William S. Harvey is a professor of leadership and newly appointed Business School Education Director at the University of Bristol in the UK. He led a study on thought leadership at professional services firms in the late 2010s.
Specializing in corporate reputation, talent management, and leadership, the Durham University graduate has published in the Harvard Business Review and other leading publications. He has touched on subjects as varied as the role of tacit knowledge in research impact and the diverging experiences of work and social networks for immigrants in Singapore, Vancouver, and Boston. Harvey is also an International Research Fellow at the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation.
In 2020, Harvey and his three co-authors (Vince-Wayne Mitchell, Alessandra Almeida Jones, and Eric Knight) published their research on thought leadership in a scholarly paper titled “The tensions of defining and developing thought leadership within knowledge-intensive firms.” In it, they redefined the often-misunderstood term of thought leadership and explained nine tensions that hamper its development and value for firms.
William Harvey and his co-authors saw clear value in the topic of thought leadership, leading them to their 2020 report and its key findings, which Harvey discusses in depth for this episode of “Everything Thought Leadership.” The leadership professor believes thought leadership should not be neglected by the world of academia, particularly in light of the challenges today with misinformation, disinformation, and fake news enabled by social media.
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