December 2002

Power Player

Computer and video games are a bigger business than the movies, and the biggest force in games is Electronic Arts -- a company whose blockbuster titles dazzle millions of customers and generate billions of dollars in sales. Here's a behind-the-scenes look at a creative powerhouse (and a model of disciplined management) where rappers beg to be hoopsters, war-game designers learn combat tactics from a Marine hero -- and a series of complex projects come in on time and on budget.
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Sophisticated Sell

Why are so many women so passionate about shopping at Anthropologie? Because Glen Senk and his colleagues aren't just selling clothes and furnishings. They're selling a sense of adventure and originality -- and the promise of self-discovery. A field report from the frontier of retail.
Innovation Now!
Vote of Confidence
John Wood Turns the Page

These Lollies Are About to Go Pop

How Chupa Chups innovates to make suckers of us all.
From the Digital Divide to One Economy

Rey Ramsey's mission of social change starts with the home and leads to the Web.
How to Make Love in the Office

Forget about loving your work. Try loving your coworker!
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Too Much Information

Call it the "echo-chamber effect": the chatter of business-related information (and pseudo-information) that produces brain-dead behavior.
Babes in an RD Toyland

Inside Fisher-Price's Play Lab, where the ultimate compliment is a baby's drool
In The Hot Seat

Title: President, chairman, and CEO-electCompany: AT&TWhere: Basking Ridge, NJChallenge: Create AT&T's future<
Speedometer

Best Analysis of business excess "It is not that humans have become any more greedy than in generations past. It is that the avenues to express greed had grown so enormously." - Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, testifying before a U.S. Senate committee, July 16, 2002.

Power

Back in the fat days -- the happy mid-1990s -- Clifford Stoll, the bad-boy computer programmer, asked me, "What's going to happen to us when electricity is gone?" Short of the apocalypse, I wondered, how could that ever happen? I didn't realize that he meant human electricity: the juice of business ideas, the spark of risk, the jolt of innovation -- everything that was making work such a blast back in the heady days when the new economy was really new.
Culture

Anne Let's take an end-of-the-year poll. Which current business miscreant committed the worst sin: Kenneth Lay, Jack Grubman, Sandy Weill, Bernie Ebbers, or the Andersen accountants? Or someone else? And would anyone care if the Nasdaq were now at 7,000?
Strategy

I was standing on the patio of a friend's house in Hastings, New York, talking to a partner at one of the nation's leading law firms. I asked him about his work. "You wouldn't believe how weird it is," he said. "On our side, we've never been busier. Insanely busy. I think that every investment banker and analyst at every major investment firm has hired a lawyer. All of the city's top criminal-defense lawyers are just swamped. They're working 12 or 14 hours a day.

Fast Talk: One Shrewd Move

It's easy to look smart when times are good. What separates winners from losers are the moves their leaders make when times are hard. Six CEOs explain their shrewdest move of 2002.

Index to Advertisers

Interact with the companies whose products and services are advertised in Fast Company.

The Year of the Cockroach

According to the Chinese calendar, 2002 was the Year of the Horse. From the perspective of American business, it was more like the Year of the Cockroach. Faced with the aftermath of a terrorist attack, a declining stock market, uncertain prospects for company profitability, a spreading stain of corporate scandal, and the growing likelihood of a war with Iraq, most corporate leaders -- make that "leaders" -- have done their imitation of the insect most likely to survive a nuclear blast: Find a small crack in the economy and crawl in for safety.