Fast Company's New Life in the Slow Lane By DAVID CARR New York Times August 11, 2003
Fast Company, a magazine that advocated a business revolution, was first published more than eight years ago on the verge of one. That revolution, fomented by digital technologies and soaring stock prices, came and went. But Fast Company remains, although in a much less exuberant and lucrative state. The task of making Fast Company relevant to slower times belongs to John A. Byrne, a writer for BusinessWeek for 18 years and the author or co-author of eight books on business, leadership and management, including the autobiography of Jack Welch, the former chief executive of General Electric. The lessons of those books, particularly Mr. Welch's, would have come in handy a couple of years ago at Fast Company. One of Mr. Welch's maxims suggests, "Change before you have to." But Fast Company is clearly an enterprise that is staring down its own obsolescence. Since being bought in 2000 for an astounding $360 million by Gruner & Jahr USA, the American publishing division owned by Bertelsmann, Fast Company has swerved into the ditch. The number of advertising pages it carried last year were a little more than a third of the 2000 total. Newsstand sales — a good indicator of salience in the marketplace of ideas — are half of what they were in 2000. The jargon that drove the magazine — "the brand of you" and "social capitalist" — seems as quaint and beside the point as the Pets.com sock puppet. Meeting with his staff last week in the Midtown Manhattan offices where Fast Company moved recently from Boston, Mr. Byrne betrays no panic as he methodically plans the October issue. The staff of 60, down from a high of 85 who once mixed Fast Company's brand of Kool-Aid, is hard at work making sure they write about a future that includes their magazine. There will be a package on ideas — everything from the choreographer Twyla Tharp on creativity to Tom Peters on leadership — an approach that is very new economy and old Fast Company. Competing for pride of place on the cover is an article rigorously examining the performance of five chief executives, which reflects old economy concerns and Fast Company's new pragmatism. Before a concept is chosen for the cover, there is consumer testing, something that never happened during the boom. But the time when Fast Company, founded in 1995 by Alan M. Webber and William C. Taylor, both former editors of The Harvard Business Review, simply dished up the gospel to a waiting cult of hungry readers is gone. "There was a lot of cheerleading that went on at this magazine, but it was hardly alone in that — it was endemic to the times," Mr. Byrne said. "My role is to reinvent the magazine for a different time. The mission and the vision are the same, but the execution has to be remarkably different." Since arriving in April, Mr. Byrne has moved to remake Fast Company. Instead of a kind of business service magazine that hyperventilated new approaches to business — sometimes innovative and sometimes kooky, like the article "How Is Your Company Like a Giant Hairball?" — he is creating a magazine that shows rather than tells, using narratives about existing companies with built-in lessons for making a go of it in conflicted times. "Fast Company is a magazine of ideas to help people work smarter and lead better," he said. The front of the magazine has been redesigned with an emphasis on clear-headed articles that reflect current business realities. "We want to do this in a way that is more irreverent and fun, more edgy than Forbes, Fortune or BusinessWeek are," he said. The August issue of Fast Company is a sobering look at the current age. In one article, Hewlett-Packard is shown duking it out with I.B.M. and E.D.S. for a contract to service the informational needs of Procter & Gamble. Another offers an update on the women who blew the whistles at Enron. And a third profiles two executives who glued their companies back together after they were obliterated in the Sept. 11 attacks. It is not sexy, it is not fun, and it is not fast. But at a time when Fortune magazine, Time Inc.'s once red-hot business publication, keynotes its feature about the "25 Most Powerful People in Business" by showing, once again, Warren E. Buffett and Bill Gates on its cover, it is clear that Fast Company is not the only business magazine casting about for the next new thing. There was a time when the business magazine field was so profitable that any publishing company without one seemed lost. When Daniel B. Brewster Jr., chief executive of Gruner & Jahr USA, bought Fast Company from Mortimer Zuckerman, owner of The Daily News and U.S. News & World Report, he was ridiculed for paying so much for a magazine that many saw as a hothouse flower of the new economy. But he insisted at the time that the company's need to grow and diversify made for a great fit, and that the price was more than fair. Now, expectations are smaller. Fast Company made $20 million in the year before it was sold, and Gruner & Jahr expected to raise profits to $40 million. Instead, the magazine lost $5 million in 2001, according to two publishing executives who saw its finances. After substantial cost reductions, they said, the magazine makes a small profit. Gruner & Jahr executives insist the magazine has made money every year they have owned it. Although Fast Company was never a pure Internet magazine — like The Industry Standard or Red Herring, which are no longer publishing — there was no publication more irrationally exuberant. Written less out of hubris than fervor, the magazine's founders advocated a culture of business in which corporations were the instruments of individuals and not the other way around. (The founders left the magazine after Mr. Byrne was hired.) Conceived on a set of principles — "work is personal" and "computing is social" — the magazine's leaders were fond of saying that Fast Company was more movement than magazine. The execution certainly bore that out: At the height of its influence, the magazine seemed to be full of beautifully rendered Power Point presentations, type-intensive tutorials that were designed to foster a bloodless coup d'état of the status quo. Articles like "Project You" and the "Brand of You" suggested that the most important product anyone could work on was themselves. During the late 1990's, Fast Company's brawny, ad-filled issues — "The Big Issue," published in October 1999, weighed in at 424 pages — did not so much break the rules as set out to make a whole new list of them. That included creating a business magazine that would attract many women as readers. The December-January 1998 issue, which touted a "Free Agent Nation," announced the formation of an active group of readers who met in cities around the country called the Company of Friends. Unabashedly cultish, the Company of Friends at one time had 40,000 members in 120 cities. The Fast Company ethic — a sort of Ayn Rand meets Tony Robbins celebration and promotion of individualistic capitalism — was meant to be shared. But after the dot-com frenzy broke, people were less interested in re-engineering their jobs and more interested in making sure they had one. "They were around when everything was opening up and booming," said Carla Stroud, an administrator for training and development at the Seattle office of the law firm Perkins Coie who served as the coordinator of the Seattle Company of Friends. She no longer attends meetings — "Most of the people there seemed to be networking or looking for jobs" — and stopped subscribing to the magazine more than a year ago. "They were writing the same stories over and over," she said. "I wanted to read stories about where the new economy meets the old economy and they were just not able to maintain my interest. They had trouble changing, which made me think that they weren't reading their own magazine." The Company of Friends has now shrunk to a total of 8,000 hardy souls. "They rode a wave, but then the waters changed quite a bit," said Charlie Rutman, president of Carat North America, a media buying firm. "That is not to say it is a bad magazine; they just have a tougher go of it now." Others in advertising say there is still a place for a business magazine that disregards conventions. "I think the biggest problem with Fast Company is that there was this misimpression that it was a dot-com magazine," said Mike McHale, group media director of Optimedia. "I always thought of it as a new-age business book that put kind of a hippie spin on doing business — a kinder, gentler approach for people who are interested in having balance in their lives. I think there is still relevance in that." Although much of the competition for a nontraditional business audience has gone away, Time Inc.'s Business 2.0, a magazine formed out of the ashes of the unfortunately named eCompany Now and an earlier incarnation of Business 2.0, is in the midst of similar re-engineering. But Business 2.0's principal weakness, a lack of a clear identity, could paradoxically become a strength now that the challenge is one of redefinition. Josh Quittner, editor of Business 2.0, has started putting a cover flap on the magazine so he can promote more articles, some of them offering classic dot-com optimism — "From the Perfect Storm to the Perfect Boom?" — or a much more practical look at how to benefit from the return of mergers. Walking a similar line between old and new is Mr. Byrne's mission as well. If he feels the pressure, Mr. Byrne is not one to show it. "There is nothing but upside here," he said. "If we get the magazine right, and I think we will, we will have taken a magazine that lost its way and turned it into something that writes about failure and success in a way that makes people want to read a business magazine again."
