Great business writing - on MLB Advanced Media, Tesla, Amazon, and working a career

There's been some really interesting business writing lately to note here, including several company profiles as well as pieces around the topic of the work people put into their jobs.

The first company profile to mention was for The Verge by Ben Popper with "The Changeup: How baseball’s tech team built the future of television," a fascinating piece on Major League Baseball Advanced Media. The company (known also as BAM) started out as MLB's technology division and has since done extensive work for HBO, just signed a technology and rights holder deal with the NHL, and is almost certain to spin off from MLB into it's own company.

Another profile I found excellent was "Decoding Tesla's Secret Formula" by Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen for Forbes Magazine. The company a fascinating one to me and as with other piece I've read on Tesla, this story paints a picture of the cars as remarkable feats of engineering.

Additionally of interest recently was another solid company profile, "Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace," one that has in the past week generated a huge amount of discussion. For the New York Times by Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, the piece has the subtitle "The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers to get them to achieve it's ever-expanding ambitions." I found it to be a well-balanced story and part of me reads it and thinks that it fine for people to be pushed so hard if those employees feel the positives outweigh the negatives from the hours and pressure. However, the larger part of me then thinks of how unsustainable it seems to have a large company made up of people either young enough to not have family to go to after work or older people willing to spend so much time in pursuit of work goals and away from family. It just feels like that abandonment of balance is eventually going have a detrimental impact on one's work. Granted, those people can then be forced out when their work suffers, but it's a cycle that it seems would eventually hit it's limits and negatively impact the company.

A couple of other pieces that the Amazon story inspired and which I found interesting were "Jeff Bezos and the Amazon Way," a column by Joe Nocera for the New York Times and "Work Hard, Live Well," published to Medium by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. The Nocera commentary is about Amazon following the lead of Bezos and that from Moskovitz on the negatives, to both employees and the company itself, that can come from too many hours put into work.

Related to the idea of how someone goes about their job, there was a great career advice post to his blog done last month by entrepreneur and angel investor Jason Calacanis. "The most important piece of advice for folks starting their careers" contains a number of interesting and highly relevant suggestions. To say it's simply a counter-argument to the idea of balance in work and life would be to miss many of the ideas Calacanis puts forth, but a theme throughout his post is about hustle and how to succeed especially when starting out in something, you gotta hustle.

Businessweek writing of note - on IBM, MLB Advanced Media & Tankchair LLC

Recent issues of Businessweek included three stories that stoood out to me as particularly interesting, with one on an absolutely inspiring small company.

The May 26-June 1 issue featured as its cover story "The Trouble with IBM" and it was a fascinating piece by Nick Summers that noted how the once high-flying technology company now known in some circles more for its financial engineering of performance results than actual growth.

The June 9-22 "Global Tech" issue included two pieces to mention here with the smaller of them "How Major League Baseball Helps ESPN Stream World Cup Soccer" by Ira Boudway about MLB Advanced Media (or BAM), which I two years ago linked to a Fast Company article on.

Additionally in this issue was a story noted by Businessweek editor Josh Tyrangiel as one that may be his "favorite story we've published in 2014." The piece was by Joshua Green and titled "The Incredible Stair-Climbing, Self-Parking, Amphibious Wheelchair" on the company Tankchair LLC. Really a great story about Brad Soden and the company that came out of his desire to improve quality of life for his paralyzed wife and now helps many seriously injured veterans. 

Categories of Sports Writing & Joe Posnanski Career Move

A topic I've discussed and been bouncing around in the head lately is how there seems to be a few distinct types of sports writing (probably distinct types of writing in general, but sports writing for the purpose of this missive) done with each having it's own unique characteristics.

I may well be missing some, but those that come to mind are below:

1. The feature piece - something big (in both length and heft) that tends towards the profound... with the accomplishment of this being aided by the amount of space (and presumably time to write) assigned the writer.

2. The column - very short and often tough to be done great. One of the things that me thinks makes this a hard type of piece to do well is columns sometimes can suffer from a lack of heft due to the space allocated.

3. The player / game analysis - this is the type of work that for me has become not not necessarily a dime a dozen, but there's tons of outlets to find it, and oftentimes this type of piece doesn't go much beyond a rudimentary retelling of what happened (or what might happen if you know, other stuff happens). Statement isn't meant to be critical of writers who do player / game analysis (and there's a market for them as long as there are newspapers and ways for websites to make money), just it's perhaps the least interesting to me of various types of sports pieces.

4. The blended player/game analysis & feature - an interesting beast to me in that it combines together what happened with both why it happened and details about the people who made it happen. Sports Illustrated as a weekly has a number of these types of pieces and I find it to be tremendously impressive when I see one of these pieces done well (rather than the piece leaning too much towards simply what happened).

This idea of different writing categories brings to mind the idea of different writing sources (magazines, books, blogs, twitter) and a blog post I did two years ago about Joe Posnanski as a writer working across platforms. I enjoy his work quite a bit and heard a while back about him leaving Sports Illustrated and then came across a piece "Prolific Posnanski embarks on new pursuits with Project X, Paterno". It's written by Dave Kindred for the Sports Journalism Center at Indiana University and overviews both Posnanski's upcoming book and new gig with a joint venture between MLB Advanced Media (overviewed in this Fast Company story) and USA Today.

Very interested to see both the work Posnanski puts out and what exactly the venture will look like as a business offering centering around sports writing (presumably baseball) and how it's delivered in a "new media" environment.

Fast Company April Issue: Features on Facebook, Tesla Motors & MLB Advanced Media

The April issue of Fast Company had three different features with solid writing on some tremendously interesting companies.

The cover story was "'Boy CEO' Mark Zuckerberg's Two Smartest Projects Were Growing Facebook And Growing Up" by Ellen McGirt and it included some excellent "then to now" material. McGirt wrote of first meeting Zuckerberg and writing the May 2007 Fast Company cover story "Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg: Hacker. Dropout. CEO." and how he's since evolved as a leader. Pretty remarkable personal transformation and probably more remarkable progress for the company with Facebook going from 19M to 845M users during that time. McGirt notes as well how Facebook in early 2007 opened up to outside developers... a step which for me brings to mind Apple and the transformative effects of its iTunes store.

Another piece from this issue was similar to McGirt's in that it featured a rock-star stature CEO, in this case Elon Musk of Tesla Motors and SpaceX. "Why Tesla Motors Is Betting On The Model S" was written by Jon Gertner and covers the much anticipated and planned for July launch of its $50,000 sedan. Musk is a fascinating guy and the thing that stood out from this piece was his mention of needing iterations (three progressive car models in his view) to reach his ultimate goal of a low priced mass market vehicle. This translates to the Model S sedan as the mid-point between the high priced roadster that's been out for a while now and the planned for the future third model. With this story told, another similarity between the pieces on Tesla and Facebook comes from how McGirt finished off with mention of a circa-2007 Zuckerberg speaking of this same iteration concept and moving towards an end-state.

Finally, a third feature from the April FC issue didn't share the same parallels as those on the companies of Musk and Zuckerberg, but was very interesting in its own right. Written by Chuck Salter, "MLB Advanced Media's Bob Bowman Is Playing Digital Hardball. And He's Winning" is about the innovative and money-making digital arm of Major League Baseball.