Lucas Conley

A contributing writer for Fast Company, Lucas Conley is an experienced journalist with an eye for stories that change how we see the world. Widely published in a number of fields, his work has appeared in The Boston Globe, SPIN, and ESPN: The Magazine, among other publications.

At the Atlantic Monthly, where Conley began his career, he spent a year-and-a-half working alongside award-winning investigative journalist William Langewiesche, reporting on stories like the recovery operation at the World Trade Center. Conley's reporting took him from the collapsed subway tunnels beneath Manhattan to the eerie dust-entombed offices high in the neighboring towers, abandoned and frozen in time for months after the collapse. Nominated for a national magazine award, the resulting three-part series, "American Ground Unbuilding the World Trade Center," was published as a book in late 2002.

As a staff writer and correspondent for Fast Company, Lucas Conley has searched for stories that go beyond trends, revealing the passions and challenges of our lives at work. Since 2002, he has followed two Manhattan CEOs as they relaunched their investment firms after losing half their employees in the World Trade Center.

He has traveled out into the wooded hills of New Hampshire to understand how composers, poets, and artists living in a secluded century-old art colony cultivated creativity; and he has profiled the world's leading management consultant on the eve of his return to the business world, after spending three years away from the corporate life, running a mission for his church.

Working with Fast Company senior editor Charles Fishman in 2005, Conley researched the economy as dominated and defined by Wal-Mart for Fishman's groundbreaking book, The Wal-Mart Effect—a national bestseller.

Beginning as essay in Fast Company, Lucas Conley's first book, OBD: Obsessive Branding Disorder, was published last June by PublicAffairs. OBD is his effort to understand the strange marketing-infused atmosphere in which we all live—one in which consumers are inundated with branding messages; one in which executives are obsessed with their brand to the point of distraction; and one in which anything and everything is open to manipulation. Lucas Conley lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife.