John Daly, one of the world’s leading communication experts, is the Liddell Centennial Professor of Communication, TCB Professor of Management, and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas, Austin. Daly is the author of numerous books and over 100 academic articles. He’s been asked to work with three presidential campaigns and has actually worked in the White House. He has also served on the Board of Directors of the International Communication Association and as president of the National Communication Association, and regularly consults with numerous global corporations.

Last week, we were privileged to sit down and talk to Professor Daly about his new book, Advocacy: Championing Ideas and Influencing Results.  In part one of the interview, below, we discuss why there’s a need for a book on becoming a better advocate for one’s ideas.

 Strategic Leadership Communication:

Let’s start with the most basic question: Why write Advocacy?  Was there some gap in knowledge, some void in practice that needed to be filled?

John Daly:

This started for me many years ago. I was sitting in the cafeteria of a company in Houston with which I was consulting, having lunch with one of their outstanding technical people, and he said to me “It’s not fair.”  What’s not fair?  “He keeps getting funding for mediocre projects, and I can’t get seem to get any funding for my projects.”  About two weeks later, I’m consulting to a company in Massachusetts, and a really smart woman employee used exactly the same words to me, “It’s not fair!” In her case, the person getting the funding was someone who used to work for her, and then had become her boss!

After that, I started seeing it everywhere: really bright people with “change the world ideas” feeling cynical, burned out, and defeated. It wasn’t because their ideas weren’t good – they were – or because they didn’t have a passion for their ideas – they did. It was because they were unable to get enough attention and “buy-in” for their ideas to make them a reality. What a loss!

So it has become a mission for me to help people become better advocates for their notions, for their ideas.

Strategic Leadership Communication:

You make it sound like the ability to generate ideas and the ability to sell ideas are completely separate skills?

 John Daly:

Absolutely separate skills. And that’s the paradox.  There are people who can’t develop good ideas, but can sell them well. And there’s a whole bunch of people, who are brilliant human beings, who wouldn’t know how to sell an idea even if it was the easiest, most natural thing on earth – which it isn’t. They just wouldn’t know how to do it; they’d be completely lost.

Strategic Leadership Communication:

That sounds awfully naïve for people you talk about as being “brilliant.” Why such a blind spot?

John Daly: 

It is a blind spot, but a common one. Like most people, especially those technically oriented – probably because of their technical training – they believe that a good idea will automatically win out over a bad idea. But that’s not true.

Strategic Leadership Communication:

Maybe I’m naïve, too, but isn’t it a truism, as the saying goes, that “Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come?”

John Daly:

It’s Victor Hugo. And he was absolutely wrong. Pick any field you want – medicine, engineering, consumer products, even history – and it’s frighteningly sad how many thousands of life changing ideas society has missed out on because their proponents didn’t know how to advocate for them.  The research, the evidence is overwhelming: it doesn’t matter how many good ideas you have, if you can’t sell those ideas, they go nowhere.

That ends part one of the interview with John Daly, author of Advocacy. In part two, Daly discusses the skills necessary for effective advocacy.