The Thoughtful Executive is a weekly newsletter for marketers on thought leadership, content marketing, and strategic messaging for executives. Delivered on Wednesdays.
Welcome—or welcome back—to The Thoughtful Executive!
Yesterday, this column flashed across my phone from Harvard Business Review: “Has AI Ended Thought Leadership?” The author—a long-time founder, executive fellow at Harvard Business School, and frequent HBR contributor—argues that thought leadership as a category is dying. He blames AI for letting anyone sound like a thought leader and for producing content that looks like it’s contributing to solutions, even when the people behind it aren’t actually doing the work.
One point he makes is worth underlining: in an AI world, making a good argument isn’t enough. You need experience, data, feedback, and what he calls “scar tissue” behind that argument. That’s exactly what we’ve been mindful about in this community when shipping commentary and reflections to the public.
I do have one big disagreement.
I don’t think AI ended—or is ending—thought leadership. I think it exposes how little of it there actually is.
Where the HBR frame falls short
For this audience, “don’t just have musings” is old news. You’re already trying to ground executive content in real work, not vibes.
That’s why the piece’s big distinction—“operators” versus “performers”—doesn’t fully tackle the issue for you. It’s not wrong, but it’s too simple.
You can be an operator with no clear signature: making real decisions but expressing them in a way that’s impossible to quote, learn from, or reuse.
And you can also be a performer with plenty of stories but almost no real skin in the game.
The sweet spot for executive thought leadership is different:
There is real source material: decisions, bets, data, feedback, past mistakes, scar tissue.
There is a recognizable signature: a way the executive thinks through problems that feels distinct and repeatable.
Thought leadership worth building is where those two meet: the experiences only this executive and company have, plus the thinking pattern only they have.
It’s not just what an executive’s done – it’s how an executive thinks
Most teams now accept that you need real experience and data behind an executive’s platform. The next frontier is showing how that executive thinks, not just what happened.
A few ways executives can do that in practice:
Show the decision tree, not just the outcome.
Don’t just say “we pivoted.” Name the real options that were on the table, what you ruled out and why, and what signal would make you change your mind again. That reveals judgment, not just activity.
Surface the questions they now ask by default.
After a few scars, good executives change their mental checklist.
For example:
“What would have to be true for this to work?”
“What are we pretending not to know here?”
“If this fails, where does it fail first?”
Building content around those questions shows the cognitive signature behind the decisions.
Connect arguments back to the feedback that shaped them.
Instead of abstract claims, anchor ideas in specific feedback loops—customers pushing back, team members leaving, investors asking hard questions.
AI can help you tighten the language around all of this. What it cannot do is invent a real combination of source and signature.
Why this HBR piece is still useful to you
So why react to an HBR piece with a frame I only half agree with?
Because it shows you how a lot of the business world is thinking about thought leadership right now: worried about faux experts, hunting for “real operators,” and increasingly skeptical of anything that sounds too polished and frictionless. And I get it. There’s a lot of slop and generic takes out there. Especially on LinkedIn.
Raise your hand if you’ve seen people share the exact same takes as if they’ve come from a template? You’re not crazy. It’s actually happening, and not only is it annoying, it’s cringy. This is why having original thoughts and real experiences makes for better thought leadership.
If you’re already doing the work of capturing, honing, and producing a real executive voice—grounded in lived experience, informed by data and feedback, and shaped by a clear way of thinking—you’re ahead. But it doesn’t happen by accident.
The questions that matter for your program are:
What are we drawing from that only we have?
Are we showing how this executive actually thinks, not just what they’ve done?
And are we resisting the temptation to let AI fill in the middle of the argument—the part that should be messy, specific, and human?
I have one more bonus point/question: Are we talking about this just because we’re trying to sell something? This one trips up a lot of teams. No judgement. I’m not above doing it. I do it often, but there’s an art to it. You can still sell, but make sure there’s authenticity at the core of an executive’s message.
Back to my main point.
AI didn’t kill—nor is it killing—thought leadership. It’s just making it harder to find and appreciate the real thing. Resources like this newsletter offer you clarity.
I sit at the nexus of many thought leadership programs, watching how ideas move between executives, marketing, and comms—from backchannel conversations to drafts to live keynotes or LinkedIn posts, and then back again as feedback, data, and new questions. That vantage point shapes what I bring back here.
Okay, that’s it for today.
Until next time, take care of yourselves. See you next week!
Johnathan