My apologies for the headline. I know, gross. But the politically correct headline for this article, "Compensating For Laziness With Non-Essential Bells & Whistles" just didn't sound as interesting.
Let's just say that Fast Company Magazine has gotten lazy and tried to compensate for a crummy magazine by adding bunch of non-essential bells & whistles, to the point where I felt the need to blow chunks while reading it. Sorry, I did said it again.
What the gate attendant was calling "weather problems" left me stuck in the Seattle airport with an extra 90 minutes on my hand. I quickly exhausted reading the iPhone version of USA Today (with it’s teeny tiny articles) and my usual fix of ESPN.com. 40 minutes and two mini-power naps later, I was bored stiff, so ambled into the Hudson Bay emporium of overpriced candy, drinks, and magazines to consider my options. Speaking of blowing chunks, if I see Barrack or the First Lady on another magazine cover, it’s gonna be airport restaurant nachos, part deux.
Fast Company caught my attention—and not just because it has a girl on the cover with an 80’s caliber Sigourney Weaver woman afro, either. The moderately interesting headline promised to showcase the 100 most creative people in business. I took the bait and forked over $6.66 for the magazine and a bag of Skittles. The price turned out to be a harbinger of what was coming. I later dubbed this purchase the “Devil’s Rag & Bag Combo.” But I digress.
Before I systematically dismantle the magazine, let’s first review the reasons why a business person, such as myself, would want to read this kind of magazine in the first place: 1) To get some good ideas that I can use in my own business, 2) to read about interesting business people that are doing interesting things (ie, profiles of successful people or companies), 3) to learn about technology that is useful, interesting, or both, and 4) to read something that’s fun to read—lighthearted, funny, interesting, etc.
Strike one. Strike two. Strike three. Strike four.
The headline from the Letter from the Editor page set the absurd tone: “Think Randomly, Execute Strategically.” What the H-E-double-hockey-sticks is that supposed to mean? You would think that an editor of a magazine would know how to pen a one-page editorial so it would instantly grab the reader and make him want to devour the magazine. This waste of 400 words left me wondering if Robert Safian (Editor) needs to tap into his 100 creative people for new ideas for his magazine. It only served to apologize, ahead of time, for the trainwreck to follow.
In the Old Testament, God decided a “do-over” was necessary and ordered Noah to build an ark—on PAGE 10 of the book. Page 10 of a 1,000 page book! Similarly, I was ready for a do-over on my devil purchase when I got to Fast Company’s page 10. Note to Fast Company: Nobody gives a crap who your contributors are. Let them put a little bio of themselves on the page that they wrote. Dedicating prime real estate right here on page 10 only serves the ego of the four people profiled. Get to something interesting already!!!
Pages 11 through 20 featured 8 ½ pages of advertising, and 1 ½ pages of Feedback on previous articles. Tim McClure from Lisbon Falls, Maine tipped me off that something would be wrong with his gripey-yet-poignant submission: “I was at a loss for words when I read ’10 Ways To Jump-start the auto business.’ Nationalize health care! Four dollar gas! Put a cop on carbon! Fake bankruptcy! These ideas are ludicrous! The solution to our economic problems is to allow the free markets to work.” A theme is already emerging: FC wants to posture itself as the eco-friendly business rag, and is dedicated to pretending like a magazine has anything to do with helping the environment. A secondary objective appears to be kissing big technology companies’ butts.
So now I’m 20 pages in, and nary an interesting tidbit to be found. It gets worse. The next 10 pages feature 5 ads and 5 pages of some kind of calendar thingy that highlights events that are coming up in the month of June—and dedicates an entire paragraph to describe each event. Apparently somebody out there cares that Waste Expo is being held in Las Vegas on June 8, that the 10th is Ballpoint Pen Day, the 14th is the Special Libraries Association Conference, and the 18th has something to do with environmental friendly water (read it twice and still have no idea what they’re talking about or why it’s relevant). Other calendar-worthy items included the International Plastics Showcase, Wimbledon, Virgin Atlantic’s 25th anniversary, the SIFMA Technology Management Conference, and the International Whaling Commission Annual Meeting. Try to keep it down—the magazine AND the chunks. They got the “think randomly” part down at least.
Finally, on Page 31, they printed an actual story called “Through the Fire.” “Cisco, Corning, IBM, Intel, and Schwab have weathered worse economic storms. Five strategies to come out of this one even stronger.” Uh, oh. I go on to read that Intel was investing more than $7 billion upgrading its factories, and how Corning had stockpiled enough cash to absorb a $400 million loss and has avoided cutting its R&D budget. Dang, wish I had thought of that. If I had only thought to stockpile a billion dollars in cash, this last year would have been much easier. What kind of out-of-touch idiot is writing this junk? That’s their strategies? Likewise, Schwab, IBM, and Cisco all blah blah blahed to get through it. Fortunately, it was a really short article. Looks like FC should have thought to stockpile a billion dollars in cash so they could hire more interesting writers. Or a better editor. Or both.
The next feature was about a design firm. Boring. Next.
Then a one-page (short) article about a company called Twine, maybe the next big thing on the Internet. Not big enough to write an interesting article about though.
Page 42: Hey look—ergonomic chairs that are designed cool. Page 44: Some guy who’s trying to make wool cool again (yes, the fabric). My gosh. Page 48: London’s public transportation system might get buses made by Aston Martin. I’m thrilled.
Page 51 yielded the only interesting article in the entire magazine, compliments of the Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made To Stick. The article builds a good case against using the employment interview as the most integral part of the hiring process. Useful, memorable, and relevant. I’d expect nothing less from the Heath brothers. Maybe FC should just hire them to write the entire freaking magazine.
If you’re as bored reading this review as I was reading the magazine, feel free to quit. I won’t blame you. But do at least skip to the bottom for the tombstone engraving.
Page 54 is a feature called “Green Business” that talks about an algae based airline fuel which might (or might not) be available in 6 to 10 years. We get it. People are looking for alternate fuels. When somebody actually has a workable solution, tell me about it. But seriously, I’m sick of hearing about the 910 different things that might be coming. So far no of them have come. I’m tired of hearing about them just so you can satisfy your craving to be seen as reporting the eco friendly business news. Reduce carbon dioxide emissions already by keeping your pie hole shut.
I quit halfway through reading the article about the lady who fell in love with her sales prospect and couldn’t bring herself to ask him for money. Sheer stupidity. I mean really, this was one of the worst business magazine articles I’ve ever read. I was embarrassed for the magazine.
Hey look—an ad for Fast Company on my iPhone. There are four sample articles shown on the screen, and you guessed it, two of them are eco-friendly articles. Now I can get composting dung on my phone, too!
Finally, the main article about the 100 most creative people in business. The introduction encourages us to quibble and complain about their choices. I’d rather quibble and complain about this idea for a magazine article in the first place. I really don’t care who they choose for their 100 most creative people—the head design guy from Apple got #1, Melinda Gates got #2, and the CEO for Netflix got #4. Great. My problem is the absolute lack of interesting, useful, and relevant information about what these 100 people actually did that should make me want to spend 30 seconds or 3 minutes of my life reading about them. Rich Ross from the Disney Channel expanded his brand to a worldwide entertainment empire and has plans to launch a channel for “tween” boys. What am I supposed to do with that information? How do I benefit from knowing that? JJ Abrams made some cool TV shows and movies. Fantastic. Tyra Banks has aired 100 shows. Okay.
This goes on for 53 grueling pages that I can flat guarantee nobody read. Worthless doesn’t begin to describe how bad this issue was. I’m sure the staff over at FC patted themselves on their green little backs for a job well done… never once stopping to consider that this issue—the creativity issue—was the least creative thing they’ve ever reported.
All I want is my $4.95 plus tax back (I already ate the Skittles… an excellent value, even at inflated airport prices). And money for new shoes that I’ll have to replace now that they’re covered with chunks.
So here’s the tombstone engraving for Fast Company: Because it was trendy to talk about going green, we talked about going green. A lot. Too much. Because design is an important part of business success, we decided to write about chairs. When it came to creativity, we tripped on our own shoelaces and fell face first into a cowpie.
Rough, but true—especially since Inc. has been on a tear for the last year with some of the most fascinating, relevant, and interesting articles of the last decade. Their interview with Jim Collins—priceless. Their profile of the guy who started PlentyOfFish.com—inspiring. Their article about Zappos—relevant.
So now for the marketing principle... Fast Company has fallen into a classic trap getting lazy and delivering a substandard (relative to their standards) product and compensated by trying to load up the product with attributes they THINK their target market will value... and accidentally butchered their main prodcut even worse in the process.
Sure business readers appreciate going green, technology issues, and interesting lists and rankings. But what we value most is relevant information that can help us grow our companies. Their own 2007 article about Johathan Goodwin (the guy that makes 100 MPG cars) was a great example of how good they used to be... and how far they've fallen. It featured an interesting guy who did interesting things and had an interesting adversary. That he happened to be a major part of the "green movement" was just fine. But it wasn't what made the article cook.
Their "Creative 100" list, on the other hand, was IMO a simple issue of laziness. People Magazine publishes their beautiful people list, Forbes has the richest list, and Inc. has their fastest growing company list. So the FC folks decided "let's kill half an issue putting together our own list... how about creative people!?" Problem is--the beautiful people are all famous and the point is to ogle and bicker about who should be where. Rich people are a ranking of wealth--there's no bickering, but plenty of ogling. Inc.'s list goes to extraordinary lengths to draw principles of growth out of the companies it features on it's list--they know we've never heard of these companies (and don't particularly care about them), but they know how to give us the info about these companies that's useful to us. FC just throws a list at us. Don't even get me started on the laziness factor of throwing a junior staffer on the "calendar" project just to kill 10 pages.
Do this: evaluate your business and its product or service offerings. Make sure that you're staying true to your core, excelling at whatever your core competency is, and not drowning that core in non-essential bells and whistles. Don't let the quality of your offering suffer due to staff cuts or decreased revenue. Your customers are too smart--they'll sniff you out and drop you like a hot rock.
It’s really a pretty simple formula.
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