Off Topic: Business Reading

You probably didn't notice but Working Woman magazine ceased publication in late 2001. I'd been a subscriber for over a decade (and still have most of those issues in boxes in the laundry room) and felt the loss keenly. After bouncing around the newstand for a few years I've finally found a new business reading routine. These are just for general knowledge. Professional journals keep me up to date at work, but I like to have a taste of things outside the bureaucracy that pays my mortgage. Fast Company is published 10 times a year and focuses a little more on the creative class and design issues than I'm comfortable with but a lot of the articles look at innovation through a variety of lenses. Take this article, "Record Time" by Charles Fishman from the April issue. It looks at a company that is computerizing medical records. Why should you care?

There is a sense of urgency about digitizing medical record-keeping--one study estimated that 100,000 people in the United States die each year (twice the number killed in car accidents) because of the sort of preventable medical errors that digital medical records help eliminate. A Rand study published last fall (paid for, in part, by Cerner) estimated that at the low end, the United States could save $140 billion a year if digital record-keeping were in place.

For gender related issues I've been reading Pink, which, like Fast Company, is aimed at a younger demographic than my own but there's not a lot else out there. American Business Woman published one issue but I haven't seen any others. NAFE (National Association for Female Executives) has a quarterly journal but it comes out too seldom and doesn't have enough content to keep me happy. For oldster news there's nothing like the Wall Street Journal.