Too often innovation is centered on creating the next new thing rather than innovating around the most commonly used apps and usages. Like accounting. Or spreadsheets. Or calendars. Schmidt gets at this well – and the need to make whatever you do mobile. Killer points.

“Companies are about sharing,” Schmidt said. “One of the new things in the last five years about the web is that it enables sharing-sensitive apps.”

He continued, “I think of calendars as incredibly boring, but I’m wrong, calendars are incredibly interesting because they’re incredibly shared. So from a computer science perspective, all of a sudden we have our top engineers who want to build calendars. I’m going, what’s wrong with you guys? But in fact it’s a very interesting example. Spreadsheets are similar, the most interesting spreadsheets are highly, highly interlinked, something I didn’t know, and was not possible with the previous technology — Microsoft technology made it very difficult because they were not built in that model.”

Schmidt also recommended to the executives present that “You should always put your best team on your mobile app that enables your service. The answer should always be mobile first.”

Too often communicators attempt to bend reality by going off the record. It isn’t a strategy – it’s a tactic when used in isolation leaves the communicator wide open for this kind of criticism.

Moreover, it’s out-of-date in the age of transparency. It drives opacity rather than frank and open dialog.

“They talk to the media quite a bit, just not in an official way,” Edward-Isaac Dovere, the editor of City Hall, said of Mr. Cuomo and his staff. “There are not a lot of politicians who, when so much media attention is focused on them, have succeeded at really not being interviewed and not speaking on the record.”

Yes.

At face value it seems to me that Eric Schmidt might have forgotten that the audience is never the audience. Whatever you say, wherever you say it, it will be contextualized by a much broader crowd.

There is always the temptation to tune the message for crowd appeal – but that often means not staying true to the message you would give to your audience at-large – or even the audience in front of you. Pander at your peril.

Haven’t been sharing this way for awhile so let me share a few from my mate John Battelle… loving the fact he is back blogging away:

• Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either) (Boing Boing) Cory puts it well, and lays out pretty much everything that bothers me about the iPad. Not that I don’t think it’s cool, it is. But.
• The Collapse of Complex Business Models (Clay Shirky) Take the time to read this. It’s long. But do it, it’s really worth it. It’s very much aligned with Cory’s piece above.
• The Impact of the Internet on Institutions in the Future (Pew) I see a theme developing here in Friday Signal, as this study talks about the open web having a significant impact on new models for all businesses (not just media).

A colleague asked me today how I define thought leadership. Here is where I landed.

Thought leadership is the perceived advantage a company achieves in the minds of its stakeholders in relation to a theme or topic that is of central importance to its business. Thought leadership is a perishable perceptual grant by your stakeholders.

Within this is an inherent paradox – what is important to your business might not be important to your target audience (at least at first). One of the critical roles of a communicator or marketer is to make the case for the thought.

Most importantly, thought leadership is a dimension of the brand. For instance, Dell is seen as a thought leader in social media having embraced social technologies and practices. Virgin is seen as a thought leader in customer service innovation. Air New Zealand as a thought leader in transforming the travel experience.

In many cases, it is the individual that is seen as a thought-leader, not the enterprise. Lionel at Dell. Richard Branson at Virgin. Rob Fyfe at Air New Zealand. The anonymity of the Enterprise lacks the personality and trust dimension so critical to being a thought leader. This is why so many of the thought leaders we think of are the management gurus like Gary Hamel.

But too often thought leadership is seen purely as a verb – it’s something we do rather than earn through “the whole” of our actions or relationships. Through that whole we earn the right to practice thought leadership. Often it is predicated not on eloquent writing or speaking (although that helps) but rather on customer experience.

So, you can practice thought leadership – say through speaking, blogging, writing, but that does not make you a thought leader. Not matter how good you are, true thought leadership can only be achieved holistically.

Importantly, thought leadership can only be granted by those you seek to do business with – to build relationships with. It is something they own and grant to you for so long as you are such to them.