fortune--2020-11-17--The Fortune/IBM Watson Health 50 Top Cardiovascular Hospitals

In January 2020, several weeks before “COVID” became the world’s most feared acronym, the National Center for Health Statistics announced the 10 leading causes of death in the U.S. for 2018, the latest year for which final data is available. Once again, the leading killer in America was heart disease.
Today, as the coronavirus continues its reign of terror, many might imagine that COVID-19 will vault to the top of nation’s list of killers in 2020. But as many lives as this insidious virus has taken, and will take in the months to come, heart disease will inevitably take more. Indeed, it will kill more people in the U.S. than any other cause—just as it has every year since 1921. For some perspective, as of mid-November, COVID has killed some 250,000 Americans. Heart disease accounted for 655,381 resident deaths in the U.S. in 2018, or 23.1% of all fatalities in the country.
And when the grim counting is finally done for 2020, the toll for heart disease may be notably higher than it has been in recent years. That will have much to do with COVID, which researchers are increasingly understanding, in part, as a vascular disease. This spring, the editors of the Journal of the American Heart Association published a white paper on the many ways the Sars-CoV-2 virus—which targets a protein receptor that’s highly expressed in cells of the heart—not only produces the familiar respiratory symptoms of COVID but also causes a slew of cardiovascular problems. COVID patients often have elevated levels of troponin, a protein marker associated with heart attack, as well as levels of inflammation that may cause dangerous arrhythmias. Those with existing hypertension or other risk factors for heart disease also have much higher rates of severe illness and death from COVID, a fact doctors began observing early in the pandemic.
Understanding these interactions—some of them subtle, some hidden but potentially lasting—is critical if we are to contain COVID’s long-term damage to the nation’s health. And the places that are likely to be on the front lines in this endeavor are hospitals that specialize in cardiac care.
That’s one reason Fortune partnered with IBM Watson Health to publish our list of the 50 Top Cardiovascular Hospitals. The list, which follows up on our ranking this summer of the 100 Top Hospitals in the nation over all, selects the leading medical centers out of a sprawling universe of nearly 1,000 short-term, acute care, nonfederal U.S. hospitals that treat a broad spectrum of cardiology patients.
Using publicly available data, we evaluated 980 hospitals based on several key performance indicators—everything from straightforward clinical outcomes (including inpatient and 30-day mortality, medical complications, and 30-day readmission rates) to average lengths of stay in the hospital, operational efficiency, and yes, patient experience. In the list below, we also break out each individual hospital’s rank on outcome measures for four key areas of cardiac treatment: acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, coronary artery bypass graft, and percutaneous coronary intervention.
Based on the data points above, the difference between this cream and the rest of the crop is dramatic. If all U.S. hospitals’ cardiovascular service lines performed at the level of our 50 exemplars, we could save more than 7,000 additional lives, avoid medical complications in an additional 5,000-plus bypass and angioplasty patients, and save over $1.6 billion annually, according to estimates by IBM Watson Health.
But taken together, this list represents more than a group of good test-takers. Many of our 50 hospitals have been showcases for serving the health of their communities as well, offering broad access to care and focusing on ways to improve health equity. University of Maryland St. Joseph’s Medical Center supports a primary-care clinic and outreach efforts that serve mainly low-income and uninsured Hispanic patients in Baltimore. St. Luke’s Regional Medical Center, meanwhile, has embraced Community Health Needs Assessments to get deeper insight into the health challenges facing families in Boise, where the hospital is based, and gives dozens of grants each year to local organizations focused on community well-being.
As we work on producing this ranking in the years ahead, we aim to focus even more deliberately on issues of equity and on how well communities surrounding hospitals are thriving—so we’ll incorporate measures of social determinants as well as evaluate access to care. There is a good and urgent reason for this, as the American Heart Association’s groundbreaking presidential advisory this week acknowledges: Our current wide health disparity is rooted, in large part, in structural bias, and we have the power and obligation to root it out. So, under the principle of what’s measured is what matters, Fortune and IBM Watson Health are partnering with researchers at Johns Hopkins University and others to incorporate measures of community health and equity into next year’s hospital rankings. (For more, please see the related commentary by Kyu Rhee, Irene Dankwa-Mullan, and Eduardo Sanchez, published today.)
The great pandemic of 2020 has revealed the challenges of a medical system stretched to its limits. The hospitals below show that, sometimes, care can reach new limits as well. —Clifton Leaf
Top community hospitals
1. Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center
Location: Medford, Ore.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 2
Heart failure (HF) rank: 4
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 8
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 2
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 6
Website
2. Columbus Regional Health
Location: Columbus, Ind.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 1
Heart failure (HF) rank: 6
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 10
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 3
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 1
Website
3. Sentara RMH Medical Center
Location: Harrisonburg, Va.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 5
Heart failure (HF) rank: 1
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 9
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 5
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 1
Website
4. McLaren Northern Michigan
Location: Petoskey, Mich.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 4
Heart failure (HF) rank: 8
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 2
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 8
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 4
Website
5. University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center
Location: Towson, Md.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 7
Heart failure (HF) rank: 7
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 1
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 9
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 12
Website
6. Mercy Iowa City
Location: Iowa City
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 3
Heart failure (HF) rank: 5
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 4
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 10
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 1
Website
7. St. Joseph’s Hospital
Location: Tampa
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 6
Heart failure (HF) rank: 10
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 3
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 7
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 3
Website
8. Parkwest Medical Center
Location: Knoxville, Tenn.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 8
Heart failure (HF) rank: 3
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 6
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 6
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 8
Website
9. Thibodaux Regional Health System
Location: Thibodaux, La.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 10
Heart failure (HF) rank: 2
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 5
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 4
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 1
Website
10. Baylor Scott & White Medical Center—Round Rock
Location: Round Rock, Texas
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 9
Heart failure (HF) rank: 9
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 7
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 1
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 1
Website
Top teaching hospitals with a cardiovascular residency program
1. Riverside Methodist Hospital
Location: Columbus, Ohio
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 2
Heart failure (HF) rank: 15
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 7
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 2
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 9
Website
2. University Hospital
Location: Madison
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 8
Heart failure (HF) rank: 11
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 5
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 5
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 10
Website
3. Intermountain Medical Center
Location: Murray, Utah
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 1
Heart failure (HF) rank: 4
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 8
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 16
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 1
Website
4. Mayo Clinic Rochester
Location: Rochester, Minn.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 3
Heart failure (HF) rank: 6
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 13
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 11
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 9
Website
5. UNC REX Hospital
Location: Raleigh, N.C.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 4
Heart failure (HF) rank: 16
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 4
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 13
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 4
Website
6. Mercy Medical Center
Location: Cedar Rapids, Iowa
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 9
Heart failure (HF) rank: 1
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 15
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 17
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 1
Website
7. Ascension Borgess Hospital
Location: Kalamazoo
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 5
Heart failure (HF) rank: 9
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 19
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 6
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 4
Website
8. The Christ Hospital
Location: Cincinnati
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 16
Heart failure (HF) rank: 7
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 9
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 8
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 14
Website
9. Summa Health System—Akron Campus
Location: Akron
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 11
Heart failure (HF) rank: 8
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 17
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 9
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 4
Website
10. WakeMed Raleigh Campus
Location: Raleigh, N.C.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 18
Heart failure (HF) rank: 12
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 3
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 14
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 3
Website
11. Baystate Medical Center
Location: Springfield, Mass.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 14
Heart failure (HF) rank: 18
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 6
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 3
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 8
Website
12. New York–Presbyterian Queens
Location: Flushing, N.Y.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 15
Heart failure (HF) rank: 13
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 10
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 10
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 1
Website
13. St. Joseph’s Health
Location: Syracuse, N.Y.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 20
Heart failure (HF) rank: 19
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 2
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 1
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 3
Website
14. Duke Regional Hospital
Location: Durham, N.C.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 10
Heart failure (HF) rank: 2
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 11
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 19
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 1
Website
15. McLaren Macomb
Location: Mount Clemens, Mich.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 17
Heart failure (HF) rank: 10
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 18
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 4
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 3
Website
16. UAB Hospital
Location: Birmingham, Ala.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 13
Heart failure (HF) rank: 5
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 16
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 15
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 4
Website
17. Ascension St. Vincent Hospital—Indianapolis
Location: Indianapolis
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 6
Heart failure (HF) rank: 14
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 14
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 18
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 8
Website
18. MercyOne Des Moines Medical Center
Location: Des Moines
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 7
Heart failure (HF) rank: 3
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 20
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 20
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 6
Website
19. Kettering Medical Center
Location: Kettering, Ohio
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 12
Heart failure (HF) rank: 17
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 12
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 7
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 8
Website
20. Sanford USD Medical Center
Location: Sioux Falls, S.D.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 19
Heart failure (HF) rank: 20
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 1
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 12
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 3
Website
Top teaching hospitals without a cardiovascular residency program
1. Saint Mary’s Regional Medical Center
Location: Reno
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 2
Heart failure (HF) rank: 1
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 19
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 11
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 2
Website
2. Mission Hospital
Location: Asheville, N.C.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 1
Heart failure (HF) rank: 17
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 5
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 16
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 14
Website
3. Aspirus Wausau Hospital
Location: Wausau, Wis.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 12
Heart failure (HF) rank: 4
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 16
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 3
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 13
Website
4. Atrium Health Pineville
Location: Charlotte
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 15
Heart failure (HF) rank: 8
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 8
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 5
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 2
Website
5. Ascension Sacred Heart Hospital Pensacola
Location: Pensacola, Fla.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 4
Heart failure (HF) rank: 9
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 18
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 1
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 3
Website
6. Baton Rouge General
Location: Baton Rouge
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 6
Heart failure (HF) rank: 16
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 1
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 20
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 1
Website
7. Lee Memorial Hospital
Location: Fort Myers, Fla.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 11
Heart failure (HF) rank: 11
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 13
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 8
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 8
Website
8. St. Joseph Mercy Ann Arbor Hospital
Location: Ann Arbor
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 10
Heart failure (HF) rank: 2
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 11
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 18
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 11
Website
9. Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center
Location: Idaho Falls, Idaho
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 14
Heart failure (HF) rank: 10
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 9
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 12
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 1
Website
10. St. Luke’s Regional Medical Center
Location: Boise
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 3
Heart failure (HF) rank: 12
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 14
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 13
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 14
Website
11. Eisenhower Medical Center
Location: Rancho Mirage, Calif.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 13
Heart failure (HF) rank: 20
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 6
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 4
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 4
Website
12. Mount Carmel St. Ann’s
Location: Westerville, Ohio
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 9
Heart failure (HF) rank: 6
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 12
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 17
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 1
Website
13. Boone Hospital Center
Location: Columbia, Mo.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 18
Heart failure (HF) rank: 18
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 3
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 6
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 2
Website
14. Bronson Methodist Hospital
Location: Kalamazoo
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 7
Heart failure (HF) rank: 14
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 10
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 14
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 1
Website
15. Ocala Regional Medical Center
Location: Ocala, Fla.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 16
Heart failure (HF) rank: 15
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 4
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 10
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 6
Website
16. CHRISTUS St. Michael Health System
Location: Texarkana, Texas
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 5
Heart failure (HF) rank: 7
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 20
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 9
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 1
Website
17. Halifax Health Medical Center
Location: Daytona Beach, Fla.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 17
Heart failure (HF) rank: 13
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 2
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 15
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 4
Website
18. North Mississippi Medical Center—Tupelo
Location: Tupelo, Miss.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 20
Heart failure (HF) rank: 5
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 17
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 2
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 2
Website
19. Grand Strand Medical Center
Location: Myrtle Beach, S.C.
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 19
Heart failure (HF) rank: 3
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 15
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 7
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 3
Website
20. Sarasota Memorial Hospital
Location: Sarasota
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) rank: 8
Heart failure (HF) rank: 19
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rank: 7
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rank: 19
Total number of years on 50 Top list: 6
Website
50 Top Cardiovascular Hospitals Methodology
Learn about the methodology for the 50 Top Cardiovascular Hospitals list here.
See also: 100 Top Hospitals
In June 2020, Fortune and IBM Watson Health published the 100 Top Hospitals list, which featured the 40 Top Teaching Hospitals and 60 Top Community Hospitals in the U.S., as well as the 15 Top Health Systems.
IBM, Watson Health, and 100 Top Hospitals are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States and other countries. FORTUNE is a trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited; registered in the U.S. and other countries.


fortune--2020-11-17--COVID-19 reminds us of the need to focus on health equity

Warren Buffett is going all in on the vaccine rally , piling into these stocks

While the top health focus today is on the COVID-19 pandemic, heart disease remains the leading cause of death for all Americans. Cardiovascular disease and its risk factors (high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity) disproportionately affect communities of color, rural populations, and other underserved groups. For example, Black Americans experience a 30% higher cardiovascular disease mortality rate than non-Hispanic white Americans, and the prevalence of obesity is highest among Black and Hispanic adults in the U.S. Rural communities experience higher rates of risk factors such as inadequate physical activity, tobacco use, obesity, and hypertension, which are associated with poor cardiovascular outcomes.
COVID-19 and its disproportionate consequences have exposed economic and health equity gaps and have surfaced the need for a national dialogue and a commitment to fundamentally reform the health system to equitably benefit all underrepresented and underserved communities.
This past week, the American Heart Association (AHA) issued an advisory that identifies structural racism as a barrier to improving the cardiovascular health of all people and declared structural racism as a fundamental driver of poor health and premature death. Earlier this year, with the generous support of numerous donors, the AHA created the Bernard J. Tyson Impact Fund to advance community-based interventions to reduce and eliminate health disparities. This long-standing commitment to heart health equity and community health was also highlighted in the 2015 Scientific Statement, where the AHA concluded that the circumstances in which people grow up, live, and work all contribute to cardiovascular and overall health.
For years, IBM has been leading an effort with health institutions to prioritize what’s known in technology circles as “TechQuity”—advancing fair, transparent, ethical, and equitable use of technology to achieve equity for health disparity populations. Earlier this year, IBM led an industrywide commitment to racial justice and responsible technology policies as the first major technology company to prohibit the use or export of facial recognition for mass surveillance, racial profiling, or violations of basic human rights and freedoms. These efforts are consistent with IBM’s perspective that there is reputational and business value in being a leader on issues of race and equity.
Most recently, IBM continued to advance health disparities science by publishing new findings on the impact of digital health in reducing cardiovascular health disparities, especially for conditions such as hypertension and heart failure. IBM is collaborating with leading academic medical centers like Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and Johns Hopkins University to address TechQuity. The collaborations aim to identify strategies to advance the need to collect race, ethnicity, and other health disparities and equity measures and produce targeted equity dashboards in collaboration with employers, health plans, and health systems.
We are encouraged by the growing dialogue surrounding health equity. And yet, we must accelerate the push for change. How? By addressing three core areas: teams, trust, and technology.
Teams: Building diverse talent and coalitions
Black and Hispanic workers are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) jobs in the U.S. It is imperative that we recruit, mentor, develop, and support students from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups to STEM careers to become the researchers, data scientists, primary care physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and community health workers of tomorrow.
As the use of technology becomes more relevant and widespread during the pandemic and future post-pandemic period, it is essential that technology and health organizations look in the mirror and look like the populations they serve, especially underserved and underrepresented communities. Having diversity in the teams that design technology solutions, develop A.I. algorithms, and deliver health and public health can help to assure benefits, impact, and accountability for all.
We must also build diverse coalitions to support the community. Health is a team sport. Partnerships across the health ecosystem, including providers, academia, employers, health plans, technology organizations, life sciences companies, public health agencies, government and municipal leaders, the media, and even community members can and should seek meaningful collective action to pursue health equity—to help reduce disease and mortality disparities. Greater collaboration and a commitment from all stakeholders to promote the health of their residents, employees, patients, members, and volunteers can help accelerate progress and serve as a model for change.
Trust: Embracing all communities
Building trust within communities of color and socially disadvantaged rural communities is an important step for successful diverse coalitions. Collecting, measuring, and reporting data on race, ethnicity, other sociodemographic factors (such as country of origin, primary language, immigration status, sexual orientation, and identity) and essential social determinants of health (educational attainment and income, for example) is imperative for advancing health equity.
Current cardiovascular disease data does not adequately characterize populations who are most impacted by heart disease. As a result, many important mechanisms for advancing treatments, including clinical trials for cardiovascular therapies, are not sufficiently representative of affected populations with implications for safety, efficacy, and trust in treatments. We must collaborate to collect data that is more relevant to historically marginalized populations, including social, environmental, and behavioral data.
Trust is also built through accountability. Hospitals and health systems, including those recognized by the AHA’s Get With the Guidelines registry and the Fortune/IBM Watson Health 50 Top Cardiovascular Hospitals list (which was released this morning), are trusted and essential pillars of their communities and have meaningful roles as change agents. Including equity in the evaluations of hospital performance generally, including cardiovascular hospital performance, is a necessary step in building community accountability. A recent collaboration between IBM Watson Health and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Bloomberg American Health Initiative and Center for Health Equity aims to identify meaningful measures of community health and equity for future rankings of hospitals and health systems.
Technology: Applying analytics and A.I.
Analytics and A.I. have the potential to provide powerful insights to help researchers, clinicians, policy-makers, and even communities help better predict and prevent illness, including cardiovascular disease. But the insights are only as good as the data used to derive them.
For example, if health databases do not adequately reflect all population groups—and accurately identify them—the insights derived by analytics and A.I. algorithms will be flawed. As we implement A.I. solutions in health, it is critical to ensure the highest levels of integrity, including extensive testing, monitoring, and evaluation of these tools with an emphasis on their impact on diverse populations. We must also ensure that we are supplying researchers, providers, payers, life sciences companies, and governmental entities utilizing A.I. with the tools they need to increase accountability for health equity through the use of robust dashboards.
Now more than ever, a united front is building in an effort to mitigate the unconscionable and unacceptable disparities in health among certain segments of the population. The AHA and IBM are organizations that are committed to addressing structural racism and health disparities to help accelerate our health equity efforts. As we do our work, diverse teams, trust, and leveraged technology will be among the building blocks to help achieve equity for all communities and broader society.
Kyu Rhee is vice president and chief health officer at IBM.
Irene Dankwa-Mullan is chief health equity officer at IBM Watson Health.
Eduardo Sanchez is chief medical officer for prevention at the American Heart Association.
All three authors are public health and primary care physicians.


fortune--2020-11-17--How design keeps companies focused on people as the pandemic pushes businesses online

This newsletter is dedicated to the proposition that, for businesses, design matters.
In nearly every issue, we’ve tried to show how the perspective of people trained as designers—whether from classical, commercial, or computational backgrounds—can change businesses for the better. Designers, we have argued, bring unique skills and ways of thinking that can help managers without design training understand customers and tailor products and services for them.
The COVID-19 pandemic has offered designers a chance to prove their worth. We’ve written in this space about the many ways designers are helping to create protective gear, reconfigure workplaces, and make it easier to work, shop, and study from home. But designers also are helping companies think through fundamental, long-term changes in the way they use data and technology to deliver value to customers.
In management jargon, those big changes are often described as “digital transformation.” The term is messy, overused and means different things to different people. But in its most basic sense, “digital transformation” implies the integration of digital technology into all aspects of an organization’s operations. Digital transformation generally involves reliance on things like automation, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and data analytics. It also entails the changes in corporate strategy, structure and culture necessary to make those technologies work.
Before the virus, many companies were experimenting with digital transformation. Since the pandemic, it has become an urgent corporate priority. Indeed, for many companies, going digital has been the only way to stay in business. We’ve seen explosive growth in online shopping and food delivery, telemedicine, remote education, online entertainment, and more. At the virtual Fortune Global Forum earlier this month, a panel of digitally savvy CEOs told Fortune CEO Alan Murray the crisis has helped convince even skeptical CEOs that they need to embrace new technologies as quickly as consumers.
“The value of digital channels, products and operations is immediately obvious to companies everywhere right now,” declares Sandy Shen, a senior analyst at Gartner. “This is a wake-up call for organizations that have placed too much focus on daily operational needs at the expense of investing in digital business and long-term resilience. Businesses that can shift technology capacity and investments to digital platforms will mitigate the impact of the outbreak and keep their companies running smoothly now, and over the long term.”
A forthcoming report by the Economist Intelligence Unit argues: “The public health crisis has motivated organizations to accelerate plans for technology deployment, governments to waive regulatory requirements, and consumers to accept new products and services.”
International Data Corporation, in a May 2020 report, forecast that global spending on digital transformation technologies and services would grow 10.4% in 2020, to $1.3 trillion. That’s down from 17.9% growth in 2019, but “remains one of the few bright spots in a year characterized by dramatic reductions in overall technology spending,” IDC analysts said.
But as Paris-based designer Patrick Avril argues in this excellent post on Medium, digital transformations that invest heavily in technology and engineering but lose sight of people risk going horribly wrong.
We’ll be talking a lot about how designers can contribute to digital transformations in the coming weeks. Here are three events you can attend virtually to take part in that conversation:
On Friday, November 20 , I’ll be participating in a virtual event presented by the Business Design Initiative at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management to talk about why organizations need design and how it enables innovation. This year’s theme: “Decoding Design for Innovation.” I’ll join in discussions with Angèle Beausoleil, Academic Director of the Business Design Initiative at Rotman, and two renowned design stars, John S. Couch and Bruce Mau. You can register for that program HERE.
, I’ll be participating in a virtual event presented by the Business Design Initiative at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management to talk about why organizations need design and how it enables innovation. This year’s theme: “Decoding Design for Innovation.” I’ll join in discussions with Angèle Beausoleil, Academic Director of the Business Design Initiative at Rotman, and two renowned design stars, John S. Couch and Bruce Mau. You can register for that program HERE. On Tuesday, December 1 , 5:00 PM Hong Kong / 9:00 AM London / 10:00 AM Central European Time, I’ll lead a virtual Fortune event entitled “Fast Forward: How the Pandemic is Shifting Digital Transformation into High Gear.” Panelists will include: Paul Scanlan, chief technology officer at Huawei Technologies’ carrier business group; Michael Frank, manager for public policy at the Economist Intelligence Unit; and two other senior European executives. You can sign up to participate in that conversation HERE.
, 5:00 PM Hong Kong / 9:00 AM London / 10:00 AM Central European Time, I’ll lead a virtual Fortune event entitled “Fast Forward: How the Pandemic is Shifting Digital Transformation into High Gear.” Panelists will include: Paul Scanlan, chief technology officer at Huawei Technologies’ carrier business group; Michael Frank, manager for public policy at the Economist Intelligence Unit; and two other senior European executives. You can sign up to participate in that conversation HERE. Then a week later, On Tuesday, December 8, 11:00AM Eastern Time, I’ll join with Fortune deputy editor Brian O’Keefe and senior editor Ellen McGirt for “Resilience by Design: Driving Business Transformation,” a 90-minute virtual conversation presented in partnership with Salesforce and IBM. We’ll hear from PepsiCo’s chief design officer Mauro Porcini and global chief commercial officer Ram Krishnan about how design drives business value. We’ll also talk with Deanna Van Buren, co-founder and executive director of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, about design’s role in building communities. We’ll tell you more about how you can sign up for that event next week.
More design news below!
Clay Chandler
— clay.chandler@fortune.com
NEWS BY DESIGN
Hype
Virgin completed a test run of its Hyperloop system, shuttling two passengers 500 meters at a top speed of 107 miles per hour. Some have praised the showcase as progress towards a new mode of transportation—one where passengers in pod-like carriages are shot through a network of vacuum sealed tubes at over 700 miles per hour. Others have criticized the venture as a kind of tech bro fantasy, pointing to high speed trains in China and Japan that shuttle thousands of passengers at speeds of 300 mph every day as a more feasible “future of transport” that the U.S. somehow still lacks.
Tear down this wall
Manchester, U.K., is tearing down part of a pavilion designed by Japanese modernist architect Tadao Ando that was installed in 2002 but has been subject to much public ire. The structure includes a long blank wall of concrete about six meters high that dissects the city’s lush Picadilly Gardens. Detractors compare it to the Berlin Wall, but it is the only structure designed by Tadao Ando in the U.K. and supporters say any other city would “give their right arm” for an Ando piece.
Over ear
Apple may have accidentally leaked the design for its latest AirPods, which are a set of over-ear headphones rather than in-ear pods. Renderings of a pair of headphones suspected to be the forthcoming "sports" version of the AirPods Studio were shared on Twitter by prolific Apple leaker choco_bit in September. This week 9to5mac said it found a headphone icon in the new iOS beta that resembles that same design. The new gadget is rumored to cost $350.
Swedish wood
Swedish furniture brands are the world’s most sustainable, according to a report by London-based design consultancy Dodds & Shute. The firm, which specializes in sustainable sourcing, audited the practices of all the brands it sources from and ranked them for sustainability. Of the top ten firms, seven were Swedish. German manufacturers placed second.
Future planning
The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has led criticism of the U.K.’s new planning permission standards, saying they fail to properly address climate change. The U.K. government is currently overhauling its town planning practices and released a white paper on its future plans in August. The plans include setting a Future Homes Standard for carbon emissions, simplifying the complexities of sustainable development into a single check box.
Headspace
Here’s a nice run down of some of the more heavy-duty personal protective equipment designers have devised to keep the average citizen safe from COVID-19. With some countries still struggling to make mask-wearing universal, it’s hard to imagine there’ll ever be much demand for these more obstructive hazmat helmets. But maybe consumers would be more inclined to mask up if their PPE came with extra (non-life saving) features, like inbuilt Bluetooth speakers.
EVENTS BY DESIGN
November
The AIGA Design Conference is being hosted online November 9-14. The event, hosted by the U.S. professional association for design, is pitching “building bridges” as the theme for its festival
Canada’s annual graphic design fest, DesignThinkers, is running online this year, November 10-21—the first time in the event’s 20-year history that it hasn’t been held in person.
Dubai’s inaugural architecture festival, d3 Architecture Festival, will run November 11-13 on the sidelines of Dubai Design Week. The event will focus on sustainability—an existential issue for the desert city.
Barcelona Design Week, bringing together architecture, tech, industrial and graphic design, is being held both online and on-site November 17-26.
Hong Kong’s Business of Design Week (BODW), billed as “Asia’s premier annual” event on design, will be in person and online from November 30 until December 5. Like many others, the event looks to provide guidance in a pandemic era.
December
Seoul Design Festival, a celebration of South Korea’s young designers and upstart design brands, is running December 9-13.
The National Gallery of Victoria’s art, design, and architecture exhibition, the NGV Triennial, will run from December 19 to April 18, 2021 in Melbourne, Australia.
QUOTED BY DESIGN
“You think, as a designer, how difficult is it to redesign a bottle? The reality is, when you need to redesign a bottle with this scale...and this impact on the world and business, it is probably one of the most difficult projects I ever faced in my career.”
PepsiCo’s chief design officer Mauro Porcini tells Fast Company as the drinks manufacturer unveils a redesign to its 2-liter bottles for the first time in roughly 30 years. The new, curved bottle designs have a slim and reinforced “waist,” enabling drinkers to pour Pepsi from the bottle one handed. (Coke has had curvaceous 2L bottles for a while now.) Pepsi’s new bottles are slimmer, but they actually use the same amount of plastic as the old ones—except for on the labelling, which is 24% smaller than before.
This week’s edition of BxD was curated by Eamon Barrett. Email him tips and ideas at eamon.barrett@fortune.com


fortune--2020-11-17--Warren Buffett is going all in on the vaccine rally, piling into these stocks

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is betting on big pharma as the industry’s fortunes swing on the development of a Covid-19 vaccine and therapeutics.
Berkshire disclosed new investments in Merck & Co. and Pfizer Inc. during the third quarter, while also adding bets on AbbVie Inc. and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., according to a regulatory filing Monday. Meanwhile, Buffett’s conglomerate continued to cut stakes in financial companies, including Wells Fargo & Co. and JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Berkshire started snapping up the health stocks just months ahead of a disclosure from Pfizer and BioNTech SE that their vaccine protects most people from Covid-19, news that sent Pfizer stock soaring. Merck has also been pushing ahead with therapies for the virus.
The bets give Berkshire more exposure to pharmaceutical companies as officials prepare to ramp up efforts to distribute a Covid-19 vaccine whenever one is approved. Buffett’s company had stakes valued at more than $1.8 billion each in AbbVie, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Merck at the end of the quarter, and about $136 million in Pfizer. Berkshire omitted some confidential information with its routine regulatory filing.
Buffett, 90, has been cautious during the pandemic, saying in May that his then-record cash pile wasn’t that huge when considering the worst-case possibilities. He’s since deployed cash in Japan and into natural-gas assets, and has bought back Berkshire’s own stock. His friend Bill Gates, a former Berkshire board member, has been donating through his foundation to help fund vaccine efforts.
Buffett, Berkshire’s chairman and chief executive officer, dumped airline stocks and sold financials earlier in the crisis. His company continued to pare bank holdings in the third quarter, trimming Berkshire’s Wells Fargo stake and slashing its JPMorgan investment by 96%. Berkshire also cut stakes in PNC Financial Services Group Inc. and M&T Bank Corp.
Berkshire has been chipping away at its Wells Fargo stake in recent months after more than three decades holding onto that bet. It held about 127 million shares at the end of September, a marked shift for an investment that once ranked as Berkshire’s biggest.
Berkshire also took a stake in T-Mobile US Inc. during the third quarter, a holding valued at $276 million.


Time to Measure Up

This is the web version of CEO Daily. To get it delivered to your inbox, sign up here.
Good morning.
Today, Fortune and Refinitiv join forces to launch Measure Up, which is designed to hold companies to account on their diversity and inclusion efforts. We all know that what gets measured gets managed—or at the very least, what doesn’t get measured doesn’t get managed—so as an essential first step, we are challenging companies to collect and report their D&I data.
You might be surprised to learn how few companies do this today. I certainly was. In part, that’s because collecting such data isn’t simple. As Refinitiv CEO David Craig wrote in this recent blog post, the act of asking employees “What race are you?” quickly puts you into “deeply personal territory, bound up with feelings of identity and history.” But there’s no way to understand how companies are progressing on this key front without asking that question. Refinitiv has now done so with its employees. Fortune will do the same with ours. And we are challenging other companies to join us, and report the results. They can learn how at Refinitiv’s ESG data collection tool, here.
At Fortune, we have long seen the power of transparency and rankings in making business better. We believe our Most Powerful Women’s list, launched in 1998, helped raise women to some of the top jobs in the corporate world. We have seen our 100 Best Companies to Work For list, also launched in 1998, raise the bar for employee engagement and well-being at many of the world’s best companies. And more recently, the Fortune Change the World list has focused attention on companies that are addressing social problems as part of their core business strategy. Using the new D&I data, we will launch next year a list ranking the most progressive companies in racial inclusion. Consider this an important turning point.
“We believe the Measure Up initiative with Fortune will help put racial equality right at the top of every corporate agenda through better data,” Craig told me yesterday. “We have already received a lot of enquiries and interest on how to disclose, suggesting companies are serious about disclosing their progress, and the gaps they have on racial equality.”
Separately, I caught up briefly yesterday with a very busy Noubar Afeyan, whose Flagship Pioneering gave birth to Moderna, which just announced its new COVID vaccine had 94% effectiveness in early tests. The Moderna vaccine uses similar MRNA technology as the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, which also shows over 90% efficacy, but has a delivery method that doesn’t require extreme cold storage. Afeyan said the Moderna vaccine can be stored for six months at minus twenty degrees, for a month in a normal refrigerator, and can be kept out of the refrigerator for twelve hours and still be functional. (The Pfizer vaccine must be stored at -70 degrees Centigrade.)
All of this bodes well for having good vaccine options distributed to a broad population by “Q2 of next year,” Afeyan says. And perhaps even more promising are the potential uses of MRNA technology beyond COVID to create a host of health care treatments in the years ahead. “If ever there was a paradigm shift in therapeutics, this is a paradigm shift.” No doubt that’s why Moderna’s share price has jumped to nearly $100 from under $20 at the beginning of the year. (BioNTech has gone from $34 to $91.)
To learn more about Afeyan and how he helped launch Moderna, listen to our interview with him earlier this summer on Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast. And catch Kohl’s CEO Michelle Gass on this week’s episode of Leadership Next, available on Apple or Spotify.
More news below.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
TOP NEWS
Biden meeting
"Unions are going to have increased power" under the Biden administration, the president-elect said in a meeting yesterday with not only union leaders, but CEOs such as General Motors' Mary Barra, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Target's Brian Cornell and Gap's Sonia Syngal. Biden: "You all have different perspectives on how we can best deal with the virus. And how we can make sure workers and small businesses stay safe, and we get back to rolling like we should… We’re pretty much in lockstep. We agree that we can’t just build back [after COVID], we need to build back better." CNBC
Markets bask
Yesterday's promising vaccine news from Moderna helped the Dow and S&P 500 hit new highs, and Moderna's own stock jumped 9.6%. Tesla's shares also leapt by as much as 12% following its long-awaited inclusion in the S&P 500, an event that was delayed by the world's most valuable car company's now-cured allergy to profitability. The Dow is now a mere 449 points shy of the 30,000 mark. Fortune
Selling Honor
As Sting once sang, kinda: If you love your budget smartphone brand, set it free. That's what Huawei is doing with its Honor subsidiary, thanks to U.S. sanctions starving it of chips. Selling Honor will allow the unit to survive, Huawei said today. The buyer is a consortium of Honor resellers and suppliers, called Shenzhen Zhixin New Information Technology Co. The price is undisclosed, but it's reported to be in the region of $15 billion. Fortune
European crisis
Europe has been plunged into a crisis with no clear way out, after Hungary and Poland blocked the bloc's budget and pandemic-recovery package. The countries are irked by a new mechanism that allows the EU to withhold funds from members states that violate the rule of law in certain circumstances. Hungary and Poland are major recipients of EU funds, but they have made it impossible for the EU to borrow the money it needs for the recovery fund. Politico
AROUND THE WATER COOLER
Going cheap
A year ago, International Consolidated Airlines Group (the owner of BA and Iberia) said it was going to buy Spanish carrier Air Europa for €1 billion ($1.2 billion) in cash. Then the pandemic happened, as did a €475 million bailout for Air Europa from the Spanish government. Now, according to Spanish media, IAG has managed to get the purchase price all the way down to the €300-€400 million range, with the payment in shares this time. Reuters
EasyJet revenue
Want an optimist's take on what many may see as a pit of despair for the aviation sector? Here's EasyJet CEO Johan Lundgren, whose low-cost carrier saw revenue more than halved in the year to the end of September: "The longer these travel restrictions are in place, it actually increases pent-up demand." CNBC
German measures
German Chancellor Angela Merkel failed yesterday to convince state premiers that the country's "lockdown lite" should be intensified, for example by forcing school pupils to wear masks during lessons. Merkel after their meeting: "We still have a long way to go but the good news is that we have halted the exponential growth for now." The Local
Georgia counts
Fortune's Geoff Colvin interviewed KPMG principal John Gimigliano, a former senior tax counsel for the House Ways and Means Committee, about the prospects for President-elect Biden's tax plans and their potential effects on business. The big point: unless the Democrats win both of the runoffs to pick Georgia's senators, Biden's proposals don't stand a chance of getting anywhere. Fortune
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.


fortune--2020-11-17--‘We were making it up as we went.’ Kohl’s CEO on weathering the COVID storm

Everything was set for Kohl’s investor day on March 16 in New York. CEO Michelle Gass was going to lay out her new strategy for the retailing giant to the hundreds of people in the room and many more watching online.
Then COVID-19 started advancing across the globe. As a precaution, Gass switched the event to online only. And until just days before, her team was busy finalizing the slides and scripts they were going to use to trumpet their plans. But on the evening of March 12, with the pandemic gaining a foothold in the U.S. and Kohl’s customers starting to sequester at home, Gass canceled the event entirely.
“What [were we] going to tell investors when we didn’t even know what the world was going to look like?” Gass said during a conversation on Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast.
Instead, Gass recalls spending March 16, the day she was supposed to be onstage discussing Kohl’s future, “all huddled around a conference room, figuring out what moves we needed to make to come out the other side of this.”
So started what has now been eight months of scrambling for Gass, the leader of one of the nation’s biggest retailers. She didn’t know whether the lockdowns, which required closing most of the company’s 1,200 stores, would last six days, six weeks, or six months.
But it did mean Gass had to make sure that Kohl’s had enough cash to survive. It did, with the help of $1.5 billion in revolving credit and by selling $600 million in bonds. It also meant negotiating with vendors to reduce deliveries of store merchandise. It meant putting procedures in place to protect the workers who were still on duty, equipping them with hand sanitizer, masks, and plexiglass. And after a few weeks into the pandemic, Gass’ job included furloughing 85,000 workers.
“There’s no playbook for this, right?” Gass says. “We were making it up as we went.”
To listen to the discussion about Kohl’s pandemic-era learnings in its entirety, plus how the company thinks it will emerge stronger, listen to the full episode.


fortune--2020-11-17--Santander buys assets from Wirecard, as failed payments company is wound down

Banco Santander SA agreed to buy highly specialized technology assets from Wirecard AG, the failed German payment processor that’s winding down its operations.
The deal will help build Santander’s global payments platform as the bank expands, the Madrid-based company said Monday in an e-mailed statement. About 500 Wirecard employees who manage the technology will remain in their current locations and join the acquirer’s global merchant-services team, according to the statement.
The sale marks a conclusion for the dissolution of Wirecard “despite unfavorable conditions,” Michael Jaffe, the insolvency lawyer handling the transactions, said in a statement. Since Wirecard failed earlier this year, Jaffe has sold off its assets in pieces.
No Wirecard companies were included in the transaction, and terms weren’t disclosed. Once the deal with Santander is complete, the rest of the business will be wound down in close cooperation with regulatory authorities, Jaffe said.
–With assistance from Steven Arons and Karin Matussek.


fortune--2020-11-17--Vaccine breakthroughs are unleashing a ‘value rally.’ Here’s what investors should  know

This is the web version of the Bull Sheet, Fortune’s no-BS daily newsletter on the markets. Sign up to receive it in your inbox here.
Good morning, Bull Sheeters. It appears investors are doing a bit of profit-taking as global stocks and U.S. futures dip in early Tuesday trading.
That’s after Monday’s Moderna rally pushed the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 into record territory with investors once again piling into value stocks (more on that below).
Let’s check in on the action.
Markets update
Asia
The major Asia indexes are mostly higher in afternoon trading with Japan’s Nikkei up 0.4% .
are mostly higher in afternoon trading with Japan’s up . To shield its business from further U.S. sanctions, Huawei Technologies is selling its budget telecoms carrier Honor . There’s no price tag on the deal, but previous speculation was Honor would fetch about $15.2 billion in a sale.
is selling its budget telecoms carrier . There’s no price tag on the deal, but previous speculation was Honor would fetch about in a sale. Currencies for commodity-dependent economies—think the Aussie dollar and Norwegian kroner—are pegged as the big currency winners for 2021. That’s because the dollar is predicted to plummet by as much as 20% in the year ahead, Citigroup says.
Europe
The European bourses were flat at the open with the Europe Stoxx 600 down 0.1% 30 minutes into the trading session.
were flat at the open with the down 30 minutes into the trading session. The European Union’s €1.8 trillion COVID recovery plan is now under threat. Hungary and Poland are threatening to veto the aid package on grounds the proposal makes it easier for Brussels to slap sanctions on countries that flout the rule-of-law.
is now under threat. and are threatening to veto the aid package on grounds the proposal makes it easier for Brussels to on countries that flout the rule-of-law. The collapse of Wirecard is now nearly complete after the scandal-rocked German fintech agreed to sell core technology to Spain’s Banco Santander. The financial terms were not disclosed.
U.S.
The U.S. futures point to a weak open today. That’s after all three indexes rallied on the Moderna news, pushing the Dow and S&P 500 to new all-time highs.
and to new all-time highs. Moderna closed up nearly 10% yesterday following its blockbuster vaccine trial news. It’s up more than 400% this year. It’s having a very good pandemic.
closed up nearly yesterday following its blockbuster vaccine trial news. It’s up more than this year. It’s having a very good pandemic. Shares in Tesla are up 13% in pre-market trading after gatekeepers at the S&P 500 admitted the high-flying EV maker onto the index, ending months of speculation. (I admit it, I didn’t think it would happen this quickly considering Tesla’s profits come from the rapidly disappearing business of selling carbon permits ; it still loses money making cars.)
in pre-market trading after admitted the high-flying EV maker onto the index, ending months of speculation. (I admit it, I didn’t think it would happen this quickly considering come from the rapidly disappearing business of ; it still loses money making cars.) U.S. retail sales will be released before the bell.
Elsewhere
Gold is flat, trading around $1,885/ounce .
is flat, trading around . The dollar is down.
is down. Crude is up with Brent trading above $44/barrel .
is up with trading above . Bitcoin is up 3% in the past 24 hours, trading above $16,750.
***
The value trade
Is the value rally for real?
Following yesterday’s Moderna vaccine news, the Dow and S&P rocketed to fresh all-time highs with the unloved misfits of the market—energy, financials and industrials—leading the way higher.
This has been the case for much of the past week, ever since the Pfizer, the first of the bunch, announced on Nov. 9 its promising COVID trial progress. The optimism of a vaccine is creating a big rotational shift out of growth stocks and into beaten-down value stocks. You can see this play out in the likes of energy and financials stocks, both ratcheting up impressive gains recently, as the chart shows.
Energy is now up 17% in the past month, outperforming the broader S&P 500 by a multiple of >4X. Financials are up about 3X on the S&P over the same period.
J.P. Morgan head of global and European equity strategy Mislav Matejka reckons the value trade has legs. “Our base case is that we could have 3-4 quarters worth of rotation, similar to the length of the ’16-’17 trade,” he wrote in an investor note.
Brian Price, head of investment management for Commonwealth Financial Network, concurs.
“It’s encouraging that we’re seeing a rotation from growth and momentum-oriented stocks to value and cyclical names,” he detailed yesterday as the markets were booming. “The more discussion about local economies reopening and a decreased risk of significant lockdowns should continue to support this trade for the time being. We’ve seen similar value, cyclical rallies in the past but these periods have been short-lived as growth, momentum sectors eventually reasserted their leadership. Any sustained move towards fewer lockdowns should continue to support value-oriented sectors of the market for the foreseeable future.”
These developments bode well for those of you long core Dow stocks. The blue chip index is a whisker away from 30,000. The value stocks will likely push it above that milestone.
***
Have a nice day, everyone. I’ll see you here tomorrow.
Bernhard Warner
@BernhardWarner
Bernhard.Warner@Fortune.com
As always, you can write to bullsheet@fortune.com or reply to this email with suggestions and feedback.
Today's read
Crop yield. For those of you who've caught the baking bug, this won't surprise you. Futures prices for such staples as soybeans, corn and hard red winter wheat are up nearly one-third over the past three months, according to the Wall Street Journal. A number of factors are at play in the price rise, including surging demand from China and, yes, the home-bakers movement. I foresee another run on bread-making ingredients in the near future.
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Market candy
-72%
Airbnb's long awaited pre-IPO filing was released yesterday, and it made for some rough reading. Airbnb disclosing it saw a staggering 72% coronavirus hit to revenues (in year-on-year terms). Fortune's Danielle Abril pores through the filing, detailing the big takeaways for those of you thinking about getting in on its IPO.


fortune--2020-11-17--U.S. sanctions force Huawei to sell its budget smartphone brand

Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies is selling its budget smartphone carrier Honor to a group of Honor resellers and suppliers to shield the brand from U.S. sanctions that have starved Huawei of semiconductor chips.
In a statement announcing the sale on Tuesday, Huawei said that a “persistent unavailability of technical elements needed for our mobile phone business” has put its consumer business under “tremendous pressure.”
The sale of Honor is a bid to ensure the “survival” of the subsidiary and its suppliers, according to the statement.
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In August, the U.S. government imposed new restrictions that banned semiconductor chip manufacturers that use U.S. technology from selling their products to Huawei. The chips are essential to smartphones, and it’s unclear how Huawei will access the components to build new phones once it uses up its existing stockpile.
The U.S. government has tightened restrictions on Huawei over the past two years owing to Trump administration claims that Huawei represents a national security threat. (Huawei denies the allegations.)
The restrictions take advantage of Chinese companies’ dependence on foreign-made chips. Self-sufficiency in semiconductor manufacturing is a strategic priority for China, but the nation has long struggled to produce its own chips.
The group of Honor resellers and suppliers that is acquiring the brand proposed the deal. The consortium, called Shenzhen Zhixin New Information Technology Co., was formed for the purpose of buying Honor. It’s made up of more than 30 companies involved in the supply and distribution of Honor phones, including firms backed by the Shenzhen city government. (Huawei is headquartered in Shenzhen.)
In a Tuesday statement, the consortium called the deal “a market-driven investment made to save Honor’s industry chain.”
After the sale, Honor will no longer be a subsidiary of Huawei. Huawei will hold no shares in Honor, nor will it have any say in management or decision-making for the brand, suggesting that Honor will be exempt from the supply chain restrictions that target Huawei once the deal closes.
Neither side disclosed the financial terms of the deal, but Reuters previously reported that the Honor sale would be worth $15.2 billion. Huawei declined to comment.
Honor launched in 2013 and ships over 70 million units annually, according to Huawei’s Tuesday statement. That figure represents around 29% of Huawei’s total smartphone shipments for 2019, according to research firm Counterpoint.
Honor-branded smartphones are priced lower than Huawei-branded phones and sell in mainland China, where they compete with other low-cost smartphone brands like Xiaomi. Honor is also available in Southeast Asia, India, and Europe.
“This sale will help Honor’s channel sellers and suppliers make it through this difficult time,” the Huawei statement said.


fortune--2020-11-18--How bad actors could sabotage a COVID vaccine—and how that can be prevented

Dozens of companies have spent the past months working to develop an effective way to stop COVID-19—and thankfully, we’re starting to see some very promising results. With final phases of testing and trials underway, we must turn our concern to the next stage and consider the idea of a vaccine-related cyberattack.
It’s not unlikely that a bad actor could attempt to sabotage the availability of a vaccine by stalling or preventing its development, or even its distribution, through a targeted attack. Many people wonder how that would even happen, but there are actually quite a few ways that the process could be compromised. (My company Claroty works with manufacturing and pharmaceutical companies to keep their operations secure, so the recommendations that follow could have a positive impact on our business.)
Let’s start at the beginning.
While we’re still in the midst of vaccine development, it’s quite plausible that an attack could happen to stall the progress or run a vaccine trial off-course. The race to develop a vaccine has pushed pharma companies to work faster than ever and race through trial phases. The increased pressure here leaves them incredibly vulnerable to a cyberattack meant to put a stop to a vaccine’s development, similar to the Stuxnet malware discovered back in 2010. This software invaded the automated machine processes in Iran’s manufacturing operations in an attempt by the U.S. and Israel to thwart the country’s development of a nuclear weapon.
Another obvious way that a vaccine could be compromised through a cyberattack is at the manufacturing level. Picture this: After going through many months and different phases of trials, one of the pharmaceutical companies finally gets approval from the Food and Drug Administration to produce and distribute a vaccine. Right away, production will kick into gear.
A cyberattack of this style, specifically intended to tamper with the vaccine formula, would home in on the Internet-connected operational technology (OT) and industrial networks that help run manufacturing facilities. In a vaccine manufacturing facility, attackers would enter the IT systems, either through a virtual private network (VPN) connection or a user or vendor utilizing an insecure mode of remote access. From there, ransomware would be able to spread from the IT to the OT network.
Vaccines are highly complex materials, compiled of various proteins and in need of near-perfect chemical balance to maintain the properties that make them effective. With such a fine balance, any small changes to the formula would throw off the efficacy and accuracy of the vaccine. An attack of this style would be reminiscent of the cyberattacks on the Israeli Water Authority from earlier this year, which attempted to alter the chlorine levels of the country’s public water supply.
If a cyberattack were properly identified in time, the vaccine could be remanufactured, but it would result in a backup in its distribution. If not caught before distribution, there could be unknown consequences for the overall health of the recipients.
Now let’s assume all goes right regarding the vaccine’s production. At this point, the vaccines have to be stored somewhere until they get distributed—millions of doses don’t go straight from the factory to the doctor’s office overnight.
Given the delicate nature of the vaccine and its composition, it would likely need to be stored in a temperature-regulated facility to maintain stability and prolong its lifespan. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the ideal temperature for refrigerated vaccine storage is between 36 and 46 degrees Fahrenheit.
Should a bad actor be interested in damaging vaccine distribution, they could stage an attack on the temperature control systems in place. By changing the climate of the warehouses or storage units, the potency of the vaccines could be greatly reduced, which would negatively affect the desired immune response.
Even if the vaccine doses remain fully intact and untampered with throughout the entire production and storage process, there are still plenty of opportunities for vaccination efforts to be compromised. The logistics of shipping and finally distributing a vaccine are prime for a cyberattack, given how often the product would have to change hands getting from the place of origin to the final destination.
This isn’t unlikely; it’s happened before. The 2017 attack on A.P. Møller-Maersk utilized NotPetya malware to completely cripple the shipping and logistics giant, ultimately costing it between $250 and $300 million.
In terms of vaccines, a ransomware attack could affect scheduling software, leading to delays in delivery and affecting the vaccine distribution schedule. Storage rooms could be locked down. Transportation could be rerouted. The connected systems that grant operators visibility into their systems could very well be the downfall of the operations.
Given the global exposure of the vaccine race as well as the monetary investments that have gone into the various companies working to develop them, a cyberattack wouldn’t be surprising.
At this point, you may be wondering what can be done to defend against such an attack. Thankfully, there are quite a few precautions that vaccine manufacturers and distributors can take.
Gaining full visibility into all systems in use, so that operators can notice immediately when anything out of the ordinary is going on in the systems, and continuous monitoring of the networks will both be key in proactively preventing or quickly responding to any attacks.
Apart from internal solutions, vaccine manufacturers should work in collaboration with external or third-party vendors to ensure that all manufacturers are enforcing the same cybersecurity standards.
Vaccine manufacturers should also consult the extensive list of specific recommendations in the alert issued by the National Security Agency (NSA) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on July 23, 2020, which indicates that Internet-accessible OT assets are becoming more prevalent across all 16 U.S. critical infrastructure sectors. The scenarios described cover multiple sectors—chemical, transportation, health care, and public health, and possibly more. The NSA and CISA’s recommendations include having a resilience plan for OT, a well-exercised response plan before an incident occurs, and reducing external exposure to OT networks as much as possible.
Lastly, there is no better time than now for cybersecurity leaders in these affected industries to build coalitions with fellow executives and board members for the vital work cybersecurity teams are performing to protect the company’s operations. Many board members have been very hands-on and involved at an operational level. They have seen how being prepared and having the right technologies and processes in place are essential for adapting to change and creating a more resilient business, so chief information security officers and other security leaders should be in a strong position to garner their support.
As security teams reassess what risk looks like now and develop plans for how to focus on resilience, strong buy-in at the top is essential.
Guilad Regev is senior vice president of global customer success at Claroty.


fortune--2020-11-17--It’s time to celebrate Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris

One of the most moving things I ever saw Vice President-elect Kamala Harris do was cut an onion.
It was nearly a year ago to the day, when she was still Senator-Who-Wants-to-be-President Harris, and stopped by actor Mindy Kaling’s home for some bonding and policy talk over a home-cooked meal. But the real subject at hand was Kaling’s unalloyed glee at knowing that someone who shared her Indian American heritage had some sort of shot at the U.S. White House. “It’s the thing we’re so excited about,” she said, referring to basically every Indian person she knew and anyone she met or even walked by on the street.
At this point, Kaling reckoned, they were practically cousins. “We’re both South Indian,” Kaling said, beaming. “You look like the entire one half of my family,” said Harris, returning the smile.
As the two began cooking, they fell into the rhythm of people who had a powerful shared experience. They recalled the vegetarian fare they both claimed as birthrights—rice and yogurt, potato curry, lots of dal, idli—lovingly prepped by their professional-class, immigrant moms who made sure multi-course meals were ready for the week every Monday. Both had sweet stories to tell about visiting relatives back in India, where even the dogs were vegetarian, and a funny inside joke about repurposing glass jars that once held Taster’s Choice instant coffee for kitchen spices.
It was around the 3:30 mark that the onion magic happens.
Harris is so proficient with her dice, that Kaling interrupts her own chatty tale about shenanigans with a cousin to exclaim, “That’s a fine chop!” She then declared, respectfully, that Harris is “kind of a show-off,” since, “meanwhile it’s taken me 20 minutes to do just this much ginger!” Food is important to Indian women, says Harris. “I take cooking very, very seriously.”
The moment touched my heart. It’s the kind of exchange that happens when people discover they have a connection that lets them move past small talk into a sense of intimacy, like family they didn’t know they had. While there’s never a guarantee that finding sudden family will be a fun experience, it’s always a short cut to the familiar.
I think I keep coming back to that moment because current political divisions have robbed so many of us of the chance to marvel at the parts of Harris’ identity that mirror our own; the parts that make her historic victory so intimate. The immigrant, Indian, Jamaican, Black American, sorority sister and HBCU grad; the professional, law enforcer, aspirational leader… and my personal favorite, stepmother.
Kamala as Mamala is the first woman to have unflinchingly chosen a professional life and a blended family and still managed to survive a presidential ticket, one of the most sexist gauntlets in political life. Being a stepmother is one of my most cherished identities and I understand the cultural challenges that surround it. Now, my country’s vice president understands something about my identity that few do.
To quote Kaling, “That’s a fine chop.”
It’s clear we are living in fraught political times, and the questions many voters still have about Harris’ record and future leadership likely remain uncomfortably unresolved. Holding the new administration accountable is what matters now.
But as we push ahead, I have had to remind myself more than once that this moment is a wondrous one for so many people who can claim a small piece of Harris, politics be damned. And that in spite of bitter divisions and our own inadequate efforts, representation happens, sometimes when you least expect it. The least we can do, is stop and smell the masala dosa.
And then get back to work.
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com
Today's mood board
That feeling when you casually drop $1 million to develop a 94.5% effective coronavirus vaccine.


fortune--2020-11-17--Republicans are starting to embrace COVID precautions after initially resisting

As an alarming second wave of COVID-19 continues to surge across the U.S., Republican politicians who initially resisted strict social distancing and mask-wearing protocols are beginning to flip their stance.
On Monday, Iowa Republican gov. Kim Reynolds, who previously labeled coronavirus restrictions as “feel good measures,” ordered a statewide mandate requiring residents over the age of 2 to wear masks in indoor public spaces.
“If Iowans don’t buy into this, we’ll lose,” Reynolds said at a news conference. “Businesses will close once again, more schools will be forced to go online, and our health care system will fail.”
Reynolds is not alone in her about-face among her Republican governor colleagues. Earlier this month, the GOP-led states of West Virginia, North Dakota, and Utah, all issued similar mask mandates. Each had resisted issuing such an order in the earlier months of the pandemic.
“Our hospitals are full,” Utah gov. Gary Herbert said in a video posted to Twitter, announcing the mandate. “This threatens patients who rely on hospital care from everything from covid-19 to emergencies like heart attacks, strokes, surgeries and trauma. We must work together to keep infections low until a vaccine is available.”
In late October, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease expert, made an ominous prediction about the fates of some of those states. “It’s much more about some of the states like Utah, Nevada, South Dakota, North Dakota, where … they never had a pretty good reserve of intensive care beds and things like that,” Fauci told the Washington Post. “I hope they’ll be okay, but it’s still a risk that, as you get more surging, they’re going to run out of capacity.”
Total COVID-19 cases have surpassed 11.3 million in the United States as of Tuesday, according to the New York Times’ database. The surge is particularly prominent in Midwestern states, with North Dakota and Iowa among the top three states with the most cases per 100,000 residents in the last seven days.
The shift in attitude among GOP leadership is reflected in a recent Axios-Ipsos poll that found that 52% of people who identify as Republicans now see in-person gatherings as risky, up from 40% in late October. Additionally, the share of Republicans who now see indoor dining as risky rose from 37% to 45% in recent weeks.
“Our survey has consistently found that Republicans are less concerned about the coronavirus, by almost any measure,” Axios’ Sam Roberts wrote. “But Republicans and Independents are beginning to come around on the risk of indoor dining and socializing, and that’s what’s driving the overall increase in risk perception.”


fortune--2020-11-17--Senators attack Facebook and Twitter over labeling election misinformation

Senators hammered the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter on Tuesday over how their services handled election misinformation.
Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee complained that warnings the companies affixed to posts, like those by President Trump that falsely claimed to have been reelected, were unfair. Democrats, in turn, said the labels didn’t go far enough and worried that leaving posts up would cause the public to doubt the democratic process.
“As we speak, Donald Trump is waging an all-out war on the truth…and one of his weapons of choice in this disinformation war is social media,” Democratic New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker told the CEOs, who attended via a video call. “You have the tools to prevent him from weaponizing these platforms.”
Twitter and Facebook both recently introduced the labels to combat the expected onslaught of election-related lies. The companies also included links in those warnings to more credible sources, such as official results and news articles.
Almost as soon as the labels appeared during the lead-up to the election, lawmakers went on the offensive against them. In fact, the labels are one rare thing that both parties agree on in their dislike, though for different reasons.
Tuesday’s hearing came three weeks after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testified before the Senate about Section 230, a law that protects Internet companies from being held liable for what their users post.
In their repeat performance, the CEOs defended their companies’ various election efforts, including labels that they said provided context to conversations. They insisted that their actions helped limit the spread of election misinformation.
“We believe the labels point to a broader conversation so that people can see what’s happening with the election and with the results,” Twitter’s Dorsey responded under fire.
Dorsey said Twitter applied more than 300,000 labels to tweets between Oct. 27 to Nov. 11, or 2.2% of all U.S. election tweets. Zuckerberg didn’t disclose how many labels Facebook added to election-related posts.
Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, suggested by adding labels, the two companies are choosing what is fact and fiction, and therefore are picking sides. He also criticized the companies for reducing the sharing of a New York Post story that claimed to connect Joe Biden to corruption in Ukraine.
In a rapid-fire exchange with Dorsey, Cruz questioned Twitter’s decision to attach a label to posts claiming voter fraud that says voter fraud is “exceedingly rare” in the U.S. “That’s not linking to a broader conversation; that’s taking a disputed policy decision,” he said.
Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska argued that the companies are taking sides by labeling posts by conservatives as misinformation, but then don’t do the same for Democrats. He claimed that the bias is because employees of both California-based companies are mostly liberals.
“You’re applying content moderation policies in seemingly a way that’s not objective,” Sasse said.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, questioned a number of instances that Twitter labeled Trump’s tweets for spreading election misinformation. She complained that the tweets weren’t labeled quickly enough and that their language was too weak.
Zuckerberg, in response to Feinstein’s attack on Twitter, pointed out that Facebook had added voter information atop users’ news feeds to steer them to credible sources, regardless of what their friends had posted on the service.
“All taken together, we went really quite far to distribute reliable and accurate information,” Zuckerberg said.
Facebook and Twitter plan to continue their election labeling policies through the Georgia runoff election in January, when the Senate majority will be determined.


fortune--2020-11-17--For pollsters, it’s back to the drawing board after yet another miss in the 2020 election

It’s been a rough few weeks for the polling industry—one that has seen the very profession of polling publicly scrutinized and dissected in the wake of yet another disappointing presidential election. After failing to predict Donald Trump’s shocking rise to the presidency in 2016, most polls got it wrong yet again this year. Though Joe Biden’s victory over Trump turned out to be correct, on a national level, once all the votes are counted, it’s clear that the 2020 election did not yield the Democratic landslide many forecast.
Polling website RealClearPolitics’ national average, which aggregates and factors the results of polls nationally, forecast a 7.2-point lead for Biden going into the election; in reality, the actual margin of Biden’s popular vote victory will likely come in at half that spread. In Wisconsin, where some polls predicted a double-digit winning margin for Biden, the Democrat ended up winning by only 0.7%, or roughly 20,000 votes. In Florida, where most polls had Biden ahead by a few points, Trump won convincingly by more than 3%. Meanwhile, polls tracking key Senate races—like those indicating that reelected Republican incumbents Susan Collins of Maine and Thom Tillis of North Carolina were in real danger of losing their seats—also proved wide of the mark.
It’s all led to a great deal of hand-wringing and consternation among those in and around the polling industry. Noted Republican pollster Frank Luntz went as far as to condemn the entire profession of political polling on the morning after Election Day. But while most aren’t nearly as fatalistic as Luntz and his prognosis, there is an acknowledgment that something is amiss in how pollsters are capturing the opinions of a deeply divided electorate—and that they must now go back to the drawing board after missing their mark for a second consecutive election.
“Polls aren’t always wrong, but they’ve been wrong enough that we ought to treat them with skepticism and realize they are imperfect instruments prone to failure and flaws,” according to W. Joseph Campbell, a professor at American University in Washington, D.C., and author of the recent book Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections.
As Campbell notes, there’s nothing new about political polls being proved wrong; one can look back as far as 1948, and President Harry S. Truman’s famous upset victory over Thomas E. Dewey in that year’s election, to find an example of pollsters failing to make the right call.
Still, he describes an industry that is “going through some tough times in terms of what the best, most reliable approach to conducting surveys is”—one still searching for its “next gold standard,” as the days of computer-generated telephone calls to landlines across the country are now a relic of the past. Coupled with federal laws restricting how pollsters can contact people via their mobile devices, the industry has faced declining telephone response rates in recent years, forcing some to explore alternative means of contact like text messages and online polls.
But beyond the medium, there has been heightened focus on the methods by which pollsters are accounting for the populace whose opinions they are meant to be gauging. Four years after Trump’s widespread support among white, non–college educated voters helped carry him to the White House, many pollsters recalibrated their methods to more greatly weigh the input of such voters. But underweighting such voters only “contributed a point or two to the [polling] miss in 2016,” according to Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, and doesn’t fully account for the polls’ underwhelming performance as of late.
Some pollsters looked to tweak their formulas in other ways. Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, noted that Marist doesn’t even weigh by education in its polls, which succeeded in calling a very tight race between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016. Instead, the college sought to sample more voters not just in rural counties, but in the more rural areas within those rural counties that are more likely to support conservative candidates.
“We feel that the difference between the polls that have been working and those that haven’t is not specific to education; we always felt that was a symptom rather than a cure,” Miringoff says. “Our feeling was that even in a rural county, there are ‘metro’ areas, and we felt that you needed to get the right balance between the ‘metro rural’ areas and the ‘rural rural’ areas that are more [supportive of] Trump. We always thought it was more about geography, and an issue of sampling rather than weighting.”
That approach yielded mixed results for Marist this election season. It rightly called an exceptionally close race in Arizona and forecast surprisingly strong support for Trump among Latinos in both that state and Florida. But Marist also had Biden up by several points in Florida and North Carolina—both states won by Trump—as well as Pennsylvania, which Biden won by only 1%.
Miringoff notes that in the case of states like Pennsylvania, Marist’s findings were “technically in the margin of error.” Still, given the extent to which political polls have lately failed to provide an accurate reading of the situation on the ground, he acknowledges: “We have to be better as an industry. The science is messy, but [polling] is still our best guess as to what is going on.”
Monmouth didn’t have much better luck, having forecast a robust advantage for Biden in Pennsylvania, Florida, and Arizona, as well as narrower advantages for him in Georgia and North Carolina. Murray says the university is already “developing hypotheses about what went wrong” in its 2020 projections—listing off possibilities including a “last-minute increase in people refusing to participate in polls” in the final weeks before the election, as well as the mooted “shy Trump voter effect” that sees Trump’s backers either disguise their support of the President or refuse to speak to pollsters outright.
But Murray also raised a far more complex theory for why this President’s support has been so hard for pollsters to nail down over the course of two election cycles—one having to do with the hyper-polarisation of the American electorate during the Trump era, a dynamic that “may have reshaped the American political psyche in a way where it’s more difficult to measure things accurately,” he says.
“We’ve been seeing, in our polling over the last few years, a deeper division in the American public, to the extent where they view everything through the lens of politics,” according to Murray. He notes that even questions about a respondent’s finances or whether they intend to take a vacation are being viewed through “partisan prisms,” with respondents more inclined to answer in a manner that reflects positively on their preferred candidate and political views.
This “social desirability bias,” Murray says, is a phenomenon unique to Trump. “When we asked in the past whether people approved or disapproved of the President, it was easy to give an answer: It depended on their performance,” he notes. “Now, it’s become a reflection of who you are as a person and how other people in society see you…These are questions we’ve asked for years that have never had a significant partisan correlation for us.”
For Murray, it remains to be seen whether this dynamic proves a distinct trait of the Trump era or indicative of a more permanent shift in the political landscape that could make it harder for pollsters to accurately gauge opinions. “We might have to accept that we’re in a different environment politically,” he says. “Under Trump, it’s accelerated to the point where your political opinions have become an intrinsic part of your identity. If that’s seen as a negative, it might be something you may not want to talk about.”
For now, it’s back to the lab for pollsters who yet again must take stock of another election’s shortcomings and devise a better way to take the pulse of the American electorate. It is a process that will require patience and due diligence. As industry observers note, it took six months for the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) to release its postmortem on the 2016 election, and it will likely take as long to comprehensively evaluate this year’s polling, even with the likes of Pew Research Center already floating theories.
That work will be of the utmost importance for the polling industry and profession. Because while polls aren’t perfect, they remain the preferred method to research and measure public sentiment—not only for political candidates but all sorts of public issues and policies that may hang in the balance.
“There’s long been this recognition that [elections are] an acid test of polling procedure,” according to Campbell. “Election polling is a mere sliver of a multibillion-dollar international industry known as public opinion research…If the polling of presidential elections is off, then are we also off on other public policy issues and market research?”


fortune--2020-11-17--CEOs say the pandemic hasn’t paused their focus on purpose—it’s accelerated it

In the past, major crises have often been reasons for companies to narrowly focus on maintaining their bottom lines. But according to CEOs on a Fortune-hosted call Tuesday, the coronavirus pandemic has instigated a different reaction: Businesses are putting purpose at the front of their recovery plans.
Leaders on the call, which is part of Fortune’s Global Forum/CEO Initiative series, said that as a result of COVID-19’s disruption, they are now more focused on climate change and sustainability, empathy and transparent communication with employees, flexibility around work arrangements and schedules, and racial justice and diversity.
Genpact was already searching to define its purpose last year, said Tiger Tyagarajan, president and CEO. When the pandemic began to force economic lockdowns, his workers scrambled to continue delivering services.
“What we realized was our teams actually made purpose come alive without actually defining purpose,” he said. That discovery has informed the formal definition of purpose the company is currently finalizing.
One theme that dominated the conversation was the importance of transparent and open communication between corporate leadership and frontline workers.
According to MassMutual chairman, president, and CEO Roger Crandall, videoconferencing technology has allowed for more authentic conversations with employees. “The days of sending a memo and never hearing back are gone. One way or another, you’re going to hear back,” he said.
Annette Clayton, president and CEO of Schneider Electric’s North American division, agreed, referencing a “turning moment” for the company during a virtual discussion with an employee who had contracted the coronavirus while doing fieldwork in hospitals.
“Having that dialogue in a transparent way and showing empathy of what everyone’s personal situation [is] was hugely powerful,” she explained.
As the discussion closed, Tyagarajan emphasized the crucial role of leaders in changing the climate inside their companies.
“If you don’t do it, the schism is going to be even worse than ever before” between leaders and workers, he said. “It’s not a ‘nice to do’ anymore.”


fortune--2020-11-17--Kohl’s CEO insists its supersize beauty shops can compete with the new Ulta/Target partnership

Last month, Kohl’s CEO Michelle Gass unveiled a new multiyear turnaround plan for the struggling department store that bet heavily on a big push to become a shopping destination for makeup and other beauty products.
But that was before Kohl’s strip-mall competitors, Ulta Beauty and Target, announced a major new initiative that will have Ulta open shops inside hundreds of Target stores.
Despite going up against two very strong retailers in a category that currently generates a very small percentage of Kohl’s sales, Gass is undaunted. The CEO claims that the beauty segment is big enough and in enough turmoil to leave Kohl’s an opening. That turmoil has included the J.C. Penney bankruptcy that led to hundreds of stores closing, including many with Sephora shops. And Macy’s, a stronger rival than Penney, has also closed stores.
“Given the disruption in the marketplace, we have a real opportunity to introduce new, elevated brands to our customers,” Gass told Fortune on a media call on Tuesday. “There’s room for Kohl’s.” And she needs that to be true given how crucial beauty is to getting Kohl’s female clientele to come to stores and spend more time and money there.
But Kohl’s is taking on two fast-growing rivals with a track record in beauty. Pre-pandemic, Ulta Beauty had doubled in revenue in only four years and was beloved by customers for its mix of high-end and affordable beauty products, as well as its salon services. Meanwhile, Target has built its own booming beauty business that will now share space with Ulta shop-in-shops at 100 stores—with more to come. The Ulta shops will offer higher-end products than Target currently does to avoid overlap.
Kohl’s has tried for years to become a real player in beauty. That was a key part of its Kohl’s “Greatness Agenda” business road map in 2014, with the retailer hoping beauty would grow from 2% to 5% of sales in short order. That did not play out as Kohl’s had hoped, though Gass notes the category grew 40% in the past five years from a small base. The CEO thinks Kohl’s can triple the size of its current beauty business, something crucial at a time its fashion offering is faltering.
So Kohl’s is giving it another serious go. “Our customers want beauty from Kohl’s. They’re telling us that,” she says.
While she was tight-lipped about what brands would appear at Kohl’s, or what gap in the market Ulta or Target don’t fill, she pointed to the recent launch of a beauty line by Lauren Conrad, the name behind one of Kohl’s major apparel store brands. In addition, Kohl’s is planning to expand the number of its largest beauty shops, which are staffed with beauty advisers; the retailer currently has 62 such locations, and Gass says she’s seeing promising results.
Gass thinks Kohl’s strong e-commerce and the fact that 95% of its stores are not located in malls, unlike competitors Penney and Macy’s, will “allow us to be a formidable player in the beauty industry.”
The renewed focus on beauty comes as the apparel-centric retailer has been hit hard by the pandemic that has seen many shoppers switch to Target as they consolidate shopping trips, and as many of Kohl’s store brands fall out of favor. The company said on Tuesday that revenue in its third quarter fell 14% year over year to $3.98 billion. Although Kohl’s adjusted profit was higher than expected thanks to cost cuts and better inventory management—a fact that lifted its shares—in the long term, Gass needs to improve sales. Whether beauty will help her accomplish that remains to be seen.


fortune--2020-11-17--Twitter’s new disappearing posts lets users ‘fleet’ instead of tweet

Twitter is expanding its version of Stories, a product that lets users post photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours, in an effort to encourage more sharing.
Twitter has been testing the product, called Fleets, in international markets like Brazil and India, and beginning Tuesday is making it available globally, including to users in the U.S. The company launched Fleets in March, hoping to capitalize on the popular Stories feature that was invented by Snap’s Snapchat and later spread globally by Facebook, which copied it into all of its apps.
Twitter also teased a new audio product called Spaces, which works like a kind of group voice call among users who have been invited to participate, company executives said Monday. But the feature is still being developed and won’t be tested until later this year, they said.
Both products are meant to give people more places to interact with one another on Twitter, including in ways that aren’t necessarily public or visible on a user’s profile over the long term. Company executives said research has shown that many users are too intimidated to post or engage with others on the service, which has led to an effort to find new ways to spark interaction.
“Tweeting, retweeting, engaging in conversation can honestly be incredibly terrifying,” said Nikkia Reveillac, Twitter’s head of research. “We do not know how others will react to us, we do not know if anyone will reply, and we do not know if anybody will even care.”
Fleets offers another venue for Twitter to sell advertising, and the feature has been lucrative for competitors. It’s estimated that Instagram Stories is responsible for 10% of all Facebook advertising, for example. Facebook reported more than $21 billion in advertising revenue in the third quarter. A Twitter spokeswoman confirmed the company is considering putting ads inside the product, but is not yet doing so.
Audio is another area where Twitter has shown interest this year. It launched an audio tweets product in June so users could tweet out a recording. Twitter’s new Spaces feature is similar in concept to Clubhouse, a startup that has gained attention in Silicon Valley. That app creates virtual hangouts for people who wish to swap ideas or discuss a particular topic, but has drawn criticism for failing to police its chats.
“Audio is interesting for us,” said Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter’s head of product. “When you can hear someone’s voice you can empathize with them in a way that’s just more difficult” over text.