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Write a Book? Whether, Who and How

Louis V. Gerstner was CEO of IBM during one of America’s greatest corporate turnarounds. Three years ago he offered a book titled Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? It doubles as a generic management primer, hence the subtitle "leading a great enterprise through dramatic change."

Apart from the cheeky title -- were those "elephants" made to stampede by a PR firm? -- it passes all of my tests for being a landmark business book. Yet this is not a book review. Rather, Gerstner’s Elephants can help test whether you should produce your own book, and if so how it might pay you back for the risks run and energy spent.

A Tough Story Deserves a Hard Book?

It was a surprise to see Gerstner confess, early on: "I wrote this book without the aid of a coauthor or a ghostwriter (which is why it’s a good bet this is going to be my last book; I had no idea it would be so hard to do)." Well, maybe not such a "surprise." After all, hard work by a smart executive should produce a better than average book, right?

In that same Foreword, Gerstner also says he wrote this book because he grew weary of having to tell the story in bits and pieces to friends and fans. He "concluded, a little reluctantly, that the easiest way for me to fulfill all this ‘popular demand’ was to write a book and to hold off on serious golf for the time being."

Okay, let’s play CFO to his retiring CEO -- if not with a formal balance sheet, then a list of debits and credits. The only debit or downside is that Lou Gerstner had none of the enthusiasm of a writer. By contrast, the upsides were many.

First, he had a transforming story to tell and exquisite insider knowledge of who did what. Second, many others seemed to want to hear that story. Third, any of a dozen blue-chip publishers would let him tell it as he pleased. Fourth, taking a year off to do it right would not cause anyone to starve or miss a mortgage payment. Fifth, if the book was at all readable, Gerstner could spend the next 10 years telling his inquirers to go buy it, rather than do consulting on the fly. In short, the book would pay back the author, longer term, in time and energy saved.

No, he did not have a collaborator or hired wordsmith. On the other hand, any of 25 good ones would have been his for the asking. Instead, he felt he had to tell his own story.

Now, how many of those plusses do you sit down at the word-processor with? Chances are, if you haven’t produced a book with a "real" publisher, you have the only driving force that Gerstner did not have -- namely, the passion to write (or to have written) a book. You have a set of things you want to say, and for some reason a book looks like the best way.

Bring On the Business Analysis

Riding Elephants for a while longer, we find author Gerstner, to avoid being swallowed up by "the old IBM," having to demand rigor and specifics from all his colleagues: Not just once a week or once a quarter, but a routine stance of taking nothing at face value. The fact that he had no experience as a technology manager turned out to be a great blessing, in that it reinforced the daily drive for clarity.

Gerstner has great fun lampooning "investment bankers" who more or less made up numbers to try to get IBM to buy other companies. But not until pages 224-25 do we find the essence of rising above other people’s superficial logic:

"Product managers want their bosses to believe the manager has created the best products in the industry. But facts are facts, and they’ve got to be assembled on a continuous, unbiased basis. Products have to be torn down and examined for cost, features, and functionality. Each element of the income statement and balance sheet has to be examined with total objectivity vis-à-vis competitors."

At this point you, as potential author, are wondering: What is this stuff about "competitors"? And since when did producing a manuscript become grand corporate strategy?

Well, you have competition on two fronts. If you produce the book, it will need to compete with anyone who’s got a similar book. Yet, I do admit, this zone is very hard to get a grip on -- you end up with so many flimsy assumptions that the "analysis" starts to feel like guesswork. And guesswork is not a good candidate to past the Gerstner test.

More tangibly, your book endeavor will "compete" against everything else you could be doing. If you produce a serious book, deduct 250+ hours from all those other realms. You should be able to analyze that basket of tradeoffs! It won’t be fun, but you already have most of the "data" needed.

"[G]ood strategies are long on detail and short on vision. They lay out multi-year plans in great quantitative detail -- the segments the company will pursue, market-share numbers that must be achieved, expense levels that must be managed, and resources that must be applied. These plans are then reviewed and become, in a sense, the driving force behind everything the company does."

How much of the above applies to you as potential author? Just about all of it. In fact, the next section of this document turns the IBM 1990s field test into a writer’s parallel. We’ll need each part of the paragraph you just saw.

Faces of the Audience

"[G]ood strategies are long on detail and short on vision."

In a single sentence, what is the purpose of your book? Leaving aside the "vision," detail its innovations and benefits.

"They lay out multi-year plans in great quantitative detail…"

Make a list of all the activities -- family, hobby, work, other intellectual goals -- that will be drawn down from in other to produce an outstanding manuscript.

"the segments the company will pursue…"

Who is the primary audience for your book? The plan can allow for secondary ones, and even half-expect the emergence of a "surprise" class of buyers. But start with a plan that posits a certain type of "face" sitting in the front row of the theater. Then create your "script" with these folks in your sights. Do you want ‘em to laugh? Cry? Be intellectually transformed? Go out and storm city hall? Love their neighbor more often?

"market-share numbers that must be achieved…"

This could bring us back to "competing" with other authors having a similar message, but I suggest being less speculative. Instead, find some "numbers" you can bank on -- for example, how much do you want to earn on this book in the three years after it becomes available?

If you are an established author, your math is simply a case of deducting from the advance. Nice calculating work if you can get it. This coaching document is for anyone who can’t -- get an advance, I mean.

"expense levels that must be managed, and resources that must be applied."

Another way of saying: Budget your time, energy, intellectual and emotional costs, earlier rather than later.

"These plans are then reviewed and become, in a sense, the driving force behind everything the company does."

As CEO, Leo Gerstner had solid staff support. So he can get away with such confident declarations. You probably don’t have a staff (and I sure as hell don’t). So the question becomes: How seriously do I take my own plan?

Not too. Opportunities and problems will emerge that cause as much as a third of the Book Plan to go into the ash can. As Eisenhower advised during World War Two, "rely on planning, but never trust plans." The exercise of making the plan is vital. And so is keeping it pragmatic.

What Do You Intend to Write About?

Well, since I don’t yet know you, this document can’t say much on that score. But I bet you already know what you want to write about. That’s where your excitement comes from, yes? Most likely, you are topic-driven and substance-focused. Fair enough.

Problem is, none of that deals with carrying out the mission. You’ve got the What -- it’s a book, about Topic XYZ -- but everything else critical to making it worthwhile turns out to be either a Who or a How question. "Who" refers to audience, and "How" means management, of self plus resources.

Look back at the ground we have covered: It’s overwhelmingly Who and How, not What. Turns out the Gerstner book has a dead-on passage there as well: "I will let you in on a dirty little secret of consulting: It is extremely difficult to develop a unique strategy for a company; and if the strategy is truly different from what others in the industry are doing, it is probably highly risky… At the end of the day…every competitor basically fights with the same weapons. In most industries five or six success factors that drive performance can be identified… So, execution is really the critical part of a successful strategy. Getting it done, getting it done right, getting it done better than the next person is far more important that dreaming up new visions of the future."

You, the would-be visionary author, really want to fight with that concluding quote, no? That’s why Gerstner is such a dash of cold water to people like most of my friends -- policy experts and analysts who dwell mostly in the world of visions, ideas and grand strategy. Most of them work alone, and since they don’t manage anyone, they find it hard to think of managing themselves. Cold water is refreshing.

But it’s also irritating. So here’s the one place where I side with those friends and colleagues, most of whom have no experience in large companies, and most of whom would never read a book such as Gerstner’s. Yes, I also have problems with his final declaration, namely that "getting it done better than the next person is far more important that dreaming up new visions of the future."

He’s talking about "execution," i.e. being rigorous enough to deliver on your strategy. Can you go along with him that far? If so, it’s also true that a new type of book is the one way to -- if any one-person product can -- put forth "a new vision."

Surprise? From "How" Back to a New "What"

If you go through all of my exercises, it’s quite possible you will end up committing to write a book quite unlike the one you originally got excited about. Maybe on a wholly different topic. (Coming out somewhere else is okay, assuming you have credibility, or at least some special knowledge, to make your stand there.)

What I’m saying is: The planning exercise will suggest a worthwhile market being neglected, or underserved, or taken for granted. That’s where Gerstner’s book was silent, which is okay. Discoveries begin with one person. Here’s hoping that’s you.

But -- please don’t do all of this in your head, or allow intuition to crowd out planning. If it’s discovery -- some big new "new" -- you’re after in authoring a book, go back 500 years to those Earth-shaking explorers from Europe and Great Britain. Yes, they made discoveries, remapped the globe, and won fame as visionaries. But first they outfitted the fleet of ships, and lined up financial backing.