Fast Company’s Greatest Hits: Ten Years of the Most Innovative Ideas in Business
Edited by Mark Vamos and David Lidsky
http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9781591841180,00.html

Fast Company was an innovation in 1995. The cofounders Bill Taylor and Alan Webber, (Webber being formerly managing editor of the Harvard Business Review) felt they had to respond to three trends: digitization (powerful devices that would make computing more personal and more social), globalization (people from everywhere, Americans, Chinese, Russians, would embrace and share the best ideas, independent of national origin) and democratization (baby-boomers hitting their fifties would accelerate the diffusion of power in society. Believing that no other magazine had taken the lead in these trends, they founded Fast Company. To quote Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, their genius came not in reporting on these trends but in the magazine’s mission to shape the conversation, and thereby shape a generation, much the way Rolling Stone did with the rock n roll counterculture. “Every magazine serves a noble purpose,” reflects Bill Taylor. “We wanted to be about how people – and business at its best- can make a positive impact on the world.”

Fast Company is purportedly about life, work and the connection between the two that needs to be resuscitated. The five premises on which the best articles are captured as fascinating conversations to be shared, are as follows:

1. Work is not a means to an end; it is an end in itself. If you create work you are deeply passionate about – because you love to do it and believe in what it can contribute – the very act of work can become a source of sanctuary and meaning.

2. If your competitive scorecard is money, you will always lose. There are two ways to be wealthy. One is to have a huge amount of money. The other is to have simple needs.

3. Business is a mechanism for social change – for good and ill. If you build a great enterprise, it will have an impact – on its people, on its customers, on the communities it touches. The question is: will that impact be positive? How will the world be better off, beyond wealth creation?