Clarify Your Cause

The Dream

In August 1990 I had a dream to write a full-length, hardcover business book. I took out a sheet of paper and some markers, went to work, and designed the cover of my hoped for book. Then I folded it and put it on my desk. I kept that sheet for about four years. Since then I've lost the sheet, but kept the dream. Sometimes the dream faded a bit, but I never let it go completely.

Today that dream came true! Today my book, Accelerate: 20 Practical Lessons to Boost Business Momentum (Kaplan Publishing) is available wherever books are sold.

For those of you who are new to this e-newsletter, this edition is unique. For the first time, I'm going to take you inside one of my long-term projects and explain how it came to be. My hope is it will give you some practical insights you can use on your important projects, whether it's writing a commercially-published book or creating some other type of value for your clients.

Every business book is the answer to a question. The question I tried to answer with Accelerate is, "What needs to happen in order to increase the rate of sustainable, profitable improvement in desired business results?" The research for this book included more than 3,000 hours of on site executive coaching with more than 120 executives in over twenty industries over a ten-year period of time. The twenty practical lessons shared in it are the final result of a year-long distillation process of all that research.

Whether you're an entrepreneur, an executive or manager inside an organization, or a consultant, there are multiple benefits to you and to your organization if you decide to write a book. You can enhance both your own brand and your organization's brand as well as add value to people inside and outside your organization by writing a book.

The Making of a Book: A Truly Collaborative Process

When a person writes a commercially-published book, the question that keeps being asked of him, or her, is, "What do I need to do to write a book?" There are literally tens of thousands of people every year who want to write a book, but they don't know where to start. Here's what I have learned. As you will see it has been very much of a collaborative process. Here's my team and the process of how we together produced Accelerate.

Business Coach

Dr. Alan Weiss (alan@summitconsulting.com) has been my business coach for the past eight years. He is one of the preeminent experts in the world on independent consulting. Since 2001 he has been actively challenging me to write books. Together we landed on the idea of me writing the lessons I've learned from 1,500 Executive Coaching sessions with my clients. That concept became the basis for Accelerate.

Writing a Book Proposal

The first step in writing a book is not to write an entire book. The first step is to write a book proposal, or what is called a book treatment, to get a contract to write a book.

A book treatment consists of a cover letter briefly introducing yourself, the book concept, your intended audience, and your credentials; a one-page overview of the book; a table of contents; an introduction; a sample chapter; a one-paragraph explanation for each of the remaining chapters; a description of your marketing plan; a description of the competition for your book and why your book is better; and a description of why you should be the person to write the book and any unique features about the book.

Literary Agent

You can't publish a commercially-published book without a contract, and you pretty much need a literary agent to get a book contract. Jeff Herman (jeff@jeffherman.com) has been my literary agent for four years now and has landed two book deals for me, one paperback and one hardcover. If you're serious about writing a book, I encourage you to read two books Jeff wrote called: Jeff Herman's Guide to Publishers, Editors, and Literary Agents, and Write the Perfect Book Proposal. These books will help you craft your book proposal and find literary agents who represent your type of book.

Writing Coach

Sam Horn (sam@samhorn.com) is my writing coach. She's not a ghost writer. I wrote every word in Accelerate, but Sam used her particular genius to help me craft the layout of the book and to start every chapter with a story based on my actual Executive Coaching experiences. Having a person like Sam is incredibly helpful.

The Writing Process

My contract for Accelerate called for a 78,000 word manuscript to be handed in within six months. Since I hate waiting until the last minute on any project, I set a goal of five months. That meant I needed to write 15,600 words a month for five months, which is about 4,000 words a week or about 13 pages a week.

Since I wanted to be with my wife, Barb, and our two children, Sarah and Ben, as much as possible, I decided to write only between 10 PM and 1 AM when I was home. It's about 12:30 AM right now, and the house is very quiet. Otherwise I wrote in hotel rooms and airport lobbies and airplanes.

I laid out the framework for my book, outlined the key concepts for each chapter, and then deployed what I call the Ferris Wheel Approach to writing where I rotated between personal stories, famous stories, quotes, analogies, Top Ten Lists, diagrams, interviews with corporate executives, and a variety of other techniques to explain my points.

Graphic Designers

Jill Wettstein (jillfcs@aol.com) at FineCraft Studio and Chris Scavotto (chris@scavottodesign.com) at Scavotto Design are my graphic designers. Jill designed all of the graphics in Accelerate, and Chris designed all of my four-color marketing pieces. They are each spectacular in their own way. And the graphics help clarify my ideas in a very powerful manner.

Publishing Team

Then there's my fabulous team at Kaplan Publishing (New York, www.kaplanpublishing.com). Jennifer Farthing, my editorial director, and Shannon Berning, my acquisitions editor, have overseen every step of the publishing process, and have both been great to work with.

Brigit Dermott was my developmental editor on Accelerate, and she gave me, oh, about 500 suggestions on how to make the book better. Her insights were extremely helpful in creating a very user-friendly product. I really appreciated the way she challenged me over and over to write better sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and sections.

Kelley Barrales-Saylor provided the fine editing. My manuscript had 80,000 words in it and Kelley examined every one of them. She did a fantastic job. Any remaining mistakes are mine, not hers.

Samantha Raue and the members of her production team created the final product including the typesetting, font type and size, and the organization of all the content and visuals. I think Samantha did a great job making every page crystal clear so the reader doesn't have to struggle through any of them.

Marketing Team

Of course, an author needs to get the word out about his or her new book, and I have a marvelous marketing team. Here they are:

Web Designer and Editor

Scott Herman of WebEditor Design Services, Inc. created my website in 2000 and has worked very hard over the years to make it both simpler and more value-added for visitors to the site.

Another great web-focused advisor has been Chad Barr (chad@cbsoftware.com) who provides strategic insights into both websites and on-line forums.

Public Relations Firm

My public relations firm is PR/PR, based in Orlando, FL. Chris Hollis (prchamp@prpr.net) is my representative and he has landed me interviews with The New York Times, Condenast Portfolio, Investor's Business Daily, Christian Science Monitor, Detroit Free Press, Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, Brilliant Results Magazine, Idaho Statesmen, and many other publications.

Publicist

My publicist at Kaplan Publishing is Yvette Romero, and she has done a great job for me, including landing me a four-page interview with MWorld, the Journal of the American Management Association, which will appear in their Summer 2007 edition.

E-Marketing

Katey Charles (katey@kateycharles.com) is president of Katey Charles Communications, and she and her team do a great job with my monthly e-newsletters. If you're ever interested in writing an e-newsletter for your organization or your customers, or both, I recommend Katey Charles. Her organization provides e-marketing services for businesses, schools, religious organizations, associations, and so on.

Unique Marketing

If you want to do something a little different than the norm, have a customized cake sent to a client or group who least expects it. For this I have used Cakes Across America (corporate@cakesacrossamerica.com) based in Florida. I've used them for a host of different fun ways to connect with people.

Printer

My printer for all of my marketing materials is Gene-Del printing, and Keith Dodel (keith@genedel.com) does a great job every time I work with him.

Repeat the Process

When I finish writing the manuscript for a book, I usually have 4-6 months before the book is actually published. I use that time to develop my book proposal for my next book project. And the cycle repeats itself.

I develop an idea for a book, discuss the concept with my writing coach, Sam Horn, work with her to hone it to a presentable proposal format, and then send it to my literary agent, Jeff Herman. And away we go!

I'm Asking You To Do Me a Favor

Here's another thing that makes this edition unique. I'm asking you to do me a favor. Would you please purchase one copy of my book, Accelerate, by Friday, May 4th?

Much like a movie or a song, the success of a book is often determined in its first week in bookstores and at on-line retailers. If the first week goes extremely well, then the book gains recognition and preferred placement in stores.

I would truly appreciate it if you would reach out to any of the following on-line stores and purchase one copy of Accelerate by May 4th. Please click on any of the following links:

• Barnesandnoble.com

• Amazon.com

If you would like to purchase Accelerate in bulk, I suggest you go to 800ceoread.com.

or call 800/CEO-READ, ext 206 and ask for Meg Bacik. They do a great job with bulk sales.

Also, you can purchase my book at any Borders or Barnes & Noble bookstore. You may have to order the book at the help desk, but every one of those stores has access to my book.

Thank you very much for considering to purchase a copy of Accelerate. I truly appreciate it.

A Taste of Accelerate

To get an idea of what is covered in Accelerate, down my Manifesto to Accelerate, which is a 22-page action plan to catapult your business results and your career.

Learn About Accelerate

If you want to read the Table of Contents, the introduction, and testimonials about Accelerate click here.

Book Recommendations Jeff Herman's Guide to Publishers, Editors, and Literary Agents and Write the Perfect Book Proposal by Jeff Herman.

Over the past twenty years, Jeff Herman has carved out quite a niche for himself as the expert on connecting potential authors to literary agents and turning their writing dreams into realities. I encourage you to read his books if you think you have a book inside of you that needs to come out.

New White Paper – Accelerate Your Strengths

On June 16th I gave a half-day seminar on “Accelerate Your Strengths: practical ideas to boost business momentum” for GE Capital. It was such an interesting project that I wrote a white paper for the group after the seminar based on what we talked about. In turn, that white paper was forwarded on to 7,000 GE employees. Consequently, I thought you might like to read the paper, except this version has all the references to GE taken out. Here is the link for the

Accelerate Your Strengths white paper: http://thecoughlincompany.com/accellerate_your_strengths.html

New Book, Find a Way to Win: Management Insights from Terry Michler, America's All-Time Winningest Soccer Coach

This book focuses on business lessons that can be learned from soccer. The foundation of the book is how Terry Michler used the powerful simplicity of Dutch soccer to win more games than any other U.S. coach in history.

On July 11th, the finals of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa between Holland and Spain was watched by more than 700 million people. While I was cheering for Holland at the beginning of the game, a major decision by their coach led me to learning a valuable lesson all over again.

Dutch soccer, which is highlighted in my book, is all based on extraordinary technical skill, efficiency, and precise attacking soccer. This is how a country with only 16 million people competes so extraordinarily well with the world's super powers in soccer including number-one ranked Brazil, whom they beat in the quarterfinals. However, in the World Cup finals Holland abandoned what made them great and instead focused on playing brutal, violent soccer. They wanted to intimidate Spain, and in the end they lost the game and the respect of so many people who love Dutch soccer. What happened and why did they do it?

They felt they couldn't compete with Spain if they allowed them to get into their normal passing game. So they consciously decided to physically attack the Spanish players with violent tackles all over the field. One Dutch player even shoved his metal cleats into the chest of a Spanish player. They received numerous yellow cards, a red card, and ridicule from the world-wide soccer press after the game.

What's the lesson to learn here for every business? Stay true to who you are. When the prize is close don't abandon what got you to be one of the best organizations in your industry. Too many companies in the past ten years have decided that what made them very, very good wasn't going to be enough to make them number one in their industry, and so they got away from their strengths. Big mistake.

I believe Holland will return to their traditional style of play, focus on precise, skillful, attacking soccer, and get away from their violent style of play. I think they learned a huge lesson. And hopefully every business that got away from its core strength in the pursuit of being bigger and more successful financially than anyone else in the industry will also return to its core and get back to winning again.

You can learn more about Find a Way to Win at http://thecoughlincompany.com/book_store.html

Republishing Articles

Each month my e-newsletter gets republished in approximately 20 blogs, on-line publications, and internal publications for businesses, universities, and not-for-profit organizations. If you would like to republish all or part of my monthly articles, please send me an e-mail at dan@thecoughlincompany.com with "Republishing Article" in the subject heading. I will send you the article in a word document. All I ask is that you include my name as the author of the article and a short paragraph at the end of the article about me with a link to my website.

Take care and have a great month!

Dan Coughlin

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