It was a most unusual week. On Sunday I attended a service in St. Peter’s in Rome, Italy, and found myself standing quite close to Pope Benedict XVI as he left the service of ordination for some select new priests and headed to an upstairs palace window to say a multilingual blessing for the crowd gathered in Vatican Square.

Then on Monday night at the GWI Global Water Summit gala dinner, Dr J. Craig Venter was the keynote speaker. The first person to sequence the human genome and a renowned scientist who is now pioneering the development of synthetic organisms, he told the water industry leaders that this will be the ‘Century of Synthetic Life.’

You could say these two men are as different as chalk and cheese, and you’d be right. But what they have in common is that they are both respected thought leaders, even if you disagree with the views of one or both of them.

Will you ever command the respect due to the Pope or to the ‘Father of Synthetic Life’? Probably not. But you certainly can be better recognized as a thought leader in your own particular field. Ask, assess, then ask.

From St. Peters in Rome, Italy: A low-fi view of Pope Benedict XVI from my mobile phone