Playing To Win
The Writing vs. Editing Distinction
Impact on Strategy, Boards & Artificial Intelligence
I always like it when multiple independent conversations spur me to think about a singular thing — and it happened in the past couple of weeks. One conversation was with a COO/CTO client who knows way more about Artificial Intelligence (AI) than I will ever know and wanted to discuss his latest thinking. A second was with a CEO client who was thinking through how and when to involve the board in our work together. The third was several decades ago with a magazine editor client. The three converged when I decided that a learning from the old conversation applied to the subjects of the two new conversations, which I write about it in this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece called The Writing vs. Editing Distinction: Impact on Strategy, Boards & Artificial Intelligence. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here.
The Three Conversations
The first recent conversation was with a clever COO who also serves as CTO of a prominent global organization who wanted my feedback on a deep and thoughtful piece he had written on the likely impact of AI on his organization. One learning for me from his piece was the distinction between generation and verification,the ability to generate an excellent solution versus verify that a solution is indeed correct, respectively. It turns out that the various relationships between the difficulty of generation versus verification create differentially effective AI solutions. If verification is easy — like whether a Sudoku solution is correct — then AI can learn to brute force its way to generating an answer. If verification is hard — e.g., will this be a successful strategy — AI has a tough time.
The second recent conversation was with an entrepreneurial business-building CEO who has already built a small business into a profitable billion-dollar force. He engages his effective board of directors on lots of issues generally and asked me whether to engage them on a particular one, very early on.
Both conversations got me thinking about the conversation decades earlier, which was with Tina Brown, the legendary magazine editor, with whom I worked on (successfully) turning around The New Yorker magazine, upon her return from a week on the west coast during which she declared: “I’ve come back from innovation to interpretation.” When she saw my perplexed face, she elaborated — a bit — “the Gestalt on the west coast is to come up with new ideas, and on the east coast it is to evaluate those ideas, to judge them, and to refine them.” That was clearer, but she still saw things only starting to sink in and provided a metaphor: “the west coast writes stories, and the east coast edits them.”
As was usually the case, she was on the money. New York City is arguably the editorial capital of the world. Writers are widely dispersed, but book, magazine and newspaper editors are overly weighted to NYC. She put in my mind the important distinction between writing and editing.
So What?
The writing vs. editing distinction became an important lens through which I think about who should do what — do we want someone to be involved in an activity that is fundamentally a writing task or is it an editing task?
What makes for a great writer is the lived experience of being immersed in the subject. That is the rationale behind the expression that everyone has one good book in them — an autobiography (whether meant literally or metaphorically). The writer has deep meaningful and nuanced experience of the subject as well as an emotional connection to the subject — and thus is best positioned to generate a useful expression of it. Of course, it takes skills on top of that deep experience — but the deep, emotional experience creates the best raw materials.
What makes for a great editor is emotional detachment, intellectual balance, and breadth of experience. Editors need to be able to step back and judge the argument being presented against a standard of other arguments to be able to help writers improve the presentation of their argument.
The CEO question about the board provides a concrete example. His question was whether we should interview each member at the inception of strategy process to determine the strategic issues on which they want management to focus. My answer was no, even though I am a big fan of board involvement in the strategy process (about which I have written about previously in this series here and here).
It is because I believe that that a board’s role is most properly editing, not writing. The best thing it can do is weigh in thoughtfully and expertly on management’s proposed approach — whether the object might be a final strategy or, as in this case, the key strategic problems on which management should be focused.
It is management’s role to generate the manuscript to which the board should react. Management lives with the business 24x7, has the most nuanced understanding of it, and the most passion about it. If those three things are not true, the job of the board is to fire management, not do its job for it!
That having been said, every great writer needs a great editor. I have written the most Harvard Business Review magazine articles in the 21st century (33) and part of the reason that I have been able to do so is that I have a great editor, David Champion, who has helped me shape and refine the past 20 articles. He doesn’t generate the ideas for the articles — I do — but he interprets my ideas for the audience and makes them clearer and more compelling.
The so-what for AI is that I believe that the dominant role for AI is going to be editing not writing — even though everybody seems to use ChatGPT to write on their behalf. I don’t really think of that as true generation; it is verification — verifying that in response to the prompt, this is the most frequently found answer. As I have said before and will say again: this editing is a very useful activity, but it shouldn’t be confused with generation or innovation. It is verification and interpretation.
Can AI generate? Yes. Per my COO/CTO friend’s diagnosis, in situations in which there is clear verifiability of the solution, AI can generate by brute force. That has always been the case even with rudimentary AI such as Deep Blue, which beat chess grandmasters based on computing the value of every potential move at every point in the match using supercomputer power to do it quickly enough to meet the strict time limits imposed on chess matches. It wasn’t smarter than a grandmaster; but it could utilize a level of brute force no grandmaster could ever match.
So-What for Strategy?
The first of two so-what’s for strategy based on this writing vs. editing distinction is that management should never hire consultants to do strategy for them. That is asking the consultants to be writers despite management having the 24x7 lived experience of the business. Any management team who hires a consultant to do strategy for it should be fired for abdicating its role.
The proper role of strategy advisors is as editors — helping management teams to shape, guide, hone, and refine strategy. That is a very valuable role — but strategy advisors should guard against the conceit that they can/should create strategy. To the extent that they do, they are leading management down a path that will lead to management’s eventual firing — no way to operate as a professional servant.
Second, it reinforces my long-held view that you can’t be a useful strategy advisor by working in only one industry. To improve them and offer alternative narratives, editors need to compare writer arguments and narratives against others that they have seen. Similarly, the capacity to shape, guide, hone, and refine strategy arises from experience across a wide range of contexts. Your learning curve on editing flattens quickly if you keep on editing the same writer or small group of similar writers. I think David is an excellent editor of my work not because he edits exclusively me but because he doesn’t. He edits many great and diverse Harvard Business Review authors, like Robert Merton (finance), Bob Kaplan (accounting), Pankaj Ghemawat (strategy) and many others.
I believe that providing strategy advice to only one industry limits the types of strategies and contexts for them that the consultant sees rendering them less likely to provide useful editorial advance. Plus, it encourages the consultants to believe that they do know the business better than their clients and they are better than their clients at generating strategy — a dangerous conceit.
Practitioner Insights
I often have thoughts rattling around my brain for decades, usually a reaction to an odd datapoint — an anomaly as I have discussed before in this series — but I don’t know what it means. As with my piece on lying to pollsters, it can take decades to figure out how to make sense out of strange data. This is a similar case. Tina’s offhand comment — mainly to herself — only made clear sense 30 years later. The practitioner insight is to not dismiss non-conforming data just because it doesn’t fit. Store it away because it might make sense down the line.
I think that even before this recent insight, my instinct drove me toward being an editor not writer in my chosen career of strategy advisor. Early in my career, I did strategy for leadership teams. Over time I realized that the most valuable thing I could provide is to help leadership teams do strategy.
Writing this piece got me thinking about the various professional services to business. Some, like auditing, are obviously in the verification/editing camp. But there are avowedly creative professional services to business, prominently design firms and advertising agencies who would see themselves (I think) in the generation/writing business.
A design firm, like IDEO or Frog would go out and do deep customer understanding through ethnographic research and generate a great design. An ad agency, like Leo Burnett or Wieden+Kennedy, would take a client brief and generate compelling ad copy.
Do they disprove my rule that professional service advisors to business should hew closer to the editing role than the writing role? I don’t think so. Both of those industries are struggling — ad agencies for decades, design firms more recently. I think it is because they are trying to do something they shouldn’t be attempting. The greatest writing/generation needs to come from 24x7 management leadership.
In almost 40 years of watching ad campaigns for P&G products, I have never seen great advertising copy coming out of anything other than a great strategy, and with it an extremely precise brief to the ad agency. And on the other end of the spectrum, I have never witnessed awesome ad copy save a mediocre strategy.
When it comes to design consultancies, I have seen many more cases of designs that never see the light of day because even though they understood the customer well, they didn’t understand the client well enough to integrate the customer understanding with the client capabilities.
To be sure, there are huge ad agency and design consultancy success stories when these firms take the writing role, but I think it is the exception not the rule.
Regardless, for me the key takeaway is that it is critical for you to consciously pick your role in every situation. Is it writing/innovation/ generation or editing/interpretation/verification? If it is the former, immerse yourself deeply, attach emotionally, and don’t worry that your point-of-view might not be fully objective — that is a feature, not a bug. But if it is the latter, don’t try to replicate the depth of understanding. Instead, use your breadth of experience and intellectual detachment to provide wise counsel with equanimity.
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As a reminder, I am doing a PTW/PI podcast series with friend Tiffani Bova. The ninth in the series will be on LinkedIn here on Wednesday, July 2nd at 12 noon EST and 9am PST. I look forward to seeing you there.
