South Africa, Sept. 25 -- Spend five minutes on LinkedIn or in the pages of any trade publication, and you will encounter it: a steady tide of executive commentary about disruption, resilience and the transformative power of artificial intelligence.

It is fluent, neatly formatted and instantly forgettable.

We call it thought leadership. In most cases it contains very little thought and no leadership at all. I have come to think of this as the thought leadership trap, and a great many otherwise sophisticated companies are caught in it.

This is not a marginal problem. Successive editions of the Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report have found that a clear majority of senior decision-makers read this material.

More than s...