Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.
Some of the most impactful and helpful journalism Inc. and Fast Company have published this year has its roots in our editorial archives.
Two recent Fast Company projects, Personal Brand Special Report and Managing a Personal Brand: Fast Company’s 196-Point Guide for Leaders, were inspired by “The Brand Called You,” a classic 1997 cover story by Tom Peters that introduced the notion of personal branding.
Meanwhile, in August Inc. published the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing privately held companies in America and a package of powerful stories. The notion of ranking and spotlighting the contributions of growth companies goes back to Inc.’s earliest days, staring with the Inc. 100 in the 1980s, which later expanded to the Inc. 500 and then the Inc. 5000.
For both newsrooms, their archives are not simply a record of what came before. They are a starting point for deciding what readers need now.
“As provocative as ‘The Brand Called You’ is, its mission is to motivate readers, not equip them with the tools to build a strong personal brand,” says David Lidsky, head of editorial strategy for Mansueto Ventures, the parent company of Fast Company and Inc. “It also did not anticipate that managers would need help leading personal brands. This was the opportunity that drove us. How can we help today’s personal brand builders—and their leaders—with advice and insights they can apply to whatever their circumstances are? We are also working on making this a living, ongoing series to fulfill that goal.”
The Inc. 5000 offers a parallel example of a franchise that has evolved dramatically while hewing to its original purpose.
Mike Hofman, editor in chief of Inc., recalls working on what was then the Inc. 500 as a reporter in the 1990s. “It was a manual operation then with legal boxes stacked high on shelves filled with paper tax returns and paper survey results that were tabulated by hand. Yet I was always thrilled to flip through the folders and learn about all the fascinating companies that Inc. was helping its audience discover, not to mention the trends and opportunities those companies revealed,” he says. “Today of course the process is fully digital and the scale is 10x. But the spirit remains the same—and now we have fast-growing companies like Whatnot, Loop, and Replit on the list.”
It might seem quaint to talk about mining archives for inspiration in this digital age, but companies and creators do it all the time. Hollywood loves a reboot. (For example, Netflix’s top 10 most-watched shows recently included a “sequel” to the 1980s–1990s show A Different World and director Zoe Kazan’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, which had been adapted into a movie in the 1950s by her grandfather Elia Kazan. HBO Max will begin screening a new Harry Potter series in December.) Fashion designers reissue fabric prints and update silhouettes, such as the jumpsuit by Diane von Furstenberg informed by its founder’s 1970s wardrobe.
Legacy as a virtue
All too often magazines such as Fast Company and Inc. are described, somewhat derisively, as “legacy media.” The evolution of projects such as The Brand Called You and the Inc. 5000 suggests that legacy actually is a virtue. Our journalists have leaned into the ideas that have legs, reanimating them for what comes next.
Are you a leader of a legacy brand or company? How do you honor heritage while staying relevant to modern audiences? Send your insights to me at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com, and we’ll highlight some of the best examples in a future newsletter.
Read more: leaning into legacy
- The best Fast Company articles of the past 25 years
- How I Did It: Inc.’s 35th-anniversary edition