Facibus Reviews

My father’s family had some fairly old-fashioned sayings - one about “going west” as a euphamism for death has its roots in an Ancient Egyptian belief that the souls of the departed would accompany the sun as it set in the West.

Another saying was “as dear as poison” when describing an overpriced item. I have no idea what this means really, but my best guess was that the poison was not expensive originally because of its ticket price - it was expensive by nature of the effect it could have on family and livestock. In other words, my guess is that poison was expensive because of the damage that it could do.

I’m researching the art and craft of writing white papers at the moment - I’ve written a heap of them in my professional life, and some have been what I considered truly great. What I want to do is write a truly great white paper every time. I want to avoid poisoning my writing with expensive mistakes.
I’m pretty hot on the power of differentiation at the moment - I want to know what I can do to make my writing stand out from the crowd - and the first best thing I can do is to perfect the craft of writing.

There is a great metaphor for a poisoned white paper at Michael Stelzner’s Writing White Papers blog. He talks about an episode of “The Apprentice” where the losing team skipped a basic step - the needs assessment. They went into the task with inadequate knowledge of the client needs - what they wanted and how they expected to receive it - and failed accordingly.

I wish that I could say that this is unheard of in the world of consulting, but that is not the case.

Michael’s hints to avoid this particular poison are:

• Identify the primary and secondary target audiences for the paper.
• Ask lots questions about the audience: what is their typical title, average age, general disposition and so on.
• Determine the objective of the paper: to educate, sell, inform, differentiate, introduce, etc.
• What are the big level issues, problems or needs that must be addressed in the paper?
• Develop an outline that will guide future discussions.
• Who are the key players who must be interviewed?
• Who are the key competitors to analyze?
• What is the schedule and timeline?

A couple of thousand words could be written on each of these. Most of the answers to these questions come with following basic commonsense consulting 101 principals - look at the story, talk to the necessary people, adjust the story to fit the reality, work out what really needs to be done, and do it while selling the solution. It’s also basic user centered document design - Stephen King said it well when he said “Write to your audience - everything else is BS”.

What I would like to do is take you on a journey with me as I discovour the true art of writing white papers - if nothing else, it will be entertaining.