Podcast
The Daily Hint with Jens Heitland
Hosted by Jens Heitland · EN
A brief daily observation on leadership, reputation, and visibility at scale.
Hosted by Jens Heitland, CEO of Heitland Media Group and former Global Head of Innovation at IKEA Centres, The Daily Hint distills experience from working with senior leaders into short, focused reflections.
Designed for executives who value clarity over noise.
© All Content Jens Heitland - Produced by Heitland Media Group
93episodes
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672 - Why CEO Thought Leadership Is an Index Fund, Not a Career Move
1w ago00:01:27Tap to summarizeWhy CEO Thought Leadership Is an Index Fund, Not a Career MovePeople often ask me why I spend so much time writing and speaking under my own name instead of leaving that work to the company brand. My answer is always the same. This was never about building a career. It's an asset, and it behaves like one.I compare it to an index fund. You put money in over time, you don't touch it, and the value compounds. My personal website is now five, six, seven years old. I started late, already 40 at the time, with no real plan beyond writing down what I was learning. For years the growth was slow and unremarkable. What's changed recently is the reason it keeps growing at all.That reason is AI.AI engines are now recommending articles, podcasts, and text I published years ago to people who are searching for answers inside those engines. Someone asks a question, the engine pulls from a body of work that includes something I wrote in year two or year four, and that person ends up on my website without ever having heard of me before. Content I published without any idea it would still be useful is now being surfaced to a new audience, automatically, at a scale I never had access to before.This is what I mean by compounding. A digital asset built consistently over years doesn't just sit there. It becomes more valuable as AI engines get better at finding and using it. The people building that asset today are going to benefit from it more with each year that passes, because the systems doing the recommending are only going to rely on it more.There's a detail in this that surprised me. People don't just want the answer an AI engine gives them. Most of the time, they still want the source. They read the summary, then they go looking for the original, and often that means watching the video where I explain the idea in full, the way I'm doing right now. That instinct, to check the source, hasn't gone away. If anything, it makes a well-built personal archive even more valuable.That's the opportunity in front of every CEO right now, a compounding asset that gets more useful the longer you maintain it, and the more AI engines learn to rely on it. The earlier you start, the longer it has to compound. I started at 40. The only real cost of waiting is time you can't get back.Most executives still treat visibility as something the company owns and the CEO borrows for a quarterly campaign. I think that gets it backward. A company's marketing can be replaced, rebranded, or reassigned to a new agency overnight. A CEO's own body of work, built consistently over years under their own name, can't be replicated by anyone else, and it doesn't disappear when a campaign ends or a budget gets cut.I also think the timing matters more than most people realize. We are at a point where AI engines are actively building their sense of who counts as a credible source on a given topic. That sense is being formed right now, based on what already exists. The CEOs who have five or seven years of consistent, genuine writing and speaking behind them are the ones these engines are learning to trust first. The CEOs who start next year are starting from behind, because the index fund analogy holds here too. Every year you're not contributing is a year of compounding you don't get back.None of this requires a dramatic change in how you operate. It requires consistency, genuinely useful work instead of promotional content, and patience while the early years look unremarkable. That was true for me in year one, and it's still true for anyone starting today. The payoff now arrives faster and reaches further, because the systems recommending your work keep getting better.Highlights:00:00 Authority as Asset00:10 Compounding Index Fund00:16 Late Start Still Works00:35 AI Boosts Discovery00:57 Build Searchable Assets01:09 Source Drives Engagement01:15 CEO Opportunity WrapLinks:https://www.jensheitland.com/links
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671 - Why Your Company May Not Exist to ChatGPT?
1w ago00:01:20Tap to summarizeWhy Your Company May Not Exist to ChatGPTWhen I sit down with CEOs and executives to talk about artificial intelligence, the conversation usually starts with anxiety. The anxiety is rarely about the technology itself. It is about the size of the commitment. Many leaders assume that taking AI seriously means signing up for a twelve-month program before they even know if the effort will pay off. That assumption has been the real obstacle, so we built something to remove it.Over the past year, we have run a twelve-month program to help companies build a long-term AI strategy. It works well, but it also taught us something important. Very few companies want to commit to a program of that length before they understand what they are working with. That hesitation is not a lack of ambition. It is ordinary caution before a long-term bet on unfamiliar ground.So we changed the question. Instead of asking companies to trust us for a year, we asked how to build that trust in three months. That question changed how we designed the entire offer, and it turned out to matter more to executives than the depth of the long-term program itself.Here is a simple exercise I recommend to every CEO I work with. Open ChatGPT, or any other major model, and search for your own company. For a surprising number of businesses, very little comes back. They are not recognized. They do not appear in the answers these engines generate, even though employees, customers, and prospects now use these tools daily to research companies and form first impressions.That gap is not a technical detail. It is a trust problem. When a company is invisible inside the systems a growing share of the world consults by default, that invisibility shapes how the company is perceived, whether it participates in the conversation or not.This is the problem the sprint was built to solve. Rather than opening our engagement with a twelve-month commitment, we designed a focused three-month product with one goal: move a company from zero visibility to being recognized, accurately and on its own terms, inside ChatGPT and the other leading AI models.The scope is deliberately narrow. The sprint does not try to solve every part of a company's long-term AI strategy. It solves one problem well, establishing the visibility and trust that has to exist before any larger transformation can be credible.That narrow scope also makes the sprint easy to say yes to. The financial commitment is modest, the timeline is short, and the outcome is concrete. For a CEO who is not ready for a year-long program, but who can no longer ignore how AI models shape perception of their company, the sprint offers a credible, low-risk way to begin.I have come to believe the biggest barrier to AI adoption at the executive level is not a lack of understanding. It is the absence of a reasonable first step. Twelve-month programs are valuable, but trust does not start there. Trust starts with a result a CEO can see, on a timeline a CEO can commit to, at a cost that does not need a board debate.That is why we built the sprint before we built anything else. Getting started well is not a smaller version of the strategy. For most companies today, it is the strategy.I have watched this three-month step change how executives talk about AI internally. Once a company can see itself clearly inside these models, the conversation shifts from whether to act to what to build next, and that shift is worth far more than the size of the program that follows it.Highlights:00:00 Why A Sprint Exists00:21 CEO Visibility Gap00:53 Three Month Sprint Offer01:12 Easy Buy CommitmentLinks:https://www.jensheitland.com/links
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670 - Why Letters Still Outperform Email and LinkedIn Messages
2w ago00:01:11Tap to summarizeWhy Letters Still Outperform Email and LinkedIn MessagesEvery outreach channel available today shares the same underlying condition. There is more volume moving through it than any single recipient can absorb. Email inboxes fill with hundreds of unsolicited messages a week. LinkedIn message requests stack up faster than most people can read them, let alone respond to them. The channels built to make communication easier have, at scale, made most individual messages disappear.Inside this environment, a pattern becomes visible. As digital volume increases, the signal carried by any single digital message decreases. An email sent to a stranger competes with automated pitches, newsletters, and spam filters that were built specifically to catch it before a human ever sees it. A LinkedIn message competes with connection requests from people the recipient has never met and never intends to respond to. The channel itself has not failed. It has simply been used at a scale that erodes its own value.A handwritten letter operates under a different set of constraints, and that difference is what gives it weight. It cannot be sent to ten thousand people at once. It requires physical effort, a stamp, an address, and time that cannot be automated away. Because of that cost, a letter signals something a digital message cannot easily convey on its own: that a specific person chose to spend real time reaching another specific person. Recipients notice this, even when they are not consciously aware of why. The reaction rate reflects it. Most letters get a reply, even if the reply is a polite decline. Most cold emails and LinkedIn messages get nothing at all.I still write my own letters by hand. Not because I am uninterested in what digital tools make possible, and not as a rejection of efficiency. I do it because the two methods solve different problems. Digital outreach scales. A handwritten letter earns attention precisely because it does not. In a landscape where nearly everyone is optimizing for reach, the rare message optimized for weight instead stands out simply by existing.This is not an argument against digital communication, nor a case for abandoning modern tools. It is an observation about what happens when a channel becomes crowded. Attention becomes the scarce resource, and scarcity changes what gets valued. As automated outreach keeps growing in volume and sophistication, the manual, deliberately inefficient alternative may keep gaining relative value, not despite its inefficiency, but because of it. That is worth sitting with, particularly for anyone whose work depends on being heard above the noise rather than simply being present within it.00:00 Why Letters Get Read00:17 Digital Outreach Gets Ignored00:23 Handwritten Notes Spark Replies00:38 AI Meets Old School00:53 Cutting Through Spam01:04 Why It Still WorksLinks:https://www.jensheitland.com/links
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669 - Why Personalities Still Decide the Biggest Deals
2w ago00:01:35Tap to summarizeWhy Personalities Still Decide the Biggest DealsBusiness development has changed more over the last two years than in the decade before it, and most of that change is invisible until you look closely at how large B2B deals actually get built.Real B2B deals still follow a familiar shape. Conversations stretch over months, sometimes half a year for the largest ones. Negotiations happen mostly online, but there is almost always a physical meeting somewhere in that process, often more than one. That part has not changed.What has changed is everything that happens before people sit down together. Both sides now have access to the same AI models to shape their opening position, anticipate objections, and prepare counterarguments before a single word is exchanged in person. A tool that used to belong to a handful of well-resourced teams is now available to anyone with an internet connection.This changes what actually creates advantage in a negotiation. When both sides can use AI to build a stronger strategy and counter the other side's likely moves, the strategic layer stops being a differentiator. Everyone arrives prepared. Everyone has already run the numbers, mapped the objections, and rehearsed the pushback.What is left, and what ends up deciding the outcome, is what happens between the people in the room. Reading personalities, understanding what someone actually needs beyond what is written in the deal terms, and knowing how to work with that information rather than around it. This is a human skill, and it has not been replaced by anything AI can produce.The organizations and individuals who understand this are building leverage in two layers at once. They use AI to strengthen their strategic position going in, and they use relationship skill to translate that position into an outcome that works for everyone at the table. A strong strategic position with no relationship skill behind it tends to stall once negotiations get personal, and relationship skill with no strategy behind it tends to produce goodwill that never quite turns into terms.A lot of business development teams right now are overcorrecting toward the first layer. Everyone is focused on the AI tooling, on prompting better, on getting sharper counterarguments out of a model. Very few are still investing in the part that actually closes deals, which is understanding the person across the table well enough to find where a genuine win-win sits.None of this means ignoring AI in business development. The tools are useful, and increasingly necessary just to keep pace with a counterpart who is also using them. Treating AI as the strategy itself, rather than as preparation for the relationship work that follows, misses where the real advantage now lives. The negotiation is still decided in the room, by people, even as everything leading up to it has changed.Highlights:00:00 BD Has Changed Fast00:08 B2B Deals Still In Person00:28 AI Shifts Negotiation Prep00:57 Personalities Decide Outcomes01:17 Relationships Over AI HypeLinks:https://www.jensheitland.com/links
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668 - Vanity Metrics and the Real Value of Reach
2w ago00:01:41Tap to summarizeVanity Metrics and the Real Value of ReachWorking inside large organizations for close to thirty years, I have had many versions of the same conversation. Someone questions whether their social media presence is working, and the question almost always starts in the wrong place.Recently, a person asked me whether their posts were successful. Instead of answering directly, I asked what the actual strategy was and where the business wanted to be. The answers came quickly: a target number of sales, a target number of conversions. That was the real strategy, the one tied to revenue.The person returned to the original question. They were looking into social media specifically, not the wider sales strategy. I pointed out that the two were not separate. Social media is one of many channels that support a business, and personality is what makes that channel work. You do not use personality to run a sales pitch. You use it to build trust, and trust is what eventually leads to a sale.Once the strategy was clear, the vanity metrics revealed themselves for what they are. Likes and reach tell you about attention. They say nothing about relevance. The person had been counting likes and measuring reach without asking who was actually seeing the content.A business exists to sell something to a defined group of people. Social media reaches a much wider group, most of whom will never buy anything. When a post gets five likes, the natural reaction is disappointment. If one of those five people is a potential buyer, and that person reaches out to the company because of the post, the value of that single like outweighs a thousand likes from people outside the buying group.Ignoring this distinction leads to a strategy built on the wrong signal. Teams optimize for reach because reach is visible and easy to measure. Sales, by comparison, take longer to trace back to a single post. Over time, this creates a gap between what looks successful and what actually is. An account with strong engagement can still be commercially irrelevant if the audience is not the buying audience. A quieter account with the right five followers can outperform it in every way that matters to the business.The gap is rarely intentional. It happens because vanity metrics are immediate and sales are delayed. It is easier to feel good about a number that updates in real time than to wait for a conversion that might take weeks. Over time, the immediate number starts to feel like the goal itself, even when it was never meant to be more than a signal.Reconnecting the metric to the business question it was meant to answer changed the conversation. How many of the people seeing this content are people who could realistically buy from the company? That question reframes everything. It turns a vanity number into a relevance number, and relevance is what social media was supposed to measure in the first place.I have seen this pattern repeat across different companies and different platforms. The channel changes. The confusion does not. Whenever a business treats social media as separate from its sales strategy, the metrics used to judge it drift away from the metrics that actually matter.Highlights:00:00 Vanity Metrics Trap00:07 Define Business Goals00:31 Social Media as Channel00:49 Trust Over Pitching01:01 Measure Buyer Reach01:13 Real Value Example01:32 Key Takeaway WrapLinks:https://www.jensheitland.com/links
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667 - Why CEOs Sound Credible in the Room and Flat Online
3w ago00:01:23Tap to summarizeWhy CEOs Sound Credible in the Room and Flat OnlineFor a while, we worked on something we called the CEO Authority Index. The goal was straightforward on paper. Measure authority as a whole, not as a collection of separate signals, and understand what actually builds it in a person over time. In practice, the research surfaced something we had not expected.We audited around eighty CEOs during that period, most of them leading large, established organizations. What we found offline was rarely surprising. These were people who had spent decades inside their industries, and it showed. Their authority was earned through repetition, through consistent behavior across long stretches of time, and through the kind of credibility that only accumulates when people have watched you operate under pressure more than once.The system that emerged from this research was less about individual failure and more about structural neglect. Digital presence, for most of these leaders, had never been treated as an extension of who they already were. It had been treated as a separate obligation, something delegated, templated, or avoided altogether. The result was a version of the person online that bore little resemblance to the version people encountered in a boardroom or on a stage. Not because anyone had set out to misrepresent themselves. It happened by omission, one skipped post and one templated bio at a time, until the gap became structural rather than accidental.The consequence of this gap is easy to underestimate. In organizations built on trust and long relationships, a mismatch between the offline and online self creates quiet friction. People who meet a CEO in person often describe them one way. People who only encounter that same CEO through a corporate LinkedIn feed describe someone else entirely, more distant, more generic, harder to place. Over time, this erodes something that took years to build. The digital self starts to compete with the offline self instead of extending it.The people who had already closed this gap were not always the ones with the most resources. Younger founders and smaller companies, the ones with fewer resources and less institutional weight behind them, had built alignment between their offline and online presence almost by necessity. They had no legacy reputation to fall back on, so they had to build the whole thing in public, consistently, from day one. Larger organizations, ironically, had the opposite problem. They had so much offline credibility that the digital gap felt low stakes, until it wasn't.I do not think this is a marketing problem. It is closer to a structural blind spot, one that most large organizations have not yet named. The leaders who close it are not doing anything dramatic. They are simply making sure the version of them online is built with the same care as the version everyone already trusts in the room.Highlights:00:00 Measuring CEO Authority00:27 Offline vs Online Presence00:33 Translating Credibility Digitally00:57 The Missing Link for Big CEOs01:11 Why Startups Win OnlineLinks:https://www.jensheitland.com/links
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666 - Why B2B Sales Always Come Down to the Relationship
3w ago00:01:20Tap to summarizeWhy B2B Sales Always Come Down to the RelationshipA mentor conversation early in my career, while working at IKEA, turned into a way of thinking I still use today. We sat down and mapped out the different people involved in a set of strategic decisions, then traced how they were connected to one another, essentially building a picture of the human ecosystem beneath the strategy itself.What that mapping exercise showed was simple to say and easy to overlook in practice. Every strategic outcome runs through people, and the outcome depends less on the strategy on paper than on how those people relate to each other.That blueprint carries directly into company-level sales work. A factory building a pipeline of business makes the point clearly. Clients need to understand the product being sold; that part is obvious. What decides the outcome more often is whether there is an actual relationship with the person doing the buying.Without that relationship in place, a sales conversation collapses into a price discussion. The buyer has nothing else to evaluate against, so price becomes the only variable left on the table.With a relationship in place, the price conversation still happens, prices get discussed in every deal, but there is an upside sitting on top of it. Trust built over time changes how a price gets received, how flexible a negotiation can be, and how likely a buyer is to stay through a difficult quarter rather than switch to a cheaper option.In B2B specifically, this upside often determines whether an account is transactional or durable. Products can be matched by competitors, but a relationship built over years of direct contact between specific people is far harder to replace.Working through strategic mapping exercises since that early conversation, the same pattern shows up in nearly every context, whether it is a company's internal strategy or its sales pipeline. The humans and how they connect tend to come first. The rest of the strategy tends to follow from there.Highlights:00:00 Everything Is Human00:07 Mapping The Ecosystem00:21 A Blueprint For Strategy00:41 Sales Is Relationships00:58 No Relationship No Deal01:14 Mentor Lesson RecapLinks:https://www.jensheitland.com/links
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665- Why Authority Raises the Price a Consulting Firm Can Charge
3w ago00:00:42Tap to summarizeWhy Authority Raises the Price a Consulting Firm Can ChargeA consulting firm sells what the industry quietly calls human capital, hours of expertise, priced for clients who need a specific outcome.Clients buying hours are really buying confidence that a particular outcome will be reached, confidence they place in specific people rather than in the hours themselves. The hour is simply the unit used to write the invoice.What changed the price range for this firm was authority, both at the company level and at the level of individual consultants. The firm had built a recognizable brand in its industry. On top of that, several of its people had built individual reputations as thought leaders, known for a particular way of thinking about the problems clients were trying to solve. Clients started asking for those specific people by name and were willing to pay more to get them staffed on the engagement.The market is responding to something that is hard to write into a proposal. A client cannot fully specify in advance whether an engagement will succeed. What they can do is look at who has solved similar problems before, whose thinking they trust, and price their willingness to pay accordingly. Authority, in this sense, serves as a signal that reduces clients' uncertainty about the outcome, and clients pay for reduced uncertainty in the same way they pay for anything else that lowers their risk.This shows up quietly at first. A senior partner with a public reputation gets requested on more proposals. A project staffed with a known thought leader gets approved at a higher rate than a similar project without one. Over time, the pattern compounds, and the firm's pricing power increases as the certainty attached to those hours rises, even though the hours themselves remain the same.For me, the moment this became clear was watching a client choose a project team based almost entirely on the individual reputations involved, and agree to a higher price specifically because of who would be doing the work. The client trusted particular people enough to pay a premium for their time, well beyond the firm's capabilities in the abstract.What this points to for any organization built on selling expertise is that authority sits inside the pricing itself, closer to the center of the business than a separate marketing initiative usually gets credit for.In my experience, this connection rarely gets discussed openly inside firms that depend on it. Pricing conversations happen separately from reputation conversations, as if the two were unrelated. The clients, treating them as inseparable and paying more for specific people because of the trust those people have built, tend to already understand something the firm itself has not yet said out loud.
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664 - The Three-Layer System Behind Corporate Thought Leadership
3w ago00:01:36Tap to summarizeThe Three-Layer System Behind Corporate Thought LeadershipCorporate thought leadership conversations tend to start in the same place, with a question about how personal a CEO's content should be. Underneath that question is a much larger strategic problem, one that goes well beyond how many personal stories show up in a LinkedIn feed.Working through this with companies over time, a pattern has become clear. Thought leadership that actually holds up is built in layers, not as a single stream of content. Three of them tend to show up consistently.The first layer is personality, the personal part that helps people inside and outside the organization understand who a leader is, what they value, and how they think. It is foundational rather than optional. Without it, everything built on top has nowhere to attach itself, and a company ends up with content that sounds credible but connects to no one in particular.The second layer is campaigning. A sales strategy is often already in place somewhere within the organization, built by people who never expected it to connect to a CEO's personal presence. Campaigning is the layer where that gap closes, taking the established personality and linking it directly to what the business is trying to sell, turning personal content into actions that support commercial outcomes rather than personal visibility alone.The third layer sits in a different position entirely, concerned with what is already happening on the marketing side of the business, the campaigns being planned and built, and what a CEO can say about the direction behind them before they launch. Handled well, a CEO takes a strategic position on where an industry or a market is heading, without referencing the marketing campaign directly. By the time the campaign becomes public, the CEO has already framed the thinking behind it in their own words, weeks or months earlier.A leader who only builds the personality layer becomes well-liked without that visibility ever reaching the business, while skipping straight to campaigning without personality in place produces content that reads like corporate messaging wearing a CEO's name, something audiences notice quickly. Leave out the third layer, and a CEO's commentary keeps trailing the market instead of framing it, arriving as a reaction rather than a perspective.Building all three layers together changes timing more than any single post ever could. Personality creates a person people recognize and trust. Campaigning connects that recognition to what the company is already trying to sell. The strategic layer positions the CEO ahead of the market's own campaigns, so that by the time a company's marketing speaks, the CEO has already shaped how people think about the space it lives in.In my experience, the plans that hold up over time are the ones where these three layers are mapped out together from the start, interlinked deliberately rather than built one at a time as separate initiatives. Once that structure is in place, the system runs largely on its own, producing content and positioning that stay connected to the business without needing constant reinvention.Highlights:00:00 Personality Foundation00:13 Campaigning for Sales00:49 CEO Vision Meets Marketing01:25 Three Layers in ActionLinks:https://www.jensheitland.com/links
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663 - Executive Visibility Only Works When It Moves the Business Forward
3w ago00:01:12Tap to summarizeExecutive Visibility Only Works When It Moves the Business ForwardA recent workshop with a group of executives circled back to a question I hear in almost every company engagement: how much a leader should actually post, and whether being visible online carries any real weight.The conversation usually starts with the platform itself, LinkedIn, the algorithm, and the frequency of posting. Underneath that surface question sits something with much longer roots. When a company invests in a leader's public presence, it is investing in an authority that already exists. That authority carries the values a person has held for years, the stories that shaped their career, and a credibility built long before a single post was written. None of that can be manufactured quickly, since it started building long before anyone was watching.In the context of a company engagement, this authority functions as a mechanism rather than an end goal. Working inside organizations for close to three decades, I have watched this system play out the same way across very different industries. A leader becomes more visible. People inside and outside the organization start to recognize a voice, a set of values, a way of thinking. Over time, that recognition becomes trust, and trust starts to move through the wider ecosystem the leader operates in, customers, partners, talent, investors.That system only holds together if it eventually connects to something the business needs. If a leader's growing authority never translates into a shorter sales cycle, an easier recruiting conversation, a partnership that opens faster, or a boardroom discussion that starts with more credibility already in the room, then something in the system has broken down.What tends to happen when that connection is missing is quiet and easy to miss. The content keeps getting produced. Engagement numbers might even look healthy. Likes accumulate, followers grow, and the dashboard looks like progress. The business itself does not move at the same pace, or at all. The problem usually sits further back than the content or the leader's credibility, in what the system was measuring from the start.Executives feel this gap most directly. Vanity metrics are comfortable because they are visible and immediate. A business outcome is slower to show up and harder to attribute to a single post or a single quarter of activity. That difference in pace makes it tempting to lean on the numbers that update daily instead of the outcomes that take longer to surface.In my experience, the leaders who avoid this trap treat their visibility as one input in a larger system rather than a goal in its own right. They ask a different question before every piece of content goes out: one focused on what it contributes to over the next year of relationships, conversations, and decisions the business needs to make.An authority built this way rarely announces itself. It shows up quietly, in a shortened sales cycle that nobody publicly credits, in a partner who already trusted the company before the first meeting, in a candidate who applied because they had read the leader's thinking for months. None of that shows up in a like count, though it eventually shows up in the business.Highlights:00:00 How Much to Post00:07 Building Personal Authority00:23 Authority Drives Business00:40 System Over Single Posts00:58 Beyond Vanity MetricsLinks:https://www.jensheitland.com/links
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