The (old) Alpha Mind

As I prepare to launch my podcast, I’ve been listening to a lot of other folks’ podcasts by way of learning and preparation. Based on many weeks of listening, here are some notes-to-self that might also be of benefit to other podcasters. (Note that I am interested not in music or “entertainment” podcasts, but in newsy podcasts related to business, technology, and leadership. If my notes are a help to anyone, it will likely be someone intending to create the same types of podcasts I listen to and plan to make.)

Today’s notes:

• Don’t talk about the time. A podcast isn’t radio, in which you’re given a precise number of minutes to fill. Even some of my favorite podcasters, like Hobson and Holtz, spend a few too many of my brain cycles talking about how long or short the podcast is running. Forget it. Such talk is cruft; listeners come for content.
• Do be aware of the time. Keep it as short as your content will permit, and waste not a scrap of your listeners’ time. (I love Lee Hopkins because his short casts never give me the sense that he’s filling minutes.) I’ve heard business podcasters say that if so-and-so can get people to listen to a whole hour a day of MTV-like audio, they should be able to find an audience who’ll listen to them for a whole hour once or twice a week. It doesn’t work that way. First, an audience of business people is a lot different from an audience of music-lovers. Second… well, see next note.
• Understand how people listen. Yes, it’s long, but this article by Walter Murch is excellent. Murch is one of the finest sound editors in the film industry, and is highly articulate as well. Here’s how I simplify his wisdom and apply it to podcasting: There are kinds of sounds that people can take in and appreciate while their minds are engaged in other tasks. Music is the extreme of this. There are other sounds that require the hearer to be fully engaged with the sound. Speech is of this type, and some kinds of speech more than others. The banter of DJs requires far less engagement than an analysis of news or a dissection of business strategy. That’s why, if you’re doing the latter in your podcast, you need to understand that anyone who’s working has far fewer minutes in the day for your audio than for a music podcast.

Welcome to my weblog. My first weblog in over three years. I have removed the previous ones because I judge that they were entirely experimental, and self-indulgent, and not likely to be of good use to anyone. So, while they may be archived somewhere, and it might be possible to find them, I don’t intend to and don’t particularly hope anyone else will, either.

I hope this new weblog will be of some actual use to some real people in need of real help—leaders.

In this weblog I plan to write about how thought leaders think. Those who dare to read the thing will find that this seemingly narrow theme will in fact take me down a great number of paths, some of them explored by only a few intrepid souls.

Today’s thought about thought leaders is that they communicate. Even those for whose messages the world is entirely unready (Jesus, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche) or mostly unready (Einstein) take some pains to communicate, somehow, somewhere, to someone. It was Nietzsche who said that “some are born posthumously”; he was referring to those who had to leave their thoughts lying around for a future generation. He was one of these; his attempts to cultivate even one disciple during his lifetime were frustrated. (He did not use the term disciple, but “Erbin” and “Fortdenkerin”—with feminine endings because his favored candidate was a woman, Lou Salomé.)

But the posthumously born to whom Nietzsche refers are only those who take the trouble to leave their thoughts for others. Those who fail to do this are not thought leaders, only “far-edgers” who may well be ahead of their times but who do nothing to help the times catch up. Too frequently, these people are simply losers, in the short run and the long. While they live, they are strangers in a strange land, without power to make the land familiar. After they leave, the next similarly constituted person to come along will find the landscape equally strange. Nietzsche’s posthumous ones, on the other hand, may be miserably lonely, as Nietzsche himself was, and yet may prepare the world for the next person cut of the same cloth, as a pine tree acidifies the soil to make its offspring a bit more comfortable. I’m pretty sure this is a conscious intention on the part of some thought leaders. I say so because it’s a drive of my own, and I’m neither extremely odd or extremely brilliant, and I must believe the motive would be even stronger forsomeone odder or brillianter than I.

I’ve mentioned Nietzsche and the posthumously born in order to surface an important fact about thought leaders: they may be severely neglected in studies of leadership because the subjects of those studies are, mostly, leaders of identifiable organizations, and are leaders during their lifetimes. They may be thought leaders—there may in the end be no other kind of leader on earth—but they do not include those whose leadership must take effect after their departure. And, for that matter, the posthumous ones are not the only class of thought leader likely to be neglected in generic leadership studies. Another is those, becoming more common as they have better tools of communication, who simply influence thought. They become true thought leaders when their ideas become memes, active organizers of patterns, not only of thought but of action.

When the meme is the organizer, its originator may not be a leader in any normal sense of the word. Examples are Adam Smith and Ayn Rand, who were influential in their own lifetimes, but who allowed themselves to lead only by their ideas, not by forming or pulling the strings of organizations.

My goal being to understand thought leadership, I must understand communication. To do so I must communicate. Ergo I blog.