Thursday, December 31, 2009

Sports Illustrated Picks for Best Writing of Decade

From the same Sports Illustrated issue that had the Wish of a Lifetime piece I posted on came a very interesting sidebar piece.



What stood out to me was that Sports Illustrated did something that I've tried to do with this blog... highlight great writing (which sometimes is due to great prose, sometimes great content and rarely, both).

Under the general heading of "Best of the Decade", SI named it's "Best Stories of the Decade"...which contained one that was familiar to me and two that I hadn't seen before.

The piece I was familiar with was written by S.L. Price and interestingly enough... was one I hadn't actually seen before in this form. Titled "A Death in the Baseball Family", this 2007 story profiled the life and tragic passing of former minor league coach Mike Coolbaugh.

I actually first heard about Coolbaugh from a different SI piece, "Hit in the Head", that was an excerpt from the Price book "Heart of the Game: Life, Death, and Mercy in Minor League America" (which I reviewed here). I didn't realize it at the time of reading either the excerpt or book itself, but it appears that the Price story on Coolbaugh actually began with this "A Death in the Baseball Family" Sports Illustrated story.

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The two other pieces referenced as "Stories of the Decade" by SI are both from 2001 and featured very different subjects (as described below by Sports Illustrated)...

- "Higher Education" by Gary Smith. "High school basketball coach Perry Reese impacts an Amish community."

- "The Wrecking Yard" by William Nack. "Retired NFL players still struggling with disability and pain."

Wish of a Lifetime Piece from Sports Illustrated

Great Point After piece from Selena Roberts (who I can't help but view fondly after she revealed Alex Rodriguez as a steroid user) in the latest Sports Illustrated.



Titled "Special Senior Moments", it details the charitable foundation created and led by former Olympic Freestyle Skier and NFL player Jeremy Bloom. The mission of Wish of a Lifetime is to enrich the lives of low-income seniors and a quote in the story from Bloom was "I just believe that too often in our society, seniors are an afterthought."

In a way, this reminds me of the excellent John Grogan book "The Longest Trip Home." Reviewed here by myself, the memoir details Grogan's relationship with his Dad and coping with aging... just excellent stuff that reminds one of how important it is to pay attention to the aging just as one does the young.

Back to Bloom's foundation, though... extremely admirable stuff and the story Roberts paints of a wish recipient is very touching.

Monday, December 28, 2009

Best Buy Articles in BusinessWeek

Couple of interesting pieces on electronics retailer Best Buy from BusinessWeek.

The first was from the start of December and titled "Why Tech Bows to Best Buy." As could be inferred from said headline, it's about the current dominance in it's category and how that translates to increased control in relationships with suppliers.

Best Buy certainly must have done some things right to enjoy this position, but along with their success, it's also helped that competitors such as Comp USA and more recently Circuit City have shuttered their doors (again, though... leads to a chicken and egg type question as perhaps moves by Best Buy helped take down the other retailers).

Getting at what they've done right, the second BW Best Buy piece of note was a December 2006 cover story titled "Smashing The Clock. No schedules, No mandatory meetings, Inside Best Buy's radical reshaping of the workplace."



As the story was from three years ago, I was curious to see what the current usage of this ROWE (Results Only Work Environment) program may be and how it seems to be doing. Well, a Google search later seems to indicate that the usage is there and it seems to be a success. I found this May 2008 post from the Tim Ferriss blog (he of the bestselling book "The Four Hour Workweek") and more recently, this June 2009 post on the blog Free Pursuits.

Additionally, the two Best Buy employees behind the ROWE program have since written a book and been spun off from Best Buy into a new consulting venture, CultureRx) to spread this management practice.

Interesting stuff.

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

"Superfreakonomics" by Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner - Book Review

Recently finished "Superfreakonomics" by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner and found it to be a fast read... with some very interesting stuff.



As the follow up to the 2005 book "Freakonomics", "Superfreakonomics" contained more viewpoints from the economist authors. Basic premise of each is the usage of raw data and actual experience to investigate various and sundry aspects of the world. That's not a very clear explanation, but frankly, it's tough to describe well what Levitt and Dubner write about.

The authors themselves describe "Freakonomics" as only having a unified theme if you consider the idea that "people respond to incentives" as qualifying as a unified theme. If that's not weighty enough as a common denominator, then the original book simply needs to be enjoyed based on it's stories... of how people name their kids, how drug dealers run businesses, and how abortion impacts crime rates.

"Superfreakonics" carries this same data and experience based investigation forward to topics in the first few chapters like walking drunk, how high end prostitutes prosper and why suicide bombers should life insurance. I found these discussions somewhat interesting, but enjoyed more the second half of the book.

This fascinating portion of the book began with chapter 4 and three different topics covered...

- How over a century ago, the simple fix of washing hands saved the lives of countless new mothers and babies... a full decade prior to germ theory being accepted.
- The relative safety benefits (there, but not to the degree one would think) of kids using car seats as opposed to regular belts in the back seat.
- Concept of using what amounts to basically floating inner tubes in targeted areas of the ocean to prevent hurricanes from forming.

Chapter 5 followed up on this idea of preventing hurricanes to look at another "natural phenomenon"... global warming. Levitt and Dubner discuss in depth the company Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, WA... led by ex-Microsoft genius type Nathan Myhrvold. The company works on a lot of cutting edge science and this particular discussion (along with the hurricane / inner tube idea also from them) is around the idea of "geoengineering" or having an actual man-made alteration to the environment.

It's best to just read the section to fully understand it (or, somewhat fully), but the concept in relation to global warming from Intellectual Ventures is that we don't know for sure that global warming will doom the planet, but if that's where it's headed, we need to do more than conserve and use less energy to reverse course. Specific geoengineering based solutions from Intellectual Ventures range from producing additional clouds over the ocean to pumping sulfer dioxide into the stratosphere.

If "Freakonomics" is about how people respond to incentives, I'd say the most interesting portions of "Superfreakonomics" are based in two things... the same response to incentives and the idea of simple solutions.

One of the fundamental reasons Myhrvold and company feel conservation wouldn't do a lot is around incentivized behavior. If either a person or country converses or cuts back, it will help all, but not necessarily help them. In terms of simple solutions, both this idea of geoengineering and washing of hands is simple (geoengineering may not seem simple, but as Myhrvold describes it, it's could be relatively low cost)... and yet would require shifts in attitudes and behavior to be fully adopted.

Whether someone agrees with Levitt, Dubner, Myhrvold and Intellectual Ventures or not... it's interesting stuff to think about.

All in all, that's how I felt about "Superfreakonomics"... had some not so great, but some really interesting things (and was a fast read).

Monday, December 21, 2009

Time Magazine Person of the Year - Ben Bernanke

Interesting and well written profile of Ben Bernanke in the latest Time Magazine.



The Federal Reserve Chairman was selected by Time as its "2009 Person of the Year" and the in-depth piece on Bernanke by Michael Grunwald provides several different views of note. At a macro level, Grunwald writes of the role of the Fed in overseeing financial markets and financial meltdown at the latter part of the decade. At a more micro level, Grunwald details the steps that the Fed Chairman took to mitigate the impact of the recession and avert a second Great Depression.

Solid writing and it makes the case that while people could certainly quibble with some of the actions taken, Bernanke deserves huge credit for choosing action over inaction. As a student of the Depression, Bernanke felt that global markets were on the verge of going down that road again, and took the steps to try to prevent that.

The Grunwald piece has the argument (which I agree with) that if somethings not working, you should do something different... the outcome may not be perfect, but it's usually going to be better than if those things not working just continued.

Whether someone agrees with the notion or not, Bernanke certainly seems a good choice as the Time Person of the Year given his influence on the global economy... and conversely, the people in it.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Wherefore the Blog... Again

Much of this post is a repackaging if not regurgitation of prior posts done, but for those of us not as smart as this guy (who I just read a section about in the book "SuperFreakonomics") or some other genius type, repetition maybe ain't such a bad thing.

With that said, I wanted to look in this post at my blog writing as a whole and where I've been and why I've visited said place...

At the end of November I did a post on topics covered over the last year and a half and followed that up with a few additional posts looking back on stuff written. This included first one and then another post on some of the best magazine writing I've linked to and then got into the quite large category of... business.

First I looked for the business topics most posted on and linked to and came up with those below...

- Touch-screen technology
- Cloud Computing
- Workplace Culture
- Customer Service
- Social Media

In this business topic listing post I also summarized content around touch-screen technology and then revisited Social Media links with this post.

As for future blog writing I'll do... between posts about the other business topics, more "best writing" posts, additional books and magazine articles I'll read, and stuff I'll find on the worldly wide interwebnet of superhighway info... I think I'll continue to have as much to write about & link to as I can carve out the time for.

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If all of this above is the "where I've been", I suppose that means it's time to address the "why I've visited said place"...

The "wherefore the blog" section at the top of my blog was written over a year ago, but hasn't really changed. To whit... "The point is to write about stuff I find... well, interesting. If these efforts should help me transition from my current business program management type job to a business writing and creative type job then all the better. If not, then the original point of the blog holds true."

Starting with this baseline idea of writing about interesting things, two more tangible type aspirations then follow. The first would be to develop a significant (however I decide to define that) blog following & second to move towards work with a writing component to it.

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Around the significant blog following idea... I think just as the baseline goal of the blog is to write about interesting things (you know, interesting to me), the baseline cause of a significant blog following would have to be to first write an interesting blog about interesting things (not rocket science me thinks).

Beyond that, I do think there's things to consider and do in the following areas that might help develop a readership:

- Specific blog topic: One thing about this blog is that even though I've worked to figure out what I've written (perhaps ad nauseam as above illustrates), there's still a good number of things I write about and link to and not a lot of what I'll call "verticality."

In many ways, I envy someone like my friend Jim who wrote a blog on circumnavigating Australia with his two year old son. Specific topic, defined timeframe, well written and... lots of readers. Another example of this was the blog referenced in the movie "Julie & Julia"... with the blog being noted in this Wikipedia link (and I'm SURE it must to true to be written on the Internet) as being the first blog to be made into a movie. In terms of just blog readership, though, I imagine it grew in part because of a specific topic that would appeal to like-minded people who came across Julie Powell's blog about cooking through the recipes of Julia Child.

- Right place to host blog: Is Blogger the best place or is a change in order? I already own the URL I would want to use (same as my blog now, but without the "blogspot"), but I'd then have to decide between services like TypePad, WordPress, or something else (I notice the "Julie & Julia blog" was on Salon).

- Commenting on other blogs: I completely get that this is an excellent way to build readership, but two things have curtailed my blog surfing/searching/commenting to date. One is the lack of verticality (there's that word again) in my own blog and one is when given a choice between doing a surf/search for places to comment and actually creating blog content, I've almost always fallen on the side of content creation. Drat that job and life thing curtailing my available hours...

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In terms of the second aspiration (again, beyond the baseline "write about stuff I find interesting"), having a career with a writing component would be just... nifty. I've done enough writing over the last year and a half to know that I don't feel drawn towards truly creative or fiction writing, but it's then a question of what non-fiction writing could be done.

I do have the business background and MBA (in Sports Marketing which I now use not at all for work) and as the blog topics noted above show, do find business to be interesting... definitely not all business areas, but... some.

So, it stands to reason that I could write within interesting areas of business and my completely conjecture-based notion is there's a need for solid writing in the business world.

I think this is becoming more of a need than ever with new forms of Social Media (as previously posted on) becoming prevalent both as a method of person to person and more to the point here, business to person communication. Additionally, there's new and interesting fields like Entrepreneurial Journalism (which I understand considers different forms media will take going forward) out there.

Now, figuring out exactly to transition from my "like to write stuff" into working and writing in an area that I "like to write about"... therein lies the interesting question.

Wherefore the Blog... again

Much of this post is a repackaging if not regurgitation of prior posts done, but for those of us not as smart as this guy (who I just read a section about in the book "SuperFreakonomics") or some other genius type, repetition maybe ain't such a bad thing.

With that said, I wanted to look in this post at my blog writing as a whole and where I've been and why I've visited said place...

At the end of November I did a post on topics covered over the last year and a half and followed that up with a few additional posts looking back on stuff written. This included first one and then another post on some of the best magazine writing I've linked to and then got into the big 'ol category of business.

First I looked for the business topics most posted on and linked to and came up with those below...

- Touch-screen technology
- Cloud Computing
- Workplace Culture
- Customer Service
- Social Media

In this business topic listing post I also summarized content around touch-screen technology and then revisited Social Media links with this post.

As for future blog writing I'll do... between posts about the other business topics, more "best writing" posts, additional books and magazine articles I'll read, and stuff I'll find on the worldly wide interwebnet of superhighway info... I think I'll continue to have as much to write about & link to as I can carve out the time for.

-----

If all of this above is the "where I've been", I suppose that means it's time to address the "why I've visited said place"...

The "wherefore the blog" section at the top of my blog was written over a year ago, but hasn't really changed. To whit... "The point is to write about stuff I find... well, interesting. If these efforts should help me transition from my current business program management type job to a business writing and creative type job then all the better. If not, then the original point of the blog holds true."

Starting with this baseline idea of writing about interesting things, two more tangible type aspirations then follow. The first would be to develop a significant (however I decide to define that) blog following & second to move towards work with a writing component to it.

-----

Around the significant blog following idea... I think just as the baseline goal of the blog is to write about interesting things (you know, interesting to me), the baseline cause of a significant blog following would have to be to first write an interesting blog about interesting things (not rocket science me thinks).

Beyond that, I do think there's things to consider and do in the following areas that might help develop a readership:

- Specific blog topic: One thing about this blog is that even though I've worked to figure out what I've written (perhaps ad nauseam as above illustrates), there's still a good number of things I write about and link to and not a lot of what I'll call "verticality."

In many ways, I envy someone like my friend Jim who wrote a blog on circumnavigating Australia with his two year old son. Specific topic, defined timeframe, well written and... lots of readers. Another example of this was the blog referenced in the movie "Julie & Julia"... with the blog being noted in this Wikipedia link (and I'm SURE it must to true to be written on the Internet) as being the first blog to be made into a movie. In terms of just blog readership, though, I imagine it grew in part because of a specific topic that would appeal to like-minded people who came across Julie Powell's blog about cooking through the recipes of Julia Child.

- Right place to host blog: Is Blogger the best place or is a change in order? I already own the URL I would want to use (same as my blog now, but without the "blogspot"), but I'd then have to decide between services like TypePad, WordPress, or something else (I notice the "Julie & Julia blog" was on Salon).

- Commenting on other blogs: I completely get that this is an excellent way to build readership, but two things have curtailed my blog surfing/searching/commenting to date. One is the lack of verticality (there's that word again) in my own blog and one is when given a choice between doing a surf/search for places to comment and actually creating blog content, I've almost always fallen on the side of content creation. Drat that job and life thing curtailing my available hours...

-----

In terms of the second aspiration (again, beyond the baseline "write about stuff I find interesting"), having a career with a writing component would be just... nifty. I've done enough writing over the last year and a half to know that I don't feel drawn towards truly creative or fiction writing, but it's then a question of what non-fiction writing could be done.

I do have the business background and MBA (in Sports Marketing which I now use not at all at work) and as the blog topics noted above show, do find business to be interesting... definitely not all business, but some areas.

So, it stands to reason that I could write within business and my completely conjecture-based notion is there's a need for solid writing in the business world. I think this is becoming more of a need than ever with new forms of Social Media (as previously posted on) becoming prevalent both as a method of person to person and more to the point here, business to person communication.

Now, figuring out exactly to transition from my "like to write stuff" into working and writing in an area that I "like to write about"... therein lies the interesting question.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Business Strategies To Do Well: Simplicity & "Special"

One of the things I've done on this blog is post about business topics that I find of interest (which included touch-screen technology and was followed up by this post on Social Media) and that's been an entertaining exercise (you know, for myself), but I also keep thinking beyond business areas and about business strategies and tactics.

For the purpose of this post, I want to look at business to consumer interaction (as opposed to business to business) and highlight two strategic consumer interaction concepts... which, done well, go a long way in helping decide who I want to spend money with. In addition to the concept itself, I also list out some tactical examples of it executed well... or not so well.

Concept # 1 - Simplicity of interaction.

- Very impressed with the new Bank of America ATM machines. To give customers the ability to go from entering their ATM card to walking away with cash with the combination of a pin # and two touches ("fast cash" and "no receipt) is an excellent example of how to make an experience easy.

- Love the simple menu at Chipotle. I know what they offer and can plainly see what it costs. I suppose there's something to be said for a fast food restaurant offering a lot of options, but so many places require you to either go with one of the limited offerings on the board, have knowledge of what else is available or just sort of guess at the offering or cost. Again, options are nice, but me thinks it doesn't behoove a company to have a stressful purchasing experience.

- Will almost always pick a mobile-enabled website (like the CNNSI site http://m.si.com/) over a standard one when surfing on my iPhone. Why there's still heavily visited sites (Yahoo! Sports as an example) which don't automatically send mobile users to a mobile-enabled site is beyond me.

- Not a fan of shopping at stores that don't have transparent and easy to find pricing. To this end, I'm a huge proponent of price scanners in stores, but even places that have them can still be annoying to shop at if there's not enough of them and prices aren't clearly marked. Bad example that comes to mind is Kohl's... yes, they've got scanners here and there, but it's still not always easy to know what stuff costs.

Concept # 2 - Making the customer "special" (or at least feel that way).

- Love the Starbucks Gold Card. They give a card and instantly you get a discount not available to all... fantastic way to make someone feel "special." With them doing away with the discount and moving to a "free drink with 15 purchases" format, I'm a bit sceptical of the same cache remaining.

- Really really not a fan of stores that want to check you upon your exit. I get that shoplifting is a major problem for retailers, but have avoided Fry's Electronics for years with their practice of checking receipts against items as people leave. My understanding is that (at least in California) shoppers are under no obligation to stop and be checked (different story entirely for stores like Costco that are membership based), but I view the request as intrusive.

Book Review - "Open" by Andre Agassi

Just finished reading the Andre Agassi biography "Open" and liked it quite a bit.



A month or so ago I came across in Sports Illustrated an excerpt from the book (which I linked to in this blog post) and as I hoped... the actual book improved on the excerpt in that it had much more of the same great writing.

I'm pretty sure I saw it around the same time as the excerpt, but this Time Magazine review also paints a good picture of "Open". The reviewer, Sean Gregory, includes the lofty praise "Agassi may have just penned one of the best sports autobiographies of all time. Check--it's one of the better memoirs out there, period."

What made the book so good was it's inner view of an amazing life that Agassi has lived thus far. From people including his almost caricature-level taskmaster father, Mike Agassi, and Coach/Handler/Surrogate Guardian Nick Bollettieri, the influence put upon the sports prodigy was amazing. What you had was someone being first pushed by an inner circle and then defined by an outer circle of fans and media... with that definition being put upon a teenager still figuring himself out.

Of course, what made Agassi different than our average 18 or 19 year old is he was playing Grand Slam Finals and having copywriter produced phrases ("image is everything") assigned (incorrectly) as his mantra.

Gregory also references this at the end of his review, but one of the more telling anecdotes from Agassi is his commentary on something said by broadcaster Bud Collins. At the end of Agassi's career, Collins attempted to sum things up with the catchy phrase "from punk to paragon." I agree completely with Agassi taking umbrage with this idea of a teenage punk, and for that matter, of him as now having transformed to "paragon" level. Instead of a transformation, you had the same guy going through different stages of his life (one in which became "adult" way before that of other people) and figuring out things as he went along.

What the book showed to me was a very vividly detailed portrait of a guy with a life way different than most. Just fascinating stuff.

Monday, December 14, 2009

SI Piece on Marin Morrison & Nick Scandone

Some excellent writing in the latest Sports Illustrated (cover below) with pieces by Austin Murphy on Alabama football and Lee Jenkins on Vince Young of the Titans. My favorite, though, was on U.S. Bejing Paralympic Athletes Marin Morrison and Nick Scandone.



Written by L. Jon Wertheim, it's titled "The Games Of Their Lives" and profiles Morrison and Scandone and their respective battles with terminal illness. For each person, their love of sport and the Paralympic Games appeared to give them a goal which sustained their health. In Morrison's case, she fought cancer and competed as a swimmer and Scandone suffered the effects of Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS) while still sailing at high level.

Not a lot to say about the piece other than it's solidly written (Wertheim wrote the book "Strokes of Genius" on the Federer-Nadal tennis rivalry, which I reviewed here) and... well, powerful. This may be a cliche to write, but I would dare someone to read Wertheim's profile of these athletes and not be moved by their stories.

Friday, December 11, 2009

Urban Meyer SI Profile by S.L. Price

Excellent feature story on Urban Meyer in the Sports Illustrated "Sportsman of the Year" issue.



Written by S.L. Price, it's a very in-depth look at the University of Florida head football coach and the path he's taken to prominence. Meyer seems a fascinating guy who has had to both work extremely hard and overcome obstacles every step of the way. Perhaps additionally, or perhaps as part of this, Meyer also was raised by an extremely authoritarian father who constantly pushed him to achieve.

What helps make this a great piece is that Price is such a good writer and able to provide a nuanced portrait of the subject. Some of the stuff he's written are the book "Heart of the Game: Life, Death, and Mercy in the Minor League America" which I reviewed here and the SI profile "Big Love "cc!" (which I originally linked to here) about Yankees pitcher CC Sabathia.

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I enjoyed the piece on Meyer primarily for the quality of the writing, but also really liked the "2009 Sportsman Of The Year: Derek Jeter" article for the subject himself. I've never been a Yankee fan, but can't help but admire how the future Hall 0f Fame shortstop conducts himself and how he feels about the game of baseball. So cool to read about someone who gets joy out of what he does and doesn't take anything for granted.

This is completely an aside, but I also have thought of Jeter in the last week as the Tiger Woods infidelity scandal has grown. If Tiger wanted, he could have just as easily developed a Jeter-like "man around town with the ladies" persona and nobody would have faulted him. Rather than Jeter's lifestyle as a single man, Tiger appeared to choose BOTH the playboy and wife with kids lifestyles. C'mon, not sustainable and... frankly, not very cool.

Wednesday, December 09, 2009

Social Media Blog Posts

Earlier this week I did a post that listed out the business topics most frequently covered in this blog... and which tackled the blog topic area of touch-screen technology. For the purpose of this post, I want to start looking at another large business topic... that of Social Media.

The area deserves attention it's become ubiquitous from a person to person communication perspective through mediums like blogs, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook among others. Arguably even more important, though, is the corporate perspective as companies attempt to use many of these same channels to reach consumers.


From either approach, Social Media is a big deal that I've written about and linked to quite a bit here. With this post I want to bring together some of those posts and links...


Books & Associated Content

Back in Sept 2008 I did a post titled "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good" by Sarah Lacy which was about... yep, Sarah Lacy's book on Web 2.0 companies. It was an interesting read in that the book looks at the newest web entries with particular focus on platform companies such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. The post above also links to a BusinessWeek excerpt from the Lacy book which focuses on the platform company Ning.

In Feb 2009 I did a blog post linking to another BusinessWeek excerpt... this time from the Jeff Jarvis book "What Would Google Do?" As to the book itself, I found it an extremely interesting read and wrote a review of it here. While it's true that the book isn't about Social Media, Jarvis is a prolific writer on web topics (often via his website BuzzMachine) and his writing deserves mention in any discussion of web or "new internet" stuff.

The last "Social Media as a topic" book I posted on was "Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters" by Scott Rosenberg which I reviewed here. An excellent book which looks at blogs and their import... as both an ongoing medium and the precursor of other Social Media mediums like Facebook and MySpace (among others).


Magazine Pieces

The most in-depth Social Media magazine writing referenced in this blog was probably in a June 2009 post titled All Around the Social Networking Mulberry Bush. Linked to within was a Time Magazine cover story on Twitter and BusinessWeek cover story about online relationships.

Also deserving of mention here, though, are three additional blog posts done. The first was an Apr 2009 post which referenced the Jarvis book along with the concept of the how relatively easy it is to launch an internet company today. The other two posts had various and sundry articles on Social Media companies and concepts linked... with the first including Facebook and LinkedIn and the second Amazon, Facebook and mobile commerce.

Lots of writing out there about a big topic... which will only get more important as both person to person and company to consumer communication moves forward. Fun times for those who understand and work in this area.

Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Best Magazine Writing: Bottled Water & BPA Articles

Following up on my "Best Magazine Writing: Esquire & Sports Illustrated"... which follows up on my "Stuff of Interest & Authors Enjoyed", I began looking at posts with BusinessWeek and Fast Company links and found some excellent writing from each magazine on both plastics and the bottled water industry.

Three different articles with three different angles... all raising red flags around bottled water and the plastic compound BPA.

From Dec 2007, Fast Company writer Charles Fishman wrote "Message in a Bottle" on the bottled water industry. This award winning article basically was an expose of many of the negative things about bottled water.

In July 2008, one of the earlier posts I did to this blog was titled Impact of Bottled Water on a Town and links to the BusinessWeek story "A Town Torn Apart by Nestlé." Not to get overly "up with small town, down with big corporation" here, but it's nettlesome when you have a company (Nestle for it's Arrowhead water brand) retaining a lawyer on behalf of a town (McCloud, CA) and then the company negotiating with the lawyer. Seems to raise just a few conflict of interest questions.

The first two blog posts and articles are around bottled water and one company that sells it, but the third is around a component that's in many of the bottles themselves. In Feb 2009 I did this blog post linking to the Fast Company feature "The Real Story Behind Bisphenol A." As the blog post and article (in of course much greater detail) covers, the compound BPA (or Bisphenol A) is a building block of many shatterproof plastics and can be found in products ranging from cell phones to drink cans and baby bottles.

The issue comes from the concerns around the product's potential to leech into water and impact the reproductive system... particularly given it's presence in products used by babies with highly undeveloped immune systems.

Three different pieces around three slightly different topics, but all linked together by excellent writing that raises some disconcerting questions about both bottled water and BPA.

Monday, December 07, 2009

Business Topics of Note & Touch-screen Technology

As part of my recent trend of looking back on what I've written, I wanted to specifically look at some of the business topics and companies that I've posted on and linked to.

From a perspective of what companies I've most frequently posted on, the following are those that I've written on the most: Hewlett-Packard, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco & IBM.

More to the point of this post, though, below are some (but, not all) of the business topics I've posted on:

- Touch-screen technology
- Cloud Computing
- Workplace Culture
- Customer Service
- Social Media


Touch-screen Technology

For the purpose of looking at the first topic above, I wanted to expand a bit the field of touch-screen to also encompass handheld e-readers along with the more well known smart phones and personal computers. Touch-screen is a fascinating area of business that really came to the forefront with the iPhone from Apple and has huge potential for growth and ubiquitous adoption through multiple product manifestations.

Touch-screen & Apple

In Dec 2008 I did this post that linked to pieces on one of the pioneers in the field, Jeff Han and I've done multiple posts on Apple, the iPhone and associated App Store. The first was back in Aug 2008 on my new iPhone and then in Jan 2009 I linked to an article about digital books via the iPhone and in Nov 2009 did a post on the BusinessWeek apps cover story... with the whole field brought about due to Apple and the App Store. Even though the Cupertino-based company brought touch as a technology into the popular lexicon, they're certainly not the only player in the market anymore.

eReaders & Amazon

Amazon for several years now has been the dominant player in the online book market (among others) and their more recent foray into e-readers is a fascinating play that may bring huge advances to the book and magazine industry just as the iPhone did for smart phones.

In terms of the general subject area, I did a Feb 2009 post on written content online. Writing this pieced (which linked to a Time cover story on the topic) really showed me how desperately innovation is needed around written content online... and how Amazon could move things forward as a result of their Kindle e-reader. Whether it's via the Kindle or a forthcoming competitor Plastic Logic or any new entry from Apple, the market is ripe for innovation. Following up on this idea where two e-reader content containing blog posts I did in June 2009. The first linked to a Fast Company article and second linked to pieces from both Time and BusinessWeek.

Touch-screen & HP

The last two sections written covered touch as a general technology area and the iPhone and e-readers as a product area within. However, blog posts I've written also cover the good old fashioned (well, not really old fashioned) personal computer as a product area which uses touch.

This Feb 2009 blog post references Hewlett-Packard's recent success in the PC business (and links to other HP blog posts done here). HP has done well with the TouchSmart desktop PC, but what really interests me is the prospect of touch becoming a standard component of notebook computer displays. In a way, this seems to me to be a melding together of attributes from smart phones, e-readers, netbooks and full-size desktop computers. You wouldn't see smart phones go away, but the convergence of the various technologies is an interesting prospect.

It's tough to know exactly where this technology (or any technology, I suppose) will wind up, but there's a lot of good stuff out there and some very big companies committed to innovation around touch. Will be interesting to see where it all goes...

Saturday, December 05, 2009

SJ Mercury News Column on High School Football Player Matt Blea

Since I heard the day after Thanksgiving about the life-threatening fractured skull suffered by San Jose High Academy football player Matt Blea, I've followed the news with hopes of his getting better... and thankfully he now has.

My interest in the story is I'm sure heightened by now having two children, but also by the freakish nature of the injury itself. In the violent game of football, Blea was hurt on a clean play that frankly could have occurred while playing hockey, soccer, or just running around in the grass.

With this in mind, I found myself drawn to the Mark Purdy San Jose Mercury News piece "Fear of injury nags all parents of prep athletes" last Friday. In his column Purdy echos my thoughts about how this was something that couldn't really be prevented and also gives his perspective as a parent whose kids played high school sports. While they did have injuries, certainly none of the cataclysmic variety that landed Blea in a medically induced coma for a week. Pretty insightful writing that makes one think.

To the "thankfully he has gotten better" note I made, this morning's Mercury News had the story "Injured high school football player's condition improves." Head injuries leave a big unknown question as to recovery, but things are definitely better than could have been the case and hopefully will continue to look up.

I thought at the time I heard of the injury and still do think it strange that the game continued, but I guess it's hard to know how situations like that should be handled unless you're actually in it. The hope now would be both for the continued improvement of Blea and that between private insurance, coverage from the school district and private donations, the financial impact of his recovery and care isn't debilitating to the family. At this time, though, I would imagine everyone is just happy that he's doing as well as he is.

Friday, December 04, 2009

Authors Are Nice People Too

A habit I've acquired as a result of writing this blog is to e-mail authors I like to express said admiration for their writing.

I suppose there's part of me thinking how great it would be if people were to then ask me to "work with them on a hot new book/movie script/epic tome," but really... I just think it's cool to express appreciation for something you like.

I found interesting from doing this that of the nine authors I've reached out to, eight responded with e-mails or notes. The intent wasn't to demand (or even request) anything back, but I do think it exceptionally good of people to take the time to write something.

So... very cool move on the part of the authors below:

- Alain de Botton
- Dave Bidini
- David Kord Murray
- Eric Weiner
- Jeff Jarvis
- John Gardner (since passed away)
- John Grogan
- John Wooden

Esquire Magazine - Dec 2009 issue

Lots of good stuff from the Dec 2009 issue of Esquire Magazine.



With Robert Downey Jr. on the cover, it features throughout the funky graphics shown being sat upon over. Concept is this being the augmented reality (as referenced in this blog post done a month ago) issue... and by using the camera in any camera-having computer one can view on said computer information triggered from the printed page graphic.


As to the content within the actual issue, quite a potpourri of interesting writing and topics covered:

- "Psyop Makes Ads You Actually Want to Watch" is about the New York-based creative shop that both worked on the augmented reality portion of this magazine and did the "Happiness Factory" Coke commercial viewed 6+ million times on YouTube... and which can be viewed from the article link. What's interesting about this to me is the Social Media implications of a company doing ads so compelling that links to which are being passed around and viewed via Social Networks. Basically marketing gold.

- "How Peter Orszag's Budget Team Makes the Government Work" from Esquire writer John H. Richardson. A fascinating look at both the financial machinations of the Obama White House and those who create and implement them.

- "Meet the Man Who Could End Global Warming" about Scientist Eric Loewen. Also by John H. Richardson, the piece details the efforts of one individual who believes he has the answer as to how to both provide clean energy w/o depleting resources and deal with nuclear waste.


- A review of the forthcoming novel "Union Atlantic" and it's author Adam Haslett. Trumpeted in this piece by Tom Junod as being "first great novel of the new century."

- An essay from Philadelphia based evangelist Shane Claiborne titled "What If Jesus Meant All That Stuff?" Interesting writing in which Claiborne attempts to separate from one another the concepts of God and organized religion as many know it.

- "The Emptiest, Loneliest, Highway in America" from Chris Jones. Very short well written piece about ruminating on the past, planning for the future and taking a long solo drive.

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Best Magazine Writing: from Esquire & Sports Illustrated

Related to a prior post I did on book authors I look to read, I wanted to use this post to list out some of my favorite magazine writing I've linked to over the last few years.

It's tough to be terribly scientific in narrowing down my favorites and there's a good number of them, so perhaps the best way to go at a listing is to do so by publication said stories came from.

So... here's some of my favorite magazine writing from both Esquire and Sports Illustrated that I've linked to in this blog (with post, or posts, to follow containing work from other magazines):


Esquire Magazine writing:

- "The Things That Carried Him" by Chris Jones. Story won a National Magazine award for feature writing and is about one soldier's journey home after being killed in Iraq. Perhaps my favorite magazine writing and linked to July 2008 in my first iteration of consistent blog posting.

- "Why We Shouldn't End Our Manned Space Program" also by Chris Jones. Linked to from a Jan 2009 post that featured an image of the Barack Obama poster by Shepard Fairey.


- "American Surprise: How Election Night Brought Us Home Again" by Charles P. Pierce. Linked to in Dec 2008, it's a very short piece with the author's feelings of Obama's election in a historical context. One of those works that feels like every word was uniquely chosen for it's impact.

- "The World's Healthiest 75-Year-Old Man" by Susan Casey. About Malibu based workout fanatic Don Wildman and his exercise regimen... and cadre of celebrity and athlete workout partners. Linked to in July 2008.


Sports Illustrated writing:

- "Miracle on the South Side" by Lee Jenkins. Detailed and emotional filled piece about White Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle's perfect game... the 18th in Major League history. Linked to in an Aug 2009 post.

- "Big Love "cc!" by S.L. Price. An in-depth profile of Yankees pitch CC Sabathia. Great writer that accomplishes something I wouldn't have thought possible... it made me want to see a Yankee player do well and win. Linked to in an Apr 2009 post.

Tuesday, December 01, 2009

"Decade From Hell" & Optimism for the Future Writing

Solid cover story in the most recent Time Magazine.



The Andy Serwer piece is titled "Goodbye to the Decade from Hell" and is about... yep, the not always rosy last 10 years hence.

Serwer is the Fortune Magazine managing editor and details some of the things which happened since 1989: the bookended stock market drops (and we thought the tech crash in 2000 was bad), 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Hurricane Katrina. Basically lots and lots of bad stuff happened during the decade, but the piece concludes with hopeful optimism that people collectively will be able to learn from some of the missteps and move forward stronger.

To this end, the story made me think of some "hope for the future" writing that I found captivating.

In August of this year I linked to a BusinessWeek "Case for Optimism" Special Report and Time Magazine also provided several excellent pieces to the same effect. Two of them were by Kurt Andersen with "The End of Excess: Is This Crisis Good for America?" and his "The Avenging Amateur" back page essay (with my blog posts referencing each piece here and here respectively).

Also from Time was the Nancy Gibbs cover story "The Great Recession: America Becomes Thrift Nation" (referenced in this blog post).

Good writing all, but also stuff to make one feel hopeful that for most people, the next ten years will be better than the last.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Book Review - "Borrowing Brilliance" by David Kord Murray

Just finished reading "Borrowing Brillance" by David Kord Murray... which I heard about when it was reviewed here in BusinessWeek.





The overarching theme behind Murray's book is business ideas and where they come from... with that spot often not being one of "out of the blue" originality. That said, I found the guy himself as being almost as interesting as where the ideas come from.


The Guy

Murray seems quite the interesting fellow given his personal and business highs and lows described in the book. He first worked as a NASA engineer and then became an entrepreneur who was poised to sell his Lake Tahoe based financial company for $50 million, and would up with close to nothing. Through a combination of his past experience, lots of reading and a good contact made, Murray eventually found himself consulting with Intuit on the Turbo Tax direct mail program. This then led to a full time Innovation Exec role at Intuit, and then another entrepreneurial venture and now him writing this book and living back in Lake Tahoe.

Solid stuff and his story seems to be an interesting example of how speed bumps can come and you may not know where you'll wind up, but you just try to keep moving forward.


The Business Ideas

As stated previously, the book works with the concepts of ideas... and how to generate, repurpose and repackage them. Following up on this idea of pattern recognition and meaning making, Murray writes of how as a business society we're now out of the information age and onto the conceptual or innovation age.

The structure of the book is broken into 6 steps:

1. Defining - Define the problem and figure out the right one to work on. The idea here is on of scope and how small problems can both fit within and when solved, sometimes create other ones. Murray cited Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page as good people to think of when considering problem definition. The idea behind Google began when they were Stanford PhD students, each working on a separate data mining problem. This led to thinking about organizing information, which led to search. Now that the lower level problem of search has been worked (and of course, continues to be), Google has moved back to the high level problem they talk about of organizing the world's information.

Related to this idea, I also think of the information architect field and how it focuses on the presentation of data, facts and ideas... interesting stuff.

2. Borrowing - Take ideas from places near and far. This is tied to the third step, but focuses on looking for the answers to your problems from yes, your competitors, but also other fields of work entirely. Murray writes heavily about Hollywood and how the construction of movies into acts with emotional triggers and levels was something he thought about in relation to the Turbo Tax offering while at Intuit.

This is in many ways the concept of critical observation... just with a wide net.

3. Combining - Throw the ideas together and try lots of different iterations. Related to borrowing, Murray writes about Star Wars and how George Lucas spend years working on it until he had the perfect combination of science fiction and mythology (with the light saber as an example). Also discussed by Murray in relation to these borrowed combinations were Google utilizing page ranks, Disneyland being built to scale like a movie set and Facebook as a metaphor of a college yearbook.

Interesting concept... causes me to think about Social Networking and web publishing as done through various sources such as Facebook, blogs, Digg and Ning among others.

4. Incubating - allow the combinations to come together.
This step centers on the concept of the subconscious mind being the best source of creative ideas. Murray describes historical intellects like Einstein and Newton as being in touch with their subconscious, but also provides his thoughts (in the three bullets below) on how people can train themselves to get more in touch with their subconscious.

- Input: Think about what problems you want to solve.
- Incubation: Work on clearing the mind... whether it be throw daily walks, meditation or simply doing creative work immediately after a good night of sleep.
- Output: Be willing to let ideas in, but not be held captive by them. Sort of a duality concept of listening to ideas and emotional responses, but at the same time having doubts about them so as to not get led astray by something that is not a true belief.


I liked this concept as it made me think of how creativity doesn't always come, but when it does, you want to run with and get the most out of it. Most simple example of this would be people who jot down thoughts that come to them so that they're not lost in the ether...

5. Judging - Identify strengths and weaknesses... the throwing out of the bad parts of any idea and expanding of the best.

6. Enhancing - Eliminate the weak and enhance the strong. This sounds a lot like point five, but Murray describes it as in many ways being like a recycling of points one through five. Just continually cycle the process.


The conclusion of Murray's book contains his view of "the creative life"... and how one can view these steps as being part of a creative process around more than just business.

Solid stuff (with more details on Murray's book website) and it reminds me of some of the great John Gardner's writing that I linked to in this blog post.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Blog Topics List: Redux Part Duex... Stuff of Interest & Authors Enjoyed

After doing a "blog inventory" post a few days ago (and thinking about the helpful comment made to said post), I wanted to follow up and look further at the topics covered... listed out as: business, sports, life, politics, writing and history.

Digging further into this, it looks to me that my postings don't really seem to be category driven, but rather just simply an amalgamation of stuff that I like. Sometimes it's due to the topic, less frequently from the writing quality and even less frequently from a combination of interesting topic well written about, but when I see it, I like to link to and write about it.

As to what it is about something I like, I have to piggyback on what Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography in a 1964 written opinion, I know stuff I find of interest when I see it.

Looking back at what I've written led me to three different topics that could warrant further writing on... (1) the authors I always look to read when I see their byline, (2) the very best writing I've linked to in posts and (3) business as a topic area and what subsets of business I posted about.

To the first topic...

In terms of authors I look for stuff from, I can probably separate things into two categories... those who I've primarily seen in magazine print and those whose books I look for.

So... magazine authors I look for:
Lee Jenkins, S.L. Price, Austin Murphy - Sports Illustrated
David Von Drehle, Nancy Gibbs, Joel Stein, Joe Klein - Time Magazine

Chris Jones - Esquire

Susan Casey - Esquire & Sports Illustrated

In terms of book authors I look for, I'm setting aside the people like Ayn Rand and Jack London who are great writers, but aren't going to be putting anything new out soon.

Book authors I'm interested in what they write next (along with my favorite, and in some cases only, book of theirs I've read and with the hyperlinked blog post I've done on said book):

Business: Jeff Jarvis - "What Would Google Do?"

History:

David Von Drehle - "Triangle: The Fire That Changed America"

Erik Larson - "Isaac's Storm"

Sports:

Austin Murphy - "How Tough Could it Be?"

S.L. Price - "Heart of the Game"

General (or Varied):

Chris Jones - "Too Far From Home" (or "Out of Orbit" in paperback)

Eric Weiner - "The Geography of Bliss"

Susan Casey - "The Devil's Teeth"

John Grogan - "The Longest Trip Home"

Michael Lewis - "Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood"

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Austin Murphy SI Story on South-Central Florida H.S. Football

Really good story from the latest issue of Sports Illustrated that I was surprised to come across.

What was of such interest to me wasn't necessarily the topic, but rather the author... Austin Murphy. Murphy is an excellent writer and I previously posted on two of his books I've read... "The Sweet Season" about small-school college football and "How Tough Could it Be?" about being (for a brief period of time) a stay at home Dad. Not very frequently, though, do I see his byline in SI.

In this piece titled "Muck Bowl", Murphy chronicles the football rivalry between Pahooke High School and Glades Central High. As he writes about, the two schools can be bitter enemies on the field, but also share much in common. Separated by some 12 miles in an economically depressed part of Central Florida, west of Palm Beach, the small town programs have sent 48 people to the NFL over the last four decades (including Santanio Holmes, Fred Taylor and Anquan Boldin).

Very compelling "slice of life" writing about how many live... including a sizable numbers of the players we watch on the NFL and major college football fields.

Out of curiosity, I did a Google Maps satellite view search of Pahooke and it's neighboring town Belle Glade, and yep... not very developed areas.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Blog Topics List: Redux

I've posted several times previously with statistics about the blog posts done here, but I think with this post, I want to start to delve even further into what I've written about.

The question I keep coming back to is what's the purpose behind the blog (the blog being, you know... this blog). I write on the opening page this not so polemical (just felt like using a big word there) goal...

"The point is to write about stuff I find... well, interesting. If these efforts should help me transition from my current business program management type job to a business writing and creative type job then all the better. If not, then the original point of the blog holds true."

Yep, that still holds true. I do want to write about interesting things... and would be happy if that led to a job writing about interesting things. At the fundamental non-job related interesting things level, though, I like the idea of using language to help both figure out and document what things I find of note. Additionally, and even though I didn't start writing the blog for the kid, I think there's something to be said for leaving for your kid(s) a historical record of what you think about.


So... blog topics posted on... the last post I did in this area was this one in July 2009 and with the additional 50 posts since then, the current point in time topics posted on is something like this:

17 months / 230 or so posts... about 13 a month or just under one every other day

55 books posted on... 45 of which being non-fiction and 10 fiction

Of the 45 non-fiction... the main topics covered are as follows:
- Business: 3 books
- History: 7 books
- Life: 7 books
- Sports: 12 books
- Writing: 2 books
- Politics: 2 books
Well, 34 out of 45 books falling into one of six areas, with most of those really being in one of four areas... that's fairly focused.


The 185 or so non-book posts cover most heavily the following areas:
- Business: 63 posts
- Sports: 32 posts
- Politics: 26 posts
- Life: 27 posts
- Writing: 25 posts
With the remaining posts being a few on heath and a few on entertainment, the topics covered are even more focused than in the books.


The point of all this? I think it a jumping off point to delve further into what I like to write about. To whit... business, sports, life (yes, quite the broad topic), politics, writing and history. Perhaps the first three more than the last, but that will be a thing to figure out through further delving (quite possibly in additional blog topic posts)...

Monday, November 23, 2009

BusinessWeek Report on Startup Ventures

Interesting feature in the Nov 23 BusinessWeek issue.



Titled "World's Most Intriguing Startups", it details some of the companies that are poised for success during this downturn in business. Some of the startups contained within are Hunch... a "website that used the experiences of others to help people make decisions." The venture was started by Flickr founder Caterina Fake and is written about in the opening story from this BW report.

Another interesting startup report was "Augmenting Reality" on the Dutch startup Layar. Augmented reality is a very cool field in that it's about the overlay of digital data on a physical world... an example of which would be pointing your iPhone (via a now available free app) at something and pressing a button to then have information about that appear on the screen... example of which can be seen below:



Not part of the Startups Report, but also of interest from this issue was "Buddy, Can You E-Mail Me 100 Bucks?" about mobile to mobile phone transfers of money. Seems closely related to the topics in the blog post I did earlier this month on apps and m-commerce enabled websites.

Finally... neither part of the Startups Report nor this BW issue, "Gunning for an Elephant in Silicon Valley" was an interesting piece from the Oct 19 BusinessWeek on networking company, and Cisco rival, Arista. Founded by Silicon Valley pioneer Andreas Bechtolsheim, the venture appears to very much below in this post on hot new startups.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Helicopter Parenting Piece from Time

Might not appeal to all, but as a parent of two (man, that sounds wierd), I found intriguing the the cover story from the latest Time Magazine.



Written by Nancy Gibbs and titled "The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting" the feature examines the question of "how much is too much" in relation to parental involvement.

Two basic concepts the story could be boiled down to... (1) it's counterproductive for your kids to hover over them and (2) it's not healthy for you as the parent.

The idea behind letting kids figure stuff out for themselves, and fail at times, is not a new one. In fact, David Von Drehle wrote a Time cover story in November 2008 on the topic titled "The Myth About Boys" basically saying "the kids are alright." If you want to go further back, you could view Mark Twain's Huck Finn as a good example of detachment parenting appearing to work out fine. And, oh yeah, both the Von Drehle piece and Time's cover story on Twain are linked to in this blog post.

In terms of how overparenting impacts the parent themself, the Gibbs piece was likely inspired by (or at least related to) her Time commentary piece "Parenting Advice: What Moms Should Learn From Dads." The generalization contained within is that parents shouldn't be so hard on themselves... and that Dads in general seem to do a better job of this than do Moms.

Some interesting "additional reading" stuff from the Gibbs cover story would be on Lenore Skenazy... the Ivy League educated New York mom who let her 9 year old son ride the subway alone (and has now built quite the writing and speaking industry around that)... and parenting websites such as http://www.honestbaby.com/ (with the heading "celebrating the imperfect journey of parenting).

It's not mentioned in the Gibbs story, but also of interest would be the wave of wilderness exploration programs for kids.

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Also from this issue of Time was this short piece on the most excellent website http://freecycle.org/... which apparently now has a mobile app.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Fort Hood Domestic Terrorist Piece from Time Magazine

Solid cover story in the latest Time Magazine on Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan.



Written by Nancy Gibbs, "Terrified or Terrorist?" investigates the life of Hasan... and both what appeared to lead him to his shooting rampage on the Texas Army base and how the military might have been able to prevent it.

To the question of what brought about his heinous act, signs seem to point to a severe disillusionment with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Hasan (who is a Muslim) viewing the US as waging a war against the religion. The interesting question that Gibbs looks at is whether Hasan's actions following up on his views make him basically a self-contained terrorist... operating outside any terrorist organization.

In terms of how this act could have been prevented, Gibbs details the various red flags about Hasan that were raised by members of the military, but with none of them thoroughly followed up upon. The reasoning put forward was that to voice questions about Hasan as a Muslim could be viewed as act of discrimination. Not good, but understandable.

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Two other pieces from this issue of Time that stood out were a mention of comedian George Carlin's posthumously published autobiography "Last Words" and the "Technology Roundtable with Jay Adelson, Jeff Han, Philip Rosedale and Michael Arrington." Interesting stuff.

Monday, November 16, 2009

Book Review - "Where Men Win Glory" by Jon Krakauer

I recently finished reading “Where Men Win Glory” by Jon Krakauer and found it to be pretty powerful. The book is on former NFL standout and Army Ranger killed in Afghanistan, Pat Tillman and features much of the same great writing that Krakauer provided in two prior books of his I’ve read… “Into Thin Air” and “Into the Wild”.



Krakauer had access to Tillman’s diary and conducted numerous interviews with people tied to him. One of those was his mother, Mary Tillman, who authored the book “Boots on the Ground by Dusk”. There’s a lot of ground covered in the Krakauer book, but I think it could all be boiled down to two basic concepts… Tillman the man and Tillman the used object.

Tillman the man

There’s an interesting section at the end of the book where Krakauer writes of the archetype known as the “alpha male”… the strong character unafraid of danger who seeks out challenges. What’s interesting is that Tillman really seems to have had both this type of makeup (in spades) along with an introspective side who really wanted to do what he felt was the right thing.

Evidence of this was of course his decision to forgo NFL millions to join the Army after 9-11, but other signs also point to this sense of internal judgment leading his decisions. While with the Arizona Cardinals, Tillman turned down a qualifying off from the St Louis Rams that would have paid him $2.6M guaranteed… and took $512K instead.

Additionally, it comes out in the Krakauer book that Tillman could have left the military (and a war in Iraq he didn’t believe in) after a year and a half, but instead stayed in to finish his three year commitment… to what is now known as tragic consequences.

Tillman the used object

The story of Tillman and what he represented would by itself have made for a compelling narrative (and I’m sure there are other books out there devoted entirely to Tillman the man), but the Krakauer book also gets heavily into the other side of the story… the usage and manipulation of the Tillman story by his government.

Tillman was initially reported to have been killed by enemy combatants, but was known immediately at multiple levels of the military that Tillman’s death was caused by friendly fire… almost certainly at the hands of Ranger gunner Trevor Alders. The actual announcement of friendly fire was released later in a manner that would mitigate the amount of press coverage and couched in terms that it “possibly” could have been friendly fire.

This preceded the events of his actual death which involved what’s described as an unnecessarily risky splitting of the platoon… for the purpose of reaching an arbitrary goal set by military planners. Then immediately after his death, Tillman’s uniform, diary and notebook were all burned against Army regulations.

After this, Tillman was almost immediately awarded posthumous medals for his actions on the fateful night, with the witness statements for those medals leaving out any mention of how the actual events transpired. Then results of the mandatory investigation into the cause of death were disregarded, presumably because the outcome of it was negligence by Army personally eventually resulting in death by friendly fire. In fact, there would then be a second investigation with the results set aside… finally with a 3rd leading to still unsatisfactory information for the Tillman family.

Testifying before Congress, Pat’s brother (and fellow Army Ranger) Kevin Tillman said…

“The fact that the Army, and what appears to be others, attempted to hijack his virtue and his legacy is simply horrific. The least this country can do for him in return is to uncover who is responsible for his death, who lied and who covered it up, and who instigated those lies and benefited from them. Then ensure that justice is meted out to the culpable. Pat and these soldiers volunteered to put their lives on the line for this country. Anything less than the truth is a betrayal of those values that all soldiers who have fought for this nation have sought to uphold.”


All of this is fairly sickening stuff about the internal response to the event of Pat Tillman’s death, but to the point of Tillman the man… it’s important to investigate the usage of his legacy, but also remember the legacy itself. Since his death, the Pat Tillman Foundation was formed and Leadership through Action scholarship program instituted at Pat’s alma matter of Arizona State University.

Really compelling stuff and short of reading the Krakauer book (or book by Tillman’s mother), this ESPN feature article also delves into the life and death of Pat Tillman.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Peyton & Other Stories from Sports Illustrated

Several pieces of note from the latest Sports Illustrated.



Leading into the annual epic battle between New England and Indianapolis, the cover story by Peter King is "Manning At His Best" about the approach to the game by the Colts QB. It's an interesting piece in that it really shows the combination of things usually required for excellence (I guess in any endeavor)... natural ability, intelligence and desire to work.

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Two other short articles I found interesting were the "update" piece on Russian billionaire Shabtai von Karlmanovic and last page commentary "Burning To Play Again" by Selena Roberts (she of the A-Rod's steroid use story).

The Karlmanovic piece is a follow up to the Dec 2008 SI story "To Russia with Love" which I linked to in this blog post. The original story profiled the impact of Russian billionaires on sports and was now updated with the news that Karlmanovic was gunned down while sitting in his car. Just a different life some people live...

The Roberts commentary is a solid look at heralded college hoops player Elena Delle Donne... who after first arriving as a freshman phenom at powerhouse UConn, decided that family and being around her cerebral palsy afflicted sister mattered more and returned home. It's not really that Delle Donne made absolutely the right as opposed to wrong move in general , but rather that she appears to have made the right move for her. Pretty compelling stuff.