Animalz’s Post

Other people's playbooks (✂️🚫) VS their frameworks (🧠📈) Illustrated by my favorite thought leadership framework ⬇️ When Katie Parrott first dropped her essay on thought leadership, it broke my brain a bit. Earned secrets as fuel for thought leadership. So simple. So lethal. It's why I chose her piece to update for Animalz. (And why I was nervous to work with it.) The H2 on earned secrets was the only one I didn't touch. Perfect, as is. Here are 3 ways her framework illustrates the core differences between copy-pasting playbooks and leveraging frameworks: ✂️ Playbook 🚫 "This worked for us, specifically. Try it yourself; let us know..." 🧠 Framework 📈 "I've done this 50x; here's what ALWAYS holds true" Most playbooks feel too good to be true. Plenty of them are. I'm not saying they didn't work. They just worked for one company, in a vacuum of their unique considerations, partners, GTM motion, team, etc. Katie looked back on a BODY of work for different brands. She had the trendlines for a foundation, the intuition to prioritize, and the expertise to cut out all the noise. ✂️ Playbook 🚫 "Just trust me bro 😎" or MAYBE "Here is our data" 🧠 Framework 📈 "I am literally using this framework right now, to share it" The meta-presentation doesn't always work. Depends on the framework. But when it does, you absolutely gotta do it. C'mon. To me, her original post on thought leadership was 3 parts industry analysis, 1 part personal narrative, 1 part counter-narrative opinion. Yes, chef! 👩🍳 ✂️ Playbook 🚫 "No one has EVER done this before!" 🧠 Framework 📈 "I'm synthesizing many proven elements for the first time" This is the core of my current research on gardening vs building. My hypothesis? The desire to build (net-new) is ego-driven. Reinventing the wheel so it's YOUR wheel. Gardening with others allows for better iteration, faster time-to-value, and better progression for the entire industry. We go further and faster, TOGETHER. Earned secrets was an idea shared by Ben Horowitz at a16z. He planted the seed for Katie to garden. She nurtured it into her thought leadership framework, providing new and unique value based on her experience. That's the magic. Do I think playbooks are completely useless? Obviously not. But I prefer to reverse engineer myself with tools like Ahrefs. And greener marketers end up worse off when they copy-paste these case studies. I'll take a brilliant framework ANY day of the week. #thoughtleadership #frameworks #contentmarketing #content #expertise