Most Intriguing People on the "Time 100 Influential" List

The Time "100 Influential People in the World" issue published April 30th was of course populated with a veritable who's who list of movers, shakers and otherwise incredibly important people in the world.



Of these individuals, below are the fourteen (with the Time pieces hyperlinked) that stood out to me as particularly interesting and people I'd want to know more about (making this my sort of "Most Intriguing Within the 100 Most Influential" list)...

- Sara Blakely: founder of Spanx - According to an earlier vignette in this issue, the world's youngest self-made female billionaire at 41 ... if that's not interesting, I don't know what is.

- Christian Marclay: artist behind the 24-hour long clip film "The Clock" - Sounds to be a fascinating movie and both it and Marclay are featured in "The Hours" by Daniel Zalewski for The New Yorker.

- Salman Khan: founder of Khan Academy - Remarkable story of free education tutorial videos from a guy whose work featured in both a Businessweek profile and Fast Company Most Creative People in Business list.

- E.L. James: writer of the 50 Shades of Grey trilogy books - An author having the top four spots, including a 50 Shades box set, on the current New York Times Fiction Bestseller List is nothing if not interesting.

- Louie C.K.: comedian - Known for doing things completely his own way both creatively and in business with his television show Louie and self-produced and sold online comedy specials.

- Ben Rattray: founder of change.org - The site which helps enable social change became much more well-known earlier this year with its petition asking for prosecution of George Zimmerman for shooting Trayvon Martin.

- Ann Patchett: author / bookstore owner - It I'm sure helps her cause to be a best-selling author, but was a cool story of Patchett seeing her hometown of Nashville, TN being without an independent bookseller and as a result, opening Parnassus Books.

- Barbara Van Dahlen: Runs the nonprofit organization Give An Hour devoted to assisting with the mental health of veterans and their families. Seems a great mission and reminds me of the Joe Klein cover story "The New Greatest Generation" for Time.

- Hans Rosling: Became known for a 2006 TED talk on worldwide socio-economic development told through statistical models... now with 4 millions views on the TED site.

- Walter Isaacson: Biographer who wrote both the bestselling Steve Jobs (which I reviewed here) and similarly acclaimed works on Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein.

- Erik Martin: 33 year old general manager of the site Reddit, which I first heard about a Jason Fagone piece for Wired written about in this blog post.

- Cecile Richards: The leader of Planned Parenthood and responsible for providing health care and advocating rights for many women in need nationwide.

- Virginia Rometty: IBM CEO who has helped the company to its current position of financial strength and (as the Time piece on her states) she's someone known for pushing the company in the area of corporate responsibility.

- Hillary Clinton: Someone who has obviously lived many lifetimes in terms of her influence and has by almost all accounts done an exemplary job as U.S. Secretary of State.

Fast Company Magazine 100 Most Creative People Issue

Some interesting content from the Fast Company annual 100 Most Creative People in Business issue.



Keeping in mind the Fast Company guideline of not featuring anything on a prior 100 most creative list (nope, no Steve Jobs in this issue), here's the vignettes that stood out...

Wadah Khanfar / Al Jazeera at #1 - Not to discount what Khanfar and Al Jazeera have done, but what struck me was mention of the Qatari government ownership... and willingness to lose what Khanfar says was "much more than $80M last year." Not a promising statement for the field of Journalism when this appears to be what it takes for a major player in News like Al Jazeera to emerge.

Sal Khan / Khan Academy at #7 - I a few weeks ago posted on and linked to this Businessweek profile of Khan and view the guy and his efforts as just plain remarkable.

Ted Sarandos / Netflix at #22 - Remarkable how the company has completely remade themselves for a digitized streaming content world.

Sitaram Asur / HP Labs at #26 - Profile includes mention of HP Labs fellow Bernardo Huberman... whose efforts around Prediction Markets were featured in Businessweek back in 2005.

Laura Ching / Tiny Prints at #60 - Impressive products from the online stationery company recently acquired by Shutterfly.

Kevin Systrom / Instagram at #66 - One of those companies that I just keep hearing about.

Natsumi Iwasaki / Author at #90 - Wrote the Japanese bestseller What If a Female Manager of a High School Baseball Team Read Drucker's 'Management'? Sounds interesting... now, if only there were an English translation...

BusinessWeek Pieces: Robert Young Pelton on Somali Pirates / Khan Academy / Interesting Companies

Interesting content from the past few issues of Businessweek that stood out for different reasons. There's the interesting story by an interesting writer, the story on an interesting guy with a noble venture and finally some pieces on companies that are just plain... interesting.

Probably the best writing was by Robert Young Pelton in his story Somali Pirates' Rich Returns. One of the points of this blog is to highlight cases of excellent writing on a topic of note and this piece definitely qualifies. I was struck even more by the story after realizing it was written by the author of The World's Most Dangerous Places (which I read years ago). Big fan I am of what seems to be a Businessweek practice of having diverse and fairly well known (and presumably non-staff) writers doing feature stories.

Also standing out as a BW piece lately was Salman Khan: The Messiah of Math. While the writing from Bryant Urstadt was certainly solid enough, the mission of Khan is just plain remarkable. On his Khan Academy website he provides free access to a self-created 2,100+ video library tutorial which began with math education and is now expanded to many other subjects.

-----

These were the metaphorical big rocks from Businessweek lately, but there were also a number of smaller pieces on companies doing interesting things...

- In the category of "writing on a big and innovative company continuing to do big and innovative things" was Apple's Deals May Transform Digital Music about a potential announcement of cloud storage for a user's music collection. As detailed in the piece, this type of offering has been chased by many... and would be yet another coup for Apple if they can introduce a user-friendly program bought into by the record labels.

- Similar to the aforementioned Pelton story in this regard, the piece Pacific Biosciences' $600 Million Decoder Ring was made more interesting in relation to another story. In this case, that other story wasn't by the same author, but rather on the same guy at Pacific Biosciences. As written about in this Esquire piece (which I posted on here), remarkable guy this Eric Schadt.

- Short, but interesting piece was Innovator: Carnegie Mellon's Richard McCullough on McCullough's efforts at the company Plextronics. His is fascinating work in the field of conductive ink for use in ultra-thin flexible displays (think: cell phones, televisions, magazines, etc). Definitely an area of business with huge potential.

- Finally of interest was SeatGeek Helps Online Ticket Buyers Beat the Scalpers on the ticket search site SeatGeek. Not the most profound offering in the world (digital music storage isn't either), but the company appears to be using technology well to fill a consumer need.