Authority Is Your Competitive Advantage

Most companies don’t have a knowledge problem. They have an authority problem.

They know things their market would find valuable, but that knowledge remains scattered across product teams, customer conversations, operating data and executive experience. It never becomes a coherent interpretation of what is changing—or a frame other people can use.

Instead, companies feed fragments of that knowledge into the content machine. A product insight becomes a blog post. An executive observation becomes a LinkedIn update. Customer data appears in a quarterly presentation. Subject-matter experts contribute to webinars on whatever themes happen to be prominent that month.

Some of this work may be useful. Almost none of it builds enduring authority. 

Building Walled City has made me see authority less as a quality that a company or individual possesses and more as a business capability they construct. Authority is not simply expertise, visibility or reputation. It’s the ability to make your interpretation of a problem the starting point for other people’s decisions.

What ADP built

One of the earliest examples that shaped my thinking was ADP’s National Employment Report.

ADP’s ordinary business gave it an extraordinary observational position. Because it processed payroll for millions of workers, the company possessed a near-real-time view of employment and pay that few private organizations could reproduce. Beginning in 2006, it converted anonymized payroll records into a recurring measure of the American labor market.

The report didn’t argue that companies should buy payroll services from ADP. Instead it helped investors, policymakers, employers and journalists understand employment trends. Independent research partners, an explicit methodology and a dependable publication schedule turned an internal dataset into a fixture of the economic calendar and a trusted labor-market benchmark.

What does your organization know that could help other people understand something important?

The competitive value of that benchmark became particularly visible last year. In August 2025, President Trump fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer hours after the agency reported weak employment growth and substantial downward revisions to earlier estimates. Two months later, a lapse in federal appropriations shut down much of the government. BLS could not release its September employment report on schedule, and it never published a standalone report for October.

On the first day of the shutdown, ADP reported that private employers had shed 32,000 jobs during September. With the government report unavailable, Reuters (free registration required) described ADP’s release as a key gauge for investors, while Axios called it “the week’s headliner.” Treasury yields fell in response.

The shutdown didn’t suddenly make ADP authoritative. It revealed the authority the company had spent nearly two decades accumulating.

To be clear: this authority didn't make ADP infallible or turn it into a replacement for the federal statistical system. And the eventual BLS estimate showed 119,000 jobs added in September, a substantial divergence from ADP’s reading. But ADP had built a source that consequential audiences could not responsibly ignore. When the normal source disappeared, it already possessed the data, methodology, partners, cadence and audience required to contribute credible evidence.

In short: ADP’s authority was stored value. The information vacuum made it visible.

What do you already know?

The first thing we do with Walled City clients is determine what proprietary, underused knowledge they are already sitting on.

That could be data generated through the ordinary operation of the business. Sometimes it’s a recurring pattern across hundreds of customer conversations. It may be technical expertise distributed among teams that rarely communicate with one another, or the personal experience of an executive who has watched an industry evolve for decades.

The form varies. The underlying question is the same: What does your organization know—or have the ability to discover—that could help other people understand something important?

This is a different starting point from asking what topics a company should publish about. That question tends to produce a list based on search volume, campaign priorities and whatever subjects competitors are discussing. Starting with proprietary knowledge creates the possibility of building an intellectual asset competitors cannot easily reproduce.

Authority may originate with a company, but is ultimately conferred by others

A 2015 Management Science study found that scientific publications by U.S. companies were positively associated with market value even after accounting for R&D spending, patents and patent quality. A subsequent literature review concluded that corporate publications can act as certified signals of otherwise hidden capabilities, strengthening credibility, attracting partners and supporting commercialization.

The lesson is not that every company should publish scientific papers. It is that sharing some of what a company knows does not mean giving away the capabilities that produced it. Done selectively, insights drawn from data, customer patterns or expert judgment give the market evidence of the deeper knowledge and expertise still inside the company.

However, proprietary knowledge is only the raw material. Data needs interpretation. Experience needs synthesis. The company must connect what it knows to a consequential question facing the people it hopes to influence.

Claiming the frame

The question cannot simply be: What can we say? It should be: What important change do we have a particular right to explain? A useful frame organizes an answer to that question. It identifies the underlying problem, names the distinctions that matter, and gives people a way to interpret new information as it arrives.

IBM demonstrated the commercial power of doing this in the 1990s. At the time, the internet was still widely seen as a tool for browsing, communication and online shopping—or simply as another channel for selling products. IBM introduced the term “e-business” to frame it as something larger: a platform that would transform how entire companies operated, reached markets and served customers.

The phrase translated a novel technology into priorities business leaders already understood: operating more efficiently, reaching new markets and serving customers better. According to IBM, by 1999 it was providing e-business services to more than 10,000 clients, and customers associated the term with IBM seven times more frequently than with its nearest competitor. IBM had not invented the internet. It had given business leaders a way to understand what the internet meant for them—and positioned itself as the company capable of helping them act on that understanding. 

Facts don’t frame themselves.

Tech industry research firm Gartner built a different kind of authority through its Magic Quadrant, a widely used framework for comparing vendors within technology markets. Founder Gideon Gartner recalled developing a precursor in the late 1980s as an internal “stalking horse”—a deliberately simplified picture analysts could use to provoke debate about a technology market. He considered the device too reductive to publish. But its simplicity proved to be its power.

Gartner introduced the Magic Quadrant as a public research format in 1994, according to Information Age. By plotting vendors according to their ability to execute and completeness of vision, it gave buyers an accessible starting point for navigating complex technology decisions. Vendors, in turn, began organizing their strategies and marketing around where Gartner placed them. The firm did not merely describe the competition. Its framework helped establish the criteria on which the competition took place. Supplying the frame became the business.

The company that supplies a useful frame can influence what the market considers important, which questions customers ask, and what evidence they expect a credible solution to provide. That can change the terms of competition before a product comparison or sales conversation begins.

The frame must be new enough to add value and familiar enough to be understood. In his classic book The Functions of the Executive, management theorist Chester Barnard located authority not in the person making a claim, but in the willingness of others to accept it. Markets work much the same way. A company can propose a new frame, but customers, investors, journalists and other influential audiences must recognize and use it before it becomes authoritative.

Chad Navis and Mary Ann Glynn documented this process in their 2010 study of satellite radio. Early on, companies such as Sirius and XM could not focus only on differentiating themselves. They first had to establish satellite radio as a legitimate category that outside audiences could understand. Only after the category gained acceptance did attention shift toward the differences between the companies competing within it.

This is what separates authority building from an exercise in corporate vocabulary. Naming a trend doesn’t mean you own it. Coining a phrase doesn’t create a category. Nor does publishing a framework ensure that anyone else will use it. A company can claim expertise and propose a frame, but it becomes authoritative only when others accept and use it.

Building the capability

The lesson is not that every company should establish a research institute or manufacture a new category. It is that, before producing more content, companies must decide what they know, who needs that knowledge and what distinctive frame they can credibly own. 

To turn proprietary knowledge into authority that compounds across the business, a company must answer five questions:

1. What can we see that others cannot? Identify the data, operating experience, customer exposure or accumulated judgment that creates a genuinely privileged vantage point.

2. What consequential question can that knowledge help answer? Start with what customers, investors or other influential audiences are struggling to understand—not with the company’s desire for attention.

3. What is our interpretation? Facts don’t frame themselves. Authority requires judgment about what the evidence means and what people should understand differently.

4. What will make the claim credible? Transparent methods, careful sourcing, external expertise and a willingness to publish findings that are not perfectly promotional all strengthen the work.

5. How will the insight compound? Authority is rarely built by one report or executive article. It needs an operating system that carries a consistent idea into research, leadership, media, marketing, customer engagement and sales.

Most corporate content programs begin with the fifth question and skip the first four. They optimize production and distribution without deciding what intellectual territory the company has a right to occupy. The result is a large quantity of material that leaves the market’s understanding essentially unchanged.

Generative AI will make that problem more acute. Plausible explanations of familiar ideas are becoming cheaper and more abundant. Proprietary observation, credible evidence and distinctive judgment are not.

That should increase the value of companies that can turn what they uniquely know into interpretations other people trust. Their advantage will not come from producing the most content. It will come from supplying the clearest and most useful account of what is changing.

The strategic question is no longer simply what your organization knows. Rather, it’s what the market might understand differently because your organization knows it.