Stuart Cunningham: From creative industries to creative economies, and beyond

This paper explores Stuart Cunningham’s thought leadership in ‘creative’ spaces since the turn of the millennium. It presents the author's personal glimpses of Cunningham's contributions to scholarship and advocacy, ranging from Cunningham and Hartley's exposé on the recently-titled creative industries at the National Humanities and Social Sciences Summit (Canberra, 2001), through the establishment of QUT's Centre of Excellence (Brisbane, 2005) and its European node (London, 2008), to Cunningham's more recent work with creative economies and their opportunities, including his influence upon Australia's Cultural and Creative Economy: A 21st-Century Guide (Canberra, 2020). The paper concludes with some comments about continuing resistance to substantial investment in Australia's creative industries, and Cunningham's call for a more united voice in their advocacy.

Plato and Modern Leadership Models

This chapter looks at the relation between Plato’s models and modern leadership approaches. Unlike many recent theorists, Plato avoids trying to find a single definition, but seeks to isolate the different strands in the complex phenomenon of leadership. In this way, his approach anticipates Wittgenstein’s idea of ‘family resemblances’: leadership is not treated as a simple ‘universal’, but a complex with several overlapping strands. Another feature of Plato’s approach is the importance of ethics to leadership. To compare Platonic and modern approaches to leadership more specifically, this chapter looks at four recent theories, and shows that each one has close affinities with one or more of Plato’s models: Burns’ ‘transformational’ leadership resembles the artist and the navigator; Collins’ ‘Level 5’ leadership the weaver; Greenleaf’s ‘servant’ leadership the doctor and teacher; Gardner’s ‘thought’ leadership (in his book, Leading Minds) the sower.

The Sower

The final model considered is the leader as sower. Here Plato anticipates the concept of thought leadership. The core components of the model include originating ideas big enough to create a legacy, but still empowering others to adapt them as circumstances demand. In the first part, the key text is the Phaedrus, where Plato discusses the best way to create an intellectual legacy—not through writing books, but by nurturing living, critical dialogue among your students and followers. The chapter looks at the way Plato put this model into practice by creating an institution to perpetuate his ideas: the Academy, the ancestor of the modern university. The second part presents examples of ‘seminal’ leaders: Marie Curie, Maria Montessori, and Mohammed Yunus, founder of the microfinance organization, Grameen Bank.

The tensions of defining and developing thought leadership within knowledge-intensive firms

Purpose A major part of knowledge management for knowledge-intensive firms such as professional service firms is the increasing focus on thought leadership. Despite being a well-known term, it is poorly defined and analysed in the academic and practitioner literature. The aim of this article is to answer three questions. First, what is thought leadership? Second, what tensions exist when seeking to create thought leadership in knowledge-based organisations? Third, what further research is needed about thought leadership? The authors call for cross-disciplinary and academic–practitioner approaches to understanding the field of thought leadership. Design/methodology/approach The authors review the academic and practitioner literature on thought leadership to provide a rich oversight of how it is defined and can be understood by separating inputs, creation processes and outcomes. The authors also draw on qualitative data from 12 in-depth interviews with senior leaders of professional service firms. Findings Through analysing and building on previous understandings of the concept, the authors redefine thought leadership as follows: “Knowledge from a trusted, eminent and authoritative source that is actionable and provides valuable solutions for stakeholders”. The authors find and explore nine tensions that developing thought leadership creates and propose a framework for understanding how to engage with thought leadership at the industry/macro, organisational/meso and individual/micro levels. The authors propose a research agenda based on testing propositions derived from new theories to explain thought leadership, including leadership, reducing risk, signalling quality and managing social networks, as well as examining the suggested ways to resolve different tensions. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, they are the first to separate out thought leadership from its inputs, creation processes and outcomes. The authors show new organisational paradoxes within thought leadership and show how they can play out at different levels of analysis when implementing a thought leadership strategy. This work on thought leadership is set in a relatively under-explored context for knowledge management researchers, namely, knowledge-intensive professional service firms.