Fast Company understands this. And that's why Fast Company is one of the smartest -- and scariest -- magazines around.

The National Magazine Award Fast Company received last month capped off an incredible first three years. The month before, Advertising Age named it Magazine of the Year; its ad pages jumped more than 50 percent in a year, and its circulation jumped from 100,000 to over 250,000. And like any hot start-up nowadays, it may cash in while the cash-in's good; owner Mort Zuckerman is reportedly shopping the magazine around, possibly to Condé Nast or another empire.

Many of the reasons are no doubt old-fashioned: snazzy design, sensitivity to trends, solid, unflashy writing, inventive regular departments, talented artists and (especially) cartoonists. But what really distinguishes Fast Company from older business magazines like Business Week, Forbes and Fortune (disclosure: I'm a contributor to Fortune) is its relentless emphasis on what's new in business: the effects of technology and reorganization on the pace of business (hence the name), the blurring of the lines between work and leisure and, especially, the changing relation and waning loyalties -- dramatized in the last recession -- between the individual and the company. And it knows how to speak its readers' highly upper-cased, consultant-ized lingo: In the May issue alone, we read how to Overcome Our Strengths, to move Beyond the Learning Organization, to Write Our Money Autobiographies.

Above all, FC realizes that its readers want a buddy, a partner, not a sage counselor or detached journalistic observer. The magazine's core support comes from intensely dedicated readers, thousands of whom have joined "Circles of Friends" -- Fast Company local reader groups that have become the Rush Rooms of the end of the century for the committed new-economy businessperson. They want to know how to motivate workers in a tight labor market, how to work in teams without becoming invisible. They'd rather hear success stories than post-mortems. And they want their magazine to cheer them on -- preferably with catchy slogans they can take back to their project teams (even if they're contradictory: "Be a gardener, not a mechanic!" but "Don't let your job run out of gas!").

There's good and bad in this relentlessly sunny, can-do attitude. Fast Company has actually carried out the idea of "creating community" that other mags pay lip service to. But its articles -- particularly its attention-getting cover stories -- sometimes romanticize disturbing aspects of the economy, taking a pile of lemons and pretending they're lemonade. In 1997, former Al Gore speechwriter Daniel Pink christened America "Free Agent Nation," heralding the spread of self-employment by noting the success of a slice of highly skilled, wired professionals -- doing yoga by day in their nice living rooms -- with scant attention to temps, the downsized and the uninsured. ("If there's one place where these solo workers -- these free agents -- feel comfortable," Pink writes in a recent Slate dialogue, it's a high-end coffee shop.")

Yet among its plugged-in target group, Fast Company is doing right. The surest measure: Its own name has become consultant-speak. "An expert at retaining and developing employees" told the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel recently that at a "Fast Company," managers "guide, energize and excite" (rather than boss around) employees. "A Fast Company creates a place employees call 'home,'" he says. Fast Company the magazine, concludes the Sun-Sentinel, is "more than a magazine ... [it's] a metaphor."

Next page | More than a metaphor -- a consultant!