How to Influence People with Your Ideas

ButmanHere is an excerpt from an article written by John Butman for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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One of my young clients, let’s call her Julie, is on a mission. Julie has an idea, one that has been gestating in her mind for quite some time, but now she realizes that for her idea to have any impact at all she will have to “go public” with it. Julie believes there are countless intelligent, talented but disadvantaged kids who, for a variety of reasons, have been shut out of traditional educational pathways and are therefore at risk of never achieving their full potential. Her idea, which she is passionate about, is to help these forgotten kids realize their potential by offering them practical guidance for achieving their goals and dreams. She has done some public speaking on the topic to educational groups and associations, and her ideas have been featured in various content venues, but now she wants to crank it up a level. She wants to start a movement.

She asked me: What do I have to do to get my idea out there? Should I blog and tweet? Write a book? Conduct a survey? Try for TEDx? Lead a seminar? In what combination? In what order?

In essence, Julie wants to become what I call an “idea entrepreneur” — a person who builds a coordinated effort around a deeply-felt idea with the goal of achieving influence, affecting how people think and behave, and thus making some change in an organization or system.

Aspiring idea entrepreneurs are everywhere: in businesses, classrooms, and communities of all kinds, all over the world. Maybe you know one. Maybe you are one. But you don’t have a massive influence-creation machine behind you (few people do) and you wonder how to get your idea heard above all the others competing for attention. How do you proceed?

You have to take your idea public, which means entering the “ideaplex” — that glamorous, treacherous place where videos go viral, TED stardom beckons, a thousand new authors publish each day, and think shops like IDEO make a business of idea generation. Julie’s inclinations were right. She would certainly need to do plenty of blogging, tweeting, surveying, speaking — the works. But none of these would be totally effective without answering the following questions, too:

[Here’s the first.]

1. What is my purpose?

People are driven to go public for all kinds of reasons, from the thirst for fame and fortune to the dream of leading a crusade. Those who gain genuine, long-lasting influence are the ones who want to create positive change for other people. So ask yourself: Why am I doing this? Idea entrepreneur Cesar Millan (he has built quite an empire around his ideas including books, tv shows, DVDs and merchandise) is a dog behavioralist (“the dog whisperer”), but his deeper motive is to reduce maltreatment of animals — and kids — in our society. The more you want to help others, the greater the influence you will have.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

John Butman is the author of Breaking Out: How to Build Influence in a World of Competing Ideas (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013) and founder of the content development firm Idea Platforms, Inc. He is available for speaking and consulting. Follow John on Twitter at @JohnButman.

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