But the key to Fast Company is really this: It's not just a magazine, it's a consultant. (Ironically, one of its best features is the "Consultant Debunking Unit" column, which zaps a different consultant catch phrase each issue.) The May issue trots out a classic business metaphor, quizzing chess master Bruce Pandolfini for 10 deep-sounding slogans for the conquering king. "To gain space, you usually have to sacrifice time." And "When you can't determine whether to accept or decline a sacrifice, accept it." (Inexplicably, the magazine omits "Don't surround yourself with yourself" and "Take a straight and stronger course to the corner of your life.")

This sounds like a throwback to the Sun-Tzu-ism of yore, but really Fast Company's philosophy is more egalitarian, less Great Leader-centered. Its game is more about teaching each pawn to move itself (uh, teaching each rook to castle itself? These metaphors are harder than they look). It's an unlikely mix of every-brand-for-himself mercenariness and team spirit: advancing your company's interests by advancing your own. At least in theory. The subtext, as in business guru and FC poster boy Tom Peters' famous cover story, "The Brand Called You," is that the company would just as soon gut you as look at you; remember that, and everyone's happy. Peters contributes the mag's current cover story, "The Wow Project," approaching project management in the same vein. The point of a Wow Project, Peters says, "is not to do a 'good job'" -- love those scare quotes -- "of managing the project that the boss dumped into your lap. It's to use every project opportunity ... to create surprising new ways of looking at old problems."

In other words, polish your resume first and do the assignment second. Live each work day like it's your last. I can't say that's bad advice, but articles like this drive home just how shitless the early-'90s recession scared the white-collar work force, how the aftershocks affect even the most Pollyanna-ish assumptions of the boom era. After that brief, scary game of musical desks, we take every minute of work available, like guilty happeners across an overturned money truck, guiltily (or not) snatching up every stray dollar bill we can, not believing our good fortune will last, stuffing our pockets and scraping our knuckles until the cops come and shoo us away again.

Thus the 24/7/365 work-o-rama captured in an ad from the issue, for something called HotOffice 2.0 software: "Scott and Lisa are in the office working on the Johnson report ... Ron's in Miami Beach [working on a laptop] wishing he wasn't working on the Johnson report." This is a selling point -- this is what someone has determined will make a Fast Company reader want to buy: Get HotOffice and you'll never take a real vacation again!

Well, it's only an ad. Fast Company didn't make this world, any more than Fortune or Forbes did; it just identified and responded to it better than anyone else. (Even its leisure section is called "Neoleisure.") And this hell-for-leather outfit does recognize the costs; last year it ran a cover package on "Getting a Life" and this spring included a section on balancing personal and professional life. But don't expect all its readers to sign on that quickly: Though the section obviously touched a chord, one reader shot back, "To succeed today, you've got to become a maniac!"

"A Fast Company creates a place employees call 'home.'" Increasingly, we're turning home -- and everywhere else -- into a place employees call "work." More power to Fast Company's highly motivated followers if they enjoy it as much as they seem to. But it'll be interesting to see what becomes of the magazine if the market tightens, if the readers ever weary of constant self-invention and of the prospect of 50 years of job insecurity, if its wired begin to grow tired. If the Free Agent Nation is put on waivers. If an economy of Fast Companies starts getting -- God forbid -- slow.
salon.com | May 10, 1999

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