Still Standing

Fast Company's New Life in the Slow Lane in today's New York Times reads like an obituary for a publication I found unique starting with the very first issue, and the demise NYT predicts looks more like a reinvention to me.

The debut of Heath Row's blog last week is just another example of how Fast Company is keeping up with the Post New Economy Economy. The fact that an excerpt in Fast Company could be an integral part of the launch and word of mouth promotion of Seth Godin's latest book Purple Cow isn't too shabby, either.

I picked up the first issue of Fast Company in the St. Louis Airport in 1995 and read it cover to cover before sharing it with tons of people. I still share items from its content today. Yes, competitors like The Industry Standard and Business 2.0 that jumped on the dot com bandwagon after it fell by the wayside. (The NYT also lumps Red Herring into that category, but, in reality, RH preceeded Fast Company, and was more focused on the IPO aspect of the dot com craziness, it's name comes from the name for a pre-IPO prospectus draft.)

Anyway, Fast Company is still standing, albeit much lighter. There is still a demand for the kind of thinking it inspires, but much of the silliness is gone. Instead of a bunch of 20 somethings out to spend millions on hockey stick projections that would never materialize, I would suspect that Fast Company readers today are the survivors. Maybe they were the ones who knew all along that there had to be some value created at the end of the wild ride.

In the Online version of this article, of the several covers are pictured, my favorite, the one that said "Screw Work Quit" was not included. Maybe that's because, despite early reports of its demise, Fast Company intends to evolve to meet the needs of the next wave of remarkable businesses.

Hope so.