Global distribution of ‘thought leaders’

As with any of our blogs at Bamboo, it’s best not to use this as the basis of a PhD.

With that caveat out of the way, we’ve noticed an increase in people describing themselves as ‘thought leaders’ on LinkedIn. With the definition being a bit too nebulous for us to get our heads around, we thought we’d look into the global and regional distribution of thought leaders, and leave the concept for others to analyse.

To kick things off we’ve taken the total number of people on LinkedIn who self-identify as thought leaders and looked at how this breaks down in terms of countries where English is the main language. There may well be a French or Mandarin equivalent of thought leader but it’s outside the remit of this blog.

Expressed as a pie chart, it doesn’t really tell us much except that most of the world’s thought leaders are in the US, but you didn’t need us to tell you that would be the case:

What’s much more interesting is what it looks like if you break down the number of thought leaders as a percentage of the total population (according to Wikipedia).

A surprisingly even distribution.
Here’s the data.

To make the comparison a bit easier, we multiplied the percentage by 1000.

It shows us that Australia and the US have broadly the same number of thought leaders in their population, which is roughly double that of the UK, Canada, NZ, and Ireland.

As a slight aside, that works out to one English-speaking thought leader on LinkedIn per 32,038,349 people globally.

Moving on to the UK.

The first thing to note is there’s a fairly big discrepancy between the overall number of thought leaders in the UK and those we could find by searching by city. We couldn’t figure out where the missing 2,910 thought leaders in the UK are living so we widened the search.

Again, the pie chart doesn’t tell us much except that most are based in London. Again, quelle surprise.

However, once again, when shown as a percentage by population, the pie chart is more revealing.

This leads us to conclude that the missing 2,910 thought leaders must be fairly evenly distributed between every town and city in the UK.

Again, the stats by city.

So, what can we conclude from all this? Perhaps that the overall distribution both on an international and regional level is surprisingly similar in countries where English is the first language.

Looking at the regional distribution of thought leaders in the UK, it seems that areas in the Celtic League have roughly half the number of thought leaders with the exception of three in Llandudno where the stats may have been skewed by the very low numbers. Why this might be is anyone’s guess.

We’ll have to revisit this in a year or so to see how things have changed.

Stay tuned.