Writing and publishing articles helps differentiate you from competitors and colleagues. It helps you sharpen your own thinking on a subject, making you more articulate when speaking with clients. Publishing can transform a career. I know it has transformed mine. You could say the same thing about many more prominent rainmakers, including accountant and management consultant, James O. McKinsey; management consultant, Peter Drucker; architect Phillip Johnson; engineer, Frederick Winslow Taylor and many others.

While not a required activity—there are many rainmakers who have never published—publishing articles offers enough benefits that it warrants all professionals’ consideration. Those with an urge to publish find time to do so. Those who don’t are put off by the perceived time required to get something written.

This posting will show that by using a specific formula, it is relatively easy to write a short article suitable for an opinions column. The articles for such columns are almost always written by outside contributors, like you, and appear towards the back many periodicals. The columns bear such regrettable titles as As I See It, or The Last Word or My Point of View. (As a significant service to the language, political correctness has forced the abandonment of one of the worst of the column titles, One Man’s Meat.)

Many of the entries in these columns express contrarian views on some trend or happening. For example, at the height corporate scandals kicked off by the implosion of Enron, The Wall Street Journal ran an article entitled “Cross-Selling Will Outlast Enron and Anderson (August 13, 2002: Page B2). The title captures its message. Let’s look at format for this piece.

The first paragraph links the article to a current event. This was essential for WSJ, a newspaper, but not required for a magazine. The event in this case, the sale of Pricewaterhouse Cooper’s consulting business to IBM, resulted from all the bad press accounting firms with large management consulting practices were getting for cross selling. This bad press reversed a trend for big service firms like PwC to add more and more services to feed to their clients. This old, bulking-up trend and its demise were described in a couple of paragraphs, including a paragraph about how the trend was sweeping not just accounting firms, but also law firms, and human resources consulting firms.

Six short paragraphs followed which agued for cross selling as essential and, in many cases, desirable for the client as well as the service provider. One paragraph shows how innocuous a lot of cross selling is. And a final paragraph summarizes the argument and states that cross selling is here to stay.

It can be outlined as follows:

1. Introduce issue and argument
2. Link to current event and its relevance to readers.
3. Introduce counter argument
4. Discuss aspects of counter argument
   Aspect #1
   Aspect #2
   Aspect #3
   Aspect #4
5. Summary
6. Conclusion

Knowing the subject, the author found this article easy to write. Pick a subject you know well of a trend going too far and see if you can make up a similar outline.
Let’s say, for example, that were predictions of the demise of mid-sized firms in your profession, and that you felt that this concern was exaggerated. Your opinion piece would be structure as follows.

1. Introduce Issue: Predictions of disappearance of mid-sized firms are both common and exaggerated. Such firms will be around for a long time.
2. Link to event: The sale of Firm X reinforced the claims that mid-sized firm can’t possibly compete with large ones.
3. Counter Argument: These predications are made periodically by people who don’t understand the profession. Reasons to feel that mid-sized firms will survive include:
   - Argument #1, Low Barriers to Entry
   - Argument #2, Room for Niche Players Where Big Firms Can’t Compete
   - Argument #3, Mid-sized Firms Often Sold as Exit Strategy of Founding Partners, but Historically a Few Firms Succeed at Growing into Large Ones
4. Summary: Predictions of demise of mid-sized firms are exaggerated
5. Conclusion: Clients, job seekers and suppliers to midsized firm need not be concerned about their long-term viability.

Now try to do the same with a claim that you disagree with. If you want to send a draft of your article for me to review and send back with annotations, please feel free to send me a copy. Please include the words “Article for Review” in the title of what you send me. I will be happy to review and return it to you.

Remember to keep it short. Opinions pieces typically run between 750 words (about the length of this posting) and 1,000 words.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Rainmaker, Pubishing Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.