By Mike Harris, Founder, Harris CMO Partners
Published August 8, 2026
Every experienced marketer has watched the same scene play out. A talented executive decides it's time to build a public voice: an eye-catching point of view, a thought leadership platform, a presence that matches what they've actually built in their career. They hire a ghostwriter or a content team. Posts go out. Some do fine. Most disappear into the feed within hours, indistinguishable from the dozen other "future of AI" or "lessons in scaling" takes published that same morning.
The content wasn't bad. It just wasn't differentiated. And differentiation was never a writing problem to begin with.
The Skill That Precedes the Craft
Anyone who has fished a river they don't know learns this quickly: you don't cast first. You read the water. You watch where it moves fast and where it slows, where the light hits, where the fish are likely holding and why. Only then do you choose your fly, tippet, line and where to cast.
Executive positioning works the same way, and it's the step most content strategies skip. Before a single piece of content gets written, someone has to read the water. The executive's actual thinking, the shape of their convictions, the arguments they make in private that never make it into a LinkedIn post, the tensions in their market that they see more clearly than their competitors do. That reading is discovery. It's not a questionnaire. It's not a brand brief. It's an investigative process designed to surface what's genuinely distinct about how this person sees their industry, and it is the single highest-leverage step in the entire content marketing process, precisely because it happens before anyone starts producing.
Skip it, and you get content that's competent but interchangeable. Do it well, and everything downstream gets easier — and sharper.
Why Most Executive Content Sounds the Same
Here's the pattern I've watched repeat across three decades and two very different eras of marketing: when discovery is rushed or skipped, content strategy defaults to category convention. The executive ends up commenting on the same five trends everyone in their space is commenting on, because "trends" are the easiest thing to write about without doing the work of finding a genuine point of view. The result is polished, professional, and forgettable.
The executives who break that pattern aren't smarter or more original in some innate sense. They've simply had someone do the work of extracting what's already true and distinctive about their thinking, and then organizing it into something coherent enough to build on. That's what real discovery produces: not a list of topics, but a small number of content pillars that are actually anchored in how this specific person thinks, not in what the market expects someone in their role to say.
What Genuine Discovery Actually Uncovers
Good discovery isn't about asking an executive what they want to write about. Most executives, understandably don't know, and it was never supposed to be. Instead, it's about surfacing:
The contrarian judgments they've made that turned out to be right, and why they made them before others did
The recurring frustration or pattern they keep noticing that nobody else in their category is naming out loud
The through-line connecting decisions they've made across roles or companies, which often reveals a worldview the executive has never consciously articulated
The gap between how their market talks about a problem and how they actually think about it
That last one is usually where the real positioning lives. It's rarely dramatic. It's often a matter of degree. A slightly different emphasis, a slightly different order of priorities. But that difference, articulated clearly and repeated consistently, is what differentiation is actually made of. Nobody needs a shocking new idea. They need their true idea, sharpened and stated with enough precision that it becomes recognizable.
From Discovery to Pillars That Hold Weight
The output of good discovery isn't a content calendar. It's a set of pillars. Three or four core positions the executive can return to again and again, in different formats, over months, without repeating themselves or drifting into generic territory. Each pillar should be specific enough that a competitor couldn't credibly claim it, and durable enough to sustain dozens of pieces of content without running dry.
This is where the compounding effect starts. A single strong post earns a moment of attention. A body of work built on the same well-chosen pillars, published consistently over eight, ten, twelve weeks, earns something much harder to buy: recognition. Readers who've never met the executive start to notice a pattern in how they think. They start predicting, correctly, what this person's take on a new development will be. And being right about that prediction is precisely what builds trust with someone who has no other reason yet to trust you. Curiosity follows recognition. A reader who's seen four pieces built on the same coherent worldview starts wondering what else this person thinks, and starts seeking out the fifth piece rather than stumbling onto it. That's the mechanism by which strangers become an audience, and eventually a network.
None of this happens on the strength of good writing alone. It happens because the underlying positioning was distinct enough to be worth returning to. This is a discovery outcome, not a copywriting outcome.
The Real Cost of Skipping It
The temptation, especially for time-constrained executives, is to treat discovery as overhead, a delay between deciding to build a platform and actually seeing content go out. In practice, skipping it is the more expensive choice. It shows up later as content that has to be scrapped and restarted, a voice that never quite feels authentic, pillars that get exhausted after six weeks because they were never load-bearing to begin with. The organizations and executives who get the most out of thought leadership are, almost without exception, the ones who treated the discovery phase with the same rigor they'd apply to any other strategic investment.
If you're advising a technology executive on building their platform, or you are that executive, the question worth asking isn't "what should we post next." It's whether anyone has actually read the water yet.
I run a discovery audit for technology executives who want their positioning built on something more durable than than what everyone else is talking about. If the ideas above resonate, it might be worth a conversation.
Discover Your Score
If you want to know where your signal stands before you wade in, I built an assessment for exactly that. It takes two minutes, it’s free, and no contact information is required. It will tell you which section of the stream you’re in — and which fly to tie on first.
Mike Harris is a tech CMO with 30+ years leading marketing at technology companies, from Fortune 500s to high-growth turnarounds. He now runs Harris CMO Partners, helping tech executives build the thought leadership systems that get them heard.
Mike Harris, © Harris CMO Partners 2026
