Should I describe myself as a "Thought Leader?"

This short article was inspired by a friend who is prominent in his country’s business community here in Hong Kong. When the HK protests hit the world's headlines, he was invited to comment on his national news channel. He did so, with a thoughtful analysis. This month, as the virus arrived, he was surprised to be invited to comment on this topic too, though he admitted to us he really did not have anything especially insightful to say at all. It seems he has just become the “go-to” expert on the ground. 

“Aha, you’ve become a thought leader” another friend teased him, before sharing with us a quote from Anand Giridharadas which laments the demise of the public intellectual and the rise of the thought leader. 

Here is the quote - it is challenging, perhaps especially to folks in my industry (the speaking industry), where there seems to be a temptation to describe ourselves as thought leaders (I am not sure if I have ever done that, but if I have, then, well… read on):

It is the best of times for thought leaders, it is the worst of times for public intellectuals — declares Daniel Drezner, in his recent treatise, “The Ideas Industry” a part-academic, part-first person, account of how an age of inequality has distorted the work of thinking. Drezner starts out by defining two distinct kinds of thinkers who share in common desire to develop important ideas and at the same reach a broad audience.

One of these types, the dying one, is the public intellectual whom Drezner describes as a wide-ranging critic and foe of power. She stays aloof from the market, society, or the state and she proudly bears a duty to point out when an emperor has no clothes. The ascendant type is a thought leader who is more congenial to the plutocrats who sponsor so much intellectual production today. Thought leaders tend, Drezner says, to know one big thing and believe that their important idea will change the world — they are not skeptics but true believers — they are optimists telling uplifting stories — they reason inductively from their own experiences more than deductively from authority. They go easy on the powerful: Susan Sontag, William F. Buckley Jr, and Gore Vidal were public intellectuals. Thomas L. Friedman, Niall Ferguson, and Parag Khanna are thought leaders.

Public intellectuals argue with each other in the pages of books and magazines. Thought leaders give TED talks that leave little space for criticism or rebuttal and emphasize hopeful solutions over systemic change. Public intellectuals pose a genuine threat to winners. Thought leaders promote the winners' values talking up disruption, self-empowerment, and entrepreneuriability.

Three factors contribute to the downfall of the public intellectual, and the rise of the thought leader, according to Drezner: one is political polarization. As American politics has grown more tribal, people have become more interested in hearing confirmation of their views by whoever will offer it than being challenged by interesting intellectually meandering thinkers. Another factor is a generalized loss of trust in authority. In recent decades Americans have lost faith in virtually every institution in the country except for the military thanks in part to years of hard economic realities and dysfunctional public sphere. Journalists have come to be trusted less and this loss of faith has pulled public intellectuals down a few notches and created new space for the less-credentialed idea-generators to vie for attention.

• Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: the elite charade of changing the world