To find your nexperts, look for the five defining characteristics of great experts.
John W. Gardner may be one of the most influential people in the history of modern thought leadership that you’ve never heard of.
Gardner graduated from Stanford, earned a PhD in psychology from UC Berkeley, served World War II, championed Medicare as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson and later founded Common Cause, one of the most influential campaign finance reform organizations in American history.
Somewhere along the way, he also managed to serve on Stanford’s Board of Trustees where he crossed paths with a young faculty member named Jim Collins.
At the time, Collins was trying very hard to develop his teaching skills. One day, Collins asked Gardner for some career advice. Gardner offered this:
“It occurs to me, Jim, that you spend too much time trying to be interesting. Why don’t you invest more time being interested?”
Collins has described that advice as one of the most important moments of his career. And, in hindsight, it may have helped shape one of the most influential business thinkers of the last 40 years.
Speaking of Thought Leadership Succession
One of the biggest and least-talked-about risks facing many professional services firms today isn’t succession planning in the traditional sense. It’s intellectual succession planning.
What happens when the founder or a key rainmaker leaves? More specifically, what happens when the person who shaped the firm’s point of view, built its credibility, attracted its clients, drove its ideas, and became the visible face of the organization decides to step away?
For many firms, especially founder-led firms, that person isn’t just an executive. They are the insight engine. The hub of client relationships. The architect of the market narrative. And the philosophical center of gravity for the business.
And when they leave, firms don’t just risk losing relationships or revenue. They risk losing their ability to shape conversations in the marketplace. They risk losing FUTURE relationships and revenue too.
That’s why firms need to start identifying and developing their “nexperts” now.
Nexperts? Talk About Marketing-Speak
Nexperts are the next generation of thought leaders who will shape your firm’s future point of view. In the AI-era where information is becoming increasingly commoditized, these people matter more than ever. Firms will increasingly differentiate not by access to information, but by the people capable of making sense of complexity in ways that are useful, compelling, and trustworthy.
But if you’re looking for your nexperts, what are you looking for anyway?
The trick, of course, is to start with the characteristics of a great thought leader. And look for people who innately have some of those skills right now. So, without further ado, I offer 5 key characteristics you might be looking for in your future thought leaders…in order of priority, you are looking for people who are…
- Interested
- Interesting
- Truth-Seekers
- Articulate
- Storytellers
And, more on each…
1. Interested People Become Interesting
The most important quality in a future thought leader is curiosity. Not charisma. Not confidence. Not how they command a stage.
Curiosity.
The best experts are deeply interested in the world around them. They ask thoughtful questions. They explore issues beyond the narrow confines of their discipline. They obsess over understanding why things work the way they do. And they frequently “fall in love with the problem” before they ever try to articulate a solution.
This is exactly what Gardner was trying to impart to Collins all those years ago.
The best thought leaders don’t start from an “expert mentality.” They start from a mindset of “learning and growth.” That mindset matters because differentiated points of view rarely emerge from people trying to sound smart. They emerge from people genuinely trying to understand something important before everyone else does.
The best firms understand this. They don’t just reward expertise. They reward discovery.
2. Interesting People Make Unexpected Connections
Of course, being interested eventually helps people become interesting. The best experts tend to be “T-shaped” individuals. They go very deep in one area of expertise, but they also have broad enough interests to connect ideas across disciplines, industries, technologies, and human behavior.
They’re often well-read. Well-traveled. Intellectually restless.
They can connect seemingly unrelated ideas together in ways that create entirely new insights.
That ability is becoming increasingly valuable in a world where AI can summarize conventional wisdom almost instantly. The firms that stand apart will be the ones capable of generating perspectives that feel genuinely fresh, nuanced, and divergent.
3. Truth-Seekers Build Stronger POVs
The best thought leaders also tend to be truth-seekers. They tend to be “yes, and” people instead of “no, but” people. They’re collaborative and innately open to new ways of thinking and working.
They’re willing to ingest information that contradicts their existing beliefs. They adapt. They refine their thinking. And they aren’t so emotionally attached to their own opinions that they can’t evolve them when new evidence emerges.
In many ways, this is what separates real thought leadership from simple self-promotion.
A real point of view isn’t stubbornness masquerading as confidence. It’s a disciplined attempt to understand reality more clearly. That requires humility. And the confidence to occasionally be wrong in public.
4. Articulate People Simplify Complexity
Relatively speaking (pun intended), Einstein wasn’t all that great at mathematics. He had an “intuitive vision of the universe” and a brilliant sense for simplifying complexity. Yet he sometimes struggled to complete the advanced mathematics required to bring it to life. Frequently, he leaned on his colleagues to help him work out the math underlying his theories.
Similarly, many of the world’s best thought leaders are not great writers. Some are not great speakers. They do, however, typically possess a similar uncanny ability to simplify complexity.
They can take difficult concepts, complicated systems, or abstract ideas and explain them in ways that make others feel smarter rather than overwhelmed.
One of the biggest mistakes emerging thought leaders make is believing they need to do all the thinking alone. They assume they must independently identify the issue, frame the problem, articulate the solution, and package it perfectly before anyone else gets involved.
The best experts use their marketers, editors, strategists, podcast producers, and other creative associates as intellectual sparring partners. They bring rough ideas, incomplete theories, half-formed observations, and “lumps of coal” into the room. Then, through discussion, pressure-testing, editing, refinement, and storytelling, those rough ideas slowly become “polished diamonds” — coherent and differentiated points of view.
The struggling experts are often the ones most convinced their thinking is already complete. The best ones remain open to sharpening it.
5. Storytelling Skills are Special
Finally, the best thought leaders understand how to hold attention. They entertain while they inform. They guide while they teach. They use stories, metaphors, examples, humor, and emotion to make complex ideas memorable.
This doesn’t mean they try to become performers. It means they recognize that if no one pays attention long enough to understand the insight, the insight itself has limited value.
You can see this dynamic in firms that intentionally create space for emerging voices. At Jump Associates, Dev Patnaik remains the defining voice of the firm, but Michelle Loret de Mola has increasingly emerged as an important collaborator and intellectual complement in their weekly podcast. Not by simply repeating Dev’s thinking, but by helping extend and evolve it in new directions.
That’s how intellectual succession should work.
Start Earlier Than Feels Necessary
Most firms wait too long to develop their next generation of thought leaders. They wait until a founder starts talking about retirement. Until a rainmaker leaves. Or until the market begins to associate the firm too tightly with one or two people. By then, the problem is already difficult to solve.
The good news is that you don’t need to find someone who embodies all five of these characteristics immediately. Very few people do early in their careers. Jim Collins certainly didn’t. He had to learn one of the most important ones through the guidance of a mentor.
What matters most is identifying people who already demonstrate some of these characteristics and who remain curious and adaptable enough to continue growing.
Because the future market leaders won’t simply be the firms with the smartest people. They’ll be the firms that systematically develop the next generation of visible thinkers capable of shaping how clients understand the world around them. And that work needs to begin long before the current voices leave the stage.
