In the Company of 'Ellie'

Preaching its philosophy on how to become a winner to its loyal flock, 'Fast Company' has fast-tracked its way to editorial excellence in three years. Here's 'how smart business works.'

By: Lisa Grananstein. This article first appeared in Mediaweek(May 3, 1999).

In an age that demands harder work, done faster and better, Fast Company has fashioned a new model for the business magazine. It is the Susan Powter of the genre: its messianic zeal and pragmatic "workstyle" tools, all seamlessly blended in an eye-catching package, have the effect of making you jump out of your chair and scream "Yes, I can!" And like Powter, the three-year-old startup, founded by former Harvard Business Review editors Alan Webber and William Taylor and published by U.S. News & World Report, has developed a cult-like following.

You can now count the jurors for the National Magazine Awards among that cult. Last week, Boston-based Fast Company took home the prize for General Excellence for a magazine with a circulation of 100,000 to 400,000, beating out American Heritage, Saveur, Teacher Magazine and Technology Review. This was the business title's first Ellie award; last year, FC was nominated for excellence in design.

It was a dizzying day for Webber, Taylor and some dozen staffers who breezed in for the day, all surely compounded by a few celebratory champagne toasts at a nearby hotel.

"Of all the acceptance speeches today, we were the only ones that talked about the readers, and our relationship to our readers," said Webber, praising the staff circled around him in lounge chairs after the awards ceremony. Fast Company does it with integrity, humanity and emotions that you don't normally attribute to a business magazine."

Clearly, Fast Company is not your parents' business magazine. This is for managers who push PalmPilot styli, not pencils. In the new world order in which E-mail and voicemail blur the lines between work and home, where conventional management rules no longer apply, Fast Company provides readers with a resource, a lifeline of sorts.

Back in 1993, after raising money and developing a prototype, Taylor and Webber shopped the Fast Company idea around to a number of publishers. It was Mortimer Zuckerman and Fred Drasner, publishers of USN&WR, The Atlantic Monthly and New York tabloid The Daily News, who wrote the check and now own a majority stake.

"It's a brilliant, brilliant product, on every level -- on the design level, on the selection of stories, the presentation," says Zuckerman. "It's just astonishing that they have this consistent ability to translate this [ New Economy ] world into human terms, and you don't have to be a nerd to understand what they're about...As I said to [ Webber and Taylor ], I'm inclined to believe that the entire success of the magazine is due the fact that I had nothing to do with it!"

Launched two years later in November 1995 as a bimonthly with a 100,000 circulation, the magazine has since ramped up to 10 times-a-year frequency with consistent double-digit gains. Paid circulation increased by a whopping 37.9 percent to 256,348 in the second half of '98 over the prior year, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The 1999 rate base grew 50 percent to 305,000 and "we think we'll be closer to half a million by the beginning of next year," says FC publisher Julian Lowin. Ads through May nearly doubled, climbing an impressive 89.1 percent to 503 pages, according to the Mediaweek Magazine Monitor. Though far from the lofty heights of Forbes' 785,000-circ or Fortune's 782,000 circulation, its rate of growth, much of it through word of mouth, is still impressive.

"It's the kind of business magazine that most people can personally identify with," explains FC associate publisher Linda Sepp, who began selling the magazine back when it was just a concept. "Most of the other business magazines are more observational, and with Fast Company, it's about real people and real ideas that they can use in their own world."

"We understood when we created this magazine there was a community of people that just needed to be introduced to each other," Webber explains. "We gave them a badge of belonging, an identifier." The bulk of those readers are men between the ages of 35 and 44, but the magazine does have a healthy 30 percent female readership. About 13,000 FC readers have even signed on to its Company of Friends Web site, a worldwide network that spans 100 cities, from Auckland, New Zealand to Boston.

"People come to us not only to learn about what's going on today, but what could be going on tomorrow," says Taylor. "They want us to help them set some goals and paint a picture of what business could be like if we all made it that way."

That approach is exemplified in the three issues awarded for General Excellence. In June/July's "I Gotta Get a Life" issue, featuring a campy orange Roy Lichtenstein cover, Fast Company bares its soul, speaks of emotions and values, and then drives it home with "Work is Crazy -- Get Sane!" A boomer business book if there ever were one.

The November issue holds forth with "The Company of the Future," written by former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, which, explains Taylor, sets the magazine's tone, "and helps shape the conversation of what kind of companies we want to work for." Stressing a series of "social-glue" attributes -- meaningfulness, pride and yes, stock options -- Reich shows how companies can be both profitable and humane. And December's issue winds up the year with "Who's Fast 99," a special report on 16 unsung heroes, leaders, dreamers and "change agents" who have made a difference in the New Economy through their ideas and practices. Together, these issues are "three very nice slices of what we do," says Taylor. "We deal with emotions, set the agenda and give people new role models."

In addition to the empowering articles, it's FC's compelling design that sets it apart from the rest of the pack. The "intellectual seed" initially planted in art director Patrick Mitchell's head was that the magazine would be a cross between Rolling Stone and Fortune. Fast Company was first designed by creative guru Roger Black, but, says Mitchell (with all due respect), "it was completely overdesigned." Within a year or so of coming to terms with what exactly the new economy is, Mitchell found The Look. Gone from the covers were pictures of cool hipsters. By the sixth issue, photos were removed from the cover altogether. Instead, Mitchell has come to rely on simple images and snappy covers lines like "QUIT your job. WORK your butt off. SCREW up. Have the Time of your Life!"

Inside, Mitchell and his crew pry CEOs away from their desks, and have them pose. "We go in with a stylist," he explains. "These are people who are not used to having their pictures taken, and we're telling them to set aside a few hours...But it's gotten much easier. Now they get the idea we'll make rock stars out of them."

Taylor attributes part of the magazine's success to being based in Boston, where "people aren't playing the magazine musical chairs game," he says. "People are committed to this enterprise, as opposed to this just being a notch on a career belt."

But a notch as prestigious as an Ellie award certainly can't hurt.