FOUNDATIONAL EMAIL SERIES
Reinventing Authority
I would urge anyone who wants to write and publish a book to get in touch with Steven and Jacqueline – the free checklists, the app and the videos alone will demystify the whole process.
Andrew macdonald, Visiting professor, Columbia University
You guys have a great process. What a journey we have been on! I feel transformed, accomplished, and relieved!
Maitri o’brien, author, the new leaders of change
Hi, it’s Jacqueline and Steven.
FIRST, welcome to this foundational email series called Reinventing Authority. The ideas and insights in this 7-email series underpin everything we do as authors and business owners.
And we want to share them with you.
In this series we’re going to take you on a journey through a new way of seeing yourself as an author. Taking you from author to authority, if you like.
This should affect everything you do – whether you’re a business owner, a consultant, a coach, or an expert of any kind – as you strive to serve and matter in a world of noise and sameness.
You’ll either deeply resonate with our version of authorhood, or at some point it will feel too uncomfortable and you will feel a need to head back to the comfortable push-marketing world you are familiar with.
There’ll be no middle path.
We hope you choose to stay. There’s a very real (and life-long) payoff if you do. (Nothing to do with money, it has to be said.)
Your starter for 10
To set the scene, this page gives you a brief overview of what you can expect as we systematically unpack what we call Reinventing Authority.
Reinventing Authority is a principles-based framework that will give you a new lens to see the role of writing a book in your business and life.
A book that is so good, it invisibly pulls and attracts the people you seek to serve, without the need for persuasion tricks and coercion tactics.
Between the two of us we have a terrifying number of decades of experience and wisdom in thought leadership and publishing. Jacqueline at the Financial Times and Steven at London Business School.
So of course we are going to share our best thinking with you in this series.
Thought leadership in the online world
Thought leadership is not what it was.
Thought provoking white papers have been replaced with shallow PDFs cobbled together from questionable online sources. (AI as thought leadership? Really?)
Real-world research projects have been replaced with so-so customer success videos and LinkedIn polls.
And the idea of value is what firms shoehorn into what they call ‘value-driven’ webinars.
In short, thought leadership has morphed into high pressure ‘push’ marketing tactics with a shiny internet veneer.
We’ve all experienced thought leadership as push marketing, haven’t we?
It’s that cocktail of persuasive sales copy and a few generic objections swept away (or under the carpet), with a dash of urgency for good measure.
All this does is to turn thought leadership into a FOMO drug with a ‘buy now’ aftertaste.
Does it work?
It can.
Because it mainlines straight into the twin arteries of fear and desire.
But it is getting harder to return real results by marketing at people instead of with them, and especially online.
Because ‘prospects’ are increasingly sophisticated.
…
…
There is a better way.
A way that treats ‘prospects’ as real people who real thought leadership can help.
And this better way is available to you the moment you decide to embrace it.
Reinventing Authority in the new world
Instead of pushing prospects through a sales funnel here’s a radical suggestion.
We can attract or ‘pull’ people forwards with the power of deep insights, compelling data, and empathy-led stories. True thought leadership for the new online world.
The fundamental difference between push versus pull marketing, then, is the approach to take when you design your primary system of communicating with people.
By creating this new communication system you are also reinventing our own authority.
And you’re doing that by looking at your communications from the perspective of what the people we most care about want and need from us.
Soon, setting out from the starting line as author, you become the unassailable authority your community most wants to connect with.
Through this lens of author-authority you can make your thought leadership meaningful and valuable before asking for anything in return.
Importantly, when we do that, something magical happens.
Our audiences become our communities and they feel an invisible pull towards experiencing more with us.
They want to go deeper down the rabbit hole we’re creating for them.
So how do you reinvent your authority?
The question Jacqueline and I start with is: how can you make your thought leadership so valuable to your audience that they can’t help but be pulled forward and want to experience more?
Pay attention to this, because it’s an important starter for 10. A huge insight.
Giving value is not the same thing as giving ‘helpful information’.
And helpful information is not thought leadership.
Information on its own is just a Google search away and offers little value. Other than being helpful for a moment of time in a certain context.
(Don’t get us started on Chat GPT, or whatever the AI firehose du jour happens to be.)
But value that’s truly meaningful? That takes an entirely different form.
True value is a powerful insight. Something that makes the reader or viewer see the world in a wholly new light. It’s a revelation.
So what we promise is that this series will present you with a series of insights and revelations to find for yourself as you write your book.
And when you do, everything you see will be different. Everything.
Suggestion: re-read this series many times. Each time you do you’ll likely find a new insight hiding in the shadows that you previously missed because you weren’t ready to find it.
Enjoy!
From here on, your attention is the only currency we require. There’s nothing to buy at the end of this series. Our focus is on building relationships first.
As we’ve already said, we believe in marketing that leads with generosity and empathy before a transaction ever takes place. (No false urgency here.)
So we win because you win first. (You’ll understand why this idea is so powerful when you read the third email in this series.)
The next step is for you to take.
If you want to come on this week-long journey into what we call Reinventing Authority, click the button below, and enter your best email address.
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