Thought Leadership in the Indian software industry

Thought Leadership

For the Indian software companies thought leadership is the need of the hour. Thought leadership is about originating and promoting ideas and building a profitable consulting practice around them. For most clients, ideas are important for increasing efficiency, improving effectiveness and facilitating innovation. The essence of thought leadership is conceptualizing, packaging and presenting ideas to clients.

Most seemingly new ideas are not all that new. They have some relatively new components and some classical wisdom. Thus in CRM, the idea of knowing and understanding the customer is an age old concept but the use of Information Technology is new. Similarly, in case of Knowledge Management, the importance of knowledge has been widely accepted since time immemorial but the ability to leverage the power of Information Technology to facilitate knowledge sharing is a more recent development.

Thought leadership is all about assembling, packaging and disseminating business ideas. Thought leadership needs a combination of three capabilities: developing practical insights through hands on doing or consulting, reflecting on these insights and writing and presenting these ideas at meetings and conferences.

How can we nurture thought leadership ? Clearly the biggest advantage of our softare professionals , especially when compared to academics (to whom thought leadership comes more naturally) is that they have plenty of hands on experience. What they need to do is to reflect on their experiences, put their thoughts together on a piece of paper, expand them, write about them in journals and present them at seminars and conferences. In short, what they need are abstraction, conceptualization and presentation skills.

How do we build these skills? Let us take conceptualization first. Associates need to develop the ability to cull out the important learning lessons from each engagement or project and capture them as insights.

The term insight can be defined in different ways. But the most practical way of viewing an insight is as something that is not known to most people, something novel, a revelation. An insight must also be applicable across situations. That is it must be somewhat conceptual and not completely context specific. At the same time it must not be so general that it can be dismissed as theory or common knowledge.

When we say that a good advertisement should be able to communicate effectively the benefit(s) to customers, it is theory. When we say that an advertisement on a hoarding should convey the benefit in not more than 3-4 words, we are conveying an insight. It is an insight because theory has been applied to a context. The practical experiences of different companies with hoardings have been distilled into a simple principle that has great practical implications.

Presentation skills include the ability to communicate both orally and in writing. Most software professionals especially at the senior levels are reasonably articulate. But when it comes to putting thoughts on a piece of paper, there is scope to improve. Like any skill, writing improves with practice. Writing is about both style and substance. The more we write, the better we become. We can also improve our writing skills by reading great articles written by celebrated thought leaders. That will tell us how they introduce a new concept; explain it with examples and the kind of writing style they employ.

The need for Thought leadership is well accepted today. It is up to associates in the software companies to go ahead and do it.