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.
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