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Top 10 Lists

Our ranking of innovative companies in the March issue elicited a flood of opinions. "Google is not innovative with regard to Web 2.0," insisted one of our Web correspondents. "Twitter is where innovation is at full speed." For more, go to FastCompany.com and read on.

Fast Company 50

Loosely defined, Team Obama might indeed be considered a business ("Fast Company 50: The World's Most Innovative Companies," March), but to rate it ahead of Google, Facebook, Cisco, and the like for innovation staggers my mind. As a consultant, I deal with firms behind true innovative technologies on a daily basis. Using blogs and instant messaging for politics might have been novel, but the applications Team Obama used were hardly unusual and certainly not innovative. Ranking Team Obama at the top of the Fast Company 50 was an insult to the 49 real businesses on your list.

Mark Greathouse
Fairfield, Pennsylvania

Team Obama is the most innovative "company," eh? Sure, it used "effective digital initiatives" to win the Democratic nomination and the presidency, but without Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals as a blueprint, the digital tools it used would have produced an also-ran.

Creighton C. Bildstein
Greenwood Village, Colorado

Why was Zappos on your 50 Most Innovative Companies list? Regardless of the wonderful things it claims to do, it sells shoes at full retail price. It takes minimal effort to find shoes cheaper and with free delivery.

Mark Newman
Lansdale, Pennsylvania

Looking Up

I smiled when I read the Letter From the Editor in the March issue of Fast Company ("One Hundred Fifty-Nine Reasons to Cheer"): "We've tried to make this issue as upbeat and bursting with potential as we can." It seems to me that negative media and mass pessimism have only fueled the current economic downturn. Be positive. It's the new innovative.

Jamie Vesay
Omaha, Nebraska

I was so pleased to read your letter in which you refused to sing along with the doomsday-economy crowd. Personally, I feel that it is a very exciting time. If I had a nickel for every person who cringed after I explained that I just launched a creative-development and content-production company -- well, I assume you know the answer to that.

People seem to be too focused on how bad things are (or may get) rather than on being proactive about how they can adapt to this change -- which is all this really is, right?

Lee Scharfstein
New York, New York

Cause Marketing

Nancy Lublin's comment (Do Something, March) on cause marketing by companies was provocative yet maybe a bit alarmist. Yes, there are those corporations that have taken this approach du jour and are using it to sell their wares. But don't fret: As soon as the return and payoff fade away (or another ad firm gets the account), the next new killer ad will be in full swing, and the not-for-profit crowd will be able to relax once more. That said, Lublin's concern about corporations somehow muscling in, as it might seem, on nonprofits' typical territory is just an example of what makes business and free enterprise so exciting and valuable: It catalyzes com-petition, increasing creativity, bolder ingenuity, and resourcefulness.

Scott Beckett
Denver, Colorado

The Cost of Clean Coal

Anyone who can flippantly say that an additional cost of 3 to 4 cents per kilowatt-hour is manageable doesn't understand the energy industry (Green Business, March). A typical kilowatt-hour costs a customer 8 to 10 cents. A 3- to 4-cent increase in energy is upward of a 30% to 50% increase in electrical-energy costs. Prices such as those would cripple our economy.

Paul Pearce
Berlin, New Jersey