Part 2: Write

Chapter 6: Preparing to Write

If you want to write, take a walk. Take it again, sitting down at your desk. Mark Tredinnick43

Taking time upfront to consider the purpose of your thought leadership material, what is of interest to your audience, how it will be published and used, and to whom it will be attributed can save you considerable heartache later. This is particularly true within organisations, where you may find yourself rewriting material in response to direction that could have been given before you started. If you are not clear about your objectives and approach, this will be reflected in the material itself, which will be similarly confused.

Define your idea

The most important step in writing a thought leadership document is to clearly define and articulate your idea. What are you saying? If you are unclear about your point, the writing process will prove difficult. Writing without a clear sense of what you are trying to say is like painting while blindfolded, or driving in heavy rain. You can’t see where you’re going.

It is true that the process of writing can help you clarify your thoughts. Indeed, this is a wonderful outcome from writing and it can be necessary to draft a document a few times before you are clear about what you want to say and how you want to say it. But the clearer you are about your idea at the start, and the simpler that idea is, the easier your piece will be to write. To that end, you should be able to capture your core idea in a single sentence, such as ‘houses could cost half the price and last twice as long if they were made using steel’ or ‘the country will be broke within 20 years if it doesn’t reform the healthcare system’.

Document your goals

Once you have defined your thought leadership idea, create a mission statement or a set of goals for your proposed thought leadership material. This will clarify why you’re creating it, whose needs you are serving and what you hope will come out of it. For example, a group of architects might decide to publish a book based on the following mission statement:

This book will outline our innovative ideas for house design in a way that promotes our expertise and experience to clients, and provides lessons and advice for other architects, developers and students.

The process of creating the book, and additional research, should also increase our team’s knowledge and professional capabilities.

The book will increase the prestige and reputation of our practice and help generate new business. It will be paid for by our firm and given away to clients, prospects and other interested parties.

It is not unusual to see the purpose of a thought leadership document clearly expressed by authors. For example, Benjamin Graham starts his 1949 book The Intelligent Investor by saying: ‘The purpose of this book is to supply, in a form suitable for laymen, guidance in the adoption of an investment policy’.

In addition to purpose, you should also consider:

• Audience. Who do you want to read the material? What do you know about them? Why will they find the ideas in your material valuable?

• Format. What’s the best way to present your material? Will it be an article, white paper, blog post or speech? How long will it be, what structure will you follow and what will the design be like?

• Timeline. How long do you expect to spend on production? Are there any deadlines to meet?

• Author(s). Are you the sole author? Will there be others? Or will the work be attributed to an organisation?

• Source material and contacts. What material is available and/or where will it come from? What research do you need to do?

• Intellectual property. Will you release IP? How much?

• Risk. Are there any risks to consider, such as breaching client confidentiality or giving too much information to competitors?

• Budget. How much are you planning to spend on production — including your research and writing time — and how much on publishing, distribution and promotion?

Answering these questions in a detailed and systematic way should put your thought leadership project on a solid footing.

Case study: Writing Built to Last

The iconic management book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies44 by James Collins and Jerry Porras was a sensation that changed the way people think about what makes a large company successful. For instance, it pointed out that many of the CEOs at US companies who had proven successful over a long period were neither high profile nor charismatic. In fact, the CEOs who were high profile often underperformed.

Built to Last involved an extraordinary amount of research. As they explain in the book, Collins and Porras started by asking whether there was such a thing as corporate ‘vision’ and, if so, what it was and whether it resided with leaders or with organisations. After looking at companies that had thrived for a long time and under many leaders, such as 3M, they decided to focus on the idea of visionary companies.

Collins and Porras then set out two research objectives:

1. To identify the underlying characteristics and dynamics common to highly visionary companies (and that distinguish them from other companies) and to translate these findings into a useful conceptual framework.

2. To effectively communicate these findings and concepts so that they influence the practice of management and prove beneficial to people who want to create, build and maintain visionary companies.45

Over the next six years from 1989 to 1994, Collins and Porras toiled away within the walls of Stanford University to answer these questions. They sent the final manuscript of Built to Last to their publisher on 14 March 1994 and were ‘somewhat astonished’ to see it become an international bestseller, printed more than 40 times between 1994 and the release of a paperback edition in 1997, and translated into 13 languages.

Collins and Porras succeeded because they asked an interesting question, then did the hard work to answer it, with a level of rigour that enabled them to uncover new and interesting truths, and back their arguments. It is particularly interesting that one of the authors’ primary objectives was to find lessons for others and to communicate them — this wasn’t a byproduct, it was the point.

The icing on the cake is that Collins and Porras are passionate and entertaining writers, enabling them to turn a potentially dull read into a captivating tale. Here’s a paragraph from Built to Last that shows the power of bringing complex research to life with clear writing and the use of a well-known analogy:

We found that the visionary companies were much less likely to begin life with a ‘great idea’ than the comparison companies in our study. Furthermore, whatever the initial founding concept, we found that the visionary companies were less likely to have early entrepreneurial success than the comparison companies ... In short, we found a negative correlation between early entrepreneurial success and becoming a highly visionary company. The long race goes to the tortoise, not the hare.

Consider your audience

Have you ever sat in a conference audience and wanted to scream at the speaker, the conveners and the career adviser who put you on the path that has left you trapped in a windowless hall with 500 other people listening to a dull speaker drone on — offering nothing you don’t already know and not discussing the topics you find interesting? Your problem is most likely that the speaker spent most of his preparation time thinking about what he wanted to say and what his organisation wanted to promote, rather than what might be of value to you as an audience member.

A far better scenario is where the speaker has spent serious time thinking about the context of the event, its timing, what others will be saying and what gift they can give to the audience. Like any good gift, this will take time, effort and resources to prepare. Nancy Duarte, the principal and CEO of Duarte Design (introduced in chapter 3), offers a breakdown for the time a speaker should put into a one-hour presentation with 30 slides. She allows anywhere from six to 20 hours for the speaker to conduct research and collect input others such as colleagues. Duarte then recommends taking a full hour to map the audience’s needs; half a day to generate and organise ideas and bounce them off colleagues; two hours to sketch out a structure for a presentation as a storyboard; then an extraordinary 20 to 60 hours to design and populate the presentation slides. Finally, a speaker should spend at least three hours rehearsing — ‘in the shower, on the treadmill or during the commute’.46

Wow. That is anywhere from one to three weeks of work. But stop and think about how much of other people’s time you’re going to consume. Let’s say you address 200 delegates for the hour; that’s 200 hours, even before you consider the time and effort they spent to get to the event. You can do the same sort of calculation for how long it might take someone to read a newsletter article, column or book. You need to give them value. Before you despair, keep in mind that you should be able to use your thought leadership material many times over, so your time and effort will be worth it.

Here are some questions you might ask to decide what your audience will value and how you can balance their needs and your goals.

About them

• What are they expecting me to say? Does the audience have expectations, based on how an article or book has been promoted, the way you’ve been introduced at an event or from your earlier material?

• Who is the audience? It’s critical to know if you’re addressing experts or laypeople, or both. Are they going to be from business, government or elsewhere? Do they know who you are, or what your organisation does? Do they speak your language well? How old are they?

• What do they already know? This is perhaps the most important question if you plan to impart new information. You need to know where the audience is up to if you want to get it just right — new and interesting, but not so far ahead they have no idea what you’re talking about.

• Why are they here? This is a fascinating question. Why are all those people in the room or reading your document? What do they hope to gain? Can you give it to them or are you actually an obstacle? For instance, if they’re at a conference to network, could you run exercises to get people talking to the person next to them?

About you

• What do you know that the audience doesn’t? Your information and advice doesn’t have to be new in absolute terms, just new to your audience.

• What can you fit into the time or space you’ve got? It’s important to be pragmatic and work within your constraints. It’s better to present less material well than to deliver too much in a rush.

• What are you most passionate or excited about? Provided it’s relevant, your most compelling material will be the parts you personally find interesting.

• What do you want to achieve? This is the brass tacks question. Your piece of thought leadership will represent a substantial investment, so you need to be clear about the outcome you want and shape your presentation towards that goal. In particular, what do you want the audience to do after they read your material or see you speak?

In addition, find out everything you can about the environment in which you will be presenting or publishing. If you’ll be speaking at a conference, find out how big the room is, whether people will be seated and whether you’ll be at a lectern or free to walk around. If you are to write for a publication, read it and understand its conventions. Also find out what the speakers before and after you will be saying or, if it’s a publication of some sort, what other material will appear alongside yours. Then shape your material to make the most of the situation, and to reduce the impact of any limitations or overlaps.

Manage intellectual property

One of the most difficult aspects of developing thought leadership material is deciding how much intellectual property (IP) to release. The tension is that you need to give away enough for an audience to find it valuable, but not so much that it’s a poor commercial proposition. This is a line you will need to explore, and it will depend on factors such as whether you are charging for your thought leadership, for example by selling a book.

If your goal is to get 100 chief executives to read a research report, consider what IP would entice them to spend their time reading your document. The smaller or more obscure your group, the more IP you will need to offer. This is what will make people say, ‘I’ve never heard of them but they’ve got amazing ideas.’

If you don’t give away enough IP, your material will fail to qualify as thought leadership. It will be like a chicken curry without the chicken, or a wedding without a bride. Worse, it can backfire as marketing. Consider how you would feel if you went to a seminar titled ‘The Future of Property Investing’ but received no new or original insights, just mountains of hard sell about a company’s financial products. In this case the promoter is borrowing a thought leadership format — the seminar — to get people into the room, but then failing to deliver intellectual value.

Nancy Duarte grappled with this issue before writing her book on designing presentation slides (described in chapter 3). She decided to publish the best book she could, which meant including all of her most valuable IP. ‘Some of my staff felt like we gave away too much in the book but I’m a big believer in sowing and reaping,’ she says. ‘Giving information away is important in this age. Several small firms have popped up offering similar services to ours, which to me isn’t as much a threat as it is a validation that there is demand to support (and create) a presentation industry.’

Like Duarte, thought leaders need faith in the principle that if you give you will receive. I can offer you no science or survey data to prove this point yet it is absolutely central to building a successful thought leadership marketing strategy. Providing true thought leadership material involves giving a genuine gift that will benefit others. The experience of many thought leaders before you is that you will then receive related and sometimes completely unexpected rewards.

There are, however, different types of IP. A car-tyre manufacturer might go to great lengths to protect the composition of its products, but it may be happy to release data about the performance of those products or to sponsor a survey on road safety. The company is protecting its core product IP but generating thought leadership marketing material based on data that it is comfortable to release.

The final point I’d invite you to consider is how rare or valuable your information really is, and whether the IP you’re protecting is as central to your competitiveness as you think. Even if it is important, could the benefits from releasing it outweigh those from keeping it secret? A good example from business is Richard Branson. He is very open about the Virgin Group’s strategies in the media, his books and elsewhere. While this might occasionally give his competitors an edge, it mainly delivers extraordinary amounts of free publicity and brand recognition. Part of the reason this works for Branson is that he and the Virgin brand are so unique that, even if others understand his company’s strategy, it is usually hard to replicate.

Name authors

It’s important to decide at the outset whether your piece of thought leadership will be published under your own name as an individual or under your name as the representative of an organisation. Other variations might be you plus one or more co-authors, or that the material is published as coming from your organisation and you are not named at all.

Whichever path you follow, it’s important to decide how authors will be named upfront as this will affect issues such as the tone and style of your writing, and whether you use pronouns like ‘I’ or ‘we’. If you use ‘we’, exactly who or what are you referring to? Being clear about whether your material comes from you personally or your organisation will also dictate whether you need to gain approval from managers, a marketing department or lawyers.

There is a range of issues regarding authorship that individuals and organisations should keep in mind. The first issue is whether you, as an individual, can claim sole ownership of your material. If not, you should take care to cite sources or acknowledge any contribution your colleagues, organisation or external parties may have provided. This won’t always be cut and dry. For instance, who would own the IP in a book that you wrote on a topic that was directly related to and based on material you had learned through your day job? To answer that sort of question, you may need to seek legal advice and it can be important to establish clear rules or agreements with your organisation.

If you are publishing as a representative of your organisation as a sales director or partner in a professional firm, for example, it’s important to check whether you have the authority to publish under the firm’s name. You also need to respect that your views will reflect on the business. This may require you to tone down extreme statements, write in a way that is appropriate to the organisation’s values and brand, and to consider whether you are releasing commercially sensitive information. Businesses often include a legal disclaimer to state that the views are those of the author, not the organisation. As the author, you might feel constrained by your organisation’s reputation, marketing positioning or even corporate baggage such as a history of weak products or poor environmental performance.

Ideally, authors or groups of authors should be explicitly named. This is due to thought leadership’s roots in academia and journalism, where advances tend to come from brilliant individuals. Most people associate E=mc2 with Albert Einstein, as an example, not the University of Zurich. Furthermore, people like to know who is behind an idea before they’ll accept it, and naming individuals makes it easier to distribute and promote thought leadership material because that person or group can talk to media and publish blogs, for instance. You can certainly find thought leadership material that is published under the name of an organisation only, but it may not be the most effective.

Find your zone

To write well, it’s vital to work in an environment in which you can really concentrate on the task and work productively. This will mean different things for different writers. Some people love to write in a quiet ‘log cabin’ environment. Others, including Barack Obama’s speechwriter Jonathan Favreau, prefer the buzz of cafés. Some people write to music, some don’t.

Whatever your preferences, creating the right environment may become a ritual — even a precondition — for you to write. Sir Gustav Nossal, for example, has developed very particular rituals involving the pens and paper he uses:

If a matter is not particularly weighty, I will dictate into the tape recorder, and my dear secretary will transcribe it. If the matter is, on the other hand, weightier, and I want something to be perfect, I will hand-write it. It always has to be on pink pieces of paper — you know that sort of copy paper people used to have, well I have great trouble finding it because it’s not quite the right shade of pink — and with a ballpoint pen which has always got to be a Parker, and I’ve always got to have two in my pocket in case one runs out, and I’ve always got to have spare cartridges in my drawer, otherwise I can’t work.

The Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, author of such classics as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera is similarly obsessive about the situation in which he writes, as described in the following extract from a profile published in the New Yorker.

García Márquez has several homes ... Each of them is furnished in the same way — with white carpets, large glass coffee tables, modern art, a carefully chosen sound system, and an identical Macintosh computer. García Márquez is obsessive about such things. They make it possible for him to work wherever he is. He says that he usually wakes at five o’clock, reads a book until seven, dresses, reads the newspapers, answers his E-mail, and by ten — ‘no matter what’ — is at his desk, writing. He stays there until two-thirty, then joins his family for lunch. After lunch, the writing day is over, and the afternoon and evening are devoted to ‘appointments, family, and friends.’47

Whatever your ideal writing situation and the rituals you use to get there, the quest is to find your zone — the point where there are no obstacles between you and the writing process and the words glide from your mind to the page. Like a computer programmer or an artist deeply immersed in her work, this is a near-hypnotic and highly productive state.

Start to write

Once you are crystal clear about your subject matter and objectives, have planned your document and found just the right environment in which to work, you need to start writing. For many people, this is the hardest part of the writing process. It’s also a very personal step, in the sense that everyone works differently.

Nancy Duarte, for example, is a visual person and a slide designer by trade. She starts writing by structuring her thoughts in PowerPoint and putting them up on walls. ‘I develop a framework and write notes on each slide, similar to how you’d use 3x5 cards when writing a thesis paper,’ she says. ‘Then I tape them up on the wall and stare at it and rearrange, add and take away from the material.’

In my experience, there are two main ways to melt the ice and start the words flowing. The first is to simply start. Just begin putting words on the page and see what comes out, understanding that you will be completely free to go back and make changes. You can also start at any point you like, whether that’s the opening paragraph, some sentences for the middle of the document or even the conclusion. The advantage of this approach is that it gets you underway. Once you have words on the page, you can build on them, improve them and move them around.

An alternative approach is to start by defining the document’s structure. This means writing your chapter titles, headlines and subheadings first. You then list what content will fall under each heading as bullet points. You can also decide how long each section will be. The benefit of this approach is that you get words on the page without starting at the hardest point — the actual prose of any sentence or paragraph. By roughing out the content for each section in points, you are also writing a first draft without the constraint of trying to get the words exactly right.

Most importantly, this approach breaks the writing task down into manageable blocks. Instead of trying to write 3 000 continuous words, for instance, you only need to write blocks of 400 words here and 250 words there. You can make the task even easier if you start by writing the easiest sections first — where you are clear about what you want to say or where you’re doing something simple like writing up research results or typing in people’s quotes. Planning the document this way also helps ensure the structure is logical and free of repetition.

And be confident. This might sound like an odd thing to add, but the biggest obstacle many people face is they simply don’t believe they can write. This is often made worse by a teacher or boss somewhere who has shattered the person’s confidence, making a blank sheet of paper more terrifying than finding themselves halfway up Mount Everest. If this describes you, then you need to recognise the obstacle and step over it. You have a right to write and if you’re an expert in your field, you can probably do it as well as, if not better, than most people.

Summary

The old axiom ‘think before you speak’ applies perhaps more to thought leadership material than any other type of writing. Start by clarifying the idea you want to communicate, then set out your goals and consider the audience you are planning to reach. As you move towards writing, think through how much intellectual property you are comfortable releasing and who will be named as the author or writing team. When you write, find your zone: that ideal balance of time, environment and caffeine that makes the words flow. Finally, explore ways to make the writing task manageable, such as breaking the total task down into smaller steps.