Fast Company October 2022

BRENDAN VAUGHAN Hello out there! Careful readers of this page may notice a new face in the upper right-hand corner. That face is mine. This is my first issue as editor-in-chief of Fast Company, and I’m thrilled to be here. Fast Company launched in 1995, just as I was launching my own career, and I remember thinking, Wow, great idea. The founding editors, Alan Webber and Bill Taylor, intuited that the acceleration of innovation would change the world forever, and they bottled that insight into a magazine that became the voice of the new economy. Nearly 30 years later, I’m excited to help write the next chapter in Fast Company’s history. Our plans are too big to cover in this space. They extend far beyond the pages of the magazine to our website,…

In 2005, the future of American business was reflected in the spotless tile behind a toilet bowl. Procter & Gamble had released the Mr. Clean Magic Reach, a sleek tool with a detachable head for scrubbing the darkest recesses of a bathroom. Developed in just 18 months, it represented a strategic move to elevate design throughout P&G, an effort that then CEO A.G. Lafley had spearheaded with an almost religious fervor. “Remember that one of the disciples had to put his hand in the bloody wounds to believe,” he told a reporter at the time, comparing the design skeptics within various divisions of the company to an incredulous apostle. “We have some businesses that are doubting Thomases.” His conviction paid off. P&G’s sales doubled and profits quadrupled between 2000 and…

BILLY EICHNER BORN: September 1978 HOMETOWN: Queens, New York ALMA MATER: Northwestern University BIG BREAK: Creation Nation, a live comedy talk show in NYC FAVORITE ROMANTIC COMEDY: 1987’s Broadcast News THE MOVIE BROS, PREMIERING September 30, is the first gay romantic comedy ever released in theaters by a major film company (Universal Studios), and the first to feature an almost entirely LGBTQ+ principal cast. At the center of this double milestone is Billy Eichner, the actor and comedian known for his acerbic, high-octane game show, Billy on the Street, and roles in Difficult People, the 2019 version of The Lion King, and Impeachment: American Crime Story. Bros marks the first time Eichner has starred in and cowritten (with director Nick Stoller) a studio film. Here, the self-proclaimed neurotic talks about carrying the dual weights of representing…

1 Harvey Fierstein “Harvey Fierstein truly broke ground. He was out there being openly, publicly gay, telling our stories in the early ’80s, decades before there was a supportive environment for that type of content.” 2 TS Madison “She’s a social media star and had her own shows on TV. I saw her in [the film] Zola, and it was one of the funniest scenes, and I thought, Oh man, we have to have TS Madison in this movie.” 3 Amanda Bearse “Amanda Bearse, who I grew up watching on Married … With Children, was on the cover of The Advocate as a lesbian actress in 1993—before Ellen, Rosie, all of them. She hadn’t acted in a [major] film in 30 years or something.” Illustration source images, clockwise from top left: Photofest (Fierstein); Bruce Glikas/Getty Images…

You can tell a lot about a person from the accounts they follow on Twitter, whether they’re using the platform to get intel on the latest hot startup, track trends in Web3, see rise-and-grind affirmations, or just read up on celebrity gossip. To get a glimpse into the mindset of a dozen leaders in business and tech on Twitter, we took a look at the kinds of accounts they follow and then mapped out some commonalities between them. Of course, in the same way a retweet isn’t an endorsement, following someone doesn’t mean the follower is fully on board with all their opinions, but it does offer insight into who many business leaders are listening to, and the information they value on social media. Trying to define the philosophies of Social…

“Food shortage and climate change are already a problem,” says Sara Menker, and they’re “about to get worse.” As the founder and CEO of Gro Intelligence, which combines agricultural and climate data with AI and machine learning to create models that predict the future of global food security, Menker understands, on a granular level, the scope of the problem. And she’s giving others the tools to solve it. Her eight-year-old company helps clients—government agencies, humanitarian organizations, banks like BNP Paribas, and conglomerates like Unilever and Yum Brands—“see around the corner and plan accordingly.” In May, Menker testified before the United Nations Security Council about the impact of such unprecedented factors as global conflict on food security, noting that 400 million people had lost reliable access to affordable, nutritious food in…