Mark Murphy argues CEOs need a business book to establish authority in their market, and it can be done in 45 days with a ghostwriter. Start by answering one question: how does your company uniquely solve a painful problem? Then follow a simple structure: origin story, how your organization aligns around the solution, and real customer examples.
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If you're a CEO, you absolutely have to have a book. Why? Because it will make you the go-to authority in your industry. It will get conferences lining up to have you speak. It will open doors for new prospects because you are the person that has solved the single most important problem in your space. Hi, I'm Mark Murphy. I'm a New York Times bestselling author. I've written a lot of books and I'm a senior contributor at Forbes., and what I'm gonna share with you in this is not how to write a book that takes a year and ultimately ends up with you on the New York Times bestseller list and on the shelves of every airport bookstore, but rather how to write a book quickly that does everything you need it to do from a business growth point of view. Listen, if you wanna retire and pen the great American novel, kudos, I applaud that, but that's a year-long endeavor. That is not a book you can get done in 45 days and that is going to open doors to triple your business. That's a special project. What I'm talking about is a book you can get done in 45 days that does open doors and establishes you and your company as the go-to player in your space. So the number one thing you've got to do if you're going to write a book like this and get a book written, because you're probably going to use a ghostwriter, of course, but the single most important thing you have to do is answer the question how your company uniquely solves a deep pain in the market, because that is what your book is about. That is what people are going to want to read, and that is going to ensure that everybody in your industry who faces this particular pain comes to you as the primary authority on that. So listen, I can tell you, as a senior contributor at Forbes, I interview a lot of prominent people— Fortune 500 CEOs, Nobel Prize winners, and the list goes on. And fundamentally, the question for all of these folks is still the same. It is, how are you uniquely solving a deep pain in your marketplace? If it's a Nobel Prize winner, maybe it's the pain of not being able to figure out how to create blue LED lights like Shuji Nakamura on the left there. Or if you're Ken Hicks, CEO of Academy Sports, a $6 billion company. Maybe it is how do we hold on to up-and-coming leaders in a major retail organization. It doesn't matter how niche your problem is that you're solving, you just have to be the go-to authority on that issue. So again, it all comes down to how your company uniquely solves a deep pain in the marketplace. And if you think about it like this, for example, If I'm the CEO of an architectural firm, maybe my specialty is designing office spaces that are really attractive for employees to come back to the office, right? Like the world's gone remote, but maybe my specialty is designing office spaces so that employees want to actually be in the office. So now my book might be something like Magnetic Workspaces: Designing Offices That Attract Employees to Return to Work. Now, anytime, any company is thinking about how do I get employees back into the office, they're looking at your book going, oh well, this guy literally wrote the book on this topic. We gotta have them come in and do it because who am I gonna get, some company that didn't literally write the book or the firm that literally wrote the book on this issue? You're gonna always take the people that literally wrote the book. If you're in a space in manufacturing, for example, and the pain solve— plaguing the industry is that there are stockouts, that people can't get orders delivered on time. They say it's going to take 3 months and it really ends up taking 12 months. Maybe your special sauce is that you are never out of stock, that you have zero breakdown manufacturing, you just don't ever have order delays. Well, now anytime somebody has an ounce of concern about, well, yeah, we want to order this part, but I don't know if it's going to get here on time, you're the go-to people for that. If you're the go-to authority on this, you will be speaking at industry conferences. You will get doors opened for you. Somebody might have turned you down if one of your salespeople called them up, but then they come to them with one of your books and they say, yeah, we're— we literally wrote the book on this. And now they won't say no. They will actually weirdly take the book, read it for an hour. They wouldn't give you 10 minutes for a sales pitch, but now they will spend an hour reading your book. Why? Because you are the authority on it. If you can answer that fundamental question, how your company uniquely solves a deep pain in the market, writing the book— like, okay, so I'll back up for a second. I obviously write my own books. I'm— have my own established authorial reputation, but I also very secretly ghostwrite 5 to 6 books for CEOs every year. And once we get this fundamental question answered We can crank out a book in 45 days because once you answer that question, how we're uniquely solving a deep pain in the market, writing the book then becomes a very simple exercise. You have your idea, you have your special unique solution. Now the rest of the book is explaining the origin or the evolution of that idea. This is the, ooh, how did this come about? Well, that's kind of cool. I want to know more about that, what it took to actually build this thing. This is really important when you're writing a business book like this because it shows the rest of the industry you can't build what I built because it took a lot. And not only is it interesting to the reader, but it also tells everybody, yeah, you probably can't repeat what we did because what we did was pretty darn cool and special and it took some time and effort. You also want to share how all of the different players in your organization, even if you only have 3, 4, or 5 employees, you want to show how all the different functions in your organization are really aligned on helping to achieve this goal, which also again further puts up some competitive barriers. And then finally, there's an old rule in business books: show me, don't tell me. And here you want to actually share some customer examples, some results. And by the way, when you're writing a book like this, oh, it's just a wonderful opportunity to showcase some of your favorite clients, some of your long-term best customers, and show them off in the book. They will be customers for life when you get to highlight them in this book you're writing. So if you start with this fundamental idea, really laser it in. Again, this is not a legacy book. I want to write the book that someday my grandchildren will read. This isn't that. This is the book that opens doors and establishes you as the go-to authority in your market space. This is a book with a purpose. Once you have that fundamental question, this is how I am able to write books for CEOs in 45 days, is get that question answered and Everything else just builds off of that. By the way, if you do want to reach out, if you do want to have a chat, if you're a CEO and you're seriously considering writing a book and you want to bounce some ideas around, feel free to reach out to me. You won't find this on our website because, as I said, all of my books are on our website. That's, you know, what I'm known for. This is the secret service, so you have to reach out to me directly for this one because we keep this one on the down low. But if you want to shoot me an email and have a little chat about this, just shoot me a note to mark@leadershipiq.com and I will give you my unvarnished opinion.
