How to write a compelling white paper

Hey LuLu,

On Friday, I wrote about being a Starting Pitcher and Incubation at Autodesk. I also promised to share how I plan to turn my proposal (fairly complex subject) into an easy-to-understand white paper. There's a process you can follow when you need to simplify and explain your 'pitch'. I learned this method from Salient Systems' talented Senior Director of Strategic Alliances and good friend, Brian Carle. Note that Brian literally wrote the book on Understanding Video Management Systems. Go Salient!

Here's how Brian describes his method:

Start by summarizing the idea into one sentence. From there write a paragraph with a bit more detail. This is the elevator pitch. These two things are the hardest part but helpful steps to distill all the concepts and technological components into only the most important items for the reader. Also, a succinct statement is much easier to understand, and this, in a way, trains you to express ideas in a succinct way, which is important for developing the rest of the document.

Here's an examples of where we might land on step one:

FutureProof enables investors to maximize rental yields in emerging and developed economies alike, while specifically mitigating their housing investments’ exposure to three main long-term risks: (a) construction sector governance & compliance, (b) climate change, and (c) exposure to natural disasters. FutureProof means higher rental yields, better risk control, and greater geographic diversification.

Next, based on the elevator pitch take the three to five biggest concepts or steps in the idea and use that as your outline for the two-page document. Create the section headings, and then fill in the sections. Each of the three to five concepts is a section heading. Add an executive summary and conclusion.

Tada! Each section should have an intro then two to three paragraphs of info related to the section heading.

Brian says he always writes using some twist on this method.

Good stuff,

Dad

PS. A great family meeting yesterday on two topics: (1) How to load a dishwasher and (2) How to use LinkedIn as a young professional. Thanks for playing along and special thanks to Uncle Ricky for his contributions! I found this post from 2015, focused on the LinkedIn topic. And a nice job yesterday with the dishwasher! Huge improvement.