Fast Company Meets the Church

Alan Webber
Co-founding editor, Fast Company magazine

New Century: New Church 2
September 24, 2001

Brad Smith, president of Leadership Network who interviewed Webber for this plenary session, introduced Alan Webber.

Brad Smith: Fast Company has become a lot more than a magazine. It’s actually become a movement. It’s a movement not just about how to do business in the new economy, but it’s about new identities for people. It’s about creating communities in the workplace and giving value and respect to people. Alan, we’re excited that you are here. One of the things that Alan and I talked about briefly yesterday was September 11 and I’d like to start our interview by asking for your reactions to what has happened following September 11^th.

Alan Webber: First of all, it’s great to be here and thank you for the invitation. When we were talking yesterday, I described what was going through my mind on the airplane ride out here in the aftermath of the attack on New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Parts of what magazine editors do for a living is read and try to make sense out of what we’re reading. So yesterday, I bought my Sunday New York Times, got on the airplane in Boston and started working my way through it. It is impossible not to be moved by the eloquence of the people who are writing about our lives right now. There is such an outpouring of eloquence and compassion and patriotism and stories about real heroes. At Fast Company, one of the things we pride ourselves on is that we don’t write about celebrities. We leave that to other people who want to put the same faces on their magazines. Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, and Jack Welch…there’s nothing wrong with those people, but our philosophy has always been that is not the whole story.

All of a sudden what you’re reading in the newspaper is about not celebrities, but about real heroes and I was deeply moved. I was also doing what I do for a living, which is not just focusing on what is the main story, but looking for the "what else" in the paper, what is maybe not getting the attention it deserves because it’s not the hot spot of the moment. I clipped a few pieces out and brought them with me to this event.

There was a story in the paper about what’s going on in Celebration, the Disney project down in Florida. This was going to be a model community, but in fact it has still turned out to be an incredibly racially segregated community. The article included a statistic that segregation has increased from 1990 to 2000 in almost every large suburban area in the United States.

I turned the page and there was a commentary on Rev. Falwell’s explanation for why the attack had happened, explaining that it was actually the fault of homosexuals and abortionists and then his retraction/non-retraction which he said he really hadn’t said that, but what he meant -- what he really said- was something different. Anyway, he didn’t realize that the rest of us folks were listening in, which was none of our business. I thought, "Maybe I’m missing something here, but that doesn’t really make it a lot better."

There was a book review about a new book by Joan Didion on politics in the United States that pointed out the largest political party in the United States today is comprised of those who see no reason to vote. And then there was another book review about a book called The Popes Against the Jews that pointed out the Vatican policy on Jews dates back to 1880 and endorsed anti-Semitism as a matter of church policy. I read these and thought, you know, there’s this amazing outpouring of patriotism and community, and I believe in that.

But there are two things wrong, two problems. Problem number one is, if we weren’t a real community before 9/11, why will we be a real community when this passes? What were we not doing right for all the time leading up to that attack that this suddenly papers over? And if we don’t attend to that, what are we doing? And secondly, when will this be over? That is to say, we’re embarked on a venture to eradicate terrorism. I don’t know how you know when that’s happened exactly. And so if that’s our definition of the thing that holds the community together and we’re not tending to these other more deeply felt root causes, then after the flags have gone back to full staff and the celebrities have stopped holding fundraisers with Bruce Springsteen and a lot of people I admire, what’s going to be the cement that holds the community together?

So that was what I was thinking about on the way out here. I thought it was really appropriate for this group because the whole theme of this gathering is the confluence of leadership and community. What do leaders do to really create a sense of community so that it is sustainable, and it is not just real heroes, but also real community? What’s the connection between lasting and deep community and this war on terrorism that’s on the front page?

I guess the connection for me is the feeling that we have a major opportunity in this moment and a major risk. The major opportunity is to look deeply at the nation’s soul, its purpose, and the connection of all of us as people, and also to look internationally at the connection of people and to use this not as a commentary on a war on terrorism so much as a deeper moment to look at what we’re all about as a people. I don’t want to criticize anybody, but again, I sort of listen with a different ear. I’m the outsider here, and I was very moved by the prayers and all of the talks yesterday.

I don’t know if Wayne Cordeiro has been monitoring my e-mails, but as soon as he was done speaking, I had to go back to my room and e-mail a bunch of people who I’d blistered with some fairly spicy e-mails before I came. I had to send some retractions last night. I want to thank Wayne for that. I think that was smart and hopefully I can get some forgiveness when I get back to Boston.

We were praying for our troops who were going off on this dangerous mission and in the back of my mind, I was praying for the Afghanistan people who, as far as I know, have done absolutely nothing to us. The Clinton administration used to say their policy toward Afghanistan was to bomb them up to rubble because there’s so little there now. My definition of victory, my definition of the whole purpose of this moment is not so much to get our pound of flesh, but to look seriously about what ties people together, both domestically, and also internationally.

When I got back to my room last night, there was an e-mail from a fellow in France. Fast Company has 40,000 people in more than 100 cities around the world who go to our Web site and register to be members of something called "The Company of Friends." It is our version of American Express. You know, American Express says, membership has its privileges. At Fast Company we say, membership has absolutely no privileges, but we love it if you’ll join. What happens is people go to the web site and they register to be a member of the Company of Friends all over the world. And what that entitles them to do is to meet other people who are like-minded individuals whom they haven’t met yet.

This fellow from France sent me an e-mail saying, "I haven’t been wanting to send you anything because I think you’re probably overwhelmed, but to let you know that the Company of Friends group in Paris is thinking about what’s going on in the United States." Across boundaries, across borders.

Smith: When you look at Fast Company magazine, it has this Company of Friends attached to it. It has conferences attached to it. Most magazines just put out a magazine. They don’t work on community. About every third issue focuses not so much on the company, but the individual and their life outside of the company. What is the background of why you wanted to create a magazine that focuses on community rather than stock markets, increasing your portfolio and which car to buy?

Webber: First, I know nothing about the stock market, so that would be a terrible magazine. You mentioned my background of working in Portland, Oregon, for a man named Neil Goldschmidt. Neil was my mentor. I had graduated from college. I’d run the newspaper in college and in high school. I went to Portland and at the age of 22, met this man named Neil Goldschmidt. Neil had grown up in Eugene, Oregon, a very small town where there were very few Jewish people. He went to the University of Oregon, became the president of the student body, graduated, went to law school at UC Berkley, graduated, and went to Mississippi during the days of the freedom marches and freedom summer. He stood with the people in Mississippi who were registering voters. He and his brother, Steve, finally got out of Mississippi in the trunk of a car because that was the summer that three young men from the north were found dead in a dam because they didn’t get out of Mississippi in the trunk of a car. Neil did, and came back to Portland, ran for the City Council, and at the age of 29 was elected mayor.

I went to work for him and learned a ton from watching what he did. He was onto the basic notion that a city is only as good as its people. A city belongs to the people and that ultimately a community is either inclusive or exclusive. The job of the mayor was to bring as many people together as possible.

The first Sunday of every month he’d be on television answering call-in questions about anything, and really created an environment, a climate, a context where citizen participation mattered. He created something in the City of Portland called the Office of Neighborhood Association. The idea was that the mayor didn’t have all the answers, but the mayor had a set of issues and values. Those values were immutable, but the process of implementing them was up to the people, to grab onto them and to own them. I went to Washington with him and saw him take that same policy to the federal government. What was not lost on me was the notion of a community being either inclusive or exclusive.

Wired magazine launched a year ahead of us. I was so jealous when they launched. They won all the awards. They took off like a rocket ship. They were the hottest magazine in America and Bill Taylor, my partner in crime, and I were looking at them and thinking, we’re never going to get our magazine launched. If we do get it launched, we won’t be as cool as they are. This is not fun.

Well, Wired was very exclusive. Their whole business model, their whole sense of community was, "We’re going to make this magazine very hard to read. The graphics will be really cool. They’ll be so cool, you can’t read the magazine. And you know whether or not you’re cool enough to read our magazine by whether you think the graphics are cool or unreadable."

Our business model was "We’re going to pitch the biggest tent we can pitch. All you got to do is believe in a very few things. Work is personal. The individual is the unit of analysis. People are what make the company go. This is the best time in the history of the world to be in a company, to work, to find meaning in your work, to contribute. There’s no division between who you are and what you do." It’s about that complicated. We’ve got a few other things that we talk about, but that’s the core of Fast Company philosophy. If you can believe in those things, come on in. Get under the tent. Disagree with us. Tell us our articles aren’t any good. Talk to us about what you’re doing. Tell us your story. You don’t have to be a celebrity. You don’t have to be a CEO. The person with the biggest job title doesn’t win. It’s all about what you do and how well you do it.

Wired plateaued and Fast Company currently has about 700,000 readers and we’re still growing. Our business model is the one I learned from Neil in Portland. You want everybody under the tent, and then you have a good, healthy argument and the best ideas, the best practices and the best values, and the best expression of those values are the ones that will win.

Smith: When you’re including everybody, how do you keep anchored to the values that are the identity with which you started?

Webber: This goes back to Ron Heifiz who teaches at the Kennedy School at Harvard. One of his definitions of the job of a leader is to know what is non-negotiable. At Fast Company some things are non-negotiable. We fundamentally believe in the value of the individual to make a difference that work and personal life are intertwined, and if the events of the last two weeks don’t prove that, I don’t know what does. The men and women who lost their lives did so at work, precisely because they were at work. And the men and women who went in to rescue them who lost their lives were doing a job that was absolutely their calling.

There’s a family that lives up the street from my wife and me. Their younger son went to school with my son. Their older son was a fireman in New York City who died when he rushed into the building to save other people. That was his job. That was who he was. I don’t think there’s any difference. I don’t think there ever was, but there used to be a debate about it. I think the debate’s over. Those things are non-negotiable. How you express them, how you implement them that ought to be open to everybody to debate. That ought to be what you argue about in a really healthy debate. That’s why local politics is fun if you’ve got a leader who has enough self-confidence to trust the people. You have to believe in the people you’re working with, to believe they’ve got good judgment; that they share your values; that they’re willing to commit themselves; that the more they participate, the more they contribute; and you’ve got to be willing to learn from them.

I learned an immense amount just from being here in the last evening and this morning. I’ve got notes to go home and work on. You’ve got to believe that leadership is a semi-permeable membrane; it’s biologic. Organizations are living organisms and what you take in and what you put out are constantly flowing back and forth. That ought to be the relationship that you have with the people in your community. That’s why for us e-mail is so essential.

We put out a magazine. From the beginning we included the e-mail address of the author of the article and the person we were writing about. We did a piece most recently about Andy Pearson, who I’ve known for a long time. Andy was the CEO of Pepsi. They used to tell the joke about Andy but it wasn’t all that funny. At Pepsi they said, "If Andy Pearson had a glass eye and a real eye, how would you know which was the glass eye?" The answer is, "The glass eye would be the warm one." This is not a good thing.

Well, we did a story about Andy called "Andy Pearson Finds Love." The details of what happened when Andy -- he went now to work at Tricon as not the CEO but the Chairman and started to working with the CEO who genuinely believed that the people of the company were the most important asset of the company. He didn’t just say it--- you can find it in every company’s annual report, but nobody does it---this guy did it. Andy, who was the tough numbers-crunching guy, realized that’s really true. There aren’t enough great people to go around. There isn’t enough teamwork to go around. The organization with the best people wins. How do you get the best people? By trusting them, by connecting with them, by giving them license to contribute, to participate, like a city. You’re running for mayor every day, of your congregation, of your company, of your magazine. So Andy found love.

We published this article and included Andy’s e-mail address. I started getting e-mails from Andy saying, in all the articles I wrote for the Harvard Business Review, in all the time I’ve been a CEO, I have never gotten more feedback on anything in my entire life. That feedback loop is an instant vote on people’s participation, sense of connection, and willingness to learn. That’s how you know when you’re touching people’s lives.

Smith: Will you say more about the intersection of trust and inclusiveness and holding to core values.

Webber: I believe in stories. I think what’s been said so far is absolutely right. The way we learn and the way we communicate, the way we connect with other people is through stories and much more than facts and data, certainly. Let me tell you a brief story about my time in Portland.

I went to work for the mayor before he was mayor. He was a city commissioner. I was 22, Neil was 28. This was long ago, before some of you were born, in a Galaxy far away, back when we weren’t proud about going to war. There were demonstrations against the war. And Neil as a former legal aide attorney and I as a former longhaired hippie freak were working in city government. In those days, when the mayor was out of town, one of the commissioners was designated acting mayor. As fate would have it, the mayor had a heart attack and Neil, at age 28, was the acting mayor at the time when a group of longhaired hippie freaks, my team, held a demonstration against the war. It ended up in front of a recruiting station for the Marines where they threw bricks through the windows and trashed the recruiting station. Neil was running for mayor and this same group of people came to City Hall and said, "We’d like another permit to have another march." Neil’s a legal aide attorney, a civil libertarian. He believes in the right of free speech. He also doesn’t want to see more violence on the streets.

So we have a meeting in the mayor’s office and around the table are the police, a couple of members of Neil’s staff, me, and representatives of the demonstrators. The police said to the demonstrators, "You say you’re going to be responsible this time. There’ll be no demonstration. You say you’re holding a series of training sessions where you’re going to teach marshals on your own team how to keep the peace. We want to come to those training sessions. We want to watch you as you train them." And the demonstrators said, "Absolutely not. You can’t come watch us. First of all, you’re on the other team. You just want to infiltrate our ranks." I hadn’t said much in my brief tenure in Neil’s office but right then I said to them, "What are you afraid of? You think there might actually be a peaceful march? What are you trying to keep these people out of the room so they won’t see? They want to have a peaceful march. You say you want to have a peaceful march. Why can’t they come monitor your training?" And that’s what happened. They monitored their training and there was a peaceful march.

What was happening in that moment with me was the recognition that I didn’t belong to one team or the other. I belonged to the City of Portland team, the "we’re all in this together" team, and that the basic proposition was, if you really believe that you wanted to have peace in the city, it didn’t matter whether you called yourself a policeman or a demonstrator or a Christian or a Jew. What mattered was whether there was peace.

That’s taking risk. It’s going outside of your comfort zone; it’s redefining the boundaries of your relationships so that you change the definition of the community. The community is no longer them versus us. It’s all of us together trying to achieve a core value that is absolutely undebatable.

That’s just one example of what I think is at the heart of moving across your comfort zone, whether it’s geographic to the inner city, or racial, or in this case political. It’s having the courage to speak out to the people who think you’re on their team, saying, "We’re not on teams here, folks. We’re not trying to win a head count battle. We’re trying to maintain a sense of peace, and we ultimately care about the outcome more than we care about the process."

Smith: You make your living connecting the dots and you’ve talked about your government and business experience. You get a lot of letters from church leaders at Fast Company, and you’ve observed this conference at least for an evening. Take a stab at applying some of these principles to the church as you see it.

Webber: First of all, I’ll cop a bit of a plea here. It would be arrogant for me to assume that I knew, because I don’t. I just wanted to make sure that we understand each other here. We’re all in the same game. I was talking to Carol earlier this morning about some of things that are going on in the world today and where progress is happening. And in my experience there is kind of a meme -- an idea that travels. There’s a meme that has at least in my life been a constant, and that is the meme of personal responsibility, personal value, people standing up for what they believe in. What’s moved is the location of that meme. For me, 20 or 30 years ago it was clearly in the world of politics and local action, social action dealing with racism, sexism, the war in Vietnam.

About ten years ago I believed that the greatest force for change was in business, that we had a huge opportunity as the world migrated from politics, which seemed less relevant, to the private sector where there was a huge amount of energy, activity, belief and passion. The private sector was where the game was. I think today the game is moving again, but it’s not moving in any one direction. It’s across the boundaries. It’s in the private sector, the public sector, and the nonprofit sector. It’s as people move from a narrow definition of their work to a broad definition of their work and lives. It’s wherever you are. So all of these things are alive in churches and in synagogues and in mosques and in Washington and it’s in everybody who has played connect the dots.

What holds it back is everything that we’ve heard this morning, whether you’re in a company or in a church. Fear. Fear of what? Fear of failure. Fear of being found out. I don’t know of what, but found out for something that you’re not good at or you’re not as good as you want to be, or that you don’t have all the answers. Well, guess what. Nobody’s got all the answers. That’s a great relief for me as a magazine editor. You put out every issue. You’ve got to start with the next one with a clean sheet of paper. You get the feedback from the readers who say, do more of this, don’t do any more of that, or how could you have published that ad? It’s offensive. You learn with every issue. It’s not my job to be right, it’s my job to start the conversation and then to listen as the conversation picks up speed.

That’s what church leaders do. Church leaders get outside their comfort zones. They ask questions. Again, that’s sort of a Fast Company mantra. It’s better to have a great question than any of the answers. The answers are going to change. The questions don’t change. There are no new questions in business. It’s really fun to have magazines about the new economy. There aren’t any new questions. How do you get great people? How do you get them to work together? How do you come up with a great business model? How do you come up with a great strategy? How do you connect with your marketplace? How do you out think the competition? How do you stay true to what your organization is all about? That stuff is timeless. What’s great is the technology and the erosion of boundaries and new ideas and new ways of working together. That’s where creativity and imagination and personality and risk and passion all come to the surface. As far as I can tell, that’s what brings you guys to this event.

Smith: The principles of Fast Company, the ones you just talked about, have been around for a long time. What did you do at Fast Company that put them together, that captured so many people’s imagination and made the magazine so successful? What’s different?

Webber: What’s different about it? Oh, gosh. I think there are a couple of things that we got right. First, timing is everything. You can’t say something that people aren’t ready to hear. You can try, but if they’re not ready to hear it, it won’t hit. All the conversation we heard last night about preparing the soil and making sure that the ground is ready. Timing is everything and we were right in the moment. But even more than that, execution is everything. You can’t be right on the principles and not follow up. You can’t say, we want to have a conversation with our community and then not listen. We heard. People are watching you, they’re watching us. I’m not a celebrity or a public figure, but our subscribers, our readers, our Company of Friends members, they detect a false note, they have a 100 percent -- forgive the barnyard reference -- what Ernest Hemingway called a bs detector. Ernest Hemingway said a novelist has bs detector. Everybody who is in the movement has the same thing, and when you hit a false note, when you say we’re all in this together except I’m a little bit more in it than you are, they hear that and they defect. You lose credibility, you lose your ability and you violate trust. Trust is essential, and you have to earn the trust.

Again, a lesson I learned from Neil. When you’re the mayor of the City of Portland, everybody loves you because you’re important. Everybody wants to make policy. The most important issue for the people of the City of Portland wasn’t crime, education, pollution. The number one issue was dog control. That was the biggest problem. Dogs running at large in city neighborhoods. They poop on your lawn. They tear up your garden. Old grandmothers carrying bags of groceries would get knocked over, break a hip. Neil Goldschmidt said, "Okay, I’m the mayor. I’ve got important policies on transportation and education. I’m going to make one person in my office the dog control person." He called her the dog lady. That person was responsible for making sure that all complaints on dogs running at large were responded in real time. You earn people’s trust when you take care of the small things. If you can do one small thing well, when you then go back and say I want to talk to you about something a little more lofty, getting together with your neighbors and having a spirit of fellowship and comradeship, you’ve earned their trust. Goof up on the little stuff and why would they believe you on the big stuff?

Smith: Last question. You consult with a lot of businesses and speak often marketing companies and businesses. I assume you don’t speak to church groups a lot. What has surprised you and is there any last word you want to leave with this group?

Webber: First of all, I should thank you all again for having me.

What has not surprised me, but what makes me feel incredibly welcome here, is that as a short, fat Jewish guy, I feel very welcome here. So thank you all for that. If I were going to say anything that I would leave as a marketing message, it is to think deep and think hard about what your definition of victory is as an organization and as leaders. Neil was absolutely clear when he was mayor of Portland what was his definition of success. We lived in a time when cities were an endangered species. People could leave the city, take their families and move to the suburbs and those who would be left in the cities were poor people with no choice, no disposable income, no disposable time to do things like volunteer to be a scout leader or work in the PTA, and that’s not healthy for a community. Neil’s definition of a success was, "How do I give people more choice, choice of where to live, where to work, who to connect with, how to make a living so that they’ll choose to live in the city?" When you know how to choose your definition and it’s about choice for others, it informs all of your actions.

At Fast Company we have a simple definition of victory or success, and ironically it’s not numerical. It’s nice to make money. That’s a bottom line measurement. We didn’t start there. It’s not a metric of how many people read the magazine, although it’s nice to have more readers than fewer readers. We don’t really start with that. Bill and I said our definition of success is impact. How many people can we have an impact on? How many great conversations can we start? How many times can we put an article into the magazine that becomes the "if you’re not talking about that, you’re not talking about what matters" moment for our community of readers? And I would say that for any organization, church, and government.

I’m very proud of a lot of the things that the President has said and I was very impressed with his speech. But I was disappointed with his definition of victory when he said his definition of victory was to rid the earth of evildoers. I think that’s a very negative definition of victory. My definition of victory is -- actually it’s provided to me by my wife who is much smarter than I am, and I learn from her by listening. Her definition of victory was, let’s have peace on earth, not rid the earth of evildoers. I mean, one may be required first, but the real goal is peace, not elimination of evil.

I think for an organization like this principles matter the most. What’s your definition of success? What business are you really in? Are you in the business of head counts? Who’s the team with the biggest church wins? Are you in the business of competition against other religious groups? I think we’re all in it together, and my definition of victory is everybody loving each other, not the team with the most members wins, but that’s my offering. My question for you is, when you go home on Monday morning and you get up and you go to work, what’s your definition of success?

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