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Issue 105

May 2006

Eat This!

  • The land of Wonder is overflowing with focaccias and ciabattas and olive loaves. The home of American cheese now regularly yields up Parmigiano-Reggiano, not to mention cow and buffalo mozzarella. In other words, it doesn't get any better than this. So enough whining about the state of the union. Grab a bag of blue heirloom potato chips, pour yourself a Trappist ale, and let's take a look at our biggest, most inventive industry: the business of staying fat and happy.

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Features

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  • The Change Function

    Technologists think, "Build it, and they will come." But they're building plenty of cool stuff, and consumers aren't coming.

  • Dumb Things That Very Smart People Said
  • The Logic of Lock-In

    HD DVD and Blu-ray are set to battle for your bucks. It won't be pretty.

  • Party On

    How to build brand loyalty? Try pounding nails in a living room.

  • Blood Simple

    New for the hypochondriac in your life: the Biophysical250, a high-octane blood test that scans for more than 200 potentially devastating problems, including heart disease and cancer. The thinking: Annual physicals can't catch everything, and doctors can miss subtle signs of diseases early in their progression. Biophysical Corp.'s test, by contrast, looks for the first chemical hints of illness by analyzing biomarkers--proteins and other bits in the blood associated with specific diseases.

  • Off the Vine, Now Online

    In the ever-expanding wine universe, "white with fish, red with meat" only gets you so far. These blogs can take you from Syrah to petite sirah.

  • My Book, by Me

    How to subvert an industry for under $30.

  • Deconstructing Wal-Mart's Wonder Truck

    The retailer vows to build an eco-friendly fleet. Is it for real?

  • Quiz: Am I a Total Jerk?
    Can I take regular criticism and unpopular actions, without remorse? Can I cope with having double standards? Are money and success more important than feeling good about myself? Am I more important than the company I work for and my colleagues? Can I suck up to important people without embarrassment?

    Questions to help first-class bullshitters self-identify, from The Business of Bullshit, by Graham Edmonds (Plume, June 2006).

  • Rogers and Heart

    A master planner eyes New York's shoreline.

  • Barefoot Is Better

    Bunker Roy says entrepreneurship, not massive aid programs, will solve mass poverty.

  • 9 Innings with Jeff Angus

    Baseball metaphors run through business speak as easily as Willie Mays ran down fly balls. But too often, writes consultant and baseball columnist Jeff Angus in Management by Baseball (HarperCollins, May), business fails to live up to the American pastime. Fast Company shared a bleacher with him at a spring-training game of his hometown Seattle Mariners.

  • The Piniella Effect
  • "What Does She Buy?" Lean, Tasteless Pork.

    The latest in a series of visionary tales inspired by the great corporate marketing films of the last century.

Fast Talk

  • Fast Talk: Good Sports

    These five executives from the world of sports bring an array of clever approaches to finding, wooing, and retaining their fans as competition for their devotion--and their dollars--increases.

From the Editor

  • Letter From the Editor

    My earliest memories are made of bones and eggs. My mother was a midnight cook who washed away the accumulated anxieties of her day in the vapors of stockpots. And if I woke and found her rattling around the steamy kitchen, she would sit me down to a slice of soft bread, spread with marrow scooped from a piece of beef shin. Add a sprinkling of salt and a hard-boiled egg. Who wouldn't go back to bed happy?

  • Between the Lines

    The stories behind this issue's stories.

  • JetBlue's Blues

    "When you're making money and good margins, you tend to get sloppy," JetBlue founder and CEO David Neeleman warned us two years ago ("And Now the Hard Part," May 2004). The hard part, we wrote, would come as JetBlue's new planes aged and its pilots moved up the pay scale. Meanwhile, the company's fast growth would test the close-knit culture Neeleman created.