Every business or management book seeks to solve a problem for the entrepreneur, corporate leader, or manager who picks it up. The reader faces a challenge—say, stagnant revenues, lack of innovation, employee disengagement—and looks to the author for answers. The author is like an expert consultant, accessible through their printed book, ebook, or audiobook at a relatively cheap price.
Writing—or in my case, ghostwriting—a business book takes discipline and knowledge of the genre. Businesspeople are busy and they don’t have time to read at a leisurely pace, as if they were lounging on the beach on a hot summer day. To keep their attention, you need to be concise and pack every page with actionable information.
I said that every business book solves a problem. To be more precise, the overarching challenge will usually consist of many smaller problems combining together. One small problem can cascade into another, until all the ripples combine into one mighty tsunami.
To be effective, a non-fiction business book must follow my 1-2-3 Formula for Success. Here it is.
1. State the problem. This may seem obvious, but surprisingly, many ghostwriters and authors don’t understand the importance of clearly outlining the challenge to be overcome. The reader has to know they have chosen the right book! They want answers to their problem, not a bunch of platitudes that could apply to anyone.
This step has another important qualification to it: The statement of the problem needs to be very brief. It needs to be just detailed enough to make the reader interested, but not so long as to become boring. I’ve seen too many business books that drone on about the problem and every possible aspect of it, when the reader knows all too well what their difficulty is, and just wants answers! So keep this first section short and concise. Describing a problem is easy, but solving it is the hard part, which makes the solution valuable.
2. State your solution. You’re the expert! Reveal, in your own words, how the reader can solve their problem. It may be changing the company culture, offering better compensation, renewing the focus on excellence, spearheading product or service innovation, changing the attitude of the leaders—as the author, this is your job to define. It’s what the reader is paying for. Make your solution simple, clear, and actionable.
3. Offer proof in the form of third-party validation. In step #2, you were basically telling the reader what to do to solve their problem. But there’s no reason why the reader should believe you. To bolster your case, you need to cite a reliable, third-party source. It could be a true story from your own career—for example, this approach worked very well for Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, both ex-Navy SEALs, who wrote, Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win. The book was based on their shared experience patrolling the dangerous streets of Ramadi, Iraq, which they translated to business applications.
Lacking your own real-life stories, you can use your own proprietary research (your old college papers or grad school thesis can sometimes find new life!) or cite case studies of other companies. If you can’t find a juicy tidbit on your own, you should be able to find newspaper or journal articles that are reliable. No matter how you do it, you need to find stories, either on the free internet or through a subscription platform such as JSTOR or Oxford Academic, that will credibly validate your solution.
Those are the three steps: Describe the problem, offer the solution, and validate it with evidence. You do this over and over again throughout your book until the mosaic comes together into a clear picture. This is what Willink and Babin did. The overarching theme of the Extreme Ownership book was that you could boost organizational outcomes and meet goals by taking personal responsibility whenever possible. Each story addressed a facet of this problem and added a piece to the overall solution.
