How Business Strategists Can Write a Book That Builds Authority

The people you want to read your book have already read the strategy books. The CEO of a 400-person manufacturer has Good Strategy Bad Strategy somewhere in the office. The PE operating partner can recite Porter on trade-offs.

So your book cannot teach strategy in general; the classics do that better. It has to say something about the reader’s own situation that the classics could not, backed by evidence the reader cannot get elsewhere.

This guide covers what is specific to strategy work. For the general consultant’s plan (billable hours, IP ownership), see how to write a book as a consultant.

Compete on the situation, not on strategy theory

A thesis for a strategy book has four parts: a type of company, a moment or constraint, what usually goes wrong, and what you would do instead. Drop the first two and you get a general strategy book, which is the one shelf where you will lose to Rumelt and Porter.

The situation is your advantage. A strategist who has worked with thirty family businesses has seen the same argument between siblings more often than any academic.

Situation	What generic strategy books tend to ignore	Hypothetical thesis
Mid-market firms (too big for the founder to hold the plan in their head, too small for a strategy team)	Nobody’s full-time job is strategy, so the plan dies in the budget round	“Mid-market companies don’t need a strategic plan; they need a quarterly kill list”
Family businesses	Ownership goals and management goals are different, and both sit at the same table	“Most family-business strategy fails at the shareholder meeting, not in the market”
PE-backed companies	The exit date fixes the time horizon, and the 100-day plan often replaces strategy	“A hold-period strategy should be written backwards from the buyer’s diligence questions”

Each of those theses could be wrong. That is the point. For the book-level version of this test (whether informed peers would argue with you), see how to write a thought leadership book. If you are still choosing a topic, these book ideas for management consultants are sorted by practice area and buyer.

Our view: you are better off writing the best book for 2,000 family-business owners than the 400th general book on competitive advantage. The narrow book gets read by people who can hire you.

Evidence a solo strategist actually has, and how to caveat it

You will not match a large firm’s benchmarks. You have something narrower and often more useful. Four sources, with the caveat each needs:

Patterns across engagements

Your diagnostic work is the core evidence. Count how often a pattern appeared and state the denominator: “in 11 of the 17 family businesses we worked with between 2018 and 2025”. Keep the conditions and the exceptions. Never describe one client in enough detail to be recognised. The IMC USA Code of Ethics (Article 5) commits members to “treat appropriately all confidential client information that is not public knowledge” and not to take advantage of proprietary information without the client’s consent. For the permission emails and disguise levels, see client stories and case studies in a book.

Public company data

Analysing public companies shows how you think without exposing a client. The SEC’s EDGAR full-text search covers electronic filings since 2001, so you can trace what a listed company said its strategy was and what it did over the next five years. In the UK, GOV.UK’s company information service gives free access to officers, filed document images and insolvency information for registered companies. Caveat: public companies are rarely the mid-market or family firms you write about, so use them to illustrate a mechanism, not to prove it applies to your reader.

Your own survey

A survey of owners in your niche can give a book a number no one else has. It is also the evidence strategists most often overstate. Sent to your mailing list or posted on LinkedIn, it is an opt-in sample. AAPOR, the US public opinion research body, has stated that “it is impossible to develop statistically valid margins of sampling error from nonprobability surveys” such as opt-in online polls (AAPOR, 2012).

That does not make the survey useless. It changes how you write about it. AAPOR’s disclosure standards give a sensible minimum to borrow: say whether the sample was probability-based or opt-in, give the exact question wording, the sample size, the dates of collection and who sponsored and ran it. Put that in a one-page method note at the back, and write results as “of the 140 owners who responded” rather than “most family businesses”.

Your dated calls

This one is underused. A 2021 board memo recommending a client exit a product line, plus what happened next (anonymised), is evidence of judgement. Strategists sell forecasts. Two calls you got right and one you got wrong, with your reasoning at the time, persuade more than any survey.

Evidence	Good for	Weak for	Caveat to print
Engagement patterns	Showing what happens in your situation	Proving prevalence across the market	Denominator, period, how cases were selected
Public filings	Showing a mechanism in a named company	Claims about private mid-market firms	“Listed companies differ from our readers in…”
Your survey	A number nobody else has	Market-wide percentages	Opt-in sample, wording, n, dates, sponsor
Dated calls	Demonstrating judgement	Generalising	What you got wrong, too

Buyers notice. In LinkedIn’s write-up of its 2024 study with Edelman, 55% of decision-makers named strong research and data as a top trait of high-quality thought leadership. LinkedIn sells B2B advertising, so read that as a direction, not a measurement.

The strategy platitude test

Strategy writing has a specific failure: sentences that sound like advice and commit to nothing. “Focus on your core customers.” “Align the organisation behind the vision.” “Invest in capabilities that differentiate.” Rumelt built a book around this problem. His publisher’s description of Good Strategy Bad Strategy (Crown Currency, 2011) criticises treating “fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals” as strategy, and describes a good strategy as “a specific and coherent response to” the obstacles to progress.

Porter makes the matching point from the other side. In “What Is Strategy?” (Harvard Business Review, 1996) he writes that “the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do”.

Your buyers know both ideas, so they will spot a platitude faster than any other audience. Run every recommendation through this test.

Before: “Family businesses should professionalise governance to support long-term growth.” After: “If the family holds more than one seat on the operating board, move all but one to a separate family council within a year, even though the sibling who loses the seat will see it as a demotion.” The second could be wrong. It names an obstacle, a loser and a threshold, so a chair can argue with it and will remember it.

A structure that mirrors the work: diagnosis, choices, trade-offs, execution

Strategy engagements run in a recognisable order, and the book should too, so a buyer reads your contents page as a description of how you work.

Part	Chapters	What it does	What the reader gets
1. Diagnosis	2–3	What is actually happening in these companies, with your evidence	A scorecard they can run on their own firm
2. Choices	3–4	The few real options, and when each works	A decision rule for choosing between them
3. Trade-offs	1–2	What each choice costs and who pays	A list of things to stop
4. Execution	2–3	Sequencing, the first quarter, how the board tracks it	A review rhythm and a one-page board report

Most strategy books skip the trade-offs part. We would write it first, because it is where your experience shows. Anyone can list options. Only someone who has watched a PE-backed company cut a profitable but distracting product line can say honestly what the choice costs.

Praise quoted on Rumelt’s publisher page singles out his ideas of “the kernel” and “the proximate objective”. If your structure borrows from them, cite the book itself, not a summary. For chapter order in general, see how to structure a business book.

A hypothetical example

Imagine a strategist who has spent eight years advising family-owned manufacturers with revenue between $20m and $150m. Her thesis: second-generation family manufacturers stall because the shareholders never agree what the company is for, so management plans for growth while half the owners want dividends. Her evidence: a pattern count from 23 engagements, a survey of 160 owners via an industry newsletter (method note at the back), and three family-controlled listed companies whose filings show the same tension. Her trade-offs chapter is called “Who gives something up”, and her execution part ends with the quarterly shareholder-and-board review she sells as a retainer.

Draft from your own memos, not from a blank page

Diagnostic reports, board papers, offsite pre-reads and the slide where you explain the four options hold your actual reasoning in your own words. They are the best starting point for a draft. They also contain client details, so anonymise before anything leaves your machine.

Guided software can help here, and WritebookAI is one option. You upload PDF, Word or text files, and its source analysis shows what your material covers and what is missing; a verification interview asks about gaps before you approve a chapter plan. When a chapter lacks something, such as a client result or an unsourced statistic, it leaves it out and asks you rather than inventing it. It will not run your survey, judge whether your thesis is sharp or check your client contracts. A developmental editor who knows strategy publishing does more of that, at a higher price. The free start is described on the WritebookAI homepage. For the wider risk with any AI tool, see how to stop AI inventing facts in your book.

How the book supports retainers and board work

Be careful with the promise. We found no reliable data linking books to board appointments. Josh Bernoff’s 2025 summary of his business book study reports that 31% of respondents boosted their consulting revenue and 34% had no gross profit, and he notes “plenty of survivor bias”. The study was run with partners that sell author services.

What the book can do is shorten the part of a sale where a senior buyer works out how you think. Three ways to design for that:

• Make the diagnostic the entry offer. If Part 1 ends with a scorecard, the obvious next step is having you run it properly.
• Make Part 4 the retainer. If the execution chapters describe a quarterly review and a one-page board report, a CEO can picture the retainer before you propose it.
• Give chairs and investors something to forward. Board and advisory roles often start with a chair or investor asking someone they trust. The trade-offs chapter is what they forward, because it shows judgement under constraint.

For the wider sales mechanics (capture, follow-up and the first conversation), see how to use a book to attract clients and the main-site guide to the authority book for consultants.

Mistakes we see in strategists’ books

• The literature review. Three chapters summarising the classics before any idea of your own. Your reader has read them; cite them in a sentence.
• The framework zoo. Six two-by-twos and no decision rule connecting them. One diagnostic and one rule beat six models.
• The survey that proves too much. An opt-in sample of 90 presented as “most CEOs believe”. One sceptical reader can discredit the whole book.

Before you outline: write two things

First, the thesis in one sentence, with all four parts: the type of company, the situation, what goes wrong and what you would do instead. Run it through the opposite test. If nobody would argue the reverse, start again.

Second, write the trade-offs chapter’s opening page. Name a real choice your readers face, what it costs and who pays. If that page comes easily, you have a book. If it does not, you have found the gap in your evidence, and that is the thing to fix before you write anything else.