Interesting business writing - on Mercedes, Rodney Mullen, prediction models, Lego & Cicada

There's been a few excellent business related pieces I've seen lately with stories that I saw just yesterday included one from Yahoo Autos (I know, who would have figured?) and two from Wired Magazine.

The Yahoo story was by Neal Pollack (who wrote the book Alternadad) with "How the pied piper of Mercedes plays the automotive media" and a pretty rollicking and entertaining read on what could perhaps be described as boondoggle "experience" events, in this case for automotive media. Related to the whole rollicking and entertaining notion, it was fascinating reading about the orchestrator of the junket, Mercedes' U.S. director of communications, Geoff Day.

The Wired pieces I found of note were  "Silicon Valley Has Lost Its Way. Can Skateboarding Legend Rodney Mullen Help It?" by Brendan Koerner and "The Man Who Knows Whether Any Startup Will Live or Die" by Klint Finley. The story on Mullen was a fascinating read by the author of the sensational book The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking and that from Finley was on predicting business success or failure out of models created by Thomas Thurston, who I mid-last year wrote about and linked to his piece "Christensen Vs. Lepore: A Matter Of Fact" for TechCrunch.

Two other recent business related pieces I found excellent and haven't written on yet were "How Lego Became the Apple of Toys" for Fast Company by Jonathan Ringen and "Cicada: Solving the Web's Deepest Mystery" by David Kushner for Rolling Stone, with this last one perhaps less business-centric than the other stories, but just a compelling and pretty trippy read.

Interesting pieces on writing and the writing process

There's been some excellent pieces on writing to note here including ones I've seen in the past week and two from earlier this year.

The two most in-depth ones were the Q&As "A conversation with Paige Williams from Nieman Storyboard" from the Columbia Journalism School blog and "Brendan Koerner storyboards a hijacking tale" from The Open Notebook, a site about science journalism. I found Koerner's recent book The Skies Belong to Us to be particularly excellent (with my post on it back in July) and fascinating from this Q&A was the description of his storyboarding process while writing, which began leading into a meeting with Spike Lee about a movie script adaptation.

Additionally of interest lately was the short Mike Sager piece "How a Man Should Navigate a Fork In His Career Path" from the site Playboy: Safe for Work (yes, it exists) and the New York Times piece "‘City on Fire,’ a Debut Novel, Fetches Nearly $2 Million" by Julie Bosman on 34-year-old writer Garth Risk Hallberg. Not as recent as the other pieces, but two additional interesting ones to mention were on ESPN The Magazine and it's editor Chad Millman, with one from Forbes and one from the Sherman Report.

"The Skies Belong to Us" by Brendan Koerner

The Skies Belong to Us by Brendan Koerner was an excellent book in which he did the trick of taking an interesting topic, finding particularly fascinating subjects within that topic and then crafting a great narrative out of it. Subtitle to the book is Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking and it's noted on the book jacket that "over a five year period starting in 1968, commercial jets were hijacked at a rate of nearly once a week."

Koerner writes in the book of how the majority of hijackers wanted to go to Cuba and his cover subjects Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow went much further forcing 1972 L.A. to Seattle flight to eventually take them to Algiers. Theirs was a fascinating story with Holder a disillusioned and somewhat unstable Vietnam veteran and Kerkow seemingly a footloose party girl from Coos Bay, Oregon. In this regard, it was particularly fascinating reading towards the end of the book about what became of Kerkow through her experiences.

 In relation to other adventure-related books I've read, The Skies Belong to Us is up there among my favorites, in the some company as Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, The Wave by Susan Casey and Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer.

Part of what made the book so good was the research that Koerner appeared to put into it, with 31 pages of notes and citations at end of book and one thought that I had while reading is it just felt very "cinematic" to me and brought to mind how the movie Argo came out of the Wired Magazine story "The Great Escape" by Joshuah Bearman.

Additionally, I've seen several interesting pieces with Koerner about his book including an interview by Alex Heard for Outside Magazine and saw just tonight that there was a 50-minute podcast with Koerner for Longform.