The word thought leader has been most commonly used in the PR and communication industry and at the drop of the hat. You go for a new business meeting and the prospects key agenda is to get the thought leader position for their spokesperson which could be the CEO or the Business head. That is ultimately the ambition of every client.

But all of us need to understand to achieve the thought leader position one need to be patient and one need to demonstrate and show results. Name any good leader, be it in retail, technology, advertising or banking, the thought leader in their respective category have not got this overnight.

In the case of advertising Piiyush Pandey who began his career in Account Management and then crossed the fence to pen scripts and campaigns demonstrated his true creativity with many path breaking campaign. Starting from Chal mere Luna to….the dancing girl in the cricket field for Cadbury’s to the evergreen and refreshing approach on Fevicol made Piyush popular. But he started speaking to media when he knew that he has arrived to conquer India’s creative kingdom and consistently delivered world class work which made Ogilvy India proud in the global network. His great work helped him and the media started approaching him and today he is truly the thought leader in the advertising space.

One more example that I would like to illustrate is from the retail sector. Kishore Biyani rewrote the retail story by strongly believing that consumer is the king and came out with his innovative retail solutions. All of us will vouch with out any hesitation that he is the pioneer in India’s retail story and his capacity to demonstrate has earned him the thought leader status in the retail space.

We have Narayan Murthy in technology and Kiran Mazumdar Shaw in biotechnology who have really demonstrated before they reached the thought leader rank.

It is the ultimate goal or ambition for every entrepreneur or founder of a company to be a thought leader but great thought leaders are the one who truly demonstrate their skills and knowledge with a long term agenda and will run with the baton for a very long distance with strong focus on the future. There are no short cuts to emerge as a thought leader.

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