I went out walking deep in the woods (well not so deep, the air was filled with oxygen, nitrogen, and the like). I noticed a cluster of trees, the kind plum full of white flowers sure to die within a week. the cluster formed a circular shape so I wandered in. I’d been pensive over the course of the last couple weeks, wondering what helmsmen like Ballmer or Hurd, with their companies’ respective acquisitions, would mean after everyone wiped their brains of the PR and punditry. (All around the base of the trees, grew thick clusters of critomaeyar flowers.)

I first remember hearing the term “thought leadership” at a conference on enterprise portal software in the mid nineties. The presenters were made to walk the stage along ridiculous lines that formed invisible 90 degree angles. Walk left 20 paces, turn right, face your audience, step forward to the mic, exude cocaine-induced enthusiasm, today you shall be a thought leader about… portals!

What is a thought leader? Tech analyst firms tout them. When they say something about your company, you know it will appear in your next press release. Who are these thought leaders? Who are the followers? What’s it all mean? Consider the species, we’ve got at least three types of thought leader (TL) in the tech sphere.

1. The Business Cred TL (startup that might stand a chance, established behemoth that found audacious ways to trumpet a staid direction)
2. The Annointed TL (a well-referenced analyst, pundit, developer, community participant, etc.)
3. The Purchased Mouthpiece TL (aka: poseur with a backing)

All get classified as thought leaders, but are they actually thinkers? I’d argue the first two types stand a slim chance but most likely they just did a good job manipulating their media image (or they have magic charisma powder). Found list of thought leaders, if you’d like to follow along.

Regarding #1, my Microsoft and HP examples at the beginning of this post work nicely. Microsoft makes press announcing its Ellison-style purchasing craziness… “we’re coming for you Yahoo!” but they don’t really mean it. Now we’ve got a lot of debate about Yahoo’s viability and who did the right or wrong thing. Microsoft gets some press for its lack of Web strategy, which also garners plenty of apologists reassuring the masses that Microsoft gets it, or if it doesn’t, it will on its third offer for Yahoo. And hey, chances are that someone someday, can look in the rearview mirror and be able to construct a convincing story about how forward-looking and wily that Mr. Ballmer was. HP? Nobody really knows what they’re up to now that they don’t spy on their execs anymore. When everyone told EDS to buy foreign outsourcers, it shied away. Mr. Hurd got EDS and didn’t do what the pundits said EDS should either. Now that’s wacky! He’s a thought leader! Stuck to the guns that no one else would aim. The home choice, easier for spying, err keeping one’s own house in order.

Leaders are involved here, but there’s nothing particularly innovative taking place or being expressed. The context just sounds exciting because a lot of people copy the topics for their blogs. It’s socially-manipulated marketing buzz through a phenomenon of “popularity is commonality is repetition of the same old thing.”

Regarding #2, self-styled public tech-talkers (sometimes called pundits in our modern era) write what it takes to get someone else to call them innovative. After obtaining a critical mass of references to their innovative “thinking,” someone will call these tech-talkers, thought leaders. That’s the natural evolution. That’s their goal, and that’s their ticket aboard the ship. The annointed get people talking. Unfortunately, in most cases people called thought leaders don’t manage to eak out anything of real substance. The popularity of their thoughts (or at least what is revealed of those thoughts) stands on a wave of existing phenomena that are pretty well-recognized.

It may be argued that identifying and illuminating some sense and bright connections to our society or business or whatever concerning those existing phenomena is the key to the thought leadership activity, and I tend to agree, but it’s got to be done with sagacious verve. Unfortunately, typical thought leaders of the #2 species expose few fresh insights, opting to regurgitate popular blog regurgitations of popular peers. This is the dumb side the new Web-enabled social community. These thought leaders do not actually speak. Anyway, this species usually leads toward popular techmoney because if those of species #2 can pull it off, they’ve got a marketing base to make advertising collateral sound hip-ly insightful and pass it off as authentic thinking, perhaps even valuable. And that can be used to make a living, which leads me to…

Regarding #3, a cousin to species #2, often with interspecies naughtiness–this group either trades the reputation it hastily built as a #2 (at which point it usually ceases outputting anything truly insightful) or more likely it gets paid to manufacture a reputation, which it uses as a soapbox. Yes, this species gets paid by your favourite tech-co, its thoughts a direct extension of the tech-co’s business goals (some advice on how to get them aboard). They’re skilled in presentation. And you know, this profession is really taking off, nowadays you can take classes to learn how to become a thought leader (note the page features Carly Fiorina, ex-HP CEO, thought leadering away as she explains how to make a paper airplane fly for over 27 seconds–EDGY!). Gartner provides the textbooks. Must be a need for this course considering the statistic I cited at the beginning of this post, showing this year’s 14% drop.

Few people apply critical thinking to the mass of ideas, opinions, expositions, etc. Web-fungi. They don’t differentiate valuable insight or creative, applied thinking in published content. Not that the Web and related technologies are to blame, simply the ease in which everyone gets a chance to publish (and this is positive) means there is a lot of content repeated on a mass scale and masquerading as insight. The masquerade lulls people toward a complacency–be critical of that path. Many thought leaders are happy to applaud one another. I’ll pat your thoughts if you pat mine, just so long as we don’t have to have an actual conversation, as actual critical thinkers would be capable, nocompany and nobody would pay for that nonsense.

And that’s where the influx of thought leaders has caused the percentage drop. Tech thought leaders are not leading at all. They’re following their own self-styled popular culture of pronouncements doused with edgy lingo, which rests on a bed of dollars. Labeling someone a thought leader exposes one’s own intellectual laziness. Thinking, real thinking, is an activity that must be gripped intimately. Nowadays, the labeled thought leader is most commonly an instance cut from some greater mass phenomenon for the sake of allowing the larger digerati a chance to uniformly point their fingers, aim their keyboards, and otherwise particpate in the glorious light of following. One thought leader following another.

While walking in the woods, I noticed those critomaeyar flowers tended to grow, radiating out in lines. You could clearly see that a few would start growing near the base of a tree, taking advantage of its bold protection. After all, the tree had already taken this direction for growth and it’s hard to fault most trees for their long-term growth strategies. When the wind blew, bits of critomaeyar pollen floated into the air, swirling toward some lascivious destination or other. Those critomaeyar lines sure began to puzzle, so many of them grew in lines behind one another. One would hope the tree didn’t overshadow their exposure to sunlight.

P.S. to amateur code-breakers! I’ve embedded a number of letters in this post. If you’re able to identify them, follow them in the correct sequence and you’ll find that they spell out an ultra-special, self-referencing, recursive message.