Fast Company Part Two
A conversation with Robert Safian
How the editor of one of the modern era’s most successful business magazines is channeling the founders’ original ambition to shine a bright light on the changing nature of business.
When it first came on the scene in 1995, Fast Company wasn’t just the best new business magazine on the newsstand, it was also the most influential. But like so many other darlings of the first dot-com boom, its visionary voice had become a bit muffled over the years. The magazine that had done so much to accelerate the revolution sweeping the business world began to find it difficult to maintain its momentum and distinctiveness as that boom became a bust.
The Legacy Lab sat down with Robert Safian, Editor-in-Chief of Fast Company to hear how he gave this iconic magazine back its voice, boosting readership, reigniting subscriber growth and building up its social media muscle. Robert focused his reignition efforts on the brand’s core challenge, namely that too few people could say what Fast Company stood for anymore. Inspired by Alan Webber and Bill Taylor’s original vision, Robert zeroed in on the fact that Fast Company was (and will always be) a magazine that believed business should be a vehicle for progress. And its mission was to help business leaders live up to that ambition. Robert explained that he sees his job in simple terms—determining what a “fast company” is in today’s culture. “Culture moves,” Robert added. “And that’s what we’re trying to reflect at Fast Company—not only where culture has shifted to but where we believe culture is shifting next.”
By Mark Miller in conversation with Robert Safian
Can you tell us about the state of Fast Company when you took the helm? What about its origins first drew you to the publication? What ambitions did you have for its future?
Fast Company launched in 1995. The title was so successful that it was sold in 2000 to Gruner + Jahr for what was the second-largest amount ever paid for a U.S. magazine. In 2005, years after the dot-com bubble burst, the magazine was sold again, for a fraction of the original price, to Joe Mansueto’s publishing company. When I joined in 2007, as the editor-in-chief working for Mansueto Ventures, I was very aware that Fast Company had a strong legacy—a strong brand presence and spirit—but it had lost momentum. The questions I needed to resolve focused around which pieces from the past we needed to hold onto—what was the brand’s core—and which pieces we needed to let go of to help the brand thrive in the present-day world and beyond.
What inspired me most was the spirit of the work originated by Bill Taylor and Alan Webber, the founding editors of Fast Company. What Bill and Alan had so vitally seen when they launched the magazine was how much more dynamic, exciting and full of possibility the business world was than was being represented in traditional business media. Their idea was to bring that dynamism to life, and to connect with readers in a different way. I wanted to honor the spirit of those origins. Yet in the years after their leadership, the magazine’s voice had become defuse and the growth in the brand’s awareness had stalled. When I worked at Fortune magazine and I asked people, ‘Do you know what Fortune is?’ everyone would say yes. When I worked at TIME magazine and asked, ‘Do you know what TIME is?’ everyone knew too. Fast Company didn’t have that kind of awareness. But those who did know it, felt intensely about it. People’s passions for Fortune and TIME were muted. At Fast Company it was the exact opposite. When I’d mention the name I’d either hear, ‘What’s that?’ or ‘I love it.” That passionate engagement was special, and something to build on. The more passion people have for a product or brand, the more intense the relationship is, the better chance you have to build something of enduring value. Building on the passion that existed for what Bill and Alan created, by adding renewed clarity and focus to today’s Fast Company was the opportunity that I was drawn to.
In working toward adding renewed clarity to the Fast Company brand, which specific facets from the past did you decide to embrace, and which ones did you choose to leave behind?
One of the choices I made early on, in terms of focus, was that Fast Company was not going to be about Wall Street. Not only did I perceive this decision to be in alignment with the ideals of the founding editors, who were intent on not covering business as usual, but there was also no way that we were going to win by competing against, say, the very established Wall Street Journal by covering the already well-covered daily happenings of the Wall Street community. Knowing who Fast Company was not was critically important. It helped us determine what kinds of stories to move away from while we were, at the same time, sorting out what kinds of stories to move towards.
We made the editorial choice to focus on progress. At Fast Company, we believe that business can and should be a vehicle for progress in the world. Our mission is to help businesses, and businesspeople, live up to that high goal. And it’s a mission that will never be fully realized, since there will always be more that we can do to improve the human condition. This doesn’t mean we ignore bad practices that exist in the world. But we look for lessons that provide a more active, positive example. My view was that Fast Company could hold a distinctive position by encouraging possibility—that focusing on more hope and optimism in the way business gets done could unlock new solutions to the world’s most difficult problems. I do not think Bill or Alan would describe this focus as very different, if at all, from what they intended when the magazine got its start.
Unfairly, part of what happened over the years, is that Fast Company got lumped in with a constellation of media properties that were associated with the dot-com boom and bust. It was seen as a tech magazine which is a much narrower description of what Bill and Alan were doing. We’ve worked to get back to their founding ideals. Fast Company now, like then, identifies with the spirit that there is always something exciting going on if you look for it. The difference between now and then? The cultural moment. Periodically, as leaders of the magazine, we have to remind ourselves to re-look at what defines the moment, the era. Today, we are applying Bill and Alan’s principles to the world as it has moved on.
One key point of evolution since the early days has been how we approach the magazine’s cover. While we have maintained the look of the original logo as a link to our heritage, we have also embraced a cover treatment that focuses on photographs of people. That was not a change that everyone initially agreed with. It was different from Bill and Alan’s covers, which tended toward bold typography and illustration. My perspective was that, in today’s world, Fast Company needed to be a warm, approachable and human brand. The best way I could think of to put that personality on display? Feature warm, approachable humans making eye contact on our covers—creating connections with readers, revealing us as a friend that you want to keep around and have a conversation with. We spend a lot of time working to make certain that the portfolio of people we feature on our covers visually represents what we believe the future of business will look like. In 2014, when we published a cover story called ‘Find Your Mission,’ we created four different covers, featuring an African-American man, an Asian man, a white woman and a celebrity rock star. Suffice to say, the future of business is not strictly the conventional, conservative older white male. There is no more important representation of Fast Company than what or who we have on our covers. Our covers are our ad campaign every month.
20 years ago, Fast Company put its founding beliefs on the cover of issue number one: work is personal, computing is social, knowledge is power, break the rules. Do these beliefs carry on?
From the start, Fast Company was absolutely, directly, on the themes that have carried through. That is pretty amazing when you consider that social media didn’t exist when Bill and Alan posited that computing is social. The only variation we discuss is around the notion of breaking the rules. While we philosophically agree that companies need to break rules, we also observe that today there really aren’t rules the way there used to be. The old rules we once thought were there no longer exist. That said, the degree of chaos that implies requires a level of adaptability that is embedded in a lot of Fast Company’s original mantras of change.
I think Bill and Alan and their founding beliefs were incredibly prescient. In the first issue, they also talked about the notion that business is culture and culture is business. They anticipated then what has become so natural to us now. Business and culture are aligned and self-reinforcing. Today’s business people are heroes as much as celebrities and politicians are. And celebrities and politicians that are successful are so, in part, because they are applying business techniques and approaches. In turn, the way we talk about business at Fast Company is that almost any enterprise or organization can be a company. We’ve brought this to life in our annual Most Innovative Companies list. One year, we recognized Occupy Wall Street as one of the most innovative companies. This year, we highlighted Black Lives Matter. Neither are companies, per se. But they are institutions that are responding to the way business works to help them succeed, and presenting a model that other businesses can learn from. They have impact across culture.
In that same first issue, Bill and Alan talked about their belief, or desire, to create not just a magazine for likeminded readers, but a movement. Today, that movement is everywhere. Our job is to empower that community. There are some businesspeople who feel they had a good day at work just because their bank account got bigger. And there is nothing wrong with that. We go to work to earn a living, so we can take care of our ourselves, our family, and so on. And on the other hand, there is another constituency of businesspeople who at the end of the day hope their bank account is bigger but believe they had a good day because they made the world a little bit better because of their effort: I did something creative, I helped some people, I had some positive impact. Fast Company is geared toward that second group of people. That’s the social movement that Fast Company helped to encourage and the community that we are still working on to reflect and empower.
Earlier you remarked upon the need to recognize the cultural moment by applying the principles of the past, albeit in the modern era. So, what does it mean to be a Fast Company in the Age of Now?
We talk about what it means to be a ‘fast company’ all the time.
When I first got to Fast Company, I would have meetings with the staff where I’d say, ‘On a scale of one to 10, how fast is this company?’ I would throw out a name: Coca- Cola, Virgin, whatever. And we would have a dialogue among the editorial team. ‘Well, how fast is it?’ This was one of the ways we tried to define for ourselves what we meant in the modern era when we would say that a company is fast.
We have since gotten much more comfortable with an emerging understanding of the phrase. And we have evolved three editorial franchises—touchstones and tools—to continuously refine the definition. One franchise is our Most Innovative Companies issue, where we identify 50 leading contemporary companies. The second franchise is our Most Creative People in Business issue, where we identify 100 new people who we have never written about before in a significant way to say that these are the most creative people right now. And the third franchise is Innovation By Design, which is an issue and an awards program. When you put the three things together, it is about companies, people and products that are creating the world of the future that we can already see today. As we go through the exercise each year of choosing those editorial things worth celebrating, it helps us to crystallize what we mean when we talk about being a fast company in the context of today.
Today, one of the common refrains in business is that people don’t buy what you make, they buy why you make it. In your view, what is the relevance of having a purpose when it comes to being a fast company?
There are many reasons why having real purpose at the core of an enterprise in today’s world makes it more likely that it will be financially successful. Having a purpose helps to attract better, more talented employees and to motivate them over time. It helps to attract and retain a loyal customer base. It helps to define a brand in a distinctive way. Even though a purpose will be something other than to be financially successful, pursuing a higher purpose has the potential to drive profitability. That said, it is not something that can simply be bolted on. Just recognizing that a business needs a purpose in order to thrive never works as well as actually having a purpose that genuinely animates that enterprise.
This topic is near to our heart since, from the outset, Fast Company took the editorial point of view that it did not only want to publish articles but that it wanted to shape the ongoing conversation about business at its best and the real meaning of success. Leading conversations on purpose beyond profit is one way that we can be of meaningful service to our readers, helping to guide them to where the world is actually moving.
We have touched upon the topic of Fast Company’s readership. Can you share a little bit more about what has united their passion for your magazine and your editorial view over time?
There are definitely targets for each part of our business. Demographically, our readership includes a broad and diverse community of people. From an editorial point of view, I always go back to the idea that Fast Company is for people who feel like they had a good day when they have made a difference in the world. We serve people who feel like their work is to passionately pursue a purpose greater than to only make a profit. I believe that if we can provide a service to help this growing group to be more successful that they will, in turn, help to move the world forward in a positive way. Journalists like to say that we are ll independent, that we don’t have any agenda and that we are neither conservative pundits nor liberal mainstream media. Well, we are all human. We all have agendas. We are in this business as journalists because we want to make a difference. We are not here just to share news. We are here because we want to have an impact. That doesn’t necessarily mean our agenda is to get candidate X elected. Our agenda can be that we want to make sure there is a real dialogue about the issues that matter most. Fast Company’s agenda is to help initiate a conversation about making a difference with those readers who want to help make a positive difference. That has stayed constant over time.
When asked about who Fast Company competes with for your audience’s time and attention, you have been quoted in the past as saying that the competition is ‘cultural.’ Can you elaborate on what it means to be a cultural brand?
I think our competition is anything you spend time on. Texting is competition. Gaming is competition. Time is the great limiter. None of us has time to do all the things we want to do. And there are now more ways to spend our time than ever before. If we focused only on other print magazines or websites, we would be doing ourselves a disservice, and we would not be truly understanding our readers and users in the right way. To stay relevant, we have to consider the larger cultural context that we all operate in.
Staying relevant includes understanding both the contemporary places where readers spend their time, and it requires us having a current voice in the conversations they are having. Fast Company aims to reflect the pieces of culture that are becoming ascendant. Earlier this year, we ran a cover story about Airbnb, which started by talking about a conference Airbnb hosted in Paris at the time of the Paris attacks. Because of world events, and the rise of terrorist groups like ISIS, some people want to engage less with those they don’t know, for reasons of security. Others, embodied by outfits like Airbnb, take the point of view that people around the world should open their homes to one another. It is this second point of view that we are trying to enhance and encourage. That does not necessarily mean that we believe that Airbnb is the greatest company or that another open community like Facebook should be in charge. But it is our global, cultural view that these kinds of companies represent a more unified, more open, more trusting, more hopeful view of the future.
At Fast Company, we see our domain as contributing to the larger world of cultural conversations. We try not to limit ourselves to the conventional boundaries of magazine publishers.
In order to remain vital, how does Fast Company reconcile its own past, present and future? From an editorial perspective, how much time is spent on culture as it was, as it is and how it might be?
Our origins are rooted in the present looking forward. In a business sense, we constantly ask ourselves who is the right leader or CEO for a company at this time? Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric for a long time. If he were still the CEO and ran the company the same way he did back then, do you think he would be successful? Probably not. But he was the right leader for that time in the same way that Jeff Immelt might be a better leader for GE at this time. Culture moves and that’s what we’re trying to reflect at Fast Company—not only where culture has shifted to but where we believe culture is shifting next.
The first cover I did at Fast Company featured Mark Zuckerberg. I wish I could say that we knew Facebook and Zuckerberg were going to be world-changing. Rather we chose that topic because we believed that social media was a rising trend, and Zuckerberg provided a compelling backstory and a relevant way for us to introduce our readers to that topic. Facebook and Zuckerberg were a good tool for talking about where culture was headed. I see this as similar to when we first put Barack Obama on the cover in early 2008 when he was trailing Hillary Clinton in the primaries. We didn’t feature Obama because we knew he was going to be the President but because he represented a new national brand that was culturally resonating with a customer base across the country. Whether that brand got number one market share or not, whether he won the White House, did not matter. He was reflecting a rising new and powerful trend among consumers that we felt our readers needed to focus on. Along those same lines, last year we did a cover about DNA testing. We put Anne Wojcickki, the CEO of 23andMe, on the cover. Do we believe that 23andMe will become the Facebook of the DNA-testing world and be worth billions of dollars? I don’t know. That’s not our call. It’s a credible business that provides a way for us to say to our readers, ‘Whatever is happening now with DNA testing, there’s going to be a hell of a lot more of it in the future, and if you don’t recognize that, you’re behind the times.’ That’s what helps to keep us vital in the cultural conversation. Progress is what is driving our present-day choices.
Building on the theme of the future being ahead for Fast Company, what do you hope for over the next 20 years? What is the brand’s legacy in the making?
We are definitely a brand focused on looking forward. We will reference the past when it is helpful, but we also recognize that nostalgia, in and of itself, is not helpful in the current climate and at the pace at which the world is moving. Since we are a brand about innovation—championing innovative companies, creative people and innovation by design—we have to continue to innovate ourselves. We have to reimagine our content and reimagine the ways in which our brand reaches out. Change is in our DNA; it’s a requirement.
When I got to Fast Company in 2007, I was put in charge of a print magazine with a circulation of about 800,000, that was published 10 times a year. We were reaching maybe a half a million people a month digitally via random Google searches. Now, we still have the magazine, but we reach about 15 million people a month directly via our websites. We have 3 million Twitter followers. Two million “likes” on Facebook. Our Fast Company Innovation festival brings together more business leaders, entrepreneurs and creatives than any other business-media event. To stay relevant today, to stay ahead of change, our content and our brand have to live in places that go way beyond the physical magazine. The world will continue to change. Whatever the next big thing is going to be—video, movies, TV, a content platform that has not been created yet—we have to be open to it and eager to embrace that change. That is what we have to do for our business, and that is what we have to continue to encourage our readers to do for their businesses.
I get a real sense of pride when I see Fast Company not only showing up in culture but also influencing it. When older platforms like the New York Times business section begins featuring more women, and when young Silicon Valley businesses engage in conversations about diversity on their boards and in their workforces, I know that we’re not the only ones driving it, but I like to believe that we’re having some impact. We are only a small player in a very large world, and if we could have impact and reverberate in broader ways to more places culturally, that’s really the influence and impact that we ultimately want to have. Creating cultural impact is perhaps the most satisfying part of the legacy we will continue to build over the next 20 years.
Given your experience of not just preserving, but adding to the lgacy of Fast Company, what advice would you give to others trying to build a successful brand legacy of their own?
Nostalgia is a very natural human emotion, and it’s hard not to look back. It’s hard not to look at pictures of my kids when they were little and say, ‘They were so adorable then.’ But getting stuck in the past is not what’s ultimately going to be useful to staying relevant, particularly in business. Today it’s perceptually better to be brand new. To be relevant requires having a respect for the past, but it means being anchored in the present and the future.
Many companies that are older have mission statements that seem like they’ve been created by lawyers. They have somehow lost touch with what their actual mission, role and relevance is. They forget that there is a reason that people go to work every day. What drives those people is not the history itself but the difference they feel they are making, and can make, today.
It can be a lot of hard work to really identify what your true brand purpose or ambition is, but when you find that, that is what will allow your legacy to move forward and your brand to remain relevant. It is important to be able to articulate, define and lean into that piece that says, ‘This is what we believe and, in turn, what we’re really all about.’ The answer is probably a thread that goes all the way through from the beginning, but it’s a thread that we lose sometimes. It’s so important to remind ourselves of where we come from and where we are going.
In just over 20 years, Fast Company has grown from an upstart to an authoritative voice on the subject of modern business. While the brand’s current leadership has embraced many of the publication’s founding philosophies, they have done so by embracing the spirit of what was written more so than by replicating exactly what was articulated so many years ago. So while philosophically Fast Company writes from the same point of view that work is personal, computing is social and knowledge is power, how that manifests in its pages, as it does in real life, continues to evolve. And while the notion of breaking the rules is still salient, today this manifests differently too, since many businesses operate as if there simply aren’t any rules to break. In turn, by setting the brand’s past in the cultural context of the present and future, Fast Company persists as a vital voice in the conversation about not where business has been, but where modern business continues to go as it writes, not reads from, the pages of history every day.