The Point Of View Guide

Philip Morgan

Ibex Publishing Taos, NM

v0.8 (beta edition), 2023

ISBN: 978-1-7367975-4-9

Dedicated to those who are willing to stick their neck out in service of their market’s improvement.

A point of view is an idea you wish your market would buy into because their buy-in would make things better for them.

Each part of that sentence has something important to tell us about point of view (POV), so we'll examine each part in turn.

A point of view is an IDEA

While we can think of a POV in a literal sense as being where you stand and what you see as a result of standing there, it's more useful to think of a POV as an idea. Ideas can be big or small, important or trivial, and simple or complex.

Ideas don't create mountains or trees, but they have created compound interest, the Internet, slavery, copyright law, the 2008 financial crisis, the public school system, vacuum cleaners, cookie consent pop-ups, and sewing needles. Some ideas are toxins, yet so much of what makes modern life comfortable, enjoyable, beautiful, and even possible started as an idea.

Ideas can be slightly better ways to do things -- optimizations. Or they can be profoundly different ways to do things -- transformations. They can be codifications of observations -- "handwashing seems to reduce deaths during childbirth". Or they can be expressions of ideals or imagination -- "humans could live and thrive on planets other than Earth".

Ideas can be abstract, sweeping, and totalistic -- "management is either an act of service or it fails". Or they can be specific and applied -- "managers should check in with every direct report on Mondays and Fridays".

Your point of view can have any of these qualities. Good points of view are not limited to "big ideas".

A point of view is an idea that you WISH

We only wish for that which could be, but has not yet happened. The fulfillment of a wish quenches its flame. Dictionary definitions of wish are peppered with the language of poetry: want, desire, hope, longing.

What idea matters enough that you feel desire, hope... or longing about the idea's fate? Maybe no idea so moves you. But what ideas do you keep returning to? What ideas would you want to discuss with a friend? Or defend? Or make sure someone you were mentoring understood? What ideas would you want to apply to a client project because those ideas have proven themselves reliably effective?

There are countless ideas. But only a few of them will motivate you enough to become a point of view.

A point of view is an idea that you wish YOUR MARKET

Just as your business exists to serve a market, your point of view exists for your market's progress and improvement. Your market reaps the first-order benefits of your POV; your business reaps the second-order benefits. Identifying, clarifying, and articulating your point of view is an act of service to your clients and your market.

A point of view is an idea that you wish your market would BUY INTO

Buy-in is an emotional or intellectual transaction. We trade our previous way of thinking about, seeing, or doing something for one we deem better or more useful. We give up our POV and buy into someone else's.

Buy-in can't be forced. It's an invitation combined with persuasion, reasoned argument, or both.

A point of view is an idea that you wish your market would buy into BECAUSE

I'm sure there are people with what we'd consider a great point of view who happened into it, focused and clarified it, and became famous for it with nearly no meta-thought about the POV itself. Effortlessly. The rest of us need a reason to go to all this trouble.

Why read a book on point of view? Why do the exercises this author suggests? Why try to puersuade or put an argument in front of your clients/audience? (Why stay in college? Why go to night school?)

There are a few reasons I've noticed why some of us want this POV thing and are willing to endure discomfort to have it:

Some very smart people, a few who I will name later, say you should have one.
Analysis of how the most visible players in our game operate, and a dash of mimetic desire, lead us to want a powerful POV of our own.
A felt sense of a "glass ceiling" on our ability to direct client engagements or build authority cause us to want a more impactful POV.

The most powerful, sustainable reason to want a point of view, however, isn't about you at all.

A point of view is an idea that you wish your market would buy into because their buy-in would MAKE THINGS BETTER FOR THEM.

The most powerful, sustainable reason to want a point of view is because it gives you a shot at making things better for those your business serves. Your clients. Your audience. Your market.

Being able to clearly articulate and defend a point of view is differentiating. This is a very good thing for your business. But if your differentiating POV is not focused on your clients' needs and progress, then it might be interesting to some, but it won't be broadly relevant or compelling to many.

Good points of view attract attention. This can be a very good thing for your business. But if that attention does not return a dividend of benefit to your market, then your POV won't be durable and sustainable.

The market you serve is the ecosystem that you business exists within. A POV that centers the health of your ecosystem is also a POV that will benefit your business in both the short and long term.

It's for your market that you read the book, do the exercises, and endure the discomfort. It's for them that you write the articles, send the emails, and share the thinking that invites their buy-in.

POV is not just for missionaries and thought leaders

The way I've described POV here suggests a strong undercurrent of "missionary zeal". It would be easy for you to conclude that POV is something that only thought leaders[^1] or those trying to build a large audience need care about. POV is more broadly important than that.

If you're having difficulty seeing how POV could be relevant to anybody other than missionaries and thought leaders, you may have made some assumptions:

A point of view needs to advocate for a transformational idea -- a fundamental break from the status quo.
A POV must appeal to a broad or very large audience.
A POV benefits from being supported by very appealing or dramatic evidence.

If the three things above were true of points of view, then yes, POV would be relevant only to missionaries and thought leaders. But there are plenty of good points of view where none of those three things are true. For example:

"Entrepreneurial expert firms don’t often fail because their work isn’t good enough. It nearly always is. No, they struggle because of the quality of their business decisions." --David Baker
"When you acquire a customer, you have about 3 months to convert the customer to a second purchase before the customer fades away." --Kevin Hillstrom
"Vertical specialization is the real specialization superpower for authority-building." --Alastair McDermott
"Agile is really about risk management. If you're not using agile to manage risk, then you're not doing agile right." --Luca Ingiani

These points of view are much more typical of what sophisticated consulting firms will articulate as part of their marketing and work. They are good examples of strong, incisive points of view that also do not appeal to very broad/large audiences, do not need to be supported by highly appealing or dramatic evidence, and (mostly) do not advocate for profoundly transformational ideas. They're the points of view of seasoned practitioners creating a combination of optimization and risk mitigation within real-world clients facing complexity and constraint, not those of the missionary or the thought leader.

POV is not just for visionaries and "futurists"

Back to that wish thing: A point of view is an idea that you wish your market would buy into...

This might suggest that having a POV means we can see far into the future, and we then use that vision of the future and our overpowering charisma to draw our market closer to that future state. Some do this, but you don't have to do the same to have a good POV.

It's more likely that your POV will flow from empathetic frustration with some specific way those you serve underperform their potential, or self-sabatoge. While those who are stuck in the past (relative to where they could be) might see you as a visionary, you're simply working to help them cure a deficiency in their maturation; you're not actually seeing the future. Some points of view do represent a vision for what lies beyond the current state of even the most advanced members of the market. But this truly visionary quality is not at all required for you to have a good POV.

POV can be a tidy hierarchy or a rowdy street gang

Thus far I've been discussing point of view using the singular -- "a point of view", etc. This suggests that you only have one idea that you wish your market would buy into, or that the multiple ideas you wish they would buy into neatly arrange themselves into a hierarchy with a central unifying "umbrella idea" at the apex. If this is how things happen to work for you and your points of view, great!, but this is not the only way POV can work.

Some folks will have several great points of view that aim to serve the same market or audience, but have little else in common with each other. This is the "rowdy street gang" of POV. The "gang" has at best a loosely-defined, fluid hierarchy, and its purpose is similarly loose and fluid. If this is how POV works for you, also great! You'll get tremendous benefit from POV despite lacking a tidy organization of your points of view.

Seth Godin is a good example here. Perhaps at an earlier stage in his career his points of view might have all related to marketing and might have arranged themselves into a tidy hierarchy. But now... he articulates points of view on a much wider range of topics from education and schooling to how to conduct effective meetings. This is POV-as-rowdy-street-gang. To attempt to force this gang into a neat hierarchy under one "apex POV" would necessitate a terrible watering-down of an otherwise potent collective.

Why don't you already have a POV? (There's one good reason why most of us don't)

If this isn't your first rodeo with client services, you're probably comfortable making recommendations to clients. Superficially, a point of view resembles a recommendation, but when you look deeper the two are different animals.

An example: I made the photographs below while traveling to Atlanta, Georgia to give a talk on point of view. The first image is a single building in Atlanta, and the second one is an aerial view of Atlanta.

What can we say that is both useful and true about the mall housed in this one building?

What can we say this is both useful and true about all of Atlanta, with its multitude of different businesses, residences, government buildings, transportation networks, parks, and on and on? If you allow those questions to sink in for a moment, you will really feel the difference between making a recommendation and articulating a point of view.

You make a recommendation after you've acquired some context on what's happening with a prospect or client. The prospect has briefed you on some specifics of their situation, or you've done some good discovery work with a new client, and at that point you're comfortable making recommendations: "X is more likely to work than Y", that kind of thing. You're comfortable making a recommendation because you understand enough of that prospect or client's situation — their context — to provide input about what they should do.

A point of view encompasses a much larger context than a recommendation. A point of view speaks to a market segment, an audience, or an entire market.

As intelligent people, we find the task of saying something that is true or defensible about such a large, varied context intimidating. It's intimidating because our POV is guaranteed to be wrong at least part of the time. And... we won't be surprised by the times it's wrong. We'll see those situations coming, in fact. Recommendations have a different job. They merely need to be useful within their context. They don't aim to be true across a much broader context the way a POV does.

Even if you have an extremely impactful POV, you'll probably never get sent a check where the memo field says "For: your POV". The real economic benefits of a powerful POV are the second-order effects of boldly articulating that POV over years. This delayed ROI on the work and risk required to articulate a POV is why most of us never venture beyond making recommendations.

POV is risky and speculative

Peter Drucker: "All profit is derived from risk"

Let's think about profit broadly, not just as first-order economic profits for your business but as the shared benefit that you want your POV to create for your market and your business.

Wanting your market to buy into an idea for their benefit is audacious. I mean, who are you (or I, for that matter) to say what's best for someone else? If the idea your POV is based on is so great, wouldn't that be self-evident to your market?

If your POV is based on an idea that matters enough to you to become a POV, then your POV is consequential, and one of the potential consequences is that you turn down a great potential client because they don't buy into your POV. Such near-misses are part of the risk of going down this POV road.

You can't have the profit of POV without some risk.

POV is also speculative. No matter how great your POV feels to you during those early days of identifying and clarifying it, you don't know for sure ultimately how profitable (in the sense we're thinking of profit here) it will be.

You don't know how much gravitas it will (or won't) have.
You don't know with certainty whether it will position you as a generous, empathetic leader or an uptight hall monitor.
You don't know with certainty how many people beyond yourself will care about your POV.

I hope that by defining POV as an idea you want others to buy into for their benefit I've predisposed you to cultivate point(s) of view that do create lots of the kind of profit we're talking about here, but there are few guarantees in life, and POV is no exception.

The relevant POV from my rowdy street gang -- the idea I wish you'd buy into: you would benefit from having a clear, incisive POV. In holding forth this POV, I join some esteemed company:

A point of view

That's the difference between saying, "what would you like me to do," and "I think we should do this, not that."

A point of view is the difference between a job and a career.

It's the difference between being a cog and making an impact.

Having a point of view is different from always being correct. No one is always correct.

Hiding because you're not sure merely makes you invisible.

—Seth Godin, https://seths.blog/2017/12/a-point-of-view

• • •

Q: What does it take for someone to go into consulting?

A: I would also add these things to the above:

Capital. Enough saved up to live for at least 6 months without incurring debt. Debt is your enemy.

POV. You must have and be willing to share a point of view. Clients are paying you for that.

—David C. Baker, https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-take-for-someone-to-go-into-consulting

• • •

Mark Schneider: So if you really wanna differentiate your firm from the firms that are seen as your direct competitors, it's really important to have an overarching perspective on what you do; a point of view.

Blair Enns: Most creative firms and ad agencies in particular are not all that differentiated from their competitors. So one of the ways that they can achieve that differentiation — it's essentially a secondary level of differentiation — is through having a point of view. And that means actually looking at the problem differently or thinking about it differently than their competitors, not just having a conviction.

—Blair Enns being interviewed by Mark Schneider of RSW/US, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svo2F6pwMAM

• • •

I am absolutely convinced—because I’ve done it thousands of times—that simply taking a contrarian or “one-off” view is the secret to success.

—Alan Weiss, Million Dollar Maverick

And in this book, I hope I help you develop what you've got now -- which are probably the near precursors to a POV -- into a clear, incisive point of view that helps you create more value and stand apart from the crowd.

Let's get started.

Info

This book is in an awkward "adolescent" stage between a preview version and the beta version. I hastily published the preview version to distribute at an event I was speaking at. Some experience coaching people through cultivating and sharpening their POV has gifted me valuable experience that I'm using to improve this book, but it's slow going. Watch this space for updates. I generally ping my email list with those updates too.

2: What Is A Point Of View?

Info

This chapter presents a different definition of a POV than the previous one. Like I said at the end of that chapter, awkward adolescent phase for this book! :) In coaching folks through POV development, I've found that thinking of POV as "an idea you wish your market would buy into" is a bit more accessible than "an argument". Both are useful, though, and I'll resolve this discrepancy in further development of this book.

Lots of consulting advice-givers who I respect gesture at the importance of point of view. They say:

You should have a point of view.
You should have a contrarian or polarizing point of view.
You should have a strong point of view, one that might challenge your clients' beliefs or assumptions.

But what is this point of view thing? I've been working for literally years to answer that question in a useful way.

A point of view is an argument (a claim of truth, supported by evidence) made in service of your audience's best interest, formulated from your clear and relevant perspective.

The Functions Of A Point Of View

A point of view actually does stuff in the world and within your relationship with prospects and clients. A POV is an active force in 4 ways.

1) Differentiation: Because few of your direct competitors care to challenge how their clients do things, a point of view that argues for change is almost always de-facto differentiating. To say "y'all should be doing things differently and I can prove it" rather than "let me help implement your agenda to your specs with quality and speed" sets you apart. This differentiation can create distinctiveness and enhance mental availability, making you more referable and more memorable to prospects who don't need your services now but eventually will. POV can also be a differentiator of last resort between service providers with roughly comparable expertise, or expertise that a prospect is not sophisticated enough to evaluate properly.

Note

1: https://philipmorganconsulting.com/pov/what-is-thought-leadership/

2) Service: A good point of view serves the health or progress of your market or audience. That service could resemble an intervention with a drug addict, helping a beloved choose a flattering outfit for an important event, or advising a child on a practical money-making college major against their strong preference for art history. In other words, it's not the frictionless service of a good waiter at a restaurant; it might involve provocation or well-meaning conflict. In the case of thought leadership, it involves a protracted campaign of arguing for change [1]. But at the end of the day, you rest easy knowing that your point of view and any conflict it engenders honestly seeks the wellbeing of your market.

3) Screening: Because your point of view will contain an argument or claim that reasonable people could disagree with, your POV will serve a client screening function. Sure, across enough client engagements, you'll eventually get hired by a client who says something like "I completely disagree with your approach but I hired you anyway because...". In the main though, you'll get hired by clients who are psyched about how your POV agrees with theirs, or who hear you saying something they feel but couldn't quite articulate until they heard you express it through your POV. And critically, you'll get not hired by pain in the ass clients who would resist your approach or ignore your advice.

4) Positioning: A POV positions you as an advisor rather than an order-taker. Order-takers are careful to emphasize their flexibility and eagerness to serve, with few boundaries beyond being able to bill hourly for that flexibility so the client bears the cost of any inconvenience. While an advisor who seeks 100% client satisfaction may exhibit significant flexibility ("sure, we can use your project management system; no, I don't care what video call software we use — what are you comfortable with?"), an inner hardass will emerge when a client asks for flexibility around something your expertise knows is non-negotiable. Clients will have gotten a preview of these non-negotiables because they are often the content — the primary argument — of your point(s) of view, and you have surfaced those in your marketing and during early sales conversations. Thoughtful, expertise-based non-negotiables in service of client wellbeing differentiate advisors and leaders from order-takers.

A POV is so often associated with deep, real expertise that the POV functions like the penumbra of the expertise.

The Components Of A Point Of View

There are several moving parts that constitute a point of view. Most good points of view emerge organically from your desire to serve your market, so as I walk you through the components of a point of view, don't get pulled into reductionist thinking about how you could engineer or construct a point of view from a box of components. Rather, think of me as a parent who is telling you, the pre-teen, what is about to happen to your body in puberty. Or don't, if that weirds you out. :) But it's the same intent: you probably don't understand how a point of view really works and even though you probably don't need to understand exactly how it works, it'll help to be roughly familiar with the underlying system's function.

The Central Elements

There are 3 central elements to a point of view.

1) Argument/Claim: The most central element of a POV is its argument or claim. In POV land, arguments and claims center on one or more of the following:

This is true, or is an under-appreciated truth that would help if properly appreciated
This is how we/you should do X

There are plenty of subtle variations on the above. For example, "How we should do X" could be "Why Y is holding us back and why X is what we should do about it", or any number of other variations. The power of a POV is not its precise grammatical structure but the fact that it bothers to make a claim or argument in service of the market's improvement. If your argument or claim is already accepted by the market, then congratulations, you have a boring, impotent POV! Most claims or arguments will be contra the status quo and pro the future benefit or wellbeing of your market, and this tension with the status quo is the source of the POV's ability to attract interest, discussion, buy-in, and action.

2) Relevance: A good point of view is relevant to the market or audience's needs, problem(s), aspiration(s), or purpose. My point of view on infrastructure in rural America is probably not relevant to your concerns, and that's fine! I'd be foolish to wish otherwise. As in the diagram above, a good point of view's argument intersects with its audience's concerns.

3) Outcome: A good point of view pushes things towards a desirable outcome. That outcome generally fits under the umbrella of improved wellbeing for your market/audience, but a specific POV will have at least a range of probable outcomes.

Jonathan Stark has a wonderfully relevant POV, the headline version of which might go like this: hourly billing is nuts. It's crazy, and it's a cancer on the professional services. On the list of probable outcomes for those that buy into and implement this POV is higher revenue or profitability, and higher satisfaction with their self-employment. Certainly if enough people embrace Jonathan's POV, someone will have a better sex life too and attribute it back to the POV. I'll have to check with Jonathan before I die on this hill, but I think "better sex life" is not a probable outcome of Jonathan's POV. The actual list of probable outcomes is lengthy and compelling enough to not suffer from the absence of "better sex life".

A POV does not need to lead to a completely revolutionary or transformational outcome. It's fine for your POV(s) to argue for something that is incremental optimization rather than rapid transformation, revolution, or reinvention. If you look with "POV envy" at a somewhat more transformationally-focused POV like Jonathan's, remember all the risk-averse businesses out there that will feel safer with your advocacy for lower-risk incremental optimization and smile when you think about getting paid to help them stay within their preferred risk budget. The world needs a range of advisors using a diversity of styles targeting a range of client risk tolerance.

The Contextual Elements

There are 4 contextual elements to a point of view. Because a POV emerges from a human being who cares about a market they have specialized in serving, the POV will be shot through with unique human-fingerprint-like stylistic qualities. In fact, if Jonathan Stark and I both cared passionately about the same audience and the same specific outcome, we would each have distinctively unique points of view by which we argue for that outcome because we are substantially different people (though both with great hair, I am told). This difference in POV would be the product of a difference in context. Those 4 contextual factors are:

1) Perspective: You stand somewhere in life; you can't help but do so. Your location partially defines what you see. A person for whom winning at standardized testing has always been easy sees annoying but trivial little games standing between themselves and the opportunities that are gated by that testing. A person who struggles with standardized tests sees heavily guarded doors in front of those same opportunities. Same thing, different perspective.

An outsider to an industry might see opportunities to do things better if only X; an insider will remember the times variations of X have been tried before and failed and that insider sees 10 reasons not to try X.

A scientist sees a need to evaluate support for a new initiative with a quantitative survey; a visionary sees a need to rally the troops with an inspiring afternoon workshop.

A point of view is called that rather than "an opinion" because the point from which you view (see) things is such an important determinant of what you see and how you argue for change. Becoming aware of the contextual factor of perspective invites you to explore some important questions:

Do those who you hope to influence with your POV share a similar perspective with you?
Whether they do or not, how might the overlap (or lack thereof) in your perspectives be a source of power?
Is there something you have been taking for granted in your perspective that could be a source of power? Are you adept with the data your audience hungers for more of? Have you accrued experience that could inspire or soothe your audience?

These two 18th-century thought leaders provide a good example of perspective.

Ignaz Semmelweis (left, in the picture above) was born in Hungary in 1818. While working as a chief resident at the Vienna General Hospital, he (and others) noticed that one of the hospital's maternity clinics had a mortality rate that was about 3 times higher than the hospital's other maternity clinic. The deadlier clinic was staffed by medical students who also dissected cadavers, and the other by midwives who did not. Semmelweis theorized that "cadaverous material" was causing the infections that led to the 3x-higher mortality. He convinced the medical students to implement hand-washing, and the mortality rate immediately dropped to match the rate of the other clinic. (Yes, there was a LONG period of human history before the importance of infection control was understood. :))

Semmelweis began campaigning for other practitioners to adopt the innovation of hand-washing; his perspective was rooted in data, and he used data from his experience at Vienna General Hospital to support his argument. He was ignored, rejected, and ridiculed by the medical establishment at the time. Semmelweis was ultimately driven mad by his quest, committed to an insane asylum by his peers in 1865, and was beaten severely by the asylum guards. He died of an infection 2 weeks later at age 47. (Think twice before you decide that thought leadership is right for you!)

Semmelweis died right as the Civil War in the United States was ending. Silas Weir Mitchell, who had been born in Philadelphia in 1829, worked treating soldiers from this war who had lost limbs to gunfire and the rapid field amputations that were done to save their lives. Mitchell coined the term "phantom limb" to help explain the phenomenon of pain in a limb that was no longer there due to amputation. He did not discover this phenomenon, but—as thought leaders often do—he coined a sticky name for it and then he wrote a fictitious short story for The Atlantic, “The Case of George Dedlow", about a Civil War survivor who had all 4 limbs amputated and suffered phantom limb pain. Acceptance of the idea of phantom limb pain subsequently grew both within the medical community and in the broader culture in part thanks to this fictitious story.

Semmelweis leaned towards data in his perspective. Mitchell leaned away from data in his, and vivified his experience with a completely made-up story. If you ever think that data is automatically more powerful than experience when it comes to your POV's perspective, remember this story. Never worry that there's anything wrong or inadequate about your perspective. Whether you are coming from data or experience, look for the ways it grants your POV power — they are there waiting for you to discover and leverage them.

(Source: Wikipedia and https://www.history.com/news/the-civil-war-doctor-who-proved-phantom-limb-pain-was-real)

2) Argument Style: In your POV you are making and supporting an argument or a claim. As you do so, your style — the way you phrase things, the examples you use, the expectations you have of your audience — will land somewhere on a spectrum running from forceful and disruptive to gentle and evolutionary. This style is not wired into you through your DNA and so can be modulated if you want. This again invites exploring a question: what argument style would best support your efforts to serve your audience's best interest?

3) Status: Your status as perceived by your audience is partially a product of how you present yourself and partially a product of your unalterable personal history and perspective. An ex-big 4 consultant will have a pedigree that they can accentuate or minimize when interacting with their audience. An industry outsider has a lack of pedigree that they can also accentuate or minimize. Combined with intentional framing (ex: "I don't have a background in X, but that also means I'm not steeped in the bad habits of X."), both can be powerful. Don't get too in your head about it, but do explore the question: how might you use your status with your audience to best serve their best interest?

4) Change Style: Finally, in working with clients to help them make things better, you'll have a natural change style — a natural way of helping them approach uncertainty, the status quo bias, risk, discomfort, institutional inertia, communication friction, and so forth. Like your argument style, this is learned, not hardwired (though many of us have un-helpful hardwiring we need to override with better learned behaviors). The most effective advisors have usually invested heavily in developing a change style that contributes to their effectiveness. But we all have our limits. Know thyself in this area, and consider to what extent there is coherence among what you are arguing for, your argument style, your change style, and your audience's needs.

All together, the 3 central factors of your POV (argument, relevance, and outcome) and the 4 contextual factors (perspective, argument style, status, and change style) combine to create a human-fingerprint level of uniqueness to any given POV. My goal in explaining the components of a POV is not for you to get in your head about optimizing each element in some way. Rather, I hope this merely leads to a deeper level of self-awareness that you use to find leverage to more effectively create the change you want in your market.

(Same diagram as before, just repeated here for convenience and emphasis now that I've explained every component of the diagram.)

https://therecognizedauthority.com/point-of-view/

3: Cultivating A POV

You can't force a plant to grow. But you can create conditions that are conducive. Likewise with POV.

Developing Your Point Of View

Points of view emerge from a living relationship between you, your concern for your market, and your market itself. Can they instead be engineered? Manufactured?

Note

1: OK, fine, my experience is writing 3 terrible songs. Really terrible songs.

Not that I have any experience in songwriting [1], but I think it's a bit like songwriting. You can nurture points of view (and songs) into being. You can create the pre-conditions that make it more likely for a point of view to emerge. You can take a mess of opinions and sift through for good "POV material". You can polish a raw POV into something more impactful and effective.

But I do not think you can engineer or manufacture a POV from nothing. That begs the question: what is the something you must have to nurture a POV?

You have to care about your market's improvement. There is a much stronger causal relationship between genuine care for your market's wellbeing and impactful points of view than there is between expertise and POV, and between fame and POV.

In other words, a good POV is a second-order effect of caring about your market's wellbeing. As you've seen if you've read this far, there's quite a lot to say about POV itself, but there's nothing more to say about what births a good POV than this: you simply have to care enough to stick your neck out with a thoughtful perspective on what would make things better for those you seek to serve.

Maybe you have the requisite care for your market's improvement and wellbeing, but you don't think you have a great POV. You probably do have "POV raw material"; most people who have been around the block a time or two do. This chapter is about helping you surface that raw material. There are two groups of exercises here: one to help you filter the raw material that's currently floating close to the surface, and the other to help you surface new raw material that might be buried deeper in your thinking.

The POVSpace

When I run a workshop on point of view, I ask participants to locate themselves in a "POVSpace" that has 4 dimensions. Most participants tell me they enjoy and benefit from this exercise, but it can be challenging because it invites a sort of self-reflection that is new to many of us. As with everything else in this guide, I hope you don't get too in your head about this idea of POVSpace, rather I hope it helps you see behind the curtain of the points of view out there that you admire while making you more effective about refining your own POV.

For entrepreneurial experts in the licensed or unlicensed professional services space, there are 4 primary elements that make for a distinctive POV. We can think of each of these as an axis with two poles; we can describe your POV as a point — or more likely a range — along each axis. This is similar to personality characteristics. Nobody is 100% introverted or extroverted all the time, most of us are somewhere in between these two extremes, and most of us have some amount of range and fluidity in how we express introversion or extroversion.

Here are the 4 elements:

What is your perspective? This will range between arguing from data, arguing from experience, or some combination of both.
What kind of change are you arguing for? We can think of this as your change agenda. Do you seek radical transformation, progressive optimization, or something that lies in between these two extremes?
With what argument style do you advocate for change? Do you encourage a rip-the-bandaid-off, disruptive approach to change, a gentle, evolutionary approach to change, or something in between? (A transformational agenda and an evolutionary change style are compatible.)
From what status do you argue? Are you perceived as a pedigreed insider, an expert outsider, or something in between (or both, depending on which audience sub-segment you're interacting with)?

Yes, I know reality is complex and nuanced in ways this map can’t represent. And if you're an effective advisor, some aspects of your POV will be softened or accentuated based on the specifics of the context where you are trying to help a client apply your POV. And yet, there is value in forcing yourself to consider which of two binary poles your POV is closer to; the artificial simplicity can be clarifying and the sense of where your natural "center of gravity" lies can be empowering.

Map Yourself On The POVSpace Map

That's why I'd like you to take some time to think, reflect, and map your POV on this POVSpace Map. Here's how to do that.

The easiest way to explain this is to show you a completed POVSpace Map and explain how it was created. Here's how I'd map myself:

I see my POV as:

Covering a range of agenda from mild transformation to moderate optimization. My work on lead generation skews towards optimization, while my work on positioning has a more transformational quality. I've represented this on the POVSpace map with a rectangle. You can see it covers the range from mild transformation to moderate optimization.
My perspective is rooted in both experience and data. My argument for transformational change needs to have an inspirational feel to it, and it's easier to use experience to create that inspirational feel. But when I talk about lead generation, I have access to data that nobody else does, and that proprietary data becomes central to my argument there, causing me to use a more data-informed argument style. That's why the other 2 sides of the rectangle I've drawn on the POVSpace Map define a range from experience to data.
Despite often arguing for transformational change, I do so with a gentle, evolutionary tone. I represent this on the map by using gently rounded corners for the rectangle I've drawn. If I wanted to represent a more sharp, disruptive change style, I'd use sharp corners on the rectangle.
Finally, my status is mostly that of the expert outsider. I focus on custom software developers and digital agencies, yet I've never gotten paid for writing code. I do have a technical background and can talk like an insider in this world thanks to that background and actually caring about the world of software development, but I'd characterize my status as mostly expert outsider. If I could show this map to you in color, I would use one of two colors to represent status, but this booklet is printed in B&W, so I've used a dashed line to represent the expert outsider status, and I would have used a solid line to represent the pedigreed insider.

If at this point you understand how to use this map, you might go ahead and fill one out for yourself. I've printed a few of them on the following pages, and if you'd like a blank electronic one, grab this one: https://philipmorganconsulting.com/povspacemap

If you'd like to see a few more example maps, I've mapped out the POV of a few people's public work, some of which I hope you are familiar with. I'm doing my best to be accurate as I do so, but I hope it's clear these maps are built on my subjective impression of these people's work, not their own description of their own POV.

Alright, here are those blank POVSpace maps (and an electronic one: https://philipmorganconsulting.com/povspacemap). You can't do this mapping thing wrong, and the questions this activity surfaces for you will be productive ones even if you can't answer them immediately, so do give it a try!

Surfacing POV Raw Material

If you have some level of clarity about where you are coming from in your POV, I can more efficiently guide you through the following questions that help you surface "raw material", which is ideas, opinions, and beliefs that might become an argument you want to put to your market. In other words, I hope you surface the somewhat rough, unpolished precursors to a more crisp, sharp POV.

I've grouped these questions based on where you might stand along the two primary axes of the POVSpace Map: Data vs. Experience and Transformation vs. Optimization. So someone whose perspective is more based in data and whose agenda is pushing or enabling an optimization for their market is called a Data-Based Optimizer and would focus on the questions in that section below. I hope the other groupings are named in a way that immediately makes sense to you. Of course you can look at all these questions, no matter which section they're grouped in. :) The questions are simple and open-ended in nature to provide you a jumping-off point for your own thinking and ideation.

Data-Based Optimizer

What does your data tell you about the problem(s) your clients face? (Or others' data?)
How might your data run counter to conventional wisdom?
How might your data support conventional wisdom?
Does your data suggest a specific sequence by which clients improve or make progress — a path that optimizes for lowest risk?

Data-Based Transformer

What "icebergs" does your data tell you your clients are headed towards? (Imagine if The Titanic had radar or sonar and could have seen the iceberg it was headed towards.)
Do you have data on radical/fundamental transformations out there in the business world that your clients would like to learn from? Can this data create a portrait or a story of these successes?
Elite segments of military forces have entrance tests with objective criteria. Does your data suggest a similar sort of "go/no-go" criteria for potential transformation?

Experience-Based Optimizer

In the following questions, I'm going to refer to the traits or accomplishments that your audience admires as "ideals". For example, in the marketing vertical, commercially-successful creativity might be a very salient ideal, while in the finance vertical, it probably won't be.

Your audience probably puts some people or companies on a pedestal because they admire those people or companies. Who does your audience put on a pedestal?
Why does your audience admire these people/companies? What traits or accomplishments in particular does your audience admire?
What ideals represent the "common sense" or obviously-desired states of being for your audience? (ex: Within team environments, diversity, alignment, and "great culture" are often considered self-evidently desirable states to work towards.)
What behavioral ideals match the values or norms of your sector? (ex: Within academia and science, objectivity and elevating the pursuit of truth over personal gain are idealized.)
What people or companies or institutions from outside your audience also match the ideals you've listed?
What stories about challenge and change do you hear over and over again from within your audience? (ex: We are right to wonder if Apple could spin up an enviably profitable division that licenses all the stories about challenge and change that are associated with its brand. These are now almost more lore and legend than anything else.)

Experience-Based Transformer

Who does your audience admire in a really emotionally-driven way, even if this person is far removed from your audience's day-to-day reality?
What represents a "pure" or "Platonic" path of improvement for your audience?
When your audience compares their sector to another, what are they comparing to and how?
Are there specific versions of "The Hero's Journey" story that get repeated or have significant mindshare among your audience?

Signals

The other elements of POVSpace — your status with your audience and your change style — are also important. They operate more in the world of "signals", which are more subtle things like how you phrase things, tone of voice, and so on.

Signaling Pedigree

The following might be ways you signal your pedigree, without clumsily saying, "You should listen to me because of my pedigree, bitches":

Name-Dropping I don't mean this in a negative sense here. What famous-to-your-audience people are you on a first name basis with? Who do you have access to? There are clumsy and artless ways to name-drop, but there are also artful ways to do this.

"When I was..." A prime example: "When I was at McKinsey, blah blah blah." This is the ole' authority-by-association move. As with every one of these pedigree-establishing "moves", overusage is going to get people's eyes rolling, but artful usage can accomplish what you want, which is a transfer of authority from the respected company, institution, or context to you.

"War Stories" Here you are presenting stories of success, case studies, and so forth that are interwoven with the source(s) of your pedigree. I think here of how Joanna Wiebe references writing a successful long-form sales page for Intuit. This is both referencing a household name and using a "war story" to argue for a specific POV (in this case, the claim that long-form sales letters are effective even in a modern SaaS context).

Style Of Dress can send signals about pedigree.

There are yet more subtle forms of signaling, too:

Diction Earlier in my career when I did tech writing work for an agency that did a lot of work for Microsoft, I noticed that every long-time Microsoft manager I interacted with speaks very quickly, under-enunciating syllables wherever possible and almost tripping over their own words. (If you listen to an interview with Ben Thompson, you'll hear a good example of this style of diction. The Conversations With Tyler interview is a good one to seek out.) I can't prove it, but I'm pretty sure that most of the 6 most recent US Presidents have made conscious choices to lean into styles of diction that signal a lack of pedigree to make them feel more relatable. Again, don't get in your head about this, but how could leaning into or away from your natural style of diction send the kind of signal you want?

Jargon And Phraseology You might use certain jargon or phraseology to signal your "insiderness" or "outsiderness". Even if this jargon is intentionally opaque to some, that may serve your pedigree-signaling purpose.

Signaling Experience

When you want to signal that you have valuable expertise, you can just present the expertise itself, but often you need to first earn enough attention to even have a chance to present your expertise or make a case based on that expertise. That's where you may need to signal that you have relevant, valuable expertise rather than just presenting the expertise itself.

The way this is done in books like Good To Great is to talk about impressively-large numbers; the number of file drawers filled by the book's source material, the number of hours spent collecting and analyzing it, and so on. Despite that particular book's fundamental methodological flaw, the basic authority-building approach of saying "I've looked at way more data than you have" is sound. Of course you wouldn’t say those exact words – that comes across as bluntly arrogant – but you can often earn a hearing for your POV with some variation of this opening gambit.

This gambit combines well with a "I'm not any smarter than you, but after looking at this much data, X is obvious, even to me" message, which artfully combines self-deprecating humility ("it's obvious even to an ordinary intellect like mine") with an appeal to authority ("I have more data than you, therefore I know more than you").

Another appealing framing takes the opposite approach. Rather than saying that your data or experience has a brute-force ability to prove your argument, you instead have noticed a pattern that few others have been careful or insightful enough to see. You've discovered a secret. Many will hold their skepticism in abeyance and their curiosity will give you an opening to support this heretofore-only-visible-to-you insight with your data, experience, or a combination of both.

Deep experience is the usual headwaters of expert confidence, and so confidence signals the upstream presence of deep experience. Many of us take someone's expert confidence as a proxy for the wisdom that comes from deep experience. This is a too-easily-hacked heuristic, thus the power of the confidence scheme. For us, we need to remember that deep expertise engenders both confidence and caution. If you want your POV to be impactful and your status is that of the expert outsider, lead with confidence and follow up with caution and caveats.

Signaling A Disrupter Change Style

The following will signal a disruptive change style:

An urgent tone; an emphasis on need for dramatic change
A command-and-control operating style (vs. consensus or coalition-building)
Dismissing or downplaying objections to change (ex: "Just do it! It's not as hard as you think!")
Using examples of disruption rather than evolution

Signaling An Evolver Change Style

The following will signal a more gentle, evolutionary change style:

An emphasis on the importance of the resulting change (to keep folks motivated over the course of a potentially lengthy change)
A consensus or coalition-building style
Addressing and contextualizing objections to change or the actual risk of change
Celebration of small victories
Contextualizing the contribution of small actions to important/big outcomes

Ideation

In the workshop I've run on POV, I ask participants to make a personal copy of this Google Doc and freewrite their way through the set of questions that matches their POVSpace location: https://philipmorganconsulting.com/povquestions. I encourage you to do the same now.

At this point, these can be just opinions. They don't have to be finely refined POVs, and in fact going for that level of polish will dampen the effectiveness of the freewriting. The filtering and polishing comes later.

Immediately after doing this freewriting, list out every opinion you have that might be relevant to your current or future client work. You will structure these opinions into a POV "layer cake" format later, so if it's easier to just freewrite a list of all the relevant opinions, do that.

Again, the document where you can do this freewriting: https://philipmorganconsulting.com/povquestions.

Audience

I use the word audience to describe the group of people who will be exposed to your POV. This group might not be what you think of as an audience for your marketing. Instead, maybe they are the several dozen prospects you will speak to over the next year, not the thousands of people subscribed to an email list you don't actually have. Maybe they are the team of 25 employees who need alignment and leadership from you, not the 250 paid attendees at a conference keynote. You get the idea, right? Those who are exposed to your POV are your audience whether they are a small, ad-hoc group or a large intentionally-attracted group.

I'd like you to think about where your audience would lie on our POVSpace map. This will be a challenging and possibly frustrating exercise, but incredibly valuable no matter how confident you feel in your resulting map. It is challenging because your audience is never a monolith, no matter how intentional the invitation you extended to them. They are a group of people with differing backgrounds, purposes, and approaches to achieving those purposes. Nevertheless, try to map them (without covering the entire map from left to right and top to bottom with one big rectangle; that's a cop-out :)). Ask yourself: where is the center of gravity of their point of view? How do they see the world? What is their agenda for themselves? What is their change style? Even the best possible answer to these questions will be an approximation — a composite — but the increase in empathy and insight that comes out of this labor is well worth the cost.

Overlaps/Tensions

There will be some amount of overlap or difference between your location on the POVSpace map and your audience's location. This leads to an important question: how does this overlap or difference create leverage for you?

I wonder if you are imagining that any difference in your POV and your audience's POV is problematic. I don't think so. I think both overlaps and differences are sources of leverage; leverage that can be used to persuade, challenge, inspire, empathize, connect, or convince.

Overlaps position you to reinforce or justify your audience's views to them. Their potential reaction: "I always felt this, but couldn't quite articulate/support it so clearly before."
Differences position you to challenge or enrich their views with an outside perspective. The hoped-for reaction: "I've never seen things that way before..." or "wow, I'd like to achieve that!"

The work of getting really good at exploiting this leverage can be the work of an entire career. Or, it may come somewhat naturally and quickly to you. There definitely are points of view that aren't very relevant or important. But I'm convinced that every potential difference or overlap with your audience is a source of leverage you can use to make your POV more impactful.

Filtering Your Opinions For Good POV Material

The output of freewriting your way through those questions should be a bunch of opinions of varying quality. These are "POV candidates". If you try to avoid self-editing during the freewriting process, you increase the chances of discovering some good stuff that lies just outside the well-trod path of ideas you are normally focused on. Hopefully there is lots of good stuff in your list of ideas, but now is the time to ruthlessly filter that list in search of what might be impactful POV material.

Below are some qualities of a good POV. Some of these are qualities you should try to maximize, and some are qualities you aren't trying to maximize, but ones you should think more deeply about to understand how the POV in question fits (or doesn't!) with your larger agenda for your business.

Durability

Here are some questions that will help you evaluate the durability and potential longevity of a candidate POV:

For how long is the candidate POV likely to be relevant?
For how long will it be seen as a challenging perspective before it becomes mainstream or conventional wisdom (if ever)? What would have to change for it to become a mainstream POV?
Consider how Dan Ariely's apparent use of faked research has cast a shadow over the entire field of behavioral economics. How exposed is the candidate POV to this kind of risk?

A POV doesn't have to be extremely durable to be worth investing in, but you do want to have a sense of a candidate POV's durability before you go all in on it.

Audience Benefit

Note

2: It probably is possible to re-frame a you-centered POV like this in terms of audience wellbeing/progress. Just because it starts out you-centered doesn’t mean it needs to remain stuck there.

To what extent is the candidate POV focused on audience benefit? If I did website work, it would be tempting to cook up a POV about how critical it is for clients to get their web developer the content they need in a timely fashion, but that would be a POV that quite transparently flows from frustration with project process, and doesn't place my audience's wellbeing and progress at the center of the POV. [2]

Saleability

Some people will agree with your POV, or even find it obvious because it so closely matches theirs. Others will need to buy into your POV. This kind of buy-in is a sometimes-costly but usually non-financial process that involves them coming to accept and agree with your POV. In essence, they adopt your POV and use it as part of how they see, interpret, and understand the world. They become intellectually and/or emotionally "bought in".

This is the right place for a reminder of this well-known quote from Upton Sinclair:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

For structural reasons, some people will never buy into your POV. Maybe their job or revenue model depends on never buying in. Perhaps they have no interest in updating their view of the world, or they have no incentive to endure the discomfort of even temporary cognitive dissonance. Some, however, do have that motivation or interest. For them, your candidate POV may present an intriguing or appealing possibility for growth and progress, but the buy-in process may be costly, requiring a lot of independent exploration or plain ole laborious thinking. How do you "sell" these folks on the candidate POV?

How much evidence do you have for the candidate POV? Evidence can be data, but it doesn't have to be. We humans also respond to stories about others' experiences (anecdata).

What are the implications of adopting your candidate POV? Does it merely provide a new/better way of understanding the world, or will it require further action, a shift in identity, or deeper forms of change in order to fully buy in?

Your candidate POV(s) may make a promise (to solve a problem or improve a status quo) to its audience. How attractive is this promise to your audience?

Note

3: You can benefit from the pursuit of something you do not ultimately achieve. I might benefit from running a marathon even if I come in last or can't complete the race; the training and effort and growth it creates has value independent of the outcome.

Ultimately, how pragmatic, achievable, or realistic is whatever you are explicitly or implicitly promising in the candidate POV? This doesn't mean you have to limit yourself to easily achievable promises, but it's worth reflecting on how many will ultimately realize and benefit from [3] the optimization or transformation you are advocating for.

Advisor/Implementer Positioning

The summer I worked as a waiter at The Olive Garden restaurant in Winston-Salem, NC, when I came home from work you could smell the musk of olives and Italian dressing from 6 feet away from me. In helping others refine their POV, I've seen some points of view that "smell" like implementation work, and others that "smell" like advisory work. This scent is usually not evident in the literal wording of the POV, but it's as easily perceived as the smell of olives and Italian dressing after my shift at the Olive Garden. So ask yourself: does each candidate POV on your list emit a "scent" of advisory or implementation work? If so, is this what you want to put out there into your audience and client base? If not, do you need to eliminate that candidate POV or merely re-frame it?

Conversational Potential

I've repeatedly emphasized that the core of your POV is an argument; a claim about what is true or how things should be done. Ideally, though, this is never a one-sided argument. Rather, it should be a jumping-off point for a variety of conversations. Conversations between you and a prospective client. You and an email list member. You and colleagues, etc.

I can't give any recipes or formulas to help, but I can urge you to consider the potential that your POV candidates do or don't have to spur conversations with your audience. Again, whether that audience is a single prospect in a sales conversation or a group of thousands, some of the best points of view are a starting point for some sort of conversation. This could be an inner mental conversation within an individual, between their priors and your POV's challenge to those priors. Or it could be an asynchronous conversation between a number of people carried out across books, articles, and social media. Or it could be a realtime conversation between people. In any event, a POV that leaves no room for conversation suffers reduced potential for impact. I won't offer any evidence to support this claim, instead I'll invite you to a mental conversation with yourself, or with me if the opportunity arises, to move you towards accepting or rejecting this idea.

Coherence

A good POV is coherent with your larger business agenda. This is both obvious and easily forgotten. It's probably obvious that if your business sells services that are optimizing in nature, you don't need to come out swinging with a bold transformational argument in your POV. And yet, the world as it is, and social media in particular, exerts a narcissizing influence on us. It's easy to forget that you don't have to have a strong, un-nuanced POV on every single issue of the moment, even if those issues are really important to your audience. Likewise, your points of view do not need to be driven by what authorities or famous personalities within your field are allocating their airtime to.

So it might be easy or sexy or popular to have a POV on X, but do you really care? (Also, a lot of these "of the moment" POVs are going to fail the durability test.) Do you want to do more client work around this POV's topic? If the POV is transformational, do you have the emotional budget to work at that transformation? Do you have the advisor/thought leader/consultant chops to enable that transformation within a possibly-hostile organizational context? So... is the POV coherent with your larger agenda, resources, timeline, "advocacy budget", etc?

In a way, coherence is the uber-quality, because it rolls up so many other of these qualities. This one asks: Is this POV the right instrument to support your larger business agenda?

• • •

I realize this part of the book might feel especially "mechanical" or "inorganic". This is the only way I know to reveal the kind of thinking I do when helping a client formulate their POV, but in reality that work is much more like a wide-ranging, messy conversation. A somewhat frustrating one, at times, to be sure, but usually an enjoyable mutual exploration. If you find this systematic approach laid out here to be somewhat cold or offputting, the best way to go about this for you would be to find a "thought partner", someone who can function simultaneously as champion, critic, and co-developer of your thinking, and talk through this stuff with them.

4: Articulating A POV

How do you articulate a POV? How do you package it in a way that's accessible and impactful? How do you tell the world about your POV?

While many experts with both a great POV and lots of visibility make the articulation part look effortless and completely organic, there are somewhat mechanical patterns that we can spot and learn to imitate on our way to effortless mastery. Those patterns break down into two categories: 1) argument form, and 2) the application of that form over time.

You'll remember that a POV is an argument (a claim of truth, supported by evidence) made in service of your audience's best interest, formulated from your clear and relevant perspective. Your POV will have both stylistic and substantive distinctiveness:

Stylistic Distinctiveness:

Your argument style can be abrasive and disruptive, supportive and evolutionary, or somewhere in between
Your status can be framed as that of the expert outsider, the pedigreed insider, or a combination of both

Substantive Distinctiveness:

Your perspective can be rooted in data, experience, or somewhere in between
Your argument can be advocating rapid transformation, gradual optimization, or something in between

Your argument itself may not be totally unique, but these stylistic and substantive qualities cause your POV — even if fundamentally similar to an argument that others also make — to be distinctive in the marketplace, like an "intellectual fingerprint".

Despite having a clear structure, your POV still needs to be packaged so it can create value and impact in the market. Much of the value of a great book comes from the content — the words and ideas — but significant value also comes from the layout that makes those ideas easy and pleasant to take in, and from the packaging that makes the printed book comfortable or even delightful to handle (or the electronic book convenient to access and nice to read on a screen). Likewise, a POV is "packaged" for similar reasons. Here, I'll refer to this as the POV's form.

Form

A nearly-infinite variety of rock songs can be based on just 3 guitar chords. Here I'll describe 3 POV argument forms that are mix-and-match elements that might become part of how you articulate your POV(s). These are mostly forms of argument not specific ways you physically arrange words, and these 3 forms are not mutually exclusive — you may use several or all of them to articulate your POV.

Think of these forms as frameworks or even rules, but know that as soon as you can, you should abandon them. That's what mastery is — abandoning and transcending the very rules that got you to the threshold of mastery. But rules can help us progress in the general direction of mastery, so I want to provide them here in the form of 3 frameworks.

1) The "Layer Cake" Framework

A point of view can be packaged into a 3-layer structure that goes like this:

Short headline that expresses a vital part of the argument
Paragraph-length version of the argument
The base layer, which can be something as long as a book or a lengthy series of articles, or as expansive as your entire body of work, which fully supports the argument

Authors will usually have several versions of their bio ranging in length from 2 sentences to a page or more. That's similar to what's going on here with the "layer cake" structure. We can also think of how audio files are compressed:

The base layer is completely uncompressed, like a WAV file.
The middle layer uses lossless compression, which reduces the size of the file without losing any vital information, like a FLAC file.
The headline uses lossy compression, which preserves enough vital information but at the cost of losing other less-vital information. MP3 files do this.

I've repeatedly used Jonathan Stark's point of view as an example because it's 1) well-constructed, 2) vividly expressed, and 3) impinges on the topic of money, which many of us can't help having strong feelings about, which makes it easier to notice the patterns I'm describing here. I'll write my summary of Jonathan's POV using the layer cake framework. To be clear, these are Jonathan's ideas (he's a friend and I've followed his work for years, so I think I'm portraying his ideas faithfully) but my words.

• • •

Note

1: https://jonathanstark.com/hbin
2: http://podcast.ditchinghourly.com
3: https://jonathanstark.com/vpb

Headline layer: "Hourly billing is nuts."
Middle layer: Hourly billing hurts both service provider and client because it disincentivizes speed and innovation. It hurts the service provider because it deprives them of a fair share of high value outcomes. It hurts the client because they don't know the true cost going in, so can't make a good ROI decision. This is why hourly billing is crazy (nuts).
Base layer: to articulate this layer, there's a book [1], a long-running podcast that Jonathan hosts [2], many podcast guest appearances, Jonathan's email list [3], and other stuff I'm not thinking of right now. In other words, there is an ocean of supporting argument — a body of work — at the base layer of Jonathan's POV.

• • •

You can see the "lossy compression" in that headline I wrote up for Jonathan's POV, right? There's not enough words there to fully support the argument, or even to fully flesh out Jonathan's core claim about hourly billing. The headline has a different job: to earn enough attention to introduce the middle layer. Whether the headline ultimately functions as the title of a book, the title of a talk, or something else, it will always be both true and incomplete. There simply isn't enough real estate for it to be both true and complete, so instead it needs to be true and intriguing, or true and somewhat surprising, or true and repulsive (it's a form of service, actually, to repel those who have no chance of getting value from your POV).

In my attempt to translate the middle layer of Jonathan's POV into writing, I hope I've correctly identified and crisply described the essential elements of his argument. There's still "compression" happening here, but it's closer to the lossless compression of a FLAC file. The person who perhaps has been feeling a dissatisfaction with hourly billing that they can't quite articulate will "feel seen" by this language, and may have an "ah ha!" moment. The person who was offended by the headline is being offered a thoughtful argument or a doorway by which the offense can become a debate. Both of these people now have an incentive to explore the base layer, which is the ocean of content that Jonathan freely shares to help his audience understand, embrace, and implement a transition away from hourly billing to something better.

You won't see the layer cake framework illustrated in the examples at the end of this chapter because it's more of a formal device for defining and refining your POV in the clean, antiseptic environment of a sheet of paper. In the real world, other forms work better for actually delivering your POV to human eyes, ears, minds, and hearts.

2) The Hub & Spoke Framework

In the hub & spoke framework, the hub is the POV and the spokes are implications of the POV. The implications of a POV are every significant variation of "X is true, therefore Y".

I'm not sure I'd call the following Blair Enns' core POV, but this is certainly a POV I've heard him express multiple times: "Sales is not persuasion, it's helping a prospect understand if there's a fit with your services." (Again, not Blair's words, but my attempt to accurately summarize his.) What are the implications of this POV; the therefore Y's of this X? An incomplete list:

Sales is fundamentally not about persuasion, therefore "being persuasive" might not be all that important to being effective at sales. What, then, creates effective sales people?
Sales is about effectively understanding fit, therefore my own lack of clarity about who is a good or great-fit client might be harming my sales effectiveness.
My close rate with sales has been bad. How could I better fit the market's needs in order to increase my close rate?

You can see that the implications might be downstream realizations that flow from the POV, second-order effects of embracing the POV, or they might be follow-on questions raised by the POV.

If you fully explored the significant implications of your POV and wrote 1,500-word essays on each implication (and maybe one to three such essays on the core POV), you would have a book. For some readers, it would be one they find to be an impactful book.

3) The Principle & Specifics Framework

The "principle & specifics" framework differs from the hub & spoke in how you tease out the implications of your POV. In the hub & spoke framework, the implications are a list that you arrive at through something like an up-front design process, much like how you'd outline a book before writing it. In the principle & specifics framework, the events of your life supply you with examples, cases, hypotheticals, and situations upon which to apply the core principle(s) of your POV(s). That's why I describe the principles and specifics framework as "event-driven".

Especially if you are open to using analogy and teaching stories, living even a relatively ordinary life will supply you with all kinds of raw material that you can apply the principles of your POV to, giving you repeated opportunities to articulate your POV into the world in accessible ways that connect with, educate, and transform a non-expert audience. If you are resistant to this "casual life stories" approach and instead want to articulate your POV using more "professional" inputs, then interactions with peers, prospects, clients, and the infrastructure of the market you've specialized in will be the event flow that supplies you with the examples, cases, hypotheticals, and situations upon which to apply the core principle(s) of your POV(s).

This framework is less hierarchical or structured than the hub & spoke framework (due to substituting stochastic life events for intentional design) but, as a result, is easier to "roll out" without a lot of up front work and easier to in-line with an existing communications stream (email list, etc.).

The layer cake, hub & spoke, and principle & specifics frameworks are not the only 3 forms that your POV can assume; there are certainly others, or notable variations of these 3. Again, my purpose here is to help you see the little "magician tricks" that master articulators of their POV use. For example, you might subscribe to Jonathan Stark's daily email list and think that he's smart and prolific (he is!) and that raw talent is the only explanation for the quality of his email list. But there's now a good chance that you'll see something else in his email list: his POV articulated using the principles and specifics framework. If you can spot these frameworks at play in other points of view that you find impressive, there's a good chance you'll be one giant step closer to articulating your own impressive POV with mastery.

Application

Many of the forms I've described above, with the exception of the principle & specifics, suggest one-shot articulations. But what about how these forms interact with the flow of time? Remember that the power of a good POV lies in its creation of mental availability ("Oh, the 'hourly billing is nuts guy'? You mean Jonathan Stark?!?"), differentiation, explanatory power, and ultimately, that moment when someone delegates part of their cognition to your POV's explanatory power. Often this power is amassed through repetitive short-form content. Think 30-second ad spots rather than 1-hour infomercials.

1) Repetition

Dripping water wears away the stone; little strokes fell great oaks. We all both understand and sometimes under-appreciate the power of repetition. One very powerful way to apply a POV over time is to repeat it frequently in a context where such repetition feels natural. You don't guest on a podcast and mindlessly repeat your POV over and over again for 30 minutes. But an email list that you publish to frequently, combined with the principle & specifics form? Over the course of some years, that's capable of creating dramatic positive transformation in thousands or tens of thousands of people!

Text is not the only form where repetition is powerful, as any 40-year-old who can sing a TV commercial jingle from their childhood can tell you. Audio and video are mediums where you can repeatedly get your POV out into the world. The idea that you would articulate your POV across multiple owned marketing channels gestures at the other form of repetition: infusion. Your POV infuses your every piece of communication and interaction with the world.

2) Ubiquity

Another form of repetition is repetition across a lot of "surfaces", otherwise known as ubiquity. A print ad can appear on billboards, bus stop benches, and a multitude of other surfaces. Likewise, your POV can be infused throughout media that you own (email list, podcast, YouTube channel, etc.) and "surfaces" owned by others (guesting on others' podcasts, guest posts in others' blogs, paid media, talks to other people's audiences, etc.).

We've all been on the receiving end of ubiquity. Unless you are completely (blissfully? :)) insulated from the American media ecosystem, you are certainly aware that circa spring 2022, a new "Top Gun" movie was released. That was at least a year long campaign of ubiquity and buildup on a scale that we could never achieve. But when I self-published the first version of The Positioning Manual, appearing within 6 months on a half-dozen or so podcasts serving the ecosystem of freelancers was enough to attract over 1,000 new email list subscribers, which was a remarkable achievement for me at that time. That was ubiquity at our scale.

3) Intensity

Intensity lies on the other end of the spectrum from repetition and ubiquity. Articulating a POV in an intense way looks something like a book or talk. How many books have changed your thinking but you've never heard from the author again, or they're not active on social media or whatever? This is impact without repetition.

Note

4: https://writeusefulbooks.com

Books can be developed and tested [4] in a way that increases their chance of achieving market impact, but they remain a sort of gold standard of authority-building for the same reason even the most thorough testing cannot guarantee their success; a book with long-lasting, deep impact in the market is something of a miracle, and we reward the author with a level authority reserved for the miracleworkers among us.

4) Intimacy

The above are all scalable in some way. There are plenty of "unscalable" opportunities to articulate a POV, and these often happen during interactions with prospects, clients, and colleagues. Nobody takes their clothes off, but I label this category of POV articulations intimacy because it generally involves some heightened level of trust or vulnerability in a 1:1 or small group setting.

Alcoholics Anonymous is a fascinating example of, well, all these forms of POV articulation, but if you've ever been to an AA meeting (my ex-wife was a recovering alcoholic, thus my insider knowledge here) you've possibly seen a vivid example of POV articulation through intimacy. With AA, there's a book that describes the POV's framework (articulation through intensity), there are reminders of the POV at every meeting (repetition), and because a lot of folks in AA hang with other AA members, there's ubiquity in the little micro-subcultures this creates. The AA meetings I've attended in support of my ex-wife were usually 30 people or less, and they're vital to the articulation of the "Alcoholics Anonymous POV" because all the other forms of POV articulation come to bear in complementary fashion during the intimate environment of most AA meetings. At those meetings, people speak with unvarnished honesty about their brokenness and their setbacks and wins in healing this brokenness. There are repetitions of the subculture's folk wisdom and formal literature. And while there are some who make a beeline for the door the second the meeting ends (lookin’ at you, folks there on court orders or therapist’s suggestion!), there are those who hang out and enjoy the company of others after the meeting. I struggle to imagine a version of Alcoholics Anonymous that is even 20% as effective without the intimacy of AA meetings to galvanize every other articulation of the "AA POV".

Do You Need To Have Some Certain Specific Combination Of Form And Application?

Is there some "recipe" you're going for here that requires, say, 40% hub and spoke, 60% principle and specifics? No. As you'll see in the examples that follow, a lot of things can work.

Just as POV itself is emergent from your living relationship with and care for your market, the specifics of how you articulate your POV over time will emerge. Maybe you'll be like Jonathan Stark, and have a book that emerges from frequent emails. Or maybe the writing of your book will be like popping a ripe pimple — an intense explosion of POV — and you'll further articulate your POV through the opportunities that typically follow publishing a book (podcast guesting, etc.) And maybe you could have more impact if you relieved yourself of the notion that you should write a book at all, and instead pursued other ways of articulating your POV.

The emergence of how you articulate your POV will also be influenced by both personal factors (maybe you're shy at public speaking but a confident writer, for example) and contextual factors (your market of medical doctors avoids LinkedIn but readily uses Twitter, for example). Unfortunately for some of us, continued impact and relevance in the market are not purely a function of the power of our POV, but a product of the POV's power, our deft (or clumsy and self-defeating) usage of the tools available to articulate it, and the strengths and weaknesses inherent in the tools we choose to use, amplified or diminished as always by contextual factors we cannot control.

Examples

Let's look at some examples of POV articulation. This is a small convenience sample, not a rigorous cross-section of all POV articulations ever. It takes time to do so, but I trust if you're really curious about POV you'll take a close look at each of these via the links I've provided.

Joe Morrison: This medium-length article from Joe Morrison, who writes about the satellite imagery business, is an excellent example of articulating his POV. This piece explores implications, argues for the benefits that applying his POV would yield, it addresses obvious and non-obvious counterarguments, and it references specific examples and experiential data points. I see this piece as combining the hub and spoke framework, and using intensity: https://joemorrison.substack.com/p/open-all-of-the-satellite-imagery

David Maister: A nice example of intensity, David Maister gave a talk called "The Problem Of Standards", and the transcription is here: https://davidmaister.com/articles/the-problem-of-standards/. This talk has some of the looseness of the principles and specifics framework, but is a clear and powerful example of intensity.

Jonathan Stark: I've already mentioned Jonathan's email list, but I want to also include it in this examples section to keep things well-organized: https://jonathanstark.com/vpb. Jonathan's email list usually hews to the principle and specifics framework, but you'll also notice his usage of repetition and, if you look outside his email into the market ecosystem that he serves, you'll see ubiquity at play.

• • •

I love it when I can find examples of emerging stuff. This is why I so often recommend that anytime you are impressed or perhaps intimidated by what some "hero" of yours is doing now, take a trip to the https://archive.org/web/ and look at the history of how they got to where they are today. The Wayback Machine can't show you the inner workings of their journey, but you'll often find that the thing you are so impressed by now began its public presence as a humble, almost embarrassingly embryonic version of what it ultimately became. I find this simple form of research very empowering! That's why I want to include some emerging points of view. The work I do, via my workshops and coaching, often puts me in the virtual room with folks who are sorting through the raw material they have for a POV and starting to use the frameworks I've described here to get it out into the world. So, two people with emerging points of view for you to keep an eye on.

1) Alastair McDermott: The headline for Alastair's POV might be "Vertical specialization is the real specialization superpower for authority-building." Because this is an emerging POV, your best perch for seeing it develop going forward is probably Alastair's email list, which I recommend you join: https://therecognizedauthority.com/

2) Luca Ingiani: "Agile is really about risk management". I'm struck by how inert and unremarkable this POV might be to those outside the world of software development and how provocative and intriguing it is to exactly the audience Luca wants to reach. You'll see this with lots of great points of view. "True believers" will see the POV as self-evident and a bit boring, but they aren't the intended audience. I know Luca will use the media channels where he has a head start, and that's shorter form more intimate stuff like podcasting and short-form video, so that predicts he will use repetition and ubiquity along with the semi-scalable intimacy afforded by his training work — which has him in an intimate setting with groups of a dozen or so people on a regular basis — to articulate his POV. Here's one starting point for following this emerging POV: https://agileembeddedpodcast.com/

• • •

James Clear: My quick attempt at a headline for James Clear's POV: "To improve yourself, change your environment before you try anything else." There are certainly other angles on his core POV, and while I'm using him as an example here, I'm not as well acquainted with his body of work as I'd like to be. I do know that he has sold around 3.5MM copies of his book "Atomic Habits", and even if he got a shitty publishing deal (unlikely because he already had a great author platform), at $3 a copy and with a few years of soaking up the gravy via the speaking circuit and careful cash management he need not work another day of his life. This is a good example of the power of articulating a POV by writing great, medium-length weekly articles that use a principles and specifics form followed up by the "knockout punch" of an intense book.

Blair Enns: Blair is a great example to end with because his POV articulation sequence is somewhat reversed. I'm sure Blair was articulating his POV into the world in various ways before he published his Win Without Pitching Manifesto book, but I think most folks will encounter his book first, and then after that intense encounter with Blair's POV (expressed in the book using a hub and spoke form), they'll sign up for his email list and get a followon articulation of the same POV using a principles and specific approach with a bit of repetition in the mix. It would be a powerful combination no matter what the order of these two elements, but the typical order is a nice contrast to the James Clear example, and proof that there's no one "recipe" or sequence by which you must articulate a POV.

What's The Difference Between POV And Thought Leadership?

Elsewhere, I've described thought leadership as a protracted campaign of arguing for the change articulated in your POV. So where does POV end and thought leadership begin?

It's a bit cartoonish, but we can think of thought leadership as a better funded POV that has a cocaine habit. Thought leadership is going to party harder and longer, and do it more frequently and in more expensive venues. :)

Said more factually, thought leadership is working harder and "going bigger" with articulating a POV, very intentionally dovetailed with a complementary offer or business model to monetize the investment in thought leadership. The thought leadership is a combination of brand and direct response marketing to support the offer/business model.

5: Getting Started

“Philip, this is all great, but give me a process, please. Or at least a starting point.”

Ask and you shall receive. I’ve run a workshop on POV for consultants several times, and based on what I’ve learned from helping those groups grapple with these ideas, I’d recommend the following "recipe". Think of this as the “Getting Started Guide” that you find when you unbox a new tech product or piece of software.

The Process

1) Model Others’ POV

One very reliable way for a teacher to get a smart but less-than-fully-confident student to feel awkward is to put them on the spot in front of the class. We recreate these unfavorable dynamics when we “put ourselves on the spot” with this POV-cultivating work. So instead of doing that – instead of diving headfirst into the question, “what is my POV” – start with the question “how do other people’s points of view work?”.

Use the POVSpace Map to map out points of view belonging to other people. You’re looking for POVs that you are already familiar with, but in case none immediately come to mind, here are some kinds of people who might have a POV that you are familiar with:

Politicians or historical figures
Authorities within your industry or discipline (for developers, Joel Spolsky comes to mind, for designers, Mike Montero, and for marketers, Seth Godin)
Authors with very useful or well-known books within your industry or discipline

Here’s a link to a blank POVSpace map that you can annotate: https://philipmorganconsulting.com/povspacemap

You can’t do this mapping “wrong”, and grappling with the slippery, somewhat ambiguous nature of it is incredibly productive, so give it some good deep-thinking time!

2) POV Ideation

Generating ideas that become a good POV can happen in a variety of ways, but we generally see three phases:

Generate a bunch of ideas of varying quality
Filter those ideas for the ones that work well as a POV
Keep refining the good ones into better, more arresting, and more impactful packaging

Now is the right time to start the ideation and filtering work. This worksheet is a good starting point: https://philipmorganconsulting.com/povquestions

3) POV Prioritization

Some points of view have pure shock value that makes them noticeable and memorable, but the most valuable points of view have relevance to your audience’s immediate concerns or long-term progress. That’s why the next step I’d propose in this process is to map out your audience’s POV on the POVSpace map. Remember that your audience might be anything from the few dozen prospective clients you speak to each year to thousands of people who follow you via your email list or other platform.

Again, a link to a blank POVSpace map: https://philipmorganconsulting.com/povspacemap

These questions will help you think about how your POV candidates relate to your audience’s POV, and how those overlaps or tensions might point to the more useful or valuable POV candidates on your list.

If there is a gap between your POV candidates and your audience’s POV:
1. How might this gap challenge your audience in a productive way?
2. Alternately, how might this gap prevent your audience from finding your POV relevant?
If there is significant overlap between one or more of your POV candidates and your audience’s POV:
1. How might this overlap inspire or motivate your audience?
2. How might this overlap de-value your POV by making it seem too obvious? (In this case, how might you tweak or re-frame your POV to make it feel fresher?)
More generally:
1. If you see things differently than your audience, why is that and how can that difference benefit them?
2. Same question but for similarities between your way of seeing and your audience’s, but with this additional challenge: they certainly have a combination of stagnation and wise conservatism in their way of seeing things; what would be an improved balance between these two elements?

These questions have 2 goals. The first is to help you explore the value of any overlaps or tensions that exist between your way of seeing and your audience’s. The second is to help you prioritize which of your candidate POVs might be most relevant and useful to your audience.

4) POV Design And Packaging

A POV is either a maypole or mycelium; it’s either a prominent central feature of your business’ brand or a more subtle thing that’s diffused throughout it. In both cases, your POV will start to show up in all the communication that normally happens between you, your business, and the market, and perhaps in some new forms like a podcast or book that are inspired by the POV. The least likely form in which your POV will show up is the form I’d like you to explore next: the “layer cake” form with a concise headline expression of the POV followed by a 1-paragraph elaboration.

This form is artificial and not very real-world-useful, but it’s very useful now, when you hopefully have at least one candidate for your primary POV that could benefit from some sharpening and clarification. As you know from earlier in this book, the headline version of your POV will be true but incomplete, while the paragraph-length version of it will fill in some of the nuance and supporting argument that can’t fit into the headline.

The next step in this process: get to packaging; take your most promising POV candidate(s) and write the headline version and the 1-paragraph version. As you do so, remember:

Headlines can be either incomplete or complete sentences
It’s OK – desirable even – for headlines to be blunt and un-subtle
There’s no physical limit to how long a paragraph can be (one of the longest sentences in a novel is a 13,955-word sentence in The Rotter’s Club by Jonathan Coe!), but if you constrain the paragraph-version of your POV to 6 to 8 sentences, you may find that helps sharpen and focus your thinking on the most essential elements of your argument.
As you write the paragraph, think about why the central claim of your POV is true or useful. The job of the paragraph is to support that central claim. The paragraph does not need, nor will it often be able to, definitively prove your POV’s claim.

5) The Fear Inventory

Right about now is usually the right time to make a written inventory of every fear – baseless or not, large or small – that you’re feeling about articulating your POV into the world. No other human ever need see this fear inventory, but that doesn’t mean it’s low-value or something you should skip. By inventorying the fears you might face as part of articulating your POV, you de-fang those fears and take away much of their power, which comes from their ability to mount a “surprise attack” that disorients you into believing their twisted logic. Putting that twisted logic into writing does a lot to help you make light of the fear as you move forward with greater confidence and strength.

6) From Strength To Strength

I hope at this point you have something close to a clear, impactful POV you can start infusing into your communication and articulating into the market. If you don’t, I want you to imagine that you do as you reflect on this final set of question prompts.

There’s research that says in the context of competitive performance (athletics, public speaking perhaps, etc.), you should avoid visualizing a peak performance because this can fool your body into believing you’ve achieved the goal you seek and then your actual performance suffers because you put 1% less into it. Or something like that. But in this context, imagining that you do have a clear, impactful POV that your market responds to in a positive way can help you further imagine what that POV might be. If you don’t at this point have a POV that you feel great about, then imagine a sort of “placeholder POV” that performs the way you want; it helps your audience see things in a new way that moves them forward or opens up a path of transformation for them. As you reflect on the following questions, the creative part of your mind may help transform that “placeholder POV” into an actual POV that has both the potential for the impact you seek and good compatibility with how you actually see things and what you actually care about.

How might you build on areas of strength (or potential strength) in your POV?
- Is your POV true but worded mildly? Might more blunt or borderline offensive wording create more positive impact?
- Are you using your audience’s terminology and idiom? If not, would your POV resonate more if you did?
How might your marketing (your positioning, messaging, and any content/ideas you put into the world) become more coherent with your POV?
If the primary purpose of your marketing was not to attract interest in your services but instead to accelerate buy-in and adoption of your POV, what would change about your marketing? (I’m not saying your marketing should change in this way, but this is a useful thought experiment even if nothing about your marketing changes.)
Another thought experiment: if every piece of content you publish for the next 3 years was only about your POV, who would this content appeal to, and would they ever become bored of it?
What ways of articulating your POV would be the strongest, most forceful, or most helpful ways?
(The world has enough Tony Robbins) but does the strongest articulation of your POV look more like Tony Robbins, Fred Rogers, or somebody else?
To what extent could persistence, authenticity, or empathy substitute for charisma, intellectual brilliance, or power in your articulation of your POV?
How might your current and future client work more deeply reflect your POV? How could your POV challenge clients in a productive way?

• • •

I hope this process helps you move from your starting point closer to having a clear, distinctive, impactful point of view. I hope that point of view creates value that both you and your audience share.

6: Conclusion

I believe that part of what makes things happen is knowing they can happen; knowing they’re possible. So, if I want to live in a world where more of you have powerful, empathetic, and distinctive POVs and reap the benefits of those POVs, then one way I can nudge things in that direction is helping more people see that kind of POV as possible, and the precursor to that is knowing how a POV functions. Thus, this guide.

Again, I am convinced that the best POVs emerge from the concentrated experience that flows from focus and an empathetic but somewhat frustrated, impatient concern for your market's progress and improvement.

So if you feel some POV raw material rolling around inside you but don't yet have one defined, let me close by saying I hope this guide has been helpful, and by encouraging you to stick with it! The struggle is worth it, even if it takes some time to resolve into one of those crisp, impactful POVs we all admire.

The Point Of View Guide

A point of view is an IDEA

A point of view is an idea that you WISH

A point of view is an idea that you wish YOUR MARKET

A point of view is an idea that you wish your market would BUY INTO

A point of view is an idea that you wish your market would buy into BECAUSE

A point of view is an idea that you wish your market would buy into because their buy-in would MAKE THINGS BETTER FOR THEM.

POV is not just for missionaries and thought leaders

POV is not just for visionaries and "futurists"

POV can be a tidy hierarchy or a rowdy street gang

Why don't you already have a POV? (There's one good reason why most of us don't)

POV is risky and speculative

2: What Is A Point Of View?

The Functions Of A Point Of View

The Components Of A Point Of View

The Central Elements

The Contextual Elements

Related Reading

3: Cultivating A POV

Developing Your Point Of View

The POVSpace

Map Yourself On The POVSpace Map

Surfacing POV Raw Material

Data-Based Optimizer

Data-Based Transformer

Experience-Based Optimizer

Experience-Based Transformer

More General Question Prompts

Signals

Signaling Pedigree

Signaling Experience

Signaling A Disrupter Change Style

Signaling An Evolver Change Style

Ideation

Audience

Overlaps/Tensions

Filtering Your Opinions For Good POV Material

4: Articulating A POV

Form

1) The "Layer Cake" Framework

2) The Hub & Spoke Framework

3) The Principle & Specifics Framework

Application

1) Repetition

2) Ubiquity

3) Intensity

4) Intimacy

Do You Need To Have Some Certain Specific Combination Of Form And Application?

Examples

What's The Difference Between POV And Thought Leadership?

5: Getting Started

The Process

6: Conclusion