I’ve got bad news for you, your thought leadership… ain’t. It’s a rearrangement of ideas that already exist, dressed up with a confident headline and a stock photo of someone looking pensively out of a window.
Approval by committee has killed more good copy than every bad writer in history combined. And the tragedy is that it’s done with the best of intentions, by clever people, one entirely reasonable comment at a time.
There is a particular kind of cringe that happens when a brand tries to talk to young audiences and gets it wrong. You can almost hear the meeting where someone said “let’s make it more Gen Z” and everyone nodded – mouths agape and eyes blank.
So the day has come. You’ve been handed a brief on something you’ve never even heard of, let alone know anything about. What looks like gobbledegook now needs to become something you can confidently write about next, and fast.
