From Writing to Leading: How John A. Byrne Is Remaking Fast Company (page 1 of 7)

Byrne also knows a lot about corporate management. He covered that beat for a long time for BusinessWeek, and in 2001 he co-authored a best-selling book on leadership, Jack: Straight from the Gut, with Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric. In addition, Byrne knows what can happen when leadership goes awry; in 1999 he wrote Chainsaw: The Notorious Career of Al Dunlap in the Era of Profit-At-Any-Price, a book about the rise and fall of Al "Chainsaw" Dunlap, former CEO of Scott Paper and Sunbeam.

These days, though, Byrne finds himself in something of a new position. He is still involved with magazines -- this time with Fast Company -- but now he's editor-in-chief, not a writer. Appointed to the leadership post last year, he must, for the first time in his career, worry about the success of an entire enterprise, not just a tight deadline for a cover story.

Byrne's task is made more complicated by the fact that he is trying to turn around a one-time high-flying publication that fell on hard times after the dotcom bubble burst in 2000. Co-founded in 1993 by former Harvard Business Review editors Alan Webber and William Taylor in partnership with real estate investor and publisher Mortimer B. Zuckerman, Fast Company's premiere issue appeared in November 1995. It found its voice at the same time that ideas about the so-called new economy were starting to gather force at the beginning of the dotcom boom. Little wonder that Fast Company took off - and fast. By 1996 it was being published bi-monthly. In 1997, Advertising Age named it the "Startup of the Year." In March 2000, Ad Week named Webber and Taylor its "Editors of the Year," acknowledging that advertising revenues had been almost $40 million two years in a row. Webber said he saw Fast Company as more than a magazine; it was "a movement of people shaping the New Economy."

With dot-com fever at its peak, Gruner + Jahr USA, a division of German media giant Bertelsmann, bought Fast Company for a price that observers reckoned to be between $360 million and $490 million. The timing could hardly have been worse -- at least for Gruner + Jahr USA. The ownership change came just as the Internet and technology bubbles burst, and the New Economy subsided with a whimper. As dotcoms went belly-up and technology stocks plummeted, the advertising market for magazines began to dry up. Publications like Red Herring and Industry Standard, which had thrived during the boom, began to shut down. While Fast Company, like Time Warner's Business 2.0, survived, it had to cope with a slow economy, a flat advertising market as well as declining newsstand sales. After some two years of economic agony, Webber and Taylor called it quits. In April 2003, Byrne came on board as editor-in-chief.

Byrne will be one of the presenters at the Eighth Annual Wharton Leadership Conference on June 2 in Philadelphia. He spoke recently about his new management challenges with Michael Useem, director of Wharton's Center for Leadership and Change Management, and Knowledge@Wharton editors. The Center for Leadership and Change Management is a co-sponsor of the conference with the Center for Human Resources and Wharton Executive Education.

Useem: You have often written about leadership when you were at BusinessWeek. You wrote about the leadership of one top executive, John F. Welch, in your book Jack. So having thought about it and written about it, what is it like now to go into a position where you are indeed the leader?

Byrne: My very first experience was to be brought up to Boston, to stand in front of everyone and be introduced as the new leader, and to give bad news immediately.