Is the thought leadership of your organization integrated with other teams? Or it is something you do on your own time, without broad company support? To explore how thought leadership is about the effective deployment of great ideas, we sit down with Mike Zimmerman. Mike is the managing editor of The Thought Leadership Hub and Newsroom at Hitachi Vantara, a company helping mission-critical organizations get from data-rich to data-driven! Purchasers for businesses now spend 83% of their buying cycle educating themselves on the products and services they seek.  Mike helps us understand how thought leadership can get you on that shortlist, by helping those purchasers understand what your product is – and more importantly, why they need it. Thought Leadership takes a different position inside every company. We examine where it sits within Hitachi Vantara, as well as the investments they are making in it. They integrate thought leadership on a top-down basis, and their “Insights” platform provides a home for stories about innovation, and perspectives on everything from supply chain to sustainability. In order to have a successful thought leadership platform, you need a fertile source of new content. Mike takes us through the steps he used to identify and recruit his subject matter experts and the various skills they contribute to the platform. This episode provides critical information for listeners seeking to develop a curatorial role for thought leadership in their organization.  Three Key Takeaways: Your commitment to thought leadership shows in the frequency of the content you produce. When your thought leadership gets published, it is as important to clarify where you stand on each issue, both for and against. When developing your company's thought leadership, make the org’s manifesto of ethics and values is the anchor for your thoughts.