Sharing Knowledge - Making Meaning - Influencing Change

What is a Thought Leader?

According to Wikipedia "Thought Leader" is a buzzword or article of jargon used to describe a futurist or person who is recognized among their peers and mentors for innovative ideas and demonstrates the confidence to promote or share those ideas as actionable distilled insights (thinklets). Visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_leader for the full description as per Wikipedia.

Another discription of a Thought Leader is found on "Blue Flavor" where it is described "as a person or company that actively promotes and discussed ideas that are relevant to their peer-base. That by talking about a topic you become a leader in that topic. Their statements are often assumed to have the experience and knowledge behind them to support what they are saying."

My own simplified definition of a Though Leader is someone who has journeyd much further down the road of a specific topic in terms of knowledge and experience than most people, and desires to share that knowledge and experience with others.

In other words, a Though Leader knows, and knows that he knows... and evangelise what he knows.

In terms of what thought leadership requires, Elise Bauer, a Consultant based in Northern California puts it beautifully:

"Thought leadership requires a spirit of generosity - generosity of one's time, intelligence and knowledge. It requires a trust that by being open with what you know, and by sharing your time and knowledge, the world will reward your efforts."

Elise is an active "blogger", and explains her goal and motive for sharing her insights as follows:

"My goal is to blog everything I know that I think others might find useful, and everything I learn that I might want to reference later. Instead of filing away a clipping into the dungeon of my file cabinet, I just blog it, so not only can I find it but others can as well. As I have a lot of interests, I now have a lot of weblogs. They have become a sort of public extension of my brain, except with a much more reliable data retrieval mechanism."

As Elise, I also have many interests and as such a number of weblogs. The idea of the "Though Leader" community or network has its origin in this. The question to myself was: "Why not bring a diversity of thought leaders together into a virtual community and create a space where they can publicly extend their wisdom."

Well, the scene has been set; that space has now been created and awaits thought leaders out there to join...