Executive visibility programmes usually begin with a wish to be seen as a thought leader and a list of target publications. They usually end with a few generic leadership columns nobody remembers.
The failure is upstream of the media plan. It is that nobody established what the executive actually knows.
Start with the unfashionable expertise
The valuable material is rarely the subject the executive most wants to discuss. It is the accumulated operational knowledge that seems ordinary from the inside: what breaks during enterprise deployments, why a category of customer churns, which regulatory assumptions turned out wrong.
It seems ordinary because they live in it. To everyone else it is the interesting part.
Write before you speak
Interviews let a speaker be vague. Writing does not. Producing two or three substantial written pieces first forces the thinking into a defensible shape, and gives every subsequent conversation something concrete to reference.
It also creates a record. A journalist deciding whether to call someone will read what they have written.
Publish what did not work
The single most effective move in most of these programmes is also the one clients resist hardest: describing a decision that went badly and what was learned. It is disproportionately memorable, it is nearly impossible to fake, and it makes everything else in the record more credible.
Expect it to take a year
A serious position takes about three quarters to establish and compounds after that. Programmes budgeted for one quarter produce a burst of undifferentiated commentary and stop just before the point where it starts working.
Ganesh Sharma
