Posting Content Isn’t a Thought Leadership Strategy

By Matteo Cassese. I coach founders and executives on the story their business depends on.

In 2011 I left a cushy job at Warner Brothers and went self-employed, and at that time I asked myself a question: how can I be useful? It sounds harmless.

How many times did my mom tell me “make yourself useful”? Useful is good, right?

Yet, when it comes to our value, useful can become very tricky.

Useful demands a deliverable. That is what happened to me: I started making marketing campaigns I did not want to make, for clients who were not happy buying them.

A deliverable is a sliver of what you know, dumbed down and simplified until there is no juice left in it, squeezed to death.

How can I be useful is definitely dangerous.

The right questions are: who are you? what is your worth?

A thought leadership strategy is the answer to those two questions, in words other people can repeat when you are not in the room, with publishing as the output, not the plan.

A content calendar is not a thought leadership strategy

If we want to avoid “how can I be useful” as a question, we just need to get rid of one word, useful. And we are left with: How can I be?

This is not a simple question to answer. Who are you? Where do you derive your energy? How do you show up?

A content calendar is useful output every week. Yet if you don’t answer the hard questions beforehand, it produces empty content.

I have proof of what changes when the position comes first. At the start of 2025 I began publishing on YouTube chasing views. I was trying to be useful. In a few months I asked the right question: how can I be me on YouTube? I ended the year doing YouTube for branding. I stopped minding the number of views and started caring about the quality of them. The measure of my performance was never a measure of my quality. In order to create effective videos, I had to figure out who I was, and only then how to communicate who I was.

A thought leadership strategy must answer who you are and what you are worth, in words other people can repeat when you are not there.

The four things a public voice requires

You are already recognized for your craft and your abilities. How about your communication? Do you communicate at the level of your craft and your abilities? Because otherwise nobody will know. Your public voice needs four things to make people want to follow you, trust you and remember you.

1. AN IDEA you would defend, EVEN under scrutiny

Your positioning is how people place you on a map: who you are, and how you see the future. Before you say anything in public, be clear who you are. Mine: I help brilliant overthinkers get clear, get concise, and make a plan. It took me quite a long time to get to that sentence. That is an idea I would defend under any scrutiny. Could someone describe your positioning in one sentence without quoting you? If not, somebody else will position you and you will become a part of their world.

2. A story bank you can reach for without preparing

A story bank is the set of stories you can reach for tomorrow with no preparation. You already have a million of them. Once you start treating every answer as a story, every question somebody asks becomes a prompt to tell one. We are all unique, we are all interesting, and the work is to extract those stories and make them simple. Think of it as publishing a book built to last.

3. Stage presence: permission, not performance

Stage presence is the permission you give yourself to be who you are in front of people. I gave myself permission to stand up, let go of my fear, and talk in front of people, and thirty years later that is still what I am doing. I stopped asking for permission to speak on stages.

We all worry about what we need to say. It doesn’t matter what you say but how you say it. It doesn’t matter what you talk about, but who you are. You can’t fake it. The whole world will tune out if they think you’re a phony. I am a deep introvert and a stage animal, and I can switch the second one on. Being able to show my craft is the best marketing I will ever make.

You need that too.

4. A public narrative that runs through every appearance

All your stories must have a common thread. That’s a public narrative.

It doesn’t matter if your medium is LinkedIn or the TED stage. The moment you can tell the world I am like this and the world looks like this, that is your moat.

My voice, these words, my expression: that is the only moat I truly have against other speakers and coaches. Spread the message because it must be heard, not because you need the applause. Minouche Shafik, who later became president of Columbia University, said in a 2018 interview that in the past jobs were about muscles, now they’re about brains, but in the future they’ll be about the heart. I think we already live in that future. AI brought us there. The difference between you and automation and outsourcing is your heart. Show it to us when you communicate.

Expertise is not the thing people follow

The expert does not see their own expertise, because it is as natural to them as breathing, like a fish unaware of water. I do not know how you do what you do unless you tell me, and for you, immersed in it every day, that is the hardest thing to see. When we feel insecure, instead of showing leadership, we dump information: we tell everyone everything we know to prove we are the real expert. That is imposter syndrome talking. It is not the expert talking. The problem here is not your presentation skills. It is clarity of thought.

I know of a very successful marketing executive, now working as a consultant, so good that everyone in his industry already calls him a guru. He walks into a company, looks around, tells them what is wrong, fixes it, and sends the bill. What he could not do was show any of this to anyone else. Fortunately he called me before giving his first ever public presentation, at forty years old.

We distilled his ideas into the simplest most compelling version until he was ready for a stage.

Where to start if you are already good

If you are already good, the temptation is to work on the surface: your language, your offer. I would start one step back instead, on who I am. A few questions worth asking yourself directly:

• Could someone describe your position in one sentence without quoting you?
• If people described your impact in one line, what would you want it to be?
• What makes you different as a professional?
• How do you make your key points quotable?
• Does your LinkedIn profile tell a coherent story, or is it just a random pile of jobs and buzzwords?

There is a quotation from a gentleman called Joseph Campbell, that everybody who works in storytelling is compelled to quote: follow your bliss, and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.

That’s what happens when you get your thought leadership right.

Questions founders ask about thought leadership strategy

What is a thought leadership strategy?

Positioning comes first. Once you have your positioning, you build a narrative around it, and that narrative has to be authentic and has to use your own words. A thought leadership strategy starts there. Publishing is what comes out of it.

Why is posting consistently not enough for thought leadership?

There is a catch 22. In order to develop a story, you need a direction first, and a publishing schedule will not hand you one. The relationship I am building is with the audience first.

Do I need to be on stage?

I speak because I like it. It is hard. So what. You need to be out there in the market so people can buy from you, and a stage is one way of being out there.

How is thought leadership different from personal branding?

Build not just a personal brand but a personal mythology. Personal branding should be predicated on values and first principles, which gives it depth and separates it from the shallow brand of an influencer. Instead of saying look at me, it encourages others to think independently, and offers a message they can adopt for themselves.

Can an expert who hates self-promotion do this?

Yes, but only if you understand that it was never about yourself. It is about being generous enough to give people the opportunity to buy from you.

How long does it take?

This may be solved in a month or be your life’s work. Just hop in and we will figure it out together.

What to do next. If you know your work cold and people still do not repeat you when you are out of the room, this is what I build with people in business storytelling coaching: positioning, story bank, presence and the public narrative underneath them.

About Matteo Cassese

Business coach, keynote speaker, and mythmaker, Matteo helps leaders thrive in chaos and conflict. Twenty years across tech, film and consulting, seven of them at Warner Bros., founding-team at Netflix Italy, and advisory work for Sony, LinkedIn and Heineken. Berlin based. His unique perspective as a queer nerd passionate about mythology and technology creates a safe space for leaders to be vulnerable and reach their full potential. Read more about Matteo.