Leveraging Thought Leadership

Companies are hiring neurodivergent talent to build their algorithms, power their hedge funds, and design their AI. Then they lose those people, and nobody can explain why. In this episode, Peter Winick sits down with Caroline Maguire , social-emotional learning expert and author of Why Will No One Play With Me? and the new Friendship Skills for Neurodivergent Adults (Hachette) . Caroline has spen...

Publishers turned it down. They said there was no data and no market for a "wisdom book." Twenty-five years and roughly 700,000 copies later, The Trusted Advisor is still on consultants' shelves, and "trusted advisor" has become so common that many people use the phrase without knowing where it came from. In this episode, Bill Sherman talks with Charlie Green , co-author of The Trusted Advisor, fo...

A leader stands up in the middle of a 200-person workshop, slams his hand on the table, and says out loud what everyone in the room is feeling: I can't do great work here anymore. That moment helped start Pause: How to Lead Brilliant Work in a Busy World , and it's where this conversation gets interesting. Shawn Vanderhoven leads the executive development practice at the Wiseman Group and collabor...

Ask professionals at the world's biggest companies whether they have a plan for their own learning and growth, and Bill Hoogterp says the answer is almost never yes. He built LifeHikes around that gap, and in this episode he shows how a happy accident turned into a scalable model. Bill's career reads like a series of rivers rather than a roadmap: a decade of living cashless and keyless, nonprofits...

What if the one thing you've spent your career building, your expertise, is about to become the least valuable thing you own? In this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, Peter Winick sits down with Jack Myers , a media ecologist, futurist, and author of Your Third Brain: Powering a Future of Unimagined Possibilities . Jack launched The Myers Report as a fax newsletter in 1984, founded MediaV...

What does it take for a corporate scientist with zero direct reports to land on a list dominated by business school professors and bestselling authors? That's the question Jayshree Seth had to answer for herself when she was named to the Thinkers50 Radar in 2025 — and her answer became a framework. In her third appearance on the show, Jayshree Seth, 3M 's Chief Science Advocate and now-published t...

Here's an uncomfortable truth for anyone thinking about writing a book: the profit from the book itself is usually a rounding error. The real return shows up somewhere else entirely — and this episode, featuring publishing strategist Zach Kristensen , is about figuring out where. Zach has spent 15 years inside the thought leadership publishing world, first at FranklinCovey helping build out titles...

What actually happens when academic research meets the boardroom?    Peter Winick sits down with Nate Bennett — professor of management and faculty director of the Executive MBA program at Georgia State University 's J. Mack Robinson College of Business — for a candid look at the gap between what business scholars know and what business leaders actually use. Bennett has spent his career straddling...

What separates a leader from someone who just holds a title? This episode goes looking for the answer with two people who've watched that question get answered under real pressure: retired Brigadier General Tom Kolditz , who spent 40 years building leaders at West Point , Yale , and Rice , and Mariana Khomitska , a Ukrainian leadership development expert who has spent the last several years watchi...

Here's an uncomfortable question: if you replaced "Gen X" with a racial or ethnic label in a hiring conversation, would anyone tolerate it?    Dan Pontefract — leadership and corporate culture strategist, six-time author, and former Chief Learning Officer at SAP and TELUS — thinks the answer says a lot about how casually organizations discriminate by age. In this conversation, Dan traces the arc t...

What does it actually take to build a coaching methodology that thousands of people rely on? According to Mary Olson-Menzel , Founder and CEO of MVP Executive Development and author of the national bestseller What Lights You Up? Illuminate Your Path and Take the Next Big Step in Your Career , it wasn't a strategic plan. It was fourteen years of watching. This episode traces Mary's career from loca...

She was skeptical about writing a book for years. Not because she lacked ideas — because she'd watched too many people write books for their ego rather than for their reader. In this episode, Bill Sherman sits down with Lisa Bodell , CEO of futurethink and bestselling author of Kill the Company and Why Simple Wins , to talk about what actually happens between "I should write a book" and "I finally...

"Personal brand" might be the most cringe-inducing phrase in business vocabulary. Say it out loud to a room of accomplished professionals and watch the shoulders tense — it sounds like self-promotion, follower counts, and algorithm-chasing. Vanessa Errecarte ,  Founder of Marketing Simplified , the UC Davis Graduate School of Management lecturer who built one of the nation's only for-credit MBA co...

Every founder-led advisory firm knows the feeling: business comes in waves. Referrals and word-of-mouth are lovely — until the pipeline goes quiet for three months and nobody can explain why. In this episode, Mark McIntosh , founder of RevGrow , joins the show to break down why that unpredictability isn't a mystery to solve, it's a system to build. A CPA by training, Mark spent years watching tale...

"We hated your books." That's what a European competitor once admitted to Ivan Misner — years after trying to build a rival networking organization and watching his own members ask, "How come we don't have books like BNI's?" It's a story that gets at the heart of this conversation: sometimes the most competitive thing you can do is give your best thinking away. Bill Sherman sits down with Dr. Ivan...

Here's an uncomfortable truth: most people will tell a total stranger about their weird rash before they'll tell their best friend how much debt they're carrying. That contradiction sits at the center of this episode. The guest is Carrie Joy Grimes , founder and CEO of WorkMoney — a nonprofit she describes as "the AARP for everyday people's money." She built it in 2020 after years as a union organ...

Book the podcast. Do the interview. Move on to the next one. That's the default playbook for most podcast guests — and according to this week's guest, it's leaving most of the value on the table. Dustin Riechmann , founder and CEO of 7 Figure Leap , and host the the 7 Figure Leap Podcast , has spent the last four years helping coaches, consultants, and agency owners turn podcast guesting into a ge...

Why do we size up a rude stranger in seconds and decide they don't belong in our "tribe"? Dr. Benjamin Granger has a term for it: the evolutionary hangover — his phrase for the cognitive biases our brains evolved for savanna survival and never quite retired. As Chief Workplace Psychologist at Qualtrics , Granger spends his days distilling billions of data points on how employees and customers real...

What happens when the person telling your success story wasn't actually in the room? That's the moment that pushed John Winso r — Founder and Chairman of Open Assembly , Harvard Business School executive fellow, and author of six books including the bestselling Open Talent — to write a widely discussed piece questioning the entire thought leadership industry. In this conversation with Peter Winick...

You just spent two years writing a book. Now what? That's the question at the center of this conversation about book publicity, expectations, and the long game of building a body of work. Bill Sherman sits down with Sandy Smith , CEO of Smith Publicity , to unpack what a smart book launch actually looks like — and why most of the excitement (and anxiety) authors feel in the 60 days around publicat...

What happens when the metrics you were taught to chase — title, bonus, prestige — stop adding up to a life that feels good? In this episode, Peter Winick sits down with Rand Selig , a Stanford MBA, former Wall Street investment banker, and founder of The Selig Capital Group , to trace his path from a jarring first job at Lehman Brothers to a self-defined version of success built on peace, gratitud...

What happens when a software CEO stops thinking like a marketer and starts thinking like a thought leader? You get a content flywheel that ranks #1 on Google, ChatGPT, and Claude — without hiring an SEO firm. Ghazenfer Mansoor , Founder and CEO of Technology Rivers , didn't set out to become a thought leader. He set out to grow a business. But as referrals gave way to inbound and conference conver...

This episode is a companion to the upcoming Thought Leadership Handbook — part of a series where Bill speaks with exemplars featured in the book about how they actually practice thought leadership. There are plenty of books explaining what AI is. This one is about the person who decided to write a book that tells you what to do about it instead — and who's spent 25 years turning disruption into fr...

Most professionals who make the leap from clinical therapy to the corporate world stumble on the same obstacle: they speak the wrong language. They know the science cold. They understand what's happening beneath the surface in any dysfunctional team, toxic culture, or burned-out leadership group. But if they can't connect those insights to the metrics that actually keep executives up at night — re...

What happens when you're wildly successful at a life you didn't consciously choose? Wani Iris Manly, Esq. , grew up groomed for one thing: the law. She did the work, built the firm, drove the Porsche. And then, on New Year's Eve in 2010, she sat alone and took an honest look at the gap between the life she had and the life she actually wanted. What followed was one of the more audacious pivots you...