Features

The Dirtiest Mind in Business

How filth met opportunity and created a franchise. By Ellen McGirt

Seven Dirty Habits of Highly Effluent People
Mike Rowe’s seven rules for job satisfaction. By Mike Rowe

Voyage of Discovery
Communications (DCI) which airs Dirty Jobs has more than 100 TV networks reaching 1.5 billion subscribers. Here are four of DCI’s key properties.

Video: Mike Rowe 'Bears' All for Fast Company
Get an exclusive behind the scenes peek at Dirty Jobs star Mike Rowe, getting good and dirty for Fast Company while romping with a bear.

Is the Tipping Point Toast?

Marketers spend a billion dollars a year targeting influentials. Duncan Watts says they're wasting their money. By Clive Thompson

Order Versus Chaos
Duncan Watts's research tells advertising execs precisely what they don't want to hear: All their clever (and lucrative!) targeted viral campaigning may ultimately be less effective than good old mass marketing.

Infographic: Order Versus Chaos

Loco Motion

The creative crazies at motion theory turn the video world topsy-turvy. By Diane Mehta

Intel's Amazon Ambitions

How a Brazilian town best known for its Festival of the Ox became a marketing tool for the world's biggest semiconductor company. By Richard Shaffer

Making Friends, Creating Customers
Intel's World Ahead Program is an ambitious billion-dollar venture, but other tech and telecom companies are also building relationships in developing countries that promise to become the most massive of mass markets.

Infographic: A New World
Intel now gets more than half of its revenues from less-developed countries in Asia and the Americas.

Sensible Investing: Oil

BP

Chevron

Royal Dutch Shell

Marathon Oil

ConocoPhillips

Groupe Total

ExxonMobil

Repsol

Eni

Valero Energy

Oil
It's a dilemma for investors who want hefty returns and a clean green conscience: Can you own Big Oil and still feel good in the morning? By Amy Feldman With R. Paul Herman and Sara Olsen

Energize Your Portfolio with Renewables
HIP & SVT examine 21 renewable-energy pure-play companies -- covering energy types as diverse as solar/photovolataic, wind, fuel cell, ethanol, and cogeneration.

The Price at the Pump Around the World
What would you pay for a gallon of gas?

HIP Methodology
Today's accounting systems only examine financial results (revenues, costs, taxes) and liabilities that are financially measurable. But a company creates many more impacts. The Human Impact + Profit methodology addresses that.

Quiz: How HIP is Your Company?
Answer ten questions and get an estimated HIP score for you business.

About the Contributors
We recognize those that contributed to the Sensible Investing: Oil project, including individuals from HIP Investor and SVT Group.

Slideshow: Can Big Oil Become Big Green?
Can big oil transform itself into a sustainable global power called Big Green Energy? Here's some ideas.

Slideshow: Who's Helping Big Oil Focus on Sustainability?
Here's are the managers leading Big Oil's efforts in sustainability.

Infographic: HIP Investor's Guide to Big Oil A concise look at HIP Investor's assessment of the 10 largest oil companies.

Podcast: Sensible Investing
HIP Investor and SVT Group founders R. Paul Herman and Sara Olsen on investors using sustainability to judge the viability of investing in oil.

Sensible Investing Archive

MAD Scientist

Can legendary Bell Labs--and its struggling parent, Alcatel-Lucent--be saved by a "crazy risk taker" who's betting that innovation can be captured in a mathematical formula? By Jon Gertner

Lab Results May Vary
Bell Labs has the history, and Google--where engineers devote 20% of their time to personal projects--has the buzz. But other models of corporate innovation are also showing results. By Danielle Sacks

Fast Talk: Health-Care Privacy

The Protector

Cora Daniels

Bureaucracy Breaker

Cora Daniels

Clean-Up Hitter

Cora Daniels

Privacy Warrior

Cora Daniels

Bush's Record Collector

Cora Daniels

Now

Now February

Q&A: Mr. Fix-It
Chrysler, Morrison Knudsen, Bethlehem Steel--in crisis, all called Steve Miller. In The Turnaround Kid, out February 5, the Delphi chairman writes about working for Lee Iacocca and saving some of the old economy's oldest companies. By Jeff Chu

Speaker For Hire
Colin Powell’s speaking engagement at the International Franchise Association annual convention cost the organization at least $100,000.

The Journal-ist: Matters of Perception
In this month's look at journals and academic reviews, studies on optimism in business, lucky execs, aesthetics in e-commerce, and smells and flavors online. By James Kuczmarski

Infographic: Numerology:the Oscars
The golden guy looks good for an octogenarian. Jon Stewart presides at the 80th Academy Awards on February 24. Here's a look at the business--and science--of the Oscars.

Next

Yahoo's Rally Cry

The Web portal has scored with its sports site. Does its success point the way to Yahoo's future? By Patrick J. Sauer

Infographic: Dead Heat
A tale-of-the-tape guide to the Yahoo Sports-Espn.com rivalry.

Artery, Heal Thyself

Abbott's new absorbable stent could change heart surgery and revive a $5 ?billion business. By Amy Feldman

Infographic: Stented Growth
The worldwide stent market peaked in 2006. Since then, new evidence of problems with drug-coated stents has hammered sales. Abbott, though, with its plain stents, has increased its share. Now, the company is betting that bioabsorbable stents could be the next big thing in unclogging arteries--and growth.

Scuttling Scut Work

Pfizer devises a new kind of outsourcing--just for the time-wasting parts of your job. By Arianne Cohen

Infographic: How Much Work Can You Off-Load?
Pfizer conducted internal studies to find out just how much time its talent was losing on menial tasks and how much of that work it could outsource.

Fueling The Future

The oil well of tomorrow may be in a California lab full of genetically modified, diesel-spewing bacteria. By Elizabeth Svoboda

Is Bacteria Fuel the Next Big Thing?
While LS9’s research seems promising, bacteria fuel will have some competition to become the fuel of the future. Here’s a look at how it compares with three other major players among alternative fuels.

Lost in the Funhouse

The battle between starchitect Frank Gehry and MIT reveals the widening chasm between design and down-to-earth craft. By Anya Kamenetz

CSI: Construction
Buildings expert Joseph Lstiburek points out some of the key potential mistakes in the raising of MIT's Stata Center.

Urban Outfitters

The nonprofit Sweat Equity Enterprises equips firms from Radio Shack to Skechers with product designs and marketing ideas from inner-city youth. By Phil Patton

Columns

Made to Stick: Make Goals Not Resolutions

Your dismal New Year's resolution record--and what your business can learn from it. By Dan Heath and Chip Heath

The Scoble Show: Office in a Cloud

Why you'll learn to love the next wave of Web-based work apps. By Robert Scoble

Scoble on Tech on FastCompany.com
Robert Scoble is a technology enthusiast and video podcast evangelist. Here you will find his magazine columns and web exclusive videos, as well as excerpts from his blog citing the best of the tech web.

Green Business: Paint the House Green

Three ways a presidential candidate can use dollars and cents to win the climate issue. By David Roberts

Not So Fast: Devil's Food

Big Food wants everything bad to be good for you. By Elizabeth Spiers

More Great Stuff

Letter from the Editor

Inspiration and Perspiration By Robert Safian

Infographic: The Hard Work
U.S. business productivity picked up in 2007.

Contributors

By Fast Company Staff

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