that the problem is serious for certain companies? What is the evidence?

Part 2: What are the existing solutions that are not working well?

Then it’s: What are the existing solutions to solving this problem that are not working very well? What are those existing solutions and why do they fall short? And that helps from a reader standpoint. The reader begins right off the bat with that first part, What is the problem? Why do existing solutions fall short?

What you're doing with the reader is you're saying, “Listen, I understand your pain. I'm going to talk about a pain. You know what that pain is. I'm going to describe this pain so well, and I'm going to bring evidence that shows your company is not the only one with this pain; many others are.”

So the first thing is to get on the same wavelength: we understand your problem. This is the way we explain the problem. And your explanation of the problem has to be in the terminology of the audience, not your terminology.

So then when you go through part two of this structure, what are the existing solutions to this problem, this big problem, and why do they fall short? Then you're meeting the reader with, “Oh yeah, we tried this approach, that didn't work. It was a little better, but not much better. These folks really seem to understand our problem and the things that we've been doing to try to solve it.”

So if the reader hasn't solved the problem, then they read on to the third part, which is

Part 3: What is the new and better solution, and what are the benefits I get if I adopt it?

And then the fourth part is going in-depth on what is the new and better solution.

Part 4: What case examples prove the new solution is better?

Give me case examples, the evidence that it really did work. And when I say case study evidence, I mean mentioning companies by name, not disguised. Not, “one agricultural chemicals company did this and that.” It's one company, DuPont, or whatever, solved it this way. Here's the common process that these X number of companies that we studied took; here were the benefits of it.

Part 5: What are the barriers to adopting the new and better solution?

The fifth then is okay, great, you explain the new and better solution. You've proven that it actually works. It's provided big benefits. Then the reader is going to want to know, “Okay, so this seems to hold water. This is pretty interesting. We haven't heard this solution before, but what are we going to face in our firm if we try to adopt this new and better solution?”

So the fifth part of the narrative structure is, what are going to be the key barriers to adopting your new and better solution? And how do you overcome those barriers?

So that's where you, the content producer, are going to win a lot of brownie points with the reader, to show that you have a very practical approach. You know where the new and better solution can go sideways, and you know how to get the train back on track.

Part 6: How much time does it take?

And then the sixth part of this narrative structure is when the reader says, “these guys have convinced me, this is something we really need to explore. We’ve got to call these people.”

The sixth part is, do we have time? How long should we wait until we begin to adopt this new and better solution? And what are some signs where we may not have as much time as the number of people on the management team—the folks who make the decision to bring in an outside firm— they may not have as much time as they think.

So how do we diagnose where we are and figure out how fast we have to move on this problem through the way that the authors of this great article that we just read advise us to move. So that's?the narrative structure.

Click here to watch this clip

The 80-20 Rule to Outlining and Developing Your Idea

Bob Buday: When it comes to producing content with an expert or multiple experts in a firm or several firms, 80 percent of the time is going to be spent taking their ideas and putting it through the six-part argument structure and going round and round: a version one, two, three, four, five, ten of what will become a detailed outline.

Sometimes the outlines are longer in words than the actual article. And that happens because when it comes down to writing the prose, which is 20 percent of the time, you realize we have five examples here. These two are weak. We don't need them. Throw them out. These three are good enough.

So, 80 percent of the time is developing the narrative, developing a persuasive argument, and collecting all the facts and the case studies, and pushing the thinking. And this, I would argue, is the ghostwriter’s job: pushing the thinking of the subject experts really hard.

Even though, of course, the ghostwriter—and I don't even like that term. To me it's more like an “argument developer” or “idea developer”—even though the idea or argument developer is not the subject expert, he or she doesn't know their field nearly as well as they do. They're not getting paid for their advice on how to solve the problem at hand. But they're the professionals, they're the ones who know how to make rigorous arguments.

They're the experts and they can smell when an argument is not rigorous or not persuasive. That's the skill of the idea developer. And that's often a different skill than many writers have when they first get to this game of thought leadership.

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Watch the complete conversation with Bob Buday: The Elements of Exceptional Thought Leadership

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