What Writing Books Is Good For

My colleague Mark Schwartz' new book The Delicate Art of Bureaucrazy (Freudian slip) just came out. Mark is a gifted writer, the kind who buries new insights and invitations for reflection beneath a friendly layer of humor and the occasional dose of sarcasm. Revealing himself as an iconoclast, but not being too cynic to convene himself of the label "thought leader" on the back cover of his previous book, his books are a fairly accurate reflection of what Mark's like in real life.

Books? That's so 1998... ?

The internet dealt the publishing industry a giant blow, outdone perhaps only by travel agents. Luckily (but slightly unfairly), Covid has boosted reading while it put another nail in the travel intermediary's coffin. Covid aside, non-fiction books did enjoy a noticeable renaissance in recent years.

The first wave of the internet made everyone who could copy and paste a bit of JavaScript a programmer. Not too long after, people realized, though, that building and securing applications that scale to millions of users, integrate with other services, run on top of cloud platforms, and are able to predict use behavior isn't quite so simple. Also, we have come to understand that the shiniest tech isn't going to give you the anticipated benefits if you don't also adjust your way of working and your organization's culture (see my post on the Treacherous Value Gap). So, meaningful guidance has become high in demand, both from developers and from executives.

Trusted Advisors

IT leaders lead a tough and sometimes lonely life. As I jested in a Blog Post on IT Complexity a while ago, most people advising IT decision makers have ulterior motives. These motives contribute to IT adding more stuff as opposed to taking things away, which is one of the reasons IT is bogged down by excessive complexity.

Knowing that technical transformation requires upper management support , we are seeing strong demand for so-called trusted advisors. Never shy to meet a customer's demand, vendors are eager to establish teams that address the C-suite's concerns. While well intentioned, this move can also lead to problems:

• I routinely remind folks that everyone wants to talk to the C-Suite but the C-Suite doesn't want to talk to everyone. So, you better have something meaningful to say.
• High demand for a premium product leads to fakes - it's no different in IT than with handbags. You're going to want an advisor who has been there and done that.

Having seen (and, sadly, worked alongside) some fakes motivated me to write a pointed blog post titled Should you trust your trusted advisor? One criteria I put forward is that a trusted advisor who purports to be a though leader should have shared some original thought in the form of blog posts, articles, or books.

Original Thought is Worth Publishing

Marks latest book reminded my of the amazing variety of books published by our relatively small team of AWS Enterprise Strategists:

• Stephen Orban's Ahead in the Cloud (2018)
• Jonathan Allen and Thomas Blood's Reaching Cloud Velocity (2020)
• Mark "The Library of Congress added a wing just for me" Schwartz with The Art of Business Value (2016); A Seat at the Table (2017); War, Peace, and IT (2019); and The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy (2020)
• And last but hopefully not least myself with The Software Architect Elevator (2020) and Cloud Strategy (2020)

We also maintain a fairly active team blog. I've been around the industry quite a bit and have for example co-authored blog posts with Bryan Stiekes and Ben Wilson during my time with Google Cloud. But it struck me that similar teams aren't nearly as prolific when it comes to publishing as our team. Moreover, 80% of the content we publish is not vendor specific but tries to help customers navigate cloud transformations in any form or shape.

So, how come? Do we have more time to write? I don't think so - most of the books written by us are personal books, written on nights and weekends and flights (when there were some). Mark might jest that we have simply more to say. As with most of Mark's snarky remarks, there is a bit of truth to this one, also.

Don't Tell me where to go. Tell me how to get there.

A trusted advisor or thought leader should do more than just recite buzzword and objectives. Any enterprise not living under a rock has understood that the world is changing, that agility is the name of the game, that they should become lean along their transformation journey and perhaps delayer the organization while they're at it. So, a meaningful advisor needs to deliver more - they need to tell you how to get from here to there. That, interestingly, is disproportionally harder than just repeating random strings of buzzwords.

Instead, true thought leaders and advisors will have managed to distill mental models and mechanisms from the data points they have gathered from conversations with many customers. And these mental models are worth writing down - not in a few bullet points, but in an actual document. That's why you'll find a strong correlation between depth of thought and amount of material published (we far away from any "publish or perish" regime, so we write something when we feel we have something to say).

But What if I'm Not a Gifted Writer?

Now someone might say that I suffer from confirmation bias after having written some books. Perhaps someone has tons of original thought but just isn't a great writer. The first analogy coming my mind would be whether a thought that's never articulated is like the tree in the forest who fell but wasn't heard. But perhaps the thought could just be verbally articulated instead of being written? To that I have a rather strong point of view: if the thought is clear in your mind, you wouldn't have much problem writing it down. No one is expecting Pulitzer-caliber writing, but clarity of thought. Hire a good editor if you need help straightening out your grammar.

I have worked alongside senior level self-declared "thought leaders" who needed someone to review their emails because they struggled to form a grammatically correct paragraph. At that point I would suggest that you picked the wrong career. Not everyone needs to be a great writer but if you have poor hand-eye coordination perhaps you won't become a pilot and if you have shaky hands you might leave surgery to someone else. I perhaps won't be looking at an acting career at least in this life. That's OK - not everyone has to be good at everything, but please be good at what you do.

People Love to Read

People read 2-3 times faster than they listen, so writing things down is also a service for your customers. Also, it's much harder to waffle about in a written document. Most executives I have met love to read a good, succinct document but are frustrated that they see so few. So, if you want to earn trust as an advisor, go, write something down.