This episode is a companion to the upcoming Thought Leadership Handbook — part of a series where Bill speaks with exemplars featured in the book about how they actually practice thought leadership. There are plenty of books explaining what AI is. This one is about the person who decided to write a book that tells you what to do about it instead — and who's spent 25 years turning disruption into frameworks other people can actually use. Charlene Li joins Bill Sherman to talk about her new book, Winning with AI, co-written with Katia Walsh, and why this one felt different from her five previous titles. It's less an explainer, she says, and more a "doing book" — built for a moment when the case studies go stale before the ink dries. That tension opens into a bigger conversation about how ideas get made and shared. Charlene walks through the origin of Groundswell, the book that made her a New York Times bestseller, written entirely remotely with co-author Josh Bernoff while she was still an in-house analyst at Forrester. She's candid about what co-authorship actually requires — not just complementary skills, but real trust built over years, disagreements included. The conversation also digs into a business model question that shaped her career: when she left Forrester to found Altimeter, she gave research away for free, betting that value would come back around. It did — inbound demand from companies who'd read the free work and wanted the deeper conversation. Bill connects this to economist Elinor Ostrom's work on knowledge commons. Underneath it all is a simple throughline: frameworks outlast the moment they were built for. The "ladder of engagement" from Groundswell is still taught 18 years later — not because the case studies held up, but because the thinking did. If you're building a book, a body of research, or a career on ideas that might get overtaken by the next news cycle, this one's worth your time. Three Key Takeaways: • Co-authorship runs on trust, not just talent. Charlene describes working with multiple co-authors over her career and is clear that the deciding factor was never just complementary skill sets — it was years of built trust, the ability to disagree productively, and knowing when to step away from a deadline argument and come back with a clear head. • Give the idea away first — the business follows. At Altimeter, Charlene made research free when competitors charged for it, building an audience of 100,000+ readers almost overnight. The resulting inbound demand became the foundation of the business, illustrating a "blue ocean" alternative to the traditional pay-for-access analyst model. • Durable frameworks outlive their case studies. Charlene expects Winning with AI to need a new edition once roughly 20% of its examples go stale — but she draws a distinction between outdated examples and outdated thinking, pointing to Groundswell's "ladder of engagement," still taught 18 years after publication. If you enjoyed hearing Charlene Li unpack the thinking behind Winning with AI, go back to her first appearance on the show — episode 113, recorded back when she was preparing to launch The Disruption Mindset. Both conversations trace the same throughline: how Charlene builds frameworks that outlast the moment they were written for, whether she's leaving Forrester to found Altimeter or navigating a fast-moving AI landscape years later. Hearing the two together shows how consistent her approach to thought leadership has been across three very different books and two decades of change. Listen to "Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick — Episode 113" with Charlene Li.