The Dilemmas of Mainstream Leadership Discourse in the Platform Era

Last week, I published an article on the Creative Leadership Hub on LinkedIn that contained over 5000 words. The next day, I read a seemingly reputable set of recommendations for posting on LinkedIn that indicated the length of posts for optimal engagement on the platform was between 800-1000 words. That recommendation led me to pause the completion of another piece for this week about how creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship have evolved as interrelated concepts and practices over recent decades. While admitting that I can be wordy and overly detailed in my reflections and analyses, I also believe that such a topic (which I had chosen because it was raised a few weeks a few weeks ago in a live event on the CLHub) deserves fuller airing and development than can be easily achieved with a (much) more limited word count.

That is to say, while acknowledging my own tendencies – and the need to adapt them better – I also began to wonder why the 800-1000 word length is optimal for engagement on LinkedIn. Not all platforms are designed for all content, of course, and besides shortening my own future posts for publication on LinkedIn, I can aim to publish longer pieces, the ones that come to me more naturally, on other platforms. This was timely realization, since the Creative Leadership Hub will very soon be launching its own website and newsletter, and its articles will also appear on Substack. Those platforms will presumably be more amenable to longer pieces than LinkedIn. (And I hope those of you reading this on LinkedIn will find CLH content, long and short, in those other spaces.)

What follows, as a result, are some thoughts – briefer thoughts, thought still around two and half times the word count that typically works best on LinkedIn – about how media platforms and formats reshape the content they present. In fact, in today’s digital ecosystems, and looking back over the recent years in which they have evolved to such prominence, I contend that the transformation of content formats and distribution channels has fundamentally altered how we consume and engage with leadership and business ideas. This evolution reflects broader shifts in attention economics, platform dynamics, and the democratization of thought leadership. At its most basic, however, the point being made and illustrated here is that platforms and formats are not neutral: not only do they favor content of certain length or presentation, they arguably alter our way of thinking about and potentially acting on that content as well as the broader mainstream discourse about business and leadership they help to constitute.

Business Content Evolution: From Books to Bytes

Traditional business publishing has undergone seismic shifts since the early 2000s. While the Harvard Business Review Press and other dedicated management and business books publishers continue to release foundational texts, their content is also increasingly atomized (particularly by authors and editors) into shareable snippets of wisdom across platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram. Relatedly, publishers of business and leadership content, like HarperBusiness, favor would-be authors with a sizeable existing social media presence and following. While this factor can be seen as evidence of the relevance of the individual’s ideas and expressions, it also potentially circumscribes which individuals and ideas are most fully considered for publication. Growing more widespread at the same time was the related concept of ‘thought leadership’ to refer to “those people who possess a distinctively original idea, a unique point of view, or an unprecedented insight into their industry” that could be spread as content through diverse channels (Kurtzman, 1997).

Current business and management books are also increasingly the bases of a sub-industry of executive summaries and other digest versions. Services like Blinkist (founded 2012) and getAbstract distill business books into 15-minute summaries, with Blinkist reporting over 18 million users by 2023. Related has been a renaissance of newsletters, offered by both by authors themselves but especially others who curate topical content, that widely distribute summaries of management content. Subscription newsletters like Morning Brew (founded 2015) as well as daily or weekly, subject-specific offerings by publications from the Financial Times to The Information have revitalized business content distribution, combining brevity with personality. Morning Brew grew from a college project to over 4 million subscribers by delivering business news in digestible, conversational formats.

At the same time that the number of distribution platforms and distribution channels has increased, another fascinating trend in the shaping – and timing – of content has emerged. On one hand, we’ve seen dramatic compression: Twitter (now X) built an empire on 140-character messages before expanding to 280 in 2017, and recently to 4,000 for premium users. Related micro-blogging sites, including Threads and Bluesky, have similar constraints. Meanwhile, platforms like TikTok initially limited videos to mere seconds before gradually extending those durations to accommodate deeper engagement.

Yet simultaneously, we’ve experienced significant expansion in long-form content. Podcasts like “Masters of Scale” with Reid Hoffman and “The Tim Ferriss Show” regularly exceed 90 minutes, contradicting general assumptions about diminishing attention spans. YouTube features both extremes of timing, with YouTube Shorts (of less than 3 minutes) introduced in 2021, while other video content runs to 20 minutes or much longer (including, increasingly, the video versions of podcasts).

Many of today’s business content creators practice what MIT media theorist Henry Jenkins termed ‘transmedia storytelling’ in his 2006 book Convergence Culture. A single leadership concept might begin as a LinkedIn post, expand to a Medium article, transform into a podcast episode, and ultimately become a book chapter-each iteration tailored to platform-specific engagement patterns. A practitioner of this process is Scott Galloway, who adapts content to different formats to reach a larger audience across multiple podcasts, newsletters, and social media channels. The Harvard Business Review, too, has adapted to this landscape, evolving from exclusively long-form articles to a diverse content ecosystem including a dedicated app, their ‘Daily Alert’ and ‘Management Tip of the Day,’ the ‘HBR IdeaCast’ podcast, and a ‘Visual Library’ of infographics that all maintaining their scholarly foundation. The most successful communicators today don’t just compress ideas, in other words, they know when and how to expand them to suit different channels and audiences.

Reshaping Mainstream Leadership Discourse

The continuing historical changes in publication and distribution channels and formats do not only offer shorter or longer or more text-, image-, or audio-based variations of the same content. Instead, the differentiation of channels and platforms has evolved with a substantive change in how – and by whom – leadership concepts are developed and disseminated. The democratization of thought leadership or, at least, of experience sharing is one obvious trend, exemplified by platforms like LinkedIn and Substack that have dramatically lowered barriers to entry for leadership voices.

Without the same previous need for formal business credentials or experience, many previously excluded practitioner voices can gain significant influence – and offer services ranging from coaching and advising to keynote speaking. In contrast, as sociologist Zeynep Tufekci argues, while shifting power from traditionally elite institutions, this democratization nevertheless often creates other forms of networked gatekeeping that still privileges certain voices – often those most adept at manipulating platform dynamics rather than those with the most substantive ideas (2017).

Among the most compelling imperatives driving these emergent platform dynamics are recognizable personal brands. The emphasis on authentic voices has evolved into an essential requirement for personal branding. In today’s crowded marketplace, developing a recognized and distinctive personal brand isn’t just helpful, as figures such a Seth Godin and Dorie Clark emphasize, it’s necessary for professional survival. This evolution has fundamentally altered the power dynamics in business discourse, creating a kind of visibility dilemma, in which leaders (or would-be thought leaders) face increasing pressure to maintain activity and omnipresence across platforms while simultaneously developing and conveying genuine expertise.

What media theorist Andrey Mir terms the ‘lazy authorship’ of views, reads, likes, and other forms of reaction on digital platforms becomes the basis for many of maintaining visibility and advancing an individual position and sense of self (2024). Put differently, individual time spent on presentation production, distribution, and platform optimization often trumps that spent on genuine content creation – even before considering the further laziness enabled by AI-augmented content production.

Platform dynamics reshape time in another way, accelerating idea cycles. The time between concept introduction and mainstream adoption has compressed dramatically. Some of the pattern is captured in the hype cycles around technologies or ideas and the mapping of expectations, disillusionment, enlightenment, and productivity in their adoption. Perhaps most familiarly associated with the work of the research company Gartner, it is helpful to recall that these cycles are plotted on the twin axes of ‘expectations’ and ‘time’. Recent examples of ideas, many of them genuinely valuable in specific situations or contexts but not the transformative solutions for all businesses at all times often promised by hype, include design thinking, agile, servant leadership, and growth mindset leadership.

An extension of this problem is perhaps more insidious. While many ideas have identifiable cycles of adoption – for example, servant leadership first emerged in the 1970s only to return to prominence in the last decade – their renewed traction in mainstream discourse is largely based in secondary, descriptive and anecdotal accounts. Rather than a new or fully repeated hype cycle, the invocation of these already familiar ideas (think: Emotional Intelligence, psychological safety, authenticity) serves more to position the brands of individuals embracing the given idea and extending the visibility, if not the substance, of the idea’s life cycle over time.

What These Changes (May) Mean for Business and Leadership Practice

These dynamics carry significant potential implications for everyday leadership understanding and practice. First, they correspond to a fundamental shift from authority-based to more relevance-based business knowledge. In the spirit of democratization noted earlier, and driven by the imperatives of digital platforms, many of the traditional signals of expertise (institutional affiliations, credentials, publishing history) have been supplanted by engagement metrics and algorithmic promotion. This shift, at least as reflected in demand and consumption preferences, is supported by research from the Edelman Trust Barometer that shows consistently declining trust in traditional business authorities.

Edelman’s 2022 report revealed that “79% of employees say they trust their co-workers, ahead of their manager, head of HR and their CEO” (2022). An important pillar of this trust in the credibility of ‘regular employees’ to share relevant perspectives and insights about business issues. The standard of relevance draws together both the content itself and the ways in which it is communicated. As long ago as 2016, Harvard Business School’s Michael W. Toffel argued for “enhancing the practical relevance of research” by better engaging practitioners in research and adapting how they ‘convey’ research insights to practitioners across popular and social platforms.

Second, platform dynamics have created unprecedented challenges in distinguishing signal from noise in business and leadership discourse. Stanford management professor Jeffrey Pfeffer has cautioned about ‘leadership BS’ proliferating in the age of content abundance, where provocative soundbites and idealized accounts of leadership actions frequently outperform nuanced analysis of actual behaviors (2015). Here is an essential problem with the platforms on which content is circulated: their architectures are designed to privilege recurrent content that increases ongoing engagement and response, regardless of their quality, veracity, or substance.

Frequently engaged and shared business content often either preys on users’ confirmation bias, offering personalized versions of well-known ideas, or present ostensibly stimulating or appealing (or intentionally) provocative insights that lack implementation frameworks or context. This flattening of information hierarchies makes it increasingly difficult to identify genuinely valuable business insights amid the ceaseless flow and noise. As a result, rather than a rich and democratized marketplace of substantive management ideas, platforms deliver continuous marketing of individual brands, personalized perspectives, and service offerings.

In their insistent and repetitive offerings of leadership development, business advisory, and coaching services, self-branding activities illuminate a third implication for leadership practice of platform dynamics: a narrowing of focus on individual leaders and their personal development. To be clear: far-reaching changes in working conditions have surely contributed to this proliferation of self-leadership content. Among these are the fundamental shift from hierarchical structures to more flexible, small unit or project-based work; the increasing number of jobs individuals would hold in their lifetimes; the displacement by automation of traditional middle-management roles that previously provided direction; and the persistent pattern of low global employee engagement (McKinsey Global Institute, 2017; Gallup, 2021).

Yet the explosion of such content also reflects a pervasive individualism potentially pursued at the expense of equally insightful content addressing organizational or environmental concerns. While invaluable, prioritizing personal narratives and self-understanding, for example, can easily divert attention from the complex, messy, and more interdependent work of systemic change. It also feeds what we might call – broadening journalist Sheelah Kolhatkar’s identification of a thriving business supporting women’s empowerment (2016) – an ‘empowerment industrial complex’ that prioritizes individual agency over structural understanding.

At the same time, it is necessary to recognize that the self-leadership and empowerment focus is counterbalanced by a growing focus on leading the future. Future studies, futurecasting, strategic foresight, and holding forth on all manner of prospective future topics (work, mobility, teams, organizations, markets, AI, etc.) have fueled an explosion of content. However, much of this content prioritizes aspirational transformation and world-building over deep structural and contextual analysis. Such future leadership discussions often favor compelling narratives, social intelligence gathering, and scenario thinking over rigorous interrogation of power structures, institutions, and entrenched systems, raising questions about whether these future-oriented perspectives account for and address the full complexity of contemporary conditions and challenges.

Looking Forward: Integration Rather Than Replacement?

Media evolution has crucially contributed to reshaping business and leadership discourse over the past two decades. The proliferation of formats and the compression of information corresponds to wider content shifts such as the increasing prominence of individualized leadership models that often come at the expense of deeper structural thinking. While democratizing production, distribution, and access, these combined trends risk reducing leadership development to personal optimization rather than addressing the greater complexity of actual leadership practice. The true challenge lies not in choosing between visibility or accessibility and depth or sophistication but in thoughtfully integrating both. Leadership ideas with lasting impact employ multiple engagement pathways and content forms. The most effective business communications strike a balance between providing actionable insights and information and offering the nuance essential for systemic thinking and fuller human understanding.

To accomplish this, business and leadership discourse should ideally blend short-form accessibility with long-form substance. While content may vary across platforms, ideas should maintain their essential value regardless of format. Leaders and other practitioners – whatever their credentials or experience – need to recognize more fully the realities of today’s media environment, where platform dynamics have accelerated idea cycles and elevated visibility over substance, creating unprecedented signal-to-noise challenges. The current surplus of self-leadership content, while some of it is valuable in principle, often reflects an individualism that can marginalize efforts at deeper organizational or structural analysis. Similarly, since many future-oriented perspectives prioritize aspirational transformation over rigorous analysis of entrenched systems, leaders should question their capacity to address contemporary realities.

The transformation in business and leadership discourse is also related to broader cultural shifts in how knowledge is created, shared, and integrated. Format, channel, and platform innovations have fundamentally changed our engagement with ideas, yet the desire for meaningful insight, relevance, purpose, and human connection at work remains strong. Today’s business leaders and practitioners face the challenge of crafting and also consuming ideas robust enough to withstand compression while remaining accessible enough to invite broad engagement and, more, motivate action. In this evolving landscape, an invaluable leadership skill is understanding how to structure ideas to thrive across diverse channels and platforms while preserving their integrity – in order to inform and inspire people. Rather than witnessing the wholesale replacement of traditional discourse with abbreviated alternatives, we need to experience their integration into a more adaptive, substantive, and multifaceted approach to business and leadership communication and action.

References

Edelman (2022) “2022 Edelman Trust Barometer – Special Report: Trust in the Workplace”; https://www.edelman.com/trust/2022-trust-barometer/special-report-trust-workplace.

Gallup, Inc. (2021) State of the Global Workplace: 2021 Report, Washington, D.C., Gallup Press.

Henry Jenkins (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York, NYU Press.

Sheelah Kolhatkar (2016) “The Feel-Good Female Solidarity Machine,” Bloomberg Businessweek, February 4, 2016; https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-feel-good-female-solidarity-machine/

Joel Kurtzman, ed. (1997) Thought Leaders: Insights on the Future of Business, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass Publishers.

McKinsey Global Institute (2017) “Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: Workforce Transitions in a Time of Automation,” McKinsey & Company, December 2017; https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/BAB489A30B724BECB5DEDC41E9BB9FAC.ashx

Andrey Mir (2024) The Viral Inquisitor, and Other Essays on Postjournalism and Media Ecology, Toronto, Popular Media Ecology.

Jeffrey Pfeffer (2015) Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time, New York, Harper Business.

Michael W. Toffel (2016) “Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research,” Production and Operations Management, Vol. 25, No. 9, September 2016, pp. 1493-1505.

Zeynep Tufekci (2017) Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, New Haven, Yale University Press.