JTC chief executive Jacqueline Poh write...

J.T.C chief executive Jacqueline Poh write...

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J.T.C chief executive Jacqueline Poh writes about fried porridge and bak kut teh hidden inside Singapore's industrial estates. If she had just written about obscure topics like zoning, infrastructure and power supply, only a few hundred people in the trade would read it.

Instead, she created #IndustrialEats, a series about the food found inside those estates. She hooks you with food and once you are in, she tells you about the businesses, workers and plans shaping the land around them.

“How do you become a LinkedIn Top Voice like her?” one senior leader asked me recently. He had been told to build a stronger external presence so he could attract clients and collaborators. But he did not want to become one of those people who posts constantly, even when they have nothing to say.

“I don't know,” I told him. LinkedIn says its Top Voices are selected by its editorial team. It looks for distinctive perspectives, useful expertise and influence within an industry.

Not every Top Voice is worth reading. But his question made me think about the executive writers I do respect. Their subjects and styles are different, but their strongest posts usually do three things.

1. The eyeball post: Give people a reason to stop

One ghostwriter told me that he spends 80 per cent of his writing time on the opening.

Jacqueline Poh uses food as her opening. Former D.B.S chief executive Piyush Gupta uses an intellectual hook.

He once opened a post with:

“Singapore's rise as a global financial centre was never preordained.”

Everyone knows Singapore became a major financial centre. Few people stop to ask why it succeeded without a large domestic economy or the scale of London and New York. The sentence creates a gap in the reader's mind. You think you know the story, but now you want to know what you have missed.

That is all a good opening needs to do.

Before you publish, ask whether you have a surprising fact, a contradiction, an overlooked detail or an opinion people rarely say aloud. If you are not excited to tell someone about it, it probably should not be your opening.

2. The expertise post: Give people something useful

Catching attention is not enough. A good story with no useful thought behind it is just entertainment.

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella recently described how he turned a public Morgan Stanley report into a working application. The application could pull up historical data, run scenarios and test “what-if” questions. The obvious achievement was speed.

But Nadella went further. He explained where the code sat, where the data remained and how security, governance and cost controls still applied.

He was not simply introducing a tool. He was showing how Microsoft's tools could address the question a serious company would ask: Can we trust this inside our own systems?

nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang does something similar when he writes about new products. When nvidia launched Alpamayo 2 Super, he did not describe it as just another autonomous-driving model. He argued that autonomous vehicles need to do more than recognise what is around them. They need to reason through difficult situations before acting.

The product announcement carried a larger idea: The next stage of autonomous driving will depend on reasoning, not just vision. That gives the reader more than product news. It gives them a way to understand where the industry is going.

Senior leaders often worry that they have nothing intelligent enough to say. Usually, the opposite is true. By the time you reach a senior position, you have seen patterns that outsiders cannot see.

The challenge is not finding a grand theory every week. It is choosing one useful observation and explaining why it matters.

Ask yourself: What do I know that is not widely understood? What is a neat framework to hang many disparate developments in my field?

If your post could have been written by anyone who read the same article, it probably does not contain enough of your judgment.

3. The evangelist post: Sell the product without boasting

Senior leaders also need to sell their organisations, products and services. The difficulty is doing that without sounding like a brochure.

When Jacqueline Poh wanted to showcase J.T.C's innovative spirit, she did not write that she was honoured, proud, or excited to attend the opening ceremony of a robot launch. Instead, she wrote about a construction robot tested by J.T.C, a contractor and a start-up. She told the story of how the robot failed repeatedly. When it finally worked, it improved productivity by 30 per cent.

She then explained J.T.C would create more places to test large construction machines and change its procurement process so successful pilots could be used elsewhere. The story showed that J.T.C could test an idea, tolerate failure and change its own processes when something worked, all without boasting. That is the difference between showing and telling.

What this actually takes

Senior leaders rarely lack content. They are already making decisions, solving problems and noticing things that others miss.

They lack time. The hard part is recognising which thought is worth preserving and finding the time to put it into words.

I have put together a short reading pack for senior leaders who want to build a useful LinkedIn presence without becoming influencers.

Leave a note if you would like a copy, or if you would like a recommendation for someone who can help put your thinking into words.

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About me

For 13 years, I wrote intelligence briefings for senior officials who already had a dozen other matters competing for their attention.

I had about 90 seconds to persuade them that a brief was worth reading, so I learnt to make that time count.

You face the same challenge every day, whether you are trying to sway an institutional buyer, pursue a warm lead or carry your people through a reorganisation.

I write about how to earn that attention and use it well.

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