Pulling A Fast One

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, June 1, 2004 by Simon Dumenco

Byline: Simon Dumenco

There's a telling head on the most recent cover of Fast Company: PULLING YOUR COMPANY & CAREER OUT OF A DEATH SPIRAL.

Yo, tell me about it.

Fast Company, you'll remember, was the once booming New Economy bible - a revolutionary business magazine for revolutionary times - that owner Mort Zuckerman famously sold to Gruner Jahr in 2000 for something north of $300 million. The sale, of course, coincided with the New Economy's implosion, and Fast Company - once packed with enough ad pages to reach InStyle proportions - soon went into its own death spiral.

But nine years after its birth in Boston, the magazine is still here, somehow outlasting its formerly high-flying brethren like The Industry Standard, Upside and Red Herring. Now published in New York City, Fast Company, I'd been thinking, is a magazine whose time might have come - again - given the ever-escalating interest in New Economy victors like eBay and Google. And since Gruner Jahr has recently given the magazine a leaner, meaner corporate structure - teaming its advertising and marketing divisions with those of its sister publication Inc. - it certainly seems like Fast Company's overlords regard it as a scrappy survivor worth championing.

The leanness of the magazine itself, arguably, could work in its favor, reducing its editorial excesses and focusing its core message. Lately, Fast Company has been clocking in at about 100 pages a month - a far cry from the 400-page editions of its heyday. In fact, I still have issues from that era in my archives; I keep them because they're perversely cute and hilarious reminders of new-media mania, the exaltation of a particular sort of happily deluded business boneheadedness.

Fast Company, it's worth remembering, wasn't started exclusively as a New Economy magazine. When the bubble really started to inflate, it hitched itself to the Net's shooting stars, but its editorial mandate had more to do with giving epic treatment to a series of Tom Peters Lite platitudes. A couple of samples from the days when FC was clinically obese: "RATHER THAN WORKING FROM THE TOP DOWN, CHANGE INSURGENTS WORK FROM WHEREVER THEY ARE" and "ORIGINAL IDEAS COME FROM REASSEMBLING KNOWLEDGE IN NEW WAYS."

Remember when people could actually say that junk with a straight face? Such platitudes were not only stated in Fast Company, they were fetishized in full-page giant-type layouts set against moody photographic backgrounds. The idea, I suppose, was to supplant those old-school Successories motivational posters - ordered from the catalogs found in airplane seat pockets - extolling the virtues of teamwork and customer service.

But guess what? In looking at the magazine anew, my hopes for some sort of post-New Economy relevance were quickly dashed. It turns out that Fast Company, in its nine years, hasn't engaged in, um, sufficient change insurgency of its own - or at least the right kind of, you know, knowledge reassembly.

Take the recent "death spiral" piece, in the May issue: It lamely serves up big-type "wisdom" such as: "YOU HAVE TIME TO LEARN OR TIME TO FAIL" and "COMPROMISE ON PEOPLE DECISIONS AT YOUR PERIL."

Allrightly then.

The cover story, meanwhile, is about indie airline JetBlue - perhaps the most overexposed business story since Apple's digital-music triumph with the iPod. Other recent cover stories have examined such old warhorse innovators as Wal-Mart and, yep, Steve Jobs.

The magazine, in general, swerves wildly between presenting information that will be completely useless to most readers (e.g., the technology behind the special effects in upcoming summer blockbusters) to...information that will be completely useless to most readers (an attempted humor piece about "Excused Absences," which suggests that "asking to take a personal day serves only to label an employee as a troubled head case.")

What gives? The magazine, after all, has a new-ish editor-in-chief: well-regarded BusinessWeek vet John A. Byrne, who took over about a year ago from founders Alan Webber and William Taylor (the two former Harvard Business Review editors who convinced Zuckerman to fund their startup). By way of explaining (or trying to figure out) his editorial mandate, Byrne says in his most recent editor's letter that the question he keeps hearing is: "What makes a company fast now?" He proceeds to answer by relisting "10 make-or-break questions" the magazine originally published a year ago. Stuff like "Are you built to change?" and "Are you built for speed?"

Puh-leeeze.

Byrne's greatest claim to fame so far had been co-authoring the bestseller Jack: Straight from the Gut with General Electric's Jack Welch. He recently told Knowledge@Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania's online business-school publication, that FC is "primarily a service magazine that delivers ideas and actionable takeaways for readers to help them work smarter or be better." But the actionable takeaway in Fast Company most often boils down to "Groan out loud" or "Cancel subscription." Seriously. If you think I'm being gratuitously mean, just read the recent "Changing" column by new-media throwback Seth Godin, who breaks down business "clownhood" into four common traits (e.g., "Clowns don't plan ahead") and then caps off with, "What would Krusty do? Or Chuckles? Bozo? Figure out the behavior of a real clown - and do the opposite."