February 2008

The Dirtiest Mind In Business

Sensible Investing: Oil

Fast Company asked the sustainability experts at HIP Investor Inc. and the Social Venture Technology Group for help. These firms have together developed an exclusive methodology they called HIP -- Human Impact + Profit -- for measuring the environmental and social impacts of business. We asked the HIP/SVT team to analyze the world's 10 largest oil companies.
Oil
Is the Tipping Point Toast?

Marketers spend a billion dollars a year targeting influentials. Duncan Watts says they're wasting their money.
Order Versus Chaos
Loco Motion

The creative crazies at Motion Theory turn the video world topsy-turvy.
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.
Making Friends, Creating Customers
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?
Lab Results May Vary

Now February

A calendar of events this month.
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.
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.

Yahoo's Rally Cry

The Web portal has scored with its sports site. Does its success point the way to Yahoo's future?
Fueling The Future

The oil well of tomorrow may be in a California lab full of genetically modified, diesel-spewing bacteria.
Artery, Heal Thyself

Abbott's new absorbable stent could change heart surgery and revive a $5 billion business.
Scuttling Scut Work

Pfizer devises a new kind of outsourcing--just for the time-wasting parts of your job.
Is Bacteria Fuel the Next Big Thing?
Lost in the Funhouse

The battle between starchitect Frank Gehry and MIT reveals the widening chasm between design and down-to-earth craft.
CSI: Construction
Urban Outfitters

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

Make Goals Not Resolutions

Your dismal New Year's resolution record--and what your business can learn from it.
Resolution or Goal? You make the Call.
Office in a Cloud

Why you'll learn to love the next wave of Web-based work apps.
Paint the House Green

Three ways a presidential candidate can use dollars and cents to win the climate issue.
Devil's Food

Big Food wants everything bad to be good for you.

Fast Talk: The Protector
Harriet Pearson Chief Privacy Officer, IBM Armonk, New York
Harriet Pearson, an attorney and former engineer, became the first major-company chief privacy officer in 2000.
Fast Talk: Clean-Up Hitter
Stanley Crosley Chief Privacy Officer, Eli Lilly Indianapolis, Indiana
Stanley Crosley, 45, installed an aggressive new system at Eli Lilly after the company suffered a privacy breach in 2001. Last year, the International Association of Privacy Professionals recognized Lilly's plan as one of the best.
Fast Talk: Bureaucracy Breaker
Colin Evans President and CEO, Dossia
Fast Talk: Bush's Record Collector
Dr. Robert Kolodner National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Department of Health and Human Services Washington, D.C.
Dr. Robert Kolodner, 59, advises HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt on health IT initiatives and oversees the federal government's efforts to get doctors, hospitals, and medical providers nationwide to adopt electronic medical records by 2014.
Fast Talk: Privacy Warrior
Dr. Deborah Peel Founder and President, Patient Privacy Rights Austin, Texas
Dr. Deborah Peel, 56, a practicing psychiatrist, founded Patient Privacy Rights, a consumer watchdog organization. She began fighting for medical privacy in 1993 after President Clinton proposed that every doctor-patient encounter be entered into a database.

Letter from the Editor

What kind of work is most valuable? At this magazine, we tend to talk about ideas and inspiration and management techniques, but less often about the dirty work of getting the job done. Which is why this issue's feature about Dirty Jobs' Mike Rowe was such an opportunity. Rowe, until recently, was a screwup. He worked a sequence of low-end acting gigs, more intent on entertaining himself than on having an impact.