Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours, and that this e-mail finds you on a boat with shoddy connection, in the tropics, three months after I sent it - which, given my current IT issues, is likelier than ever.
Now accepting keynotes for 23Q3-24Q1
Every year, I create three main presentations. For 2023, they are:
Delusions of determinism: Why planning for success leads to failure
Regression toward the meme: Why modern leadership continues to fall into old traps
Under pressure: Retail in a new financial era
If you want to book me for your event, workshop, or guest speaking slot, just send me an email. To make sure I am available, however, please do so at your earliest convenience; my schedule is filling up fast. More information can be found here.
A couple of updates before we go-go
For all the talk of high speed trains being superior to airplanes because they offer better working conditions, I must say that the experience does not live up to the legend. Although free Wi-Fi certainly is nice, and the silence of a quiet carriage first class is lovely, the constant movement creates a sensation of nonstop turbulence when you are typing away on a keyboard.
I never understood the point of selling a service as a slightly less shit version of something else, instead of a lovely version of something altogether different. Rory has a hypothesis that videoconferencing never took off because it was positioned as a poor man’s air travel instead of a rich man’s phone call. He may have a point. Trains excel at comfortable traveling amid scenic surroundings. Why try to be a crap office on wheels?
Having said all that, working Wi-Fi would be a blessing right now; my IP, by all accounts, is currently attempting to run its internet services off the voltage generated by an arthritic hamster in a Ferris wheel. I have not been able to access the internet other than via my iPhone all week.
Moving on from first-world problems and the incoherent ramblings of a loudmouth malcontent, today’s newsletter will not feature a guest writer but yours truly. More guest writers are to come, but for now, I will once more take over. So, let us get into it.
Thoughts on writing
The creation of a different kind of business book
I wrote my first professional – using the term somewhat liberally – piece when I was 14 years old. By then, my essays had won a few competitions and so, with the sort of optimistic naïveté habitually reserved for the young, I thought an article for an industry leading magazine was a natural next step. The editor was kind enough to allow me to try.
Not wanting to disappoint, I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote, until I thought I had covered everything. His feedback was predictable. “It is great”, he replied, “but you are trying to get too much in. Think about the narrative first and the details later.”
I rewrote my piece and, eventually, it made it into print: a tiny, heavily edited, 500 word story covering my experiences at the first ever snowboarding world cup event held in Sweden. I doubt anyone ever saw it, hidden away on a late page in-between news recaps and advertisements. But to me, it meant the world.
Today, nearly three decades later, his feedback remains firmly lodged in the back of my head. Think of the narrative first and the details later. It is the standard way to compose, a best practice that authors have adhered to for centuries. But, as I have discovered in now quite a few years writing, it is not the only way. One can also begin with the details and attempt to identify the emergent narrative that connects them. It is more challenging, but can be more rewarding. At its uncommon best, the author is able to uncover hidden truths and see how seemingly unrelated items are, in fact, tightly connected. At its common worst, the author draws all the wrong conclusion and comes across as no more than a half-baked conspiracy theorist. The best solution, therefore, is typically to do a bit of both. One begins with a narrative in mind, but remains open to adaptation should emergent details force a shift in direction.
But few business writers actually do. Since it is near-impossible to make money off books, their ideal output is a single idea that one can sum up in ten pages extended into 300; a narrative established before the first letter has been typed, and cherry-picked evidence to support it.
To be fair to the writers, it is also what literary agents and publishers typically seek. Financial returns are created on the speaking circuit during the 18 months that follow the book’s release; that 290 out of 300 pages are fluff is neither here nor there when you only need ten for a keynote. Once the tour is over, the cycle begins anew, and the world ticks on.
Steve and I decided early on that our upcoming book will be different. Rather than create an overstretched leaflet, we have ensured that each and every subchapter is able to stand on its own. Given the very practical nature of what we will be discussing, we thought there was no other intellectually honest approach - help that is provided with an asterisk of “to be continued” simply is not genuine. We are also entirely open when it comes to what one might call counter-evidence, thereby enabling the reader to make up their own mind about our reasoning. If they end up disagreeing, so be it.
The challenge, outside of the entire literary world telling us that we should stick to what everyone else is doing, is that the approach takes time. A lot of time. When one is making the same point on every page, research is a relatively brisk, one-and-done endeavor. When every chapter raises a new point in order to build a larger argument, research is perpetual. If the details are not perfect, or at least good enough to be met with nodding approval from an expert within the relevant field, the entire exercise fails.
Perhaps we are indeed going about it the wrong way; perhaps we are overambitious; perhaps we are in for a long line of Schadenfreudians gleefully telling us that they told us so. But I am genuinely very proud of what we have written thus far – in fact, I think it is my best work to date by some distance. I also think that, as a result, the output should stand not just the test of critics but that of time significantly better.
Sure, putting ten books’ worth of insights, ideas, methods and tools into one may admittedly be a poor financial decision. We know. Yet, when it comes to the overall value equation for the reader, it makes more sense to us (in our potential ignorance) to increase the numerator than lower the denominator.
And either way, at the end of the proverbial day, there is no telling whether our work will have an impact on the international stage or end up on the mountain of strategy writings that nobody could be bothered to flick through. The success of books follows power law distributions; for every successful author, there are thousands upon thousands of never-reads. Statistically, we are significantly more likely to end up in the latter group than in the former.
If that is our fate, I want to be able to welcome it knowing that I have poured my heart and soul into making what is on our pages different to those that have come before. However the book is received, I will know that I gave it my all.
And that, really, is all that is in my power to do.
Next week, we will get back to more common strategy parlance. Until then, have the loveliest of weekends.
Onwards and upwards,
JP
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