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Business Writing to Remember

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Business Writing to Remember Business Writing to Remember Story links, summaries & book reviews of great business writing Dave Stark December 2014 Introduction Business Writing to Remember is a follow-up to the compilation book projects Words Written Down, 111 Books Reviewed and More Words Written Down with all three coming out of the writing blog www.wordswrittendown.com. The idea behind first the website and now the books has been to read writing of interest and then attempt to describe those pieces well and make connections between them, with the result both a repository of great writing and body of work with my thoughts on the pieces. This particular book compilation differs from the prior ones in that one of those was focused on book reviews done on books about many different subjects and the other two compilations also aggregated posts from many subjects, including sports writing, writing about writing and business writing. Business Writing to Remember is about… just that, my favorite business writing by others linked to and written about during the duration of the time I’ve written the blog Words Written Down. As I began the process of looking back at past stories read, linked to and written about, categories of business writing began to emerge, with some of them around business segments and some specific companies. A particular segment or company not being included here in no way means it not interesting, just that the pieces here are those which most resonated with me, can be found via links that are currently available for reading without a subscription and tend to be fairly recently published works as some solid writing from years past not quite as relevant anymore. The business segments separated out with pieces in that area are health care, venture capital, security, manufacturing & resource utilization and power generation & management. Companies with great writing about each are Tesla Motors, Google, Amazon and Apple. Additionally, there’s a section that includes single pieces of writing on Facebook, Twitter and Netflix, along with remarkable stories on two less-known companies in Declara and Tankchair. The final section includes reviews I’ve written over the last several years on solid business books, with many different segments and companies represented throughout the various reviews. There’s been a lot of reading done to suss out the writing found to be interesting enough to include in the blog and this particular effort is the best of the business writing I’ve come across, along with a summary and for many of them, my thoughts on what makes the pieces so good. Pulling the pieces of writing with a business focus together and separating them out by category is simply a continuation of the point of the blog… to attempt to give a bit more permanence to pieces of great writing, along with my thoughts on what makes each a work to remember. Contents Segments: Health care 4 Venture capital 5 Security 8 Manufacturing & resource utilization 9 Power generation & management 11 Companies: Tesla Motors & electric cars 12 Google (including Nest) 13 Amazon (including Zappos) 14 Apple 16 Tankchair, Twitter, Declara, Netflix & Facebook 17 Book reviews: Being Mortal by Atul Gawande 18 Factory Man by Beth Macy 20 Abundance by Peter Diamandis 21 Show your work by Austin Kleon 22 Flash Boys by Michael Lewis 23 Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton 24 The Everything Store by Brad Stone 25 Ingenious by Jason Fagone 26 Plan B by David Kord Murray 27 Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson 28 Segments Health care "Illumina's new low-cost genome machine will change health care forever" by Ashlee Vance for Businessweek in Jan 2014 – on people gaining affordable access to information about the genetic traits that they carry. "Patient Zero" by Tom Junod and Mark Warren for Esquire in Dec 2013 – on cancer patient Stephanie Lee and noted scientist and researcher Eric Schadt. "States of Health" by Atul Gawande for the New Yorker in Oct 2013 – on the Affordable Care Act by the noted physician and excellent writer. "Has Carl June Found a Key to Fighting Cancer?" by Jason Fagone for Philadelphia Magazine in July 2013. "Is Concierge Medicine the Future of Health Care?" by Devin Leonard for Businessweek in Nov 2012 – on doctors taking on patients on a monthly fee basis rather than billing insurance carriers for exams and basic services. It’s an interesting notion with lots of different service derivations and costs ranging from extremely high to quite affordable. "Craig Venter’s Bugs Might Save the World" by Wil Hylton for the New York Times in May 2012. "Adventures in Extreme Science" by Tom Junod for Esquire in Mar 2011 – on scientist Eric Schadt and his "emperor has no clothes" approach to conventional wisdom in the field of molecular biology. Schadt makes for an interesting topic with his proselytizing about the vast networks and cause-effect relationships within the body... and how that runs counter to the previous belief that things within ran independently enough that successful mapping of human DNA would start us on the road to disease cure. In terms of this new viewpoint, the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is cited as one of Schadt's early influences and which led to him breaking away from conventional belief. Junod details not just the intelligence and contrarian viewpoint of Schadt, but also his propensity to get out in front of his ideas and advocate loudly for him. Lest that statement make him appear a simple self-promoter, also noted in the profile is Schadt's collaborative approach to solving problems and curing disease... regardless of whether it's he or his company getting the credit and subsequent revenue. It was really interesting reading on Schadt and also striking to me from the piece was an anecdote about how he "likes to do his supercomputing on planes" via Amazon servers. Venture capital "The Zen Master of Silicon Valley Chatter" by Max Chafkin for Fast Company in Jan 2013 – on Kevin Rose, the Digg founder and now internet investor as part of Google Ventures. "Social+Capital, the League of Extraordinarily Rich Gentlemen” by Drake Bennett for Businessweek in July 2012 – profiles the Venture Capital Fund led by former Facebook employee Chamath Palihapitiya and backed in part by Silicon Valley heavyweights Kevin Rose and Peter Thiel. Solid piece on an interesting fund build on the idea of backing companies trying to accomplishing something good. "8 Visionaries on How They Spot the Future" by Joanna Pearlstein for Wired in Apr 2012 – written as a wisdom compilation story and the following are the people and their insights that struck me the most. Paul Saffo (Technology Forecaster) - looks for things that seem out of place as an indicator of events to come. Chris Sacca (Venture Capital investor) - you don't need to be a seer, prophet, soothsayer, diviner, or clairvoyant to spot and potentially invest in the companies that could be poised for success. Barriers to entry are low enough in many technology realms that evaluation decisions can be made based on the actual product or service experience (or at least an early stage iteration of it). “How to Get Started as a Business Leader” by Mitch Joel for the Twist Image blog in Feb 2012 – contains an embedded video interview with investor Chris Sacca, head of the venture capital fund Lowercase Capital. I first heard of Sacca from a Feb 2010 Businessweek piece "And Google Begat..." on investing by Google alums and have since come across a number of interesting things noted and linked to by Sacca on his Twitter feed. The recent interview, though, particularly stood out as it's an hour-long conversation between Sacca and Kevin Rose (who founded Digg and hosts for another of his companies, Revision3, an interview series with business leaders). The interview with Sacca has a short introduction by Twist Image President Mitch Joel and my notes (which of course may differ from what someone else gleams) from the actual Rose-Sacca interview are as follows. Background Sacca went to the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown and then started down the road of graduate school. However, rather than completing grad school at the time, he received the school loan checks and used the money to start a business with the intention of aggregating class action lawsuit information. The business didn’t do much, but the story probably serves as an early indicator of his entrepreneurial bent. He then began day trading online and during this heyday period went to being up $12M, but then found himself down $4M in the market crash around 2000. With this roller coaster ride in his background, he proceeded to get his law degree and came to Silicon Valley. While having a day job as a lawyer, Sacca did lots of outside of work business hustling and attended all the networking events and worked hard to build a network. He was at the law firm for 13 months before getting laid off and then created a company that didn’t do a heck of a lot, but having that company helped him land a job at Spedera and from there got hired into Google. Sacca was brought into Google to buy data centers for server housing and negotiated with local officials on the space Google was looking to take. This role was part of the core engineering function at the company and exposed him to some of the brilliant people working there. He then became Head of Special Projects and worked on initiatives such as free WIFI for Mountain View and the $4.7B bid by Google for wireless spectrum.
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