
with Sam Smith
Note: This webinar will be offered at two different times. The content will be the same in each.
Cost: Free to ILA Members; $9.95 for non-members.
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- 19 February 2025, 11:00AM - 12:00 PM EST (UTC-5)
- 19 February 2025, 4:00-5:00 PM EST (UTC-5)
Bestselling leadership book? Thought leader status? So what? Did it actually make a difference? Using the Kansas Leadership Center’s bestselling book, When Everyone Leads, as a case study, this webinar will weave together elements of strategic communications, marketing, leadership, and education, to discuss the purpose, value, and limits of thought leadership. Smith will also incorporate evaluation research on KLC’s programs measured against their aspirations for impact.
By attending this webinar, participants will
- Understand the purpose of thought leadership as a content strategy
- Be better able to assess the strategic value of thought leadership
- Learn to recognize the limits of thought leadership as a content strategy
- Consider how a strategic approach to thought leadership could apply to participants’ own individual or institutional context to expand audiences and create greater impact in leadership education and practice.

Director of Communications for the Kansas Leadership Center, Sam Smith is a communications, public relations, and marketing leader with expertise in arts, higher education, leadership, and nonprofit administration.
He has served as lecturer in the School of Digital Arts at Wichita State University and as an appointee to the City of Wichita’s Cultural Funding Committee. He received a 2024 Marketing Award from the Wichita Business Journal.
He earned a B.A. in classical languages and history from USC and an M. Phil. in classics from King’s College, Cambridge University, with further graduate work at Stanford University.

Dr. Max Klau (Moderator 11AM EST) is a consultant, author, speaker, and Integral Master Coach based in Boston, Massachusetts. He received his doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2005 with a focus on adaptive leadership. He currently serves as the Senior Advisor to the New Politics Leadership Academy (NPLA), an organization focused on bringing more servant leaders into politics. As the Chief Program Officer at NPLA from 2016-2024, Max designed a sequence of leadership development programs that have graduated more than 2,500 servant leaders. Prior to that, he was the Vice President of Leadership Development at City Year, the education-focused AmeriCorps program. His writing about leadership has appeared in Fast Company and the Harvard Business Review and his second book, Developing Servant Leaders at Scale: How to Do It and Why it Matter, will be published in August 2025. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and two children. Learn more about him at www.maxklau.com.

Dr. Kathleen A. Curran (Moderator 4:00PM EST) is a global coach, facilitator, and boundary-spanning strategist. Founder of Intercultural Systems, with 25 years of professional experience in Asia, she specializes in catalyzing the intersection of intercultural competencies, leadership, and global strategy in support of individual, team, and organizational global leadership development with the concomitant inclusive mindset and practices. She is also a Fellow with the Institute for Social Innovation, Fielding Graduate Universities, where she engages with the relationship between the sense of belonging and the freedom to experiment and the alignment of external global corporate and internal functional strategies, which comprise the fully global corporation. Her published works include From Uncertainty to Transformation: Emergent Generative Team Leadership from the Void (2022), co-authored with R.J. Thompson, Reimagining Leadership on the Commons: Shifting the Paradigm for a More Ethical, Equitable, and Just World (2021), with Randal Joy Thomson and Devin Singh. The Study and Practice of Global Leadership (2022), edited by Gama Perucci; Leadership and Power in International Development: Navigating the Intersections of Gender, Culture, Context, and Sustainability (2018), co-edited by Thompson and Storberg-Walker; and Advances in Global Leadership, Vol 12 (2021).