Narrative Writer for Business Case Studies (read by executives and investors)

Commoncog is building the world's largest library of business cases, and we need sharp, curious writers who can turn business history into clear, narrative-driven case studies. The cases you write will be read by executives at billion-dollar companies and investors at billion-dollar hedge funds. They use these cases to sharpen their pattern recognition and business judgment, a method backed by cognitive science originally developed for the US military. Each case is a 1,000–5,000 word narrative drawn from real businesses, constructed from publicly available sources: books, podcasts, news articles, and industry reports. You can browse the full Commoncog Case Library here: https://commoncog.com/c/ About You You are, in order of importance: *A strong writer. You write clearly, use limited jargon, in an active voice. You enjoy reading and writing not just as a job, but as a habit. You'll be evaluated on writing skill before anything else. *Good at structuring and distilling. You can take a large set of sources and extract a coherent argument from it, deciding what to include, what to leave out, and in what order a story should be told. *Someone who finds business stories naturally interesting. You don't need to arrive with a full vocabulary. What matters is that you find this world interesting and are eager to pick things up as you go. *Someone who enjoys getting to the bottom of things, in order to get at the truth. *We're looking for someone who, life permitting, is open to this being a long-term engagement. Our best case writer was with us for three years and we’d love to build that kind of relationship again. *Have some overlap with the SGT timezone. We are based in Singapore and may need you to attend the occasional live feedback session. What we’re looking for *Ability to structure a story, not just summarise information. A good case has a narrative spine. You should be able to identify the important turning points, decisions, tradeoffs, and consequences. *Strong reading comprehension and judgment about what matters. You should be able to read a lot of source material and decide what is central, what is supporting context, and what should be left out. *Clean prose and good sentence-level judgment. We are looking for clear, natural writing, not awkward academic writing or padded business jargon. *NO AI-generated writing. We are explicitly evaluating AI-written material. If your proposal, samples, or communication reads like AI output, we will disqualify you immediately. Some Nice to Haves: *Background in history, journalism, or long-form writing *Experience writing case studies, research briefs, or analytical essays Our Case Writing Process Each case starts with a researched brief that we provide. You'll first put together an outline, which we'll review together before you move to prose. Once the draft is written, we'll edit it collaboratively and queue it for publishing. We work in Google Docs, manage projects in Trello, and communicate primarily over email. The writing style we're after is non-formal, clear, using an active voice, and in the classic style. If you want a sense of what that looks like, browse a few cases in the Case Library: https://commoncog.com/c/ On AI use: We are hiring you for your writing skill and your judgment. You MAY use AI to speed up background research or to help organise notes, but we expect you to exercise judgment on the final outline of the case. You MAY NOT use AI in the writing of the final case. We expect you to write every word of the case that will eventually be published. We are hiring you for your writing skill, not for a machine’s. Remuneration and Job Scope The remuneration for this role is between $250–$500 per written case. The standard caseload is one case per week, with the option to take on a second if you have the capacity. Our workflow is mostly asynchronous. We publish on Wednesdays, so outlines are due the Thursday the week before, and final prose is due by Tuesday (All timezones mentioned are in SGT). You'll be working alongside the rest of the Commoncog team and reporting to Cedric, our founder. Editing is collaborative where you'll work with Cedric or another writer on the team to get each case to a publishable standard. Hiring Process To apply, send us your Upwork proposal along with writing samples, ideally business cases, research essays, or any long-form writing you're proud of. Please submit your samples in Google Doc format only. If you don't have anything that fits neatly, just share your best work and tell us why it's relevant. Shortlisted applicants will go through two paid stages: 1. Pre-test. We’ll send you a few short Commoncog concept pages, some excerpts to read, and then ask you to answer two long-form questions. The goal is to see how well you can understand a business concept, spot where it appears in messy source material, choose the details that matter, and explain your thinking clearly in your own words. ($30) 2. Full test case. Candidates who do well on the pre-test will be invited to complete a test case. The test case will not be too difficult, but it will be representative of the kinds of cases you’ll be doing with us. ($200) You will be compensated for each stage you complete, regardless of the eventual hiring outcome. We look forward to hearing from you.