Most executive thought leadership is "instantly forgettable," communications director warns
Nkateko Khosa, Business Unit Director at BOLD, argues that executives and their communications teams have fallen into a "thought leadership trap" by prioritising safe, consensus-driven content over genuine insight — rendering most of what they publish invisible to the audiences they seek to influence.
A communications director at South African agency BOLD has argued that the bulk of executive thought leadership published on LinkedIn and in trade media fails to deliver genuine influence, warning that the instinct to avoid controversy has made most corporate commentary interchangeable and unread.
Writing in Lifestyle & Tech on 22 September 2026, Nkateko Khosa, Business Unit Director at BOLD, said the problem stems from a confusion between visibility and authority. The trap closes when executives and their communications teams confuse visibility with influence, Khosa wrote. Under pressure to participate in public discourse, he argued, leaders publish whatever is safest, and their advisers reinforce that instinct. Under pressure to "be part of the conversation", leaders publish whatever is safest, and their advisers (my own profession among them) help them do this.
Khosa cited successive editions of the Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report to illustrate the scale of the problem. According to that research, a large proportion of senior decision-makers consume thought leadership content, yet only a minority find it genuinely valuable. More than seven in 10, by some counts read such material, Khosa noted, but only a small minority, in some years fewer than one in five, rate what they read as genuinely insightful. The remainder, the report found, cite jargon, recycled ideas and a lack of original perspective.
Khosa identified three recurring patterns that he argues render content ineffective. The first is the "echo chamber" — a summary of existing research with no original operational insight added. The second is what he termed the "ice cream is good" position: an argument no rational person could disagree with. The third is the scrub, in which a sharp view is passed through so many layers of legal and corporate approval that it emerges with its teeth removed.
The piece is direct in assigning shared blame to communications professionals. We are not transcribers of our executives' least controversial ideas, Khosa wrote. We are meant to build their authority, and authority cannot be built without risk.
Khosa proposed four disciplines he argues can lift content above the baseline. The first is a "disagreement test": content that no informed peer could dispute is not an argument but a brochure. The second is transparency about failure, drawing on Brené Brown's work on vulnerability: trust is earned through candour about what went wrong. The third is shifting analytical focus from describing trends to explaining their operational consequences. The fourth is narrowing the scope of claimed expertise, referencing executive coach Wes Kao's concept of a "spiky point of view": a defensible, deeply informed position that people can genuinely disagree with.
On the challenge of machine-generated content, Khosa argued that the stakes of playing it safe have risen. In a market now saturated with machine-generated prose, invisibility has a price. Safe is no longer safe. Safe is a line in the marketing budget that might as well not have been spent.
Khosa concluded that the real risk for executives is not being challenged but going unnoticed. The real risk is not being disagreed with. It is blending in so completely that nobody notices you were there.
Prepared with AI assistance and reviewed by the editorial team.
