fortune--2020-12-19--WarnerMedia Studios chief on the controversial decision to release new movies on HBO Max

Hollywood was up in arms earlier this month when WarnerMedia announced a bold new theatrical release plan: Movies will premiere in theaters and on its streaming service, HBO Max, on the same day. That includes highly anticipated blockbusters like Dune, The Matrix 4, In the Heights, and Godzilla vs. Kong.
Critics mourned the imminent death of cinemas, now without exclusive windows to generate profits. Industry observers predicted the movie business would change forever. Director Christopher Nolan, whose film Tenet was distributed by Warner Bros. earlier this year, denounced the plan and called HBO Max “the worst streaming service.”
Despite the uproar, WarnerMedia maintains the plan is just a temporary measure following a year in which the entertainment industry was upended by stay-at-home coronavirus measures.
“It’s a pandemic strategy. We have 17 movies ready to go, and we want to be able to release them,” said Ann Sarnoff, chair and CEO of WarnerMedia Studios and Networks Group, during a Fortune panel on Monday about the future of media and entertainment.
“What other studios have done is just kicked the can down the road, if you will, and kept pushing the movies off,” Sarnoff added. “Or sold them to streamers or released them digitally on [premium video on demand].”
Sarnoff said that Warner’s strategy is actually in the interest of the exhibitor industry, despite criticism from theater aficionados like Nolan and cinema chains themselves.
“We really wanted [the upcoming movies] to be seen on the big screen,” she said. “We agree with the fact that the theaters are very, very important. We want to help keep the theaters in business. Giving them 17 movies in 2021, much of which I think will still be feeling the effects of COVID, we thought was a pretty good strategy in that regard.”
AMC, the nation’s largest theater chain, doesn’t seem to agree with that sentiment, with CEO Adam Aron saying that WarnerMedia “intends to sacrifice a considerable portion of the profitability” in order to subsidize HBO Max.
“As for AMC, we will do all in our power to ensure that Warner does not do so at our expense,” Aron said. “We will aggressively pursue economic terms that preserve our business.”


fortune--2020-12-19--Volkswagen to tie top executives’ bonuses with hitting ESG targets

Trump pardons : 7 high profile people who may get one

Volkswagen AG plans to link top executives’ bonuses to environmental, social and governance targets as the German industrial giant seeks to bolster sustainability credentials that are increasingly relevant to investors.
VW will seek shareholder approval for the updated remuneration system at its annual general meeting next year, Chairman Hans Dieter Poetsch told Bloomberg News in an interview. Executives’ compensation includes the bonus, a fixed salary and a long-term incentive plan linked to share-price performance.
“Integrating ESG criteria into the bonus calculations for our management board offers concrete incentives to pursue the sustainability goals we have outlined,” Poetsch said. The progress of ESG initiatives will be tracked via key metrics including internal decarbonization and diversity indices, he said.
The announcement comes as a growing number of financial companies, from banks to private-equity firms, attempt to retool their businesses and portfolios for a future largely free of fossil fuels.
While the move echoes similar steps by BMW AG and parts supplier Continental AG, the implications of the world’s best-selling carmaker stepping up its environmental efforts in particular are vast. The company has 125 factories in countries from Brazil to China and estimates its cars alone account for 1% of global carbon-dioxide emissions. The group has pledged to become carbon-neutral by 2050 in a major strategy overhaul focused on building the industry’s largest fleet of electric cars.
VW has added ESG targets to its strategic goals and calculates bonuses using a range of factors including the group’s operating performance and in the future also ESG improvement. Chief Executive Officer Herbert Diess received a bonus of just over 3 million euros ($3.7 million) for last year, roughly twice as much as most management board members.
“The market is starting to view ESG performance as positively correlated with financial performance, and to think about ESG as an enhancer of investment returns rather than something requiring a trade-off,” Richard Butters, an analyst at Aviva Investors, said in a report last month.
VW boosted its ESG efforts in the wake of the diesel-engine scandal that erupted five years ago when regulators uncovered widespread cheating on emissions tests. Larry D. Thompson, who headed the U.S. government’s prosecution of Enron Corp. and in September completed a stint overseeing VW as part of a plea agreement with the Justice Department, said the company can be “a long-term and sustainable ethics, integrity and compliance success.”
Oversight Issues
While VW has made headway when it comes to identifying potential misconduct, its complex governance and shareholder structure remains a concern for investors. BlackRock Inc., the world’s biggest asset manager, in October reiterated its criticism that VW’s supervisory board lacks enough independent oversight.
Outsiders have little sway at VW because just over 90% of voting stock is in the hands of the three key shareholders: the Piech and Porsche billionaire clan, the German state of Lower Saxony and Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund. Poetsch acknowledged the long-standing criticism but argued the company largely complies with German corporate-governance rules and welcomes involvement of its key shareholders.
Comparing ESG initiatives across sectors is complicated by different methodology and priorities used for ratings from providers such as MSCI Inc., Sustainalytics and the Carbon Disclosure Project. The depth of data companies disclose can also vary significantly in individual regions and is less standardized than, for example, financial reporting based on established accounting standards.
VW has adjusted its peer groups to reflect the company’s new strategy focused on electric vehicles and expanding software operations, Poetsch said. It has added automakers Tesla Inc. and BYD Co. as well as technology firms SAP SE, Uber Technologies Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. and will disclose its list of peers in the future, he said.


fortune--2020-12-19--COVID vaccine allergies are raising concerns. Most Americans should still get their shots

You may have read that the unprecedented COVID-19 vaccine rollouts in the U.K. and the U.S. have hit some early road bumps. In the slightly more than a week since the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave Pfizer and BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccine an emergency authorization for certain groups at the highest risk of COVID, such as health workers and nursing home residents, there have already been issues with distribution and disparate, confusing policies on to whom exactly the first doses should go.
None of this is all that unexpected, given the highly complex nature of this project and the gamut of stakeholders who need to work together to make a vaccine campaign successful. But one thing that may be giving Americans pause as the effort rolls out is the wave of initial reports of side effects experienced by some of the first people in the U.K. and the U.S. to receive doses of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine, including health workers.
At least two health care professionals in Alaska developed serious reactions, including one who had to be hospitalized. Two other health care workers in the U.K. developed similar symptoms, including anaphylactic symptoms, but most of the workers recovered from their symptoms quickly, including one within slightly more than an hour. More of these stories will inevitably trickle in, since the vaccine is so new and the sheer number of people, all with different biological peccadilloes, are expected to eventually take it. (We’ll find out in the coming months exactly when other groups can get a shot, which will likely depend on where you live.)
An allergic reaction certainly sounds like an unpleasant prospect, but if it’s deterring you from getting a vaccine, it shouldn’t. Instead, you should keep an eye on potential side effects and prepare to potentially take a day or two off from work if they prove severe.
Although side effects are possible and can be severe, they tend not to be debilitating in most people without a severe history of allergies or inflammatory problems. There’s plenty of evidence of that, both from Pfizer’s and Moderna’s large-scale clinical trials and from the conclusions of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) .
That said, side effects are fairly widespread, per the CDC report. The most common by far is some pain at the site of the first COVID vaccine injection, which is usually done in the arm. In a trial of Pfizer’s vaccine versus a placebo, more than 83% of people aged 18 to 55 reported experiencing this side effect.
But 51.1% of the study participants reported that the injection site pain was mild; another 30% reported it was moderate. Severe and above was limited to 1%. Other side effects such as redness and swelling were far more rare. Other common issues, which lasted a median of about one day, according to the CDC, included fatigue, headache, and muscle pain (although which mild to moderate side effects hit which age groups can vary).
Healthy skepticism is understandable. But health care experts note it’s still more important to get a COVID vaccine than risk getting COVID-19 itself. That latter option is far more precarious.
One expert, Dr. Melanie Swift of the Mayo Clinic, recently told Fortune that her own health system has developed a grid of side effects related to COVID vaccines versus those related to active coronavirus infections, in order to keep as much of a depleted workforce in place as possible.
So how do these (generally) mild-to-medium, (usually) brief side effects compare to the symptoms that hit you when you actually contract the disease?
“When the virus does cause symptoms, common ones include fever, body ache, dry cough, fatigue, chills, headache, sore throat, loss of appetite, and loss of smell,” according to a guide from Harvard Medical School. “In some people, COVID-19 causes more severe symptoms like high fever, severe cough, and shortness of breath, which often indicates pneumonia. People with COVID-19 are also experiencing neurological symptoms, gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms, or both. These may occur with or without respiratory symptoms.”
There have been more than 17.5 million coronavirus cases and 315,000 COVID-related deaths in the U.S. to date. That’s more than five times as many deaths in the highest range of the CDC’s estimates for annual flu-related deaths since 2010.
Those numbers make an even stronger case for taking a chance on the vaccine.


fortune--2020-12-19--The broken business model of Uber and Lyft is taking a heavy toll on society

What would a safety net look like for gig workers in the Internet-based economy?
It would provide health insurance, naturally, and a retirement plan, sick leave, and injured worker and unemployment compensation. And it would be equitable and portable: A person working part-time for different companies would have robust benefits that travel with them from job-to- job.
The good news is that we know how to design that sort of safety net. The bad news is that the digital platform companies keep missing opportunities to make it a reality.
Uber and Lyft are well aware of proposals to build better benefits systems. Following the publication of my book, Raw Deal: How the ‘Uber Economy’ and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers in 2015, I met with executives at both ride-sharing firms. A central part of the discussions was my proposal for an “Individual Security Account,” a portable safety net for drivers and for other freelance workers.
My idea was that each worker would have a mandatory, government-regulated Individual Security Account, and that any business that hires a worker would contribute an amount pro-rated to the number of hours worked for that business. The worker would then use those funds to pay for safety net needs such as health care, Social Security, sick leave, injured worker and unemployment compensation.
Instead of pitting flexibility against security—making a gig worker choose between the work they want and the benefits they need—a portable safety net based on this kind of an “hours bank” system would allow for both. (The Screen Actors Guild, the Service Employees International Union, and the Teamsters all manage these kinds of multi-employer plans). The Individual Security Account, as I envisioned it, would fill in the gap when there is no labor union to coordinate contributions.
President Barack Obama endorsed my idea in his 2016 State of the Union address. Forty business and government leaders—including the co-founders of Lyft—signed a statement of principles calling for a portable safety net. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi also called for enacting a portable safety net plan.
But when bills for portable safety nets were introduced in states, Uber and Lyft, rather than contributing 20% of a worker’s wages (the minimum necessary to fund an adequate safety net according to federal actuarial tables) offered to contribute 2.5%.
One study found that if their California drivers had been classified as employees rather than contractors these last five years, Uber and Lyft would have paid more than $400 million into the state unemployment insurance fund alone. Instead, California taxpayers have had to foot the bill for the significant wage and benefit gaps created by these companies.
Without a serious offer from the companies, the California legislature passed AB5, which attempted to solve the problem by reclassifying drivers as employees rather than independent contractors. Uber and Lyft refused to implement the law, and pursued Proposition 22 instead.
Why can’t these companies, rich enough to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a ruinous ballot measure, do better by their workers?
The answer is that Uber and Lyft are in huge financial trouble. They lose billions of dollars every year. Profit margins are inherently low in the taxi business, and their predatory model subsidizes more than half the cost of every ride in a bid to undercut competition.
With the passage of Prop 22, the companies have now legislated into existence another miserly version of a portable safety net, along with a face-saving attempt at a minimum wage. The value of Proposition 22’s health benefit is estimated at about $1.20 an hour—well below the $4 to $6 hourly value of benefits mandated for employees under state and federal laws.
Proposition 22 also appears to offer to drivers a new hourly minimum wage of at least $16.80 per hour. But read the fine print: A complex formula will be used in which only “engaged hours” (when the driver has a passenger in the car) will be counted as hours worked when calculating the minimum wage.
A driver, in a 10-hour shift, might only have passengers for five hours. If the driver earns $100 in that shift, that would amount to only $10 per hour—less than California’s legal minimum wage of $12 per hour. Yet the Prop 22 formula will calculate that wage as $20 per hour, meaning the companies will have no obligation to top it up.
None of Prop 22’s offerings come close to what drivers would receive if voters had rejected the initiative and drivers had remained regular employees instead of independent contractors.
The CEOs of Uber and Lyft talk a good game, saying they are “ready to do their part” to help their drivers. But they are hamstrung by their own unprofitable business model, which has also turned out to be bad for many of their drivers, for traffic congestion, for the environment, and for transportation. How much longer can society afford to allow this business model to continue?
Steven Hill is the author of Raw Deal: How the ‘Uber Economy’ and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers and Expand Social Security Now: How to Ensure Americans Get the Retirement They Deserve. He originally wrote this article for Zócalo Public Square.


fortune--2020-12-19--Biden introduces his environment team, calling climate change ‘the existential threat of our time’

President-elect Joe Biden introduced on Saturday key members of the team he is assembling to fulfill his pledge to combat climate change, calling them brilliant and qualified.
Climate change is “the existential threat of our time,” Biden said, and the people he was nominating to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, the White House Council on Environmental Quality and the departments of Energy, and Interior will be “ready on day one.”
“We need a unified national response to climate change. We need to meet the moment with the urgency it demands, as we would with any national emergency, ” Biden said at an event in Wilmington, Del.
With Republicans set to hold at least 50 seats in the Senate, likely dooming the chances for sweeping climate and environmental legislation, Biden will be relying heavily on the officials to advance his clean-energy agenda through federal regulation. He has proposed a sweeping $2 trillion climate plan to promote clean energy, called for an emissions-free electric grid in 15 years and and promised to pare oil drilling on federal lands.
“We need to get to work and we’ve got to get to work right away,” Biden said.
He vowed to promote the use of electric vehicles by having the federal government purchase more of them, and to get 500,000 charging stations installed. He also called for 1.5 million energy-efficient homes and public housing units to be built, and 3.2 million abandoned oil and gas wells to be plugged.
He said the U.S. would rejoin the Paris climate accord and establish a climate-focused civilian conservation corps to put people to work.
The nominees he presented represent veteran government leaders and regulators as well as environmentalists that progressives had demanded. They include former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm to lead the Energy Department, North Carolina environmental regulator Michael Regan to be EPA administrator and Democratic Rep. Deb Haaland to head the Interior Department. Biden has also tapped lawyer Brenda Mallory to be chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, Gina McCarthy as national climate adviser and Ali Zaidi as her deputy.
If confirmed, Haaland would be the first Native American in a U.S. cabinet post, Mallory would be the first African American to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality and Regan would be the first Black man to serve as Environmental Protection Agency administrator. Lisa Jackson was the agency’s first African American administrator, under former President Barack Obama.
Neither McCarthy nor Zaidi will need Senate approval to become climate advisers, and the others are widely expected to be confirmed. However, Republicans have already signaled they will sharply scrutinize the records of Haaland and Regan, including their past opposition to fossil fuel projects. Haaland, for instance, has supported a ban on the fracking process that has propelled U.S. oil and gas production—a stance that gives oil industry leaders concern but has been heralded by environmentalists.
Senator Kevin Cramer, a Republican from oil- and coal-rich North Dakota, warned the candidates could see “a bit of a brawl,” during a Fox Business Network interview Friday.
The Independent Petroleum Association of New Mexico said Thursday it had “serious concerns” about Haaland’s nomination, adding that she “has repeatedly demonstrated contempt toward our industry.”
The Interior Department runs the national park system and oversees grazing, recreation, energy development and other activities on about a fifth of U.S. land. The department holds trust title to more than 56 million acres for tribal nations and its Bureau of Indian Affairs works directly with 578 federally recognized Native American tribes.
Read More: Republican Threatens ‘Brawl’ Over Biden’s EPA, Interior Picks
Haaland, 60, and a citizen of the Laguna Pueblo, a 7,700-member tribe west of Albuquerque, New Mexico, has drawn widespread praise from environmental groups and tribal leaders. They say she would bring a deep commitment to protect the land to an agency in charge of 500 million acres of it. She was just elected to her second term in the House of Representatives.
Appearing to fight back tears as she accepted Biden’s nomination, she noted that one prior Interior secretary had pledged to “to civilize or exterminate” American Indians.
“We will ensure that the decisions at Interior will once again be driven by science,” she said.
McCarthy, 66, who now leads the Natural Resources Defense Council, pioneered the first limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants during her nearly four years leading the EPA during the Obama administration.
“I’m here today because climate change is not only a threat to the planet — it is a threat to our health and our well-being,” McCarthy said. “Defeating this threat is the fight of our lifetimes and our success will require the engagement of every community, every sector in our nation and every country in the world.”
Mallory, 63, previously served as the Council on Environmental Quality’s general counsel under former President Barack Obama. Most recently, she has been the director of regulatory policy for the Southern Environmental Law Center, a group that uses litigation to promote clean air, safe water and wildlife conservation.
“It is essential that we deploy smart and humane policy to help communities pull themselves back from the edge and improve the health, security and prosperity of all people,” Mallory said.
Regan, 44, already worked at the EPA for roughly a decade, though he’s currently secretary of North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality. He has guided initiatives to combat environmental inequities and climate change, and he’s been at the center of disputes over new gas pipelines and pollution cleanup that are playing out nationwide.
Invoking Biden’s campaign motto to “build back better,” Regan said on Saturday that “we need an all-hands-on-deck approach from industry and individuals, finding common ground to build back better.”
Granholm, 61, served as energy adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and has been credited with expanding Michigan’s clean energy industry during her two terms as governor. She served as Michigan’s attorney general from 1999 to 2003, has been an adviser to the Pew Charitable Trusts’ clean energy program and is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Granholm said Saturday that the Energy Department would take steps to assure that a transition to clean energy would result in jobs for Americans.
“We can win those jobs for American workers with the right policy,” she said.
Zaidi, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s deputy secretary for energy and environment, is a longtime adviser to Biden who helped negotiate the Paris Climate accord. He is a native of Pakistan.


fortune--2020-12-19--Boris Johnson imposes an emergency London lockdown to fight a new COVID-19 strain

Prime Minister Boris Johnson imposed a full lockdown on London and large parts of southeast England and told the public across the country to avoid travel, in a desperate attempt to stop a new strain of coronavirus that is spreading rapidly in the U.K.
After emergency talks with his most senior officials, Johnson canceled plans to ease pandemic restrictions for five days during the holiday. Household mixing will be banned in London and the south-east, and socializing restricted to just Christmas Day across the rest of England.
The premier announced a new Tier 4 will apply in the hot-spot areas around the capital from Sunday, with all non-essential shops closing, millions of people ordered to stay at home and all foreign travel banned except for essential purposes. Johnson urged people across England to “stay local” and not travel far. He promised the new rules will be reviewed on Dec. 30.
“When the virus changes its method of attack we must change our method of defense,” Johnson said at a news conference. “Without action the evidence suggests infections would soar, hospitals would become overwhelmed and many thousands more would lose their lives.”
The dramatic escalation in the government’s pandemic response was triggered by a new strain of the virus that is virtually unique to the U.K. Emerging scientific evidence suggests the new strain can spread significantly more quickly than previous strains in circulation and is behind a huge surge in infections in recent days.
COVID-19 case rates nearly doubled in London over the past week, with almost 60% of these infections attributed to the new strain of the virus, according to government officials.
Tier 4 London Lockdown Rules from Dec. 20 * People must stay at home, unless they must travel for work, education, healthcare.
* Households are largely banned from mixing, there will be no Christmas bubbles.
* All non-essential shops, indoor leisure and entertainment, personal care such as hair salons will close.
* Socializing limited—one person can meet one other from a different household, in a public space outside.
* Exceptions apply for support bubbles.
* People will be advised not to enter Tier 4 areas and residents in Tier 4 areas must not stay overnight away from home.
* Tier 4 applies to: whole of London, Kent, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, most of Surrey, Bedfordshire, Luton, Hertfordshire, most of Essex
* Rules apply for two weeks, will be reviewed on Dec. 30
England’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty said that the new variant was faster-spreading, and likely behind the alarming climb of case numbers in that part of the country.
“There is no current evidence to suggest the new strain causes a higher mortality rate or that it affects vaccines and treatments although urgent work is underway to confirm this,” Whitty said. “Given this latest development it is now more vital than ever that the public continue to take action in their area to reduce transmission.”
As recently as Friday, Johnson refused to rule out a third U.K. lockdown to control the spread of the virus. Britain would join Italy and Austria in tightening curbs during the holiday season, with all three countries facing rapidly rising case numbers.
The situation has deteriorated dramatically across Europe, with French President Emmanuel Macron contracting the illness and countries like Italy and Germany introducing new measures during the festive period.
Unpredictable mutations
Leaders are also grappling with another set of challenges just as vaccines are being rolled out.
Viruses tend to evolve or mutate quickly, particularly those like flu that require new vaccines to be developed each year because of changes in key proteins. SARS-CoV-2 also changes, although generally at a slower pace than some other viruses because it has a self-correcting mechanism that keeps its genetic sequence relatively stable.
Other variants in the coronavirus have been reported in the past, including one in minks, which are susceptible to the virus, that was feared to be highly transmissible and was reported to the World Health Organization. Millions of farmed mink were culled, although as of Nov. 20 the WHO said the most worrying strain linked to the animals is no longer circulating in humans.


fortune--2020-12-19--Mike Pompeo: Russia was ‘pretty clearly’ behind SolarWinds cyberattack on government and business

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said late Friday that Russia was “pretty clearly” behind the gravest cyberattack against the United States on record. Pompeo is the first administration official to publicly tie the Kremlin to the widespread intrusion at a time when President Trump has kept silent on the failure to protect government and private-sector computer networks.
It’s not clear exactly what the hackers were seeking, but experts say it could include nuclear secrets, blueprints for advanced weaponry, COVID-19 vaccine-related research and information for dossiers on key government and industry leaders.
“We’re still unpacking precisely what it is, and I’m sure some of it will remain classified,” Pompeo said in an interview late Friday with radio talk show host Mark Levin. “But suffice it to say there was a significant effort to use a piece of third-party software to essentially embed code inside of U.S. government systems and it now appears systems of private companies and companies and governments across the world as well. This was a very significant effort, and I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity.”
Russia has said it had “nothing to do” with the hacking.
Deputy White House press secretary Brian Morgenstern told reporters Friday that national security adviser Robert O’Brien has sometimes been leading multiple daily meetings with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the intelligence agencies, looking for ways to mitigate the hack.
He would not provide details, “but rest assured we have the best and brightest working hard on it each and every single day.”
The Democratic leaders of four House committees given classified briefings by the administration on the hack issued a statement complaining that they “were left with more questions than answers.”
“Administration officials were unwilling to share the full scope of the breach and identities of the victims,” they said.
Pompeo, in the interview with Levin, said Russia was on the list of “folks that want to undermine our way of life, our republic, our basic democratic principles….You see the news of the day with respect to their efforts in the cyberspace. We’ve seen this for an awfully long time, using asymmetric capabilities to try and put themselves in a place where they can impose costs on the United States.”
What makes this hacking campaign so extraordinary is its scale: 18,000 organizations were infected from March to June by malicious code that piggybacked on popular network-management software from an Austin, Texas, company called SolarWinds.
It’s going to take months to kick elite hackers out of the U.S. government networks they have been quietly rifling through since as far back as March.
Experts say there simply are not enough skilled threat-hunting teams to duly identify all the government and private-sector systems that may have been hacked. FireEye, the cybersecurity company that discovered the intrusion into U.S. agencies and was among the victims, has already tallied dozens of casualties. It’s racing to identify more.
Many federal workers — and others in the private sector — must presume that unclassified networks are teeming with spies. Agencies will be more inclined to conduct sensitive government business on Signal, WhatsApp and other encrypted smartphone apps.
“We should buckle up. This will be a long ride,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and former chief technical officer of the leading cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. “Cleanup is just phase one.”
The only way to be sure a network is clean is “to burn it down to the ground and rebuild it,” Schneier said.
Florida became the first state to acknowledge falling victim to a SolarWinds hack. Officials told The Associated Press that hackers apparently infiltrated the state’s health care administration agency and others.
SolarWinds’ customers include most Fortune 500 companies, and its U.S. government clients are rich with generals and spymasters.
If the hackers are indeed from Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence agency, as experts believe, their resistance may be tenacious. When they hacked the White House, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department in 2014 and 2015 “it was a nightmare to get them out,” Alperovitch said.
The Pentagon has said it has so far not detected any intrusions from the SolarWinds campaign in any of its networks — classified or unclassified.
___
Associated Press writers Matthew Lee in Washington and Bobby Caina Calvan in Tallahassee, Florida, contributed to this report.


fortune--2020-12-19--Is the boom in electric vehicle stocks almost over?

Tesla has thrilled some investors and jarred others by soaring to a valuation of as much as $649 billion, more than what the world’s seven largest carmakers were collectively worth at the beginning of this year. The company is now comfortably in a category by itself, defying even Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk’s warnings.
“I actually said the stock is too high a long time ago,” Musk said at the start of December. “But they didn’t listen to me.”
For startups aiming to mimic Musk’s success and for traditional carmakers struggling to disrupt themselves, most lingering doubts about future demand for electric vehicles have dissipated. Thanks in large part to the Tesla phenomenon, a consensus has emerged that they are undeniably the future.
“What you’ve had is a greater realization of the inevitability” of EVs, said Michael Pye, an investment manager at Baillie Gifford, which oversees about $370 billion and is one of the biggest shareholders of both Tesla and China-based EV maker Nio. Ten years from now, “it’s likely we’ll look back on this as the electric decade.”
Tesla alone has not brought the world to this point. A mix of stricter regulations against internal-combustion cars, increased support for plug-in vehicle purchases, improvements in technology and benefits of scale have led more consumers to embrace electrics. Still, two big questions remain: Can any other startup meaningfully replicate Tesla’s success? And will the EV market grow quickly enough to support both incumbents and startups?
“A reason all the current frothy action is happening is no one wants to miss the next Tesla,” said Jeff Chamberlain, CEO of Volta Energy Technologies, a Chicago-area fund that focuses on energy investments. “The question is, which one is the next Tesla?” Musk himself has described Tesla as having been “in mortal danger” before only recently pulling off a combination of high-volume manufacturing and cash generation. The time it took the 17-year-old company to get there suggests a high risk of failure for newer entrants trying to catch up. That risk is giving prominent investors who doubted Tesla a shot at redemption. Famed short seller Jim Chanos, who has had a “painful” year wagering against Musk, is betting that Nikola and other EV companies riding Tesla’s coattails are overvalued. “I would tell investors, if you’re in a hot area, be careful, because that’s an area in which promoters will try to foist off not only unprofitable but fraudulent businesses,” Chanos told Bloomberg Television.
The dramatic rise and fall of Nikola over just a few months was this year’s cautionary tale. The company founded by entrepreneur Trevor Milton set out to transform the trucking industry by replacing the diesels in big rigs with batteries and fuel cells. It also said it would build a hydrogen-station network and charge customers upfront for refueling.
In June, Nikola went public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, led by a former vice chairman of General Motors. Optimism that the infusion of cash would help the startup begin to produce trucks briefly sent its valuation soaring past Ford’s. The stock collapsed by September after a short seller claimed Nikola had deceived investors about its technology; the company has denied this. Regulators opened investigations, and Milton left the company.
Nikola’s breakdown hasn’t deterred other SPACs. The so-called blank-check firms have raised $70 billion in 2020 — a fivefold increase from 2019 — and at least 15 EV companies have been taken public or have listings pending. Those that already made their debut include Lordstown Motors, which has said it will begin producing its Endurance electric pickup in September 2021, and Fisker, whose Ocean SUV is planned for 2022.
“I have had very credible people, with very large sums of money, DM me on Twitter to see if we’d be interested in working with their SPAC,” said Gene Berdichevsky, CEO of Sila Nanotechnologies, a California-based battery company, and ex-Tesla engineer. The blank-check company board member who messaged him reached out in early October, after Nikola’s implosion.
Tesla shares started their meteoric rise in late 2019, when Musk proved he could not only dominate the nascent EV market but also make a small amount of money in the process. The company got on a roll by accelerating production of Model 3 sedans in China and Model Y crossovers in California and has now recorded five consecutive quarterly profits.
Companies getting in on the coinciding EV stock-buying bonanza include XPeng, the Guangzhou-based company co-founded by He Xiaopeng, the billionaire behind one of China’s most popular mobile browsers. Within three months after its U.S. listing in August, the stock almost quintupled.
“We have been talking about our goals of penetration and growth for the past five years,” said Brian Gu, the vice chairman and president of XPeng. “Yet we hadn’t seen the real explosion until this year. There’s an increased confidence in the industry’s long-term growth.”
Even so, XPeng won’t appear high up on global sales charts anytime soon. Bloomberg Intelligence analysts estimate the company will deliver about 25,000 P7 sedans and G3 SUVs this year. Its market cap still managed to reach $53 billion last month, a valuation Ford hasn’t seen in several years. Entering December, investors were awarding the company about $1.7 million of market cap per vehicle it’s expected to sell this year. If the same multiple were applied to Volkswagen, the German giant would be worth about $15.5 trillion. Instead, it’s being valued at about $10,000 per vehicle.
VW wasn’t alone in watching its valuation take a hit from the biggest disruption to auto-industry output since World War II. Vehicle sales in some markets were almost completely wiped out for the month of April. By June, the industry had taken on $72 billion of new debt to cope.
But amid all the carnage, EVs outperformed. It hasn’t mattered that the price of oil crashed and remains depressed. China stepped in with a series of measures that supported plug-in car purchases, while Germany and France started offering subsidies to help boost automakers out of their slump.
“If historically low oil prices, a major economic downturn, a plunge in auto sales and all these other factors didn’t derail the growth, it gets harder to see what does,” said Colin McKerracher, head of advanced transport for BloombergNEF. “The trajectory is getting clearer and clearer, and all these factors that might have derailed things are sort of bouncing off and not landing a blow.”
The current quarter may well be the first ever in which automakers sell 1 million fully electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles worldwide. It took the industry until 2015 to get its first million on the road. The global fleet is now about to cross the 10 million mark. “Each order of magnitude, a different number of people become aware that this shift is happening,” McKerracher said. “EVs have become part of the general consciousness instead of the consciousness of a small number of people who care about them.”
Conventional carmakers are benefiting somewhat from the bump in EV demand, too, but only a handful have seen their shares rise meaningfully this year. Companies including GM and Daimler are getting credit for undergoing metamorphoses, though they have spent more than a century basing manufacturing, labor and retailing practices on the internal-combustion engine.
GM’s stock got a boost when it told investors in November that it would spend $27 billion introducing 30 battery-powered models by 2025, increasing its budget by more than a third. But it’s going through an awkward process of buying out some Cadillac dealers that aren’t on board with the shift.
Daimler, which envisions more than half of its global sales being electrified by the end of the decade, will have to overcome labor-union opposition to shrinking its variations of combustion engines by 70%. Workers protested last month after the leader of a powertrain plant Daimler is retooling for EVs left the company for Tesla.
Musk may have ambitions to dominate Daimler’s home market of Germany and the rest of Europe, but the growth that has the region rivaling China for the first time this year has been driven by incumbents. In the U.S., GM and Ford have electric pickups in the works and have successfully defended that segment — far and away their most lucrative — from Toyota and others.
“I would not underestimate traditional OEMs in this area,” said Christina Woon, a Singapore-based investment manager at Aberdeen Standard Investments, which manages about $563 billion in global assets, including Toyota shares. “Having an existing business that’s profitable and that has cash flows that you can use to invest in a new or emerging business — that does help to balance out that risk.”
No automotive CEO has been as supportive and openly admiring of Musk and Tesla as VW’s Herbert Diess. He joined the company just before its 2015 diesel-emissions scandal and has remained consistent in his message about and moves toward electrification. During a two-hour briefing last month on the massive spending VW has planned for the next half-decade, Tesla’s name came up 31 times.
“We think it’s a very important competitor” because Musk is “really pulling the industry,” Diess said in an interview last month. “Coming from a software background, he has capabilities which we still have to build up. He’s a reference for us.”
But VW unintentionally echoed a troubling time for Tesla when launching a crucial new electric model this year. When software issues plagued the launch of the German carmaker’s ID.3, it hired a contractor to fix thousands of the electric hatchbacks in a tent, then rushed them to sale before some features were ready. The episode was reminiscent of when Tesla erected a structure in its parking lot two years ago during its struggle to get Model 3 sedans out the factory door.
As rough as the ID.3 launch was, Diess is starting to see some payoff. The car outsold all other EVs across Europe in November. Analysts at Evercore ISI predict that VW and Tesla will form a global EV duopoly for the foreseeable future. Baillie Gifford’s Pye credits VW for grasping where the industry is headed. In his view, too many of its peers still don’t.
“If you’re about to be run over by a 40-ton semi, don’t lie down in the middle of the road and smile,” Pye said. Even for those who “have got the gist of that,” like VW, “whether they’re able to act on it or not within the required time frame is more challenging.”


fortune--2020-12-20--How Hawaii’s COVID-19 testing program could serve as the blueprint for a broader reopening of intern

How Hawaii’s COVID-19 testing program could serve as the blueprint for a broader reopening of international travel

Biden wants to change how credit scores work in America

While it had remained closed to visitors throughout much of 2020, Hawaii reopened to tourists in October. Given that tourism is the top moneymaking industry in the 50th state, reopening quickly—but safely—is crucial for businesses of all sizes on every island.
Over the past few months, Hawaii’s state government has imposed entry and quarantine rules that are strict compared with those of other U.S. states; its geographical advantage as an archipelago hasn’t proved to be an especially effective barrier against the virus, with resurgences more akin to those seen in Ireland or Iceland versus near-perfect textbook examples of controlling the virus as seen in New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea.
Nevertheless, Hawaii set up a detailed program this fall that has some travel industry experts suggesting it could serve as a blueprint for reopening international travel, even as approved vaccines start to roll out in the coming months.
“Given the size of our country and rapidly growing infection rate, other countries are very concerned about Americans traveling abroad. Several countries have implemented programs similar to Hawaii’s, requiring a valid PCR test prior to arrival,” says Jason Feldman, cofounder and CEO of Vault Health, which provides mail-in, saliva-based tests (versus a nasal swab) for at-home use with videoconference supervision to ensure the test is taken properly. “Most airlines have done remarkable work to make travel safer, especially with more flights available over the holidays [when] more people will be traveling. Testing before, and after, arrival is smart to keep yourself and others safe.”
Lanai, the secluded 90,000-acre Hawaiian paradise, has become a popular destination for travelers seeking luxury experiences during the holidays. Courtesy of Four Seasons
And so far, travel industry experts don’t see the stricter requirements as deterrents, but rather just the opposite.
“These rules are very specific, and knowing the state is being so cautious with entry makes travelers feel more comfortable. We know the requirements can also be challenging for travelers,” says Misty Belles, a managing director at luxury travel firm Virtuoso. “For example, having to time their COVID test right before their departure; travelers are taking advantage of airlines that are offering preflight testing. Hawaii is so dependent on tourism—they know if they get this wrong and COVID spreads through the islands, it will take years for it to come back.”
The hope, and the intent, is that Hawaii serves as a blueprint for other parts of the world, Belles says. “We heard about the possibility of travel bubbles and travel corridors early on, but nothing has materialized at this point. If Hawaii gets it right, international destinations could replicate this model, opening up both corporate and leisure travel that is so important to driving economies.”
The key, she continues, is ensuring rigorous standards are maintained at both the entry and exit points. “We can’t have one set of protocols at one destination, with another set of protocols at another destination. Success is dependent upon the cooperation between both countries for this to work.”
Vault Health is working with Infinity BiologiX and Spectrum Solutions to offer at-home saliva testing for the coronavirus. Courtesy of Vault Health
All international and domestic transpacific travelers to Hawaii are required to submit a negative COVID-19 test taken within the previous 72 hours to avoid a mandatory 14-day quarantine. (The notable exception is for travelers visiting the island of Kauai, which, as of Dec. 2, is requiring a 14-day quarantine for all visitors—with or without a COVID test.)
However, visitors cannot take just any COVID-19 test. Rather, Hawaii requires a nucleic acid amplification test (NAAT) from a certified CLIA (Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments) lab that’s provided by one of the state’s designated testing partners. For Americans planning on domestic travel right now, some accepted testing partners include CVS Health, Costco, and Walgreens. But even these major retailers don’t offer COVID-19 testing at every location, making it difficult for some would-be visitors to Hawaii to get tested easily before departure.
Vault’s COVID-19 test is performed under supervision via Zoom video call, eliminating the risk of person-to-person exposure to the virus. Courtesy of Vault Health
Hawaii has approved less than a handful of health providers that offer at-home COVID-19 tests, with Vault Health among them. “We are working with several state governments who want to unlock testing for their residents and travelers. Hawaii is a unique case as they rely on tourism for their economy,” Vault CEO Feldman says.
Vault Health is also the exclusive mail-in option accepted by the state. Vault’s consultants monitor the saliva collection via Zoom to ensure the sample is properly secured and sealed for accurate results, which is preferred by state governments and airlines. Available for patients of all ages, tests are sent out via FedEx and arrive on doorsteps within 48 hours of ordering. Sent back via Fedex as well, results can be made available within 24 hours. Individual tests cost $119. Vault provides a detailed receipt highlighting the cost of the test that can be submitted to insurance for reimbursement through the CARES Act, and the company also accepts HSA and FSA funds.
Upon their arrival in Hawaii, visitors will find that hotels and resorts have stepped up their requirements and sanitization protocols considerably to curb the spread.
Under new COVID-19 protocols, each Four Seasons property is appointing a hygiene officer focused on implementing enhancements to already stringent procedures. Courtesy of Four Seasons
The Four Seasons in Lanai, for example, has experienced a remarkable turnaround in the last quarter. While untouched by the pandemic for months, Lanai sustained a serious outbreak in October. Most of the hotel properties on the island are owned by Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, whose funding has reportedly been critical not only in curbing the virus through investment in testing supplies but also in keeping employees on the payroll as any further pandemic aid flounders in Congress. Lanai has since kept down consistently its daily new-cases average to zero, as of Dec. 15.
Lanai hosts two Four Seasons locations, open at 50% occupancy: the Four Seasons Resort Lanai, a more traditional island resort with a lush pool oasis and four-star restaurants such as Nobu; and Sensei Lanai, a Four Seasons Resort, which is touted as an ultra-wellness getaway with a guided experience curated to each individual guest based on his or her wellness needs and set mostly outdoors. Aside from the Four Seasons, the 140-square-mile island has a few other tourist-friendly activity sites, such as a horseback riding range and a ferry terminal for local sailing and connections to Maui, as well as a hydroponic farming startup that sells its organic produce across greater Hawaii.
Any outbreaks risk longer-term economic pain for Lanai’s workers and inhabitants, which has inspired the Four Seasons to develop a rigorous health and safety program, Lead With Care. Developed in partnership with Johns Hopkins Medicine International, the program includes extra employee training, new food handling protocols, and enhancements to ventilation systems and other back-of-the-house operations.
Rooms are disinfected daily with EPA-approved products and will undergo black-light inspection by room attendants. Public areas are cleaned hourly with extra attention to frequented areas, such as front desk counters and public restrooms. Restaurants and bars may operate with reduced capacity and socially distanced seating, and nearly all restaurants must provide à la carte service with digital menus wherever possible. In-room dining means contactless delivery outside guest rooms along with sustainable, single-use packaging. And special kits are placed in each guest room upon arrival, providing masks, hand sanitizer, and sanitization wipes, with additional masks supplied on request from guest services.
The Four Seasons Resort Lanai features 213 guest rooms in a series of low-rise buildings spread along the Pacific coastline, providing a private residential experience. Courtesy of Four Seasons
Even though many resorts like the Four Seasons are also promoting special offers to attract visitors (airfare from Honolulu to Lanai is included in all bookings through March 31), most hotels aren’t offering big discounts compared with the bargain basement airfares currently available from major U.S. carriers. That’s because there is still healthy tourist traffic to Hawaii this winter, and Virtuoso’s Belles says that there is more demand than supply.
“People want to naturally go there. They have been reopening their doors methodically, in a very structured way, to ensure safety,” Belles says. “Beyond standard tourism, Hawaii is being creative by attracting people to come and stay for longer durations, ensuring more money moves through their economy for longer periods of time.”


fortune--2020-12-21--Everything to know about the stimulus deal—including $600 checks and $300 unemployment benefits

The broken business model of Uber and Lyft is taking a heavy toll on society

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We finally have a deal.
On a whirlwind Sunday, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell announced that lead Republicans and Democrats reached a deal for a $900 billion stimulus package. The relief package will send most Americans a $600 stimulus check. And the bill provides $300 weekly enhanced unemployment payments to most jobless Americans.
The $900 billion stimulus package is scaled back from the $2.2 trillion CARES Act passed in March, but it is on par with the $787 billion stimulus package signed into law in 2009 by President Barack Obama.
The deal, which was struck on Sunday and still needs to be passed by the Senate and House, would also include funds for small business loans, vaccines, schools, and $25 billion in rental assistance (as well as an extension of the eviction moratorium). But even with funding to keep the government running expected to be renewed in a one-day stop gap vote in Congress Sunday night (with a seven-day extension expected to be taken up Monday), it leaves a tight timeline for lawmakers to review and pass the bill.
The deal marks the resolution of a drawn out, many-months-long debate in Congress over new relief amid the pandemic. “Make no mistake about it: This agreement is far from perfect, but it will deliver emergency relief to a nation in the throes of a genuine emergency,” Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer said Sunday.
How much will stimulus checks be worth?
The direct payments would be worth as much as $600 for individuals and each child dependent, and will phase-out for higher incomes. A spokesperson for Sen. Schumer confirmed the phase-out would be similar to the spring stimulus package: The CARES Act stimulus checks decreased for 2019 adjusted gross income—federally taxable income—above $75,000 per individual or $150,000 per qualified couple. Those checks completely phased out for individuals earning above $99,000, and joint filers with no children at $198,000.
The news capped off a frantic week as both parties rushed to make a deal before a slew of pandemic benefits expired this month—including some unemployment benefits and eviction moratoriums.
What notably isn’t included in the deal is fresh funding for state and local aid, a key Democratic wish, and COVID-19 lawsuit protection for businesses, a big Republican ask. Both provisions weren’t in the most recent iteration of a $748 billion bipartisan bill either, and leaders like McConnell recently proposed dropping the two sticking points from a deal in order to get it done quickly.
Unemployment assistance extended
The extension of pandemic unemployment provisions is welcome news to the more than 19 million Americans currently receiving jobless benefits. Around 13 million of those current recipients were set to lose their benefits the week of Dec. 26 when Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) are set to expire. The package would extend both PUA and PEUC, providing $300 weekly enhanced benefits up to 11 weeks. PUA expands unemployment benefits to gig workers and self-employed Americans, and PEUC provides 13 weeks of additional unemployment benefits to qualified individuals. However, given how late the deal was reached, it’s likely there may be lags in getting benefits to recipients because of the need to reprogram states’ systems.
The deal comes as economists worry the country’s economic recovery could be at risk. The rebound that started off strong in the summer, with 4.8 million jobs added in June alone, has slowed. Only 245,000 jobs were added in November. At that pace, it would take until late 2023 for employment to fully recover to pre-pandemic levels.
A spokesperson for McConnell could not be reached for comment.


fortune--2020-12-21--Tesla’s addition to the S&P 500 on Monday could be a shock for these big name stocks

Tesla Inc.’s historic entry into the S&P 500 could be bad news for shareholders of some other stocks in the index — at least temporarily.
Funds that mimic the benchmark are set to buy more than $70 billion of the carmaker’s shares and dump an equal amount of stock in existing members, producing intense selling pressure that could lead to dislocations, warned Greg Sutton, head of portfolio trading at Citadel Securities, one of the most active traders of U.S. stocks.
The potential funding stress is one factor that had prompted the index’s overseers to consider implementing the addition in two tranches. After consulting with the financial community, S&P Dow Jones Indices decided that Tesla will join the traditional way: in one shot, before markets open on Monday. The danger is that trading in many stocks may not be active enough to absorb the sudden deluge of supply.
“Adding it all at once creates more stock that needs to be sold for the funding trade, which potentially creates more impact — especially in less-liquid components of the S&P 500,” Sutton said by phone. “The market can digest it, but there is the potential for liquidity impact.”
While S&P 500 members get shuffled frequently, Tesla’s enormous size adds an unusual layer of uncertainty this time. Boasting a market capitalization of more than $600 billion, Elon Musk’s company is joining as the sixth-largest company in the index. Since the stock it’s replacing — Apartment Investment and Management Co. — is only a tiny fraction of Tesla’s size, all other constituents are at risk of feeling the pinch.
To Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P Dow Jones, the Tesla trade is the easier one to execute for professionals because it’s just a matter of how much they are willing to pay. A bigger challenge, as he sees it, involves hundreds of stocks that are up for sale virtually at the same time.
“It’s things that they’ve all done before, just not on this magnitude,” Silverblatt said. “There should be a lot of commotion, but hopefully it goes smooth.”
Just before U.S. exchanges opened on Friday, Cboe Global Markets Inc. said it experienced an issue with reporting some Tesla trades to a computer system that consolidates price quotes from all of the various exchanges and trading venues into a single data feed. The problem was resolved less than five minutes after the open of exchanges, Cboe said.
Berkshire Hathaway Inc., Procter & Gamble Co. and Johnson & Johnson are among stocks facing the risks from elevated selling pressure, according to data compiled by Kevin Muir of the MacroTourist blog. The trio is estimated to each have a number of shares to be disposed that is equal to the average daily trading volume in the past three months. While that may not sound like a lot, imagine if the selling flares up in the final minutes of Friday’s session, the last window of trading before Tesla’s entry. That’s the time when passive investors tend to step up transactions so as to track the benchmark as close as possible.
To be sure, mammoth additions like this have happened before. Tesla is the biggest entrant by market value in history. However, when measured as a percentage of the S&P 500, its weighting is similar to Berkshire Hathaway’s in 2010, when Warren Buffett’s firm was picked to join, data compiled by Sanford C. Bernstein showed. Yet with passive investing now accounting for roughly half of equity funds, up from 30% a decade ago, the funding requirement this time will be much higher, warned analysts including Toni Sacconaghi and Ann Larson.
Tesla shares rose almost 2% as of 10:58 a.m. New York time. Since S&P Dow Jones announced the news of Tesla’s addition on Nov. 16, the stock has rallied more than 60%. Over the stretch, about 52 million shares changed hands each day on average, 77% more than the previous month. During the past decade, the 10 biggest new entrants climbed an average 10% from the announcement until the actual inclusion, Bernstein’s analysis showed.
Money managers may have already started adjusting portfolios in anticipation of the changes, with Tesla’s share offering earlier this month providing an opportunity to build positions. Some may opt to carry out part of the trade in the days leading up to the event, leaving some residual amount to work out around Friday’s close. To minimize tracking errors, or deviation from the benchmark, some may choose to use market-on-close orders or turn to options to help performance.
“They’re going to be pulling out all the stops,” said Ben Johnson, director of global ETF research at Morningstar Inc. “They are not going to be taking any one singular approach, not using any one tactic in isolation, but using all of the different tools that are available to them to try to again leave no footprint and minimize the cost to their investors.”
Friday is poised to be one of the busiest trading sessions on record, with other market events scheduled that typically spur a torrent of equity transactions — index rebalances as well as expirations of options and futures on indexes and equities.
U.S. stock volume hit an all-time high of more than 19 billion shares a day in late February amid bear-market carnage. While some stocks may suffer dislocations because of Tesla-related selling, Sutton at Citadel Securities is confident the broader market structure is well equipped to handle the turbulence.
What happened earlier this year “was actually a decent stress test for the system and overall everything seemed to work well,” Sutton said.
(Updates with Cboe reporting issue with some Tesla trades in eighth paragraph)


fortune--2020-12-20--Stimulus deal reached: leaders announce agreement on COVID-19 relief package, government funding bil

Stimulus deal reached: leaders announce agreement on COVID-19 relief package, government funding bill

Top Capitol Hill negotiators sealed a deal Sunday on an almost $1 trillion COVID-19 economic relief package, finally delivering long-overdue help to businesses and individuals and providing money to deliver vaccines to a nation eager for them.
The agreement, announced by Senate leaders, would establish a temporary $300 per week supplemental jobless benefits and $600 direct stimulus payments to most Americans, along with a new round of subsidies for hard-hit businesses and money for schools, health care providers and renters facing eviction.
The House was expected to vote on the legislation very late Sunday or Monday and Senate action would follow. Lawmakers are eager to leave Washington and close out a tumultuous year.
A breakthrough came late Saturday in a fight over Federal Reserve emergency powers that was resolved by the Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer of New York, and conservative Republican Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. That led to a final round of negotiations.
The final agreement is the largest spending measure yet. It combines COVID-19 relief with a $1.4 trillion government-wide funding plan and lots of other unrelated measures on taxes, health, infrastructure and education.
Passage is nearing as coronavirus cases and deaths spike and evidence piles up that the economy is struggling.
Late-breaking decisions would limit the $300 per week bonus jobless benefits — one half the supplemental federal unemployment benefit provided under the CARES Act in March — to 10 weeks instead of 16 weeks as before. The direct $600 stimulus payment to most people is also half the March payment, subject to the same income limits in which an individual’s payment begins to phase out after $75,000.
President Donald Trump is supportive, particularly of the push for providing more direct payments. “GET IT DONE,” he said in a tweet late Saturday.
It would be the first significant legislative response to the pandemic since the $1.8 trillion CARES Act passed virtually unanimously in March.
The legislation was held up by months of dysfunction, posturing and bad faith. But talks turned serious last week as lawmakers on both sides finally faced the deadline of acting before leaving Washington for Christmas.
In the meantime, with a government shutdown deadline looming at midnight Sunday, lawmakers faced the reality of needing to enact another temporary spending bill — the second in as many days — to avert a shutdown of non-essential activities by federal agencies on Monday.
Lawmakers had hoped to avoid that step, but progress slowed Saturday as Toomey pressed for the inclusion of a provision to close down the Fed’s lending facilities. Democrats and the White House said it was too broadly worded and would have tied the hands of the incoming Biden administration, but Republicans rallied to Toomey’s position.
The Fed’s emergency programs provided loans to small and mid-size businesses and bought state and local government bonds. Those bond purchases made it easier for those governments to borrow, at a time when their finances were under pressure from job losses and health costs stemming from the pandemic.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said last month that those programs, along with two that purchased corporate bonds, would close at the end of the year, prompting an initial objection by the Fed. Under the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law passed after the Great Recession, the Fed can only set up emergency programs with the support of the treasury secretary.
Toomey said the emergency powers were designed to stabilize capital markets at the height of the pandemic this spring and were expiring at the end of the month anyway. Democrats said that Toomey was trying to limit the Fed’s ability to boost the economy, just as President-elect Joe Biden prepared to take office.
The agreement on virus aid would deliver more than $300 billion in aid to businesses as well as the extra $300-per-week for the jobless and renewal of state benefits that would otherwise expire right after Christmas. It included $600 direct payments to individuals; vaccine distribution funds; and money for renters, schools, the Postal Service and people needing food aid.
The governmentwide appropriations bill would fund agencies through next September. That measure was likely to provide a last $1.4 billion installment for Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border wall as a condition of winning his signature.


fortune--2020-12-20--Stimulus update: leaders appear on the brink of a Sunday deal including $600 checks

Top Washington negotiators, propelled by a late-night agreement on the last major obstacle to a COVID-19 economic relief package, said a Sunday agreement is all but inevitable to deliver long-overdue pandemic aid of almost $1 trillion.
“I am very hopeful that we get this done today,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., told Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”
The breakthrough involved a fight over Federal Reserve emergency powers that was resolved by the Senate’s top Democrat and a senior conservative Republican. Aides to lawmakers in both parties said the compromise sparked a final round of negotiations on a handful of remaining issues.
An aide to a key GOP lawmaker said it would likely require all of Sunday to finalize and draft the final agreement, which is already guaranteed to be the largest spending measure yet, combining COVID-19 relief with a $1.4 trillion omnibus spending bill and reams of other unrelated legislation on taxes, health, infrastructure and education.
The measure is finally nearing passage amid a frightening spike in coronavirus cases and deaths and accumulating evidence that the economy is struggling. Lawmakers and aides say it would establish a temporary $300 per week supplemental jobless benefits and $600 direct stimulus payments to most Americans. It would provide a fresh round of subsidies for hard-hit businesses and money for schools, health care providers and renters facing eviction.
President Donald Trump is supportive, particularly of the push for providing more direct payments. “GET IT DONE,” he said in a late-night tweet.
It would be the first significant legislative response to the pandemic since the $1.8 trillion CARES Act passed virtually unanimously in March.
The COVID-19 legislation was held up by months of dysfunction, posturing and bad faith. But talks turned serious last week as lawmakers on both sides finally faced the deadline of acting before leaving Washington for Christmas.
The measure is being added to a $1.4 trillion spending bill and combined with lots of other unfinished work, including previously stalled legislation to extend tax breaks, authorize water projects, and address the problem of surprise sky-high medical bills for out-of-network procedures.
It would be virtually impossible for lawmakers to read and fully understand the sprawling legislation before a House vote expected on Monday. Senate action would follow.
In the meantime, with a government shutdown deadline looming at midnight Sunday, lawmakers faced the reality of needing to enact another temporary spending bill — the second in as many days — to avert a shutdown of non-essential activities by federal agencies on Monday.
Lawmakers had hoped to avoid that step, but progress slowed Saturday as GOP Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania pressed for the inclusion of a provision to close down Fed lending facilities. Democrats and the White House said it was too broadly worded and would have tied the hands of the incoming Biden administration, but Republicans rallied to Toomey’s position.
The Fed’s emergency programs provided loans to small and mid-size businesses and bought state and local government bonds. Those bond purchases made it easier for those governments to borrow, at a time when their finances were under pressure from job losses and health costs stemming from the pandemic.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said last month that those programs, along with two that purchased corporate bonds, would close at the end of the year, prompting an initial objection by the Fed. Under the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law passed after the Great Recession, the Fed can only set up emergency programs with the support of the treasury secretary.
Toomey defended his provision in a Senate speech, saying the emergency powers were designed to stabilize capital markets at the height of the pandemic this spring and were expiring at the end of the month anyway. Democrats said that Toomey was trying to limit the Fed’s ability to boost the economy, just as President-elect Joe Biden prepared to take office.
“This is about existing authorities that the Fed has had for a very long time, to be able to use in an emergency,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. “It’s about a lending authority for helping small businesses, state government, local government in the middle of a crisis.”
Toomey disputed that, saying his proposal “is emphatically not a broad overhaul of the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending authority.” His office issued a statement early Sunday calling the compromise with Schumer “an unqualified victory for taxpayers” that met Toomey’s aim of shutting down the emergency facility.
The emerging agreement on virus aid would deliver more than $300 billion in aid to businesses as well as the extra $300-per-week for the jobless and renewal of state benefits that would otherwise expire right after Christmas. It included $600 direct payments to individuals; vaccine distribution funds; and money for renters, schools, the Postal Service and people needing food aid.
The governmentwide appropriations bill would fund agencies through next September. That measure was likely to provide a last $1.4 billion installment for Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border wall as a condition of winning his signature.


fortune--2020-12-20--It’s not clear whether ‘mutant’ COVID strain has made it from the U.K. to the U.S.

It’s not clear whether a more transmissible variant of the coronavirus that prompted tighter restrictions in the U.K. has made its way to the U.S., according to Moncef Slaoui, chief scientific adviser for the government’s vaccine acceleration program.
“We don’t know,” Slaoui said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” on Sunday. “We’re looking at that.”
Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir questioned the threat posed by the virus changes cited by the U.K. government, saying the coronavirus blamed for Covid-19 has mutated more than 4,000 times since its discovery. There’s no imminent need to suspend flights from the U.K., he said on ABC’s “This Week.”
“We don’t know that it’s more dangerous, and very importantly we have not seen a single mutation yet that would make it evade the vaccine,” and while that can’t be ruled out for the future, “I don’t think there should be any reason for alarm right now,” Giroir said.
The new variant may be as much as 70% more transmissible, which led U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson to announce a lockdown for London and large parts of southeast England on Saturday. He canceled plans to ease pandemic restrictions for five days over the holidays, and banned household mixing in London and the southeast while restricting socializing to just Christmas Day across the rest of England.
Vaccinate Trump?
Even if the variant does become more widespread, Slaoui said the vaccines that are now rolling out will provide protection against it. That includes the Moderna Inc. vaccine that received approval from U.S. regulators Friday, and Slaoui said the first shots are expected to be administered Monday.
Giroir, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, urged President Donald Trump to get vaccinated against Covid-19 to promote acceptance of immunization among his supporters.
“Again, we have every reason to believe that these two vaccines are very effective and they are safe,” he said. “So I would encourage the president to get a vaccine for his own health and safety, and also to generate more confidence among the people who follow him so closely.”
Vice President Mike Pence and his wife Karen Pence received the coronavirus vaccine developed by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE in a televised event at the White House on Friday.


fortune--2020-12-20--From pet adoptions to D.I.Y. home improvement to sweatpants: 10 COVID-fueled consumer trends that wi

From pet adoptions to D.I.Y. home improvement to sweatpants: 10 COVID-fueled consumer trends that will endure

As Americans have hunkered down amid the continuing pandemic, the unable to engage in travel or their usual social activities, they’ve sought different outlets for their energies, and by extension, their spending.
Millions people across the country, lonely looking to occupy bored kids, adopted pets in record numbers. Others figured they might as well fix their roof or set up a new home office in their basement. Another cadre of people doubled down on streaming entertainment into their home while theaters were closed, or set up their own home gyms. Legions of shoppers discovered they are happy to go to a store to pick up an online order without having to go inside, or pay without having to touch anything other than their own phone.
“The way consumers want to shop has permanently shifted, and it’s not going back,” Sonia Lapinsky, a managing director at AlixPartners, tells Fortune. Services like curbside pickup and contactless payment are now “table stakes.”
While a lot of consumer behavior could revert to what it was pre-COVID, some of these shifts are here to stay. Here are some of the consumer trends Fortune thinks will endure after most Americans are vaccinated and the pandemic has eased.
Puppy love
Americans have gone wild for dogs (and, to a lesser extent, cats), leading to a surge in adoptions that has fueled the pet industry. Petco, which aims to return to the stock market soon, said sales were up 16% last quarter, while Chewy saw business spike by nearly 50%. The legions of new ‘pet parents’ will only accelerate the pre-pandemic trend toward the humanization of pets, so expect the rise of fido-oriented to spending to continue.
Home is where the spending is
In November, consumers did what they’ve been doing since the pandemic broke out: spending less on fashionable clothing—but much more on home projects. With analysts expecting home values to hold steady, and more Americans working from home at least part of the time even once it’s safe to venture out into the world again, home improvement projects will continue apace and solidify Lowe’s and Home Depotas two of retail’s biggest winners.
Handmade crafts
Etsy has thrived during the pandemic, partly by selling enormous quantities of face masks ($130 million-worth in the first quarter alone); the company’s revenue doubled in the first nine months of the year. The handmade goods e-commerce site, which has made big strides in improving the reliability of its sellers’ delivery of orders, has attracted many new entrepreneurs, including more than a few needing to supplement their incomes during a brutal recession. Along the way, it has tapped into a significant cultural shift that is seeing many consumers seeking more customized products than what they can find at big-box stores.
Curbside pickup
It might seem like pedestrian service for shoppers, but curbside pickup has made all the difference in determining retail’s winners and losers are this year. Chains like Petco and Ulta Beauty that didn’t offer the service before the pandemic but quickly stood it up as spring lockdowns limited retail options immediately saw the benefit. And now that shoppers have gotten used to the convenience of retrieving online orders in a way that doesn’t even require them to leave their car—and with a speed that makes it hard for even Amazon to compete—expect customers to make curbside a regular part of how they shop.
Casual and cozy are in , dressy is out
Work from home turned sweatpants into office wear and deepened the so-called “casualization” of the American wardrobe. With workers not so concerned about professional attire—at least from the waist down—and fewer events for people to get fancy for, 2021 saw overall apparel sales plummet. The exception to the rule: retailers specializing in athletic wear or casual clothing. To see that schism playing out in companies’ bottom lines, just compare the results of struggling fashion retailers like Banana Republic, Macy’s or Nordstrom with those of those of Lululemon Athleta or Old Navy. Expect the trend toward casual wear to continue into 2021, with American offices unlikely to be teeming with people again anytime soon.
E-commerce for the little guy
In March, as non-essential retailers like Kohl’s and Old Navy were ordered to close stores indefinitely, they were least able to fall back on big and established e-commerce businesses. Not so for countless small local stores. That has led to a surge in such companies going the Shopify route to quickly build a digital business. Shopify, which provides the tech needed to operate an e-commerce site, said sales on websites using its technology rose 76% over the Black Friday-Cyber Monday period—with much of that growth fueled by companies new to online selling.
Who needs a gym?
Peloton’s sales skyrocketed as gyms closed for weeks nationwide and the more affluent sought other ways to stay in shape. (The stationary bike maker’s sales more than tripled last quarter.) But many Americans also gravitated toward less expensive means of staying fit, creating a new cycling and running boom. That has now translated into surge in ski equipment sales for the colder months.
Zooming in
As much as we talk about “Zoom fatigue,” videoconferencing has been an essential way for people to stay connected, professionally and socially. It remains to be seen whether Zoom itself will maintain its overwhelming popularity as security-minded corporations are increasingly gravitating toward services like Microsoft Teams and Google Meet. But with videoconferencing technology vastly improved and work-from-home likely to remain a popular option, this way of remotely connected isn’t going away any time soon.
Movies from the comfort of home
Netflix, HBO Max, and similar services have become a lifeline for tens of millions of Americans during the pandemic, allowing them to binge watch programs at a time of their choosing. Unless people miss audience members talking or eating loudly during a movie, it’s hard to see viewers reverting en masse to movie houses—with the likely exception of seeing blockbuster movies that demand the big screen. And at least some of the Hollywood studios seem to be signaling that they agree: Warner Bros said this month it would release all of its 2021 movies in theaters and on HBO Max simultaneously.
Contactless payment
Even before the pandemic, more and more businesses were going cashless, despite misgivings from some local government regulators that this excludes America’s sizable “unbanked” population. But with COVID-19, the ability to conduct a transaction without touching anything—via ‘tap-and-pay’—became a selling point for many stores and restaurants. By mid-2020, the use of contactless payment had nearly tripled in the U.S. compared to spring 2019. The convenience and ease of this touch-free option will make it a fixture in U.S. consumer spending.


fortune--2020-12-20--It’s time for progressive white women to do more for racial equality

It is now well-known that a narrow majority of white women, once again, voted for Trump this November. There’s a lot to unpack.
In my Wonder Media Network podcast, White Picket Fence, I do a deep dive into the topic, exploring the many influences on white women’s identities and politics. What I’ve discovered is that moving our national conversation about race, gender, and politics to something more constructive requires more than “hot takes” on exit polls. We should be concerned by the growth of a base ginned up on misinformation and white grievance. But the overwhelming focus on white women who vote Republican shifts some of the responsibility from where it needs to be: on the shoulders of progressive white women.
I am one of those progressive white women, And the more I’ve examined white women’s identities and politics, the more I’m convinced that building a more just and equitable nation requires more of us. We must go deeper and re-examine some of our own long-held beliefs about our personal politics.
Growing up in a suburb of Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota, my family’s yard was often littered with election signs. We were a family of volunteers, activists, and all-around political junkies. My dad had spent 13 years in a Catholic religious order, and although he left to marry my mom, social justice remained a strong guiding force. My mother was a biology and women’s studies professor. I was the “nerdy” kid who subscribed to Ms. Magazine and dreamed about running for office.
My interest in presidential politics was piqued when Walter Mondale—former vice president and U.S. senator from Minnesota—chose Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate in 1984. I was ten years old, and I was ecstatic—certain there was about to be a woman in the White House. Inspired by Ferraro, I launched my own campaign that year: for class student council representative. When I won, my teacher announced it as the “official start” of my political career.
On Election Day, I ran home from school, proudly informing my parents that the Mondale-Ferraro ticket had won a resounding victory in my class’s mock election. I settled in to watch election returns, confident that I was about to witness history in the making.
I did—but not the kind I was expecting. The 1984 election was a landslide for Ronald Reagan. I remember staring in shock at the blue specks of Minnesota and Washington, D.C., amidst a sea of red. It was the first time I realized that my world wasn’t the world.
It was a crushing disappointment for a young kid. But that election instilled something else in me: a sense of political “specialness.” The story I told myself was that my state, my community, even my family, was different. We believed in the common good. We invested in things like public schools, a social safety net, a clean environment. We were a welcoming state. Racial injustice? That was something that happened in other parts of the country. In Minnesota, we did things “right.”
I grew up, moved away, and built a career in philanthropy and politics. But even as I developed an understanding of how deep and structural the problems facing our nation are, I retained that sense of “specialness.” That by growing up in the place that I did, in the time that I did, I had some unique insight into what “good” politics looked like.
There wasn’t one moment that permanently disabused me of that notion. But like many of us, 2016 turned my world upside down.
On Election Day, I went to the polls with my then two-year-old son. After casting my vote, I took a selfie holding my son in my arms. We were both beaming at the camera, wearing “I Voted” stickers. Things had come full circle. That night, I was confident that my son would witness the triumph that had eluded me as a child: a woman in the White House. Hillary Clinton as the first woman president.
But Trump’s election wasn’t the only event of 2016 that made me seriously question my political story. A few months earlier, Philando Castile was killed by a police officer during a routine traffic stop. His murder happened about a mile away from my childhood home. And the following year, the officer who shot him was acquitted of all charges.
The truth is, the community of my childhood is plagued by the same injustice that exists everywhere. There was nothing special about us—or our politics. The “good” liberal politics of my Minnesota childhood may have produced many favorable outcomes when it comes to education, health, and quality of life, but it masked deep racial inequality that continues to this day. And the self-aggrandizing political story I constructed obscured my own complicity with the status quo.
As an adult, I purchased a home close to “good” public school for my son, further solidifying segregated housing patterns forged through decades of redlining and predatory lending practices. I availed myself of financial support from my parents that helped me with a down payment, thereby perpetuating racial privilege and giving my family an unearned leg up. My housing choices have meant that my family spends a good deal of time in predominantly white spaces.
None of these were intentionally racist acts. But as Prairie View A&M Endowed Professor of Political Science and New York Times columnist Melanye Price told me on the podcast, “The complement of your privilege is my disadvantage.” White women—white people—cannot retain our privilege while fighting for equity.
It can be tempting for progressive white women to pat ourselves on the back and view those “other” white women as the problem. But let’s be clear: voting Donald Trump out of office was the bare minimum of what it requires to move this country forward. We must also interrogate why it’s hard for so many of us to cede the racial privilege that remains our birthright. Do we work to ensure that our own kids’ public schools are well-funded and supported, while not engaging—or even opposing—efforts to equalize school funding across schools or districts? Do we advocate for or against housing zoning changes that would permit multi-family housing in affluent neighborhoods? Do we engage in fights for racial justice consistently, or only sporadically, like this past summer, when the depths of racial injustice and Black suffering become impossible to ignore?
It’s time to shift the white woman story. To make it less about “them” and more about “all of us.” And to step up in the ways that we must, through this continuous political action, alongside and led by communities of color. For it is through this engagement—this ongoing practice that goes well-beyond any one particular election—that progressive white women can own our stake in building a nation that reflects the values we profess to hold.
Julie Kohler is a fellow in residence at the National Women’s Law Center, a senior advisor to the Democracy Alliance, and the host of the podcast, White Picket Fence.


fortune--2020-12-20--Men named Jo(h)n have written as many of 2020’s top business books as all women combined

Of the year’s 200 bestselling business books, only 17 were written by women. That’s equal to the number of business bestsellers written by men named John or Jon. (And this phenomenon isn’t unique to book lists—research has shown that men named John outnumber the women who are Fortune 500 chief executives and hold other high-ranking jobs.)
The top titles by women in 2020, according to sales data from the NPD Group/NPD BookScan, include new releases from Suze Orman (The Ultimate Retirement Guide for 50+) and older books from Brené Brown (Dare to Lead) and Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In). The women authors on the list are overwhelmingly white. Shellye Archambeau, who wrote Unapologetically Ambitious: Take Risks, Break Barriers, and Create Success on Your Own Terms, is one of the few women of color.
It’s nothing new to see women underrepresented on these business bestseller lists—and the problem is getting worse. In 2019 women authors occupied 11.5% of the spots, and in 2018 it was 13%. Sadly, this year their share has dropped to 8.5%. One of the bestselling business books for 2020 written by a man is about the disgraced Elizabeth Holmes, founder and former CEO of Theranos—it seems like one story about businesswomen that people love to hear over and over again is when they fail.
Why is the absence of women, especially BIPOC women, a problem? Because it distorts everybody’s perception of what the ideal leader and innovator looks like. It adds to the tired narrative that women aren’t daring risk-takers. Changing who we choose to publish and read is an urgent step toward correcting this bogus narrative and expanding business opportunities for women everywhere.
Publishers have a long-running fondness for business books by white guys who are CEOs of big corporations, high-ranking military leaders, and celebrated professors—so it’s no surprise we end up with so many bestsellers written by the same. In May, when entrepreneur and investor Kathryn Finney announced she was writing a book for Portfolio, Penguin’s business imprint, she said she was the first Black woman ever to get a deal with the two-decade-old imprint.
Arlan Hamilton is a prominent venture capitalist who in 2018 tweeted that she was fed up seeing the business sections of bookstores filled with titles by white men. “I vow to help change this,” she wrote at the time. She delivered in May with her book It’s About Damn Time: How to Turn Being Underestimated Into Your Greatest Advantage.
Hamilton didn’t go to college. Instead, she relied on books to begin her self-education of startups and venture capital. A favorite was Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson. While such books were invaluable to her, Hamilton, a Black lesbian, has complained that she couldn’t read business advice from someone “who looked or sounded like me.”
I’ve spent the last four years researching entrepreneurship’s gender gap, interviewing more than 100 women and nonbinary entrepreneurs, and they’ve told me how crucial it is to have role models who look and sound like themselves. Yet women who want to start a company or simply work for a great one often struggle to find success stories to emulate.
Women are too often missing from business school case studies and even as contestants on Shark Tank. An informal survey released by Electric Literature last year found that only a small fraction of women’s memoirs emphasize work; they focus instead on family life or trauma. Media coverage of women in business has seen infuriating missteps. In September 2019, when Forbes released its America’s Most Innovative Leaders list featuring 102 founders and CEOs, only one was a woman.
In response, more than 50 women CEOs signed an open letter to voice their frustration: “A list like this also has major ripple impacts. It governs who gets tapped for boards, which candidates get to interview, who speaks at conference podiums, and who gets funding for their next gig.” I would add that it influences who gets book deals.
Women aren’t being snubbed for a lack of business acumen. Startups founded by women produce higher revenue than those launched by men and achieve faster exits. Companies with women CEOs and CFOs see higher profits and stock returns.
And this isn’t just about being “fair.” Men, especially those who work for women bosses, would also benefit from reading more examples of successful women business leaders. Men need women role models just as much as women do.
We need to rethink who we’re publishing, who we’re reviewing, and who we’re reading. The Jo(h)ns have had their turn.
Susanne Althoff is an assistant professor of publishing at Emerson College, the former editor of the Boston Globe Magazine, and the author of the new book Launching While Female: Smashing the System That Holds Women Entrepreneurs Back.


fortune--2020-12-21--Why middle managers are feeling the most stressed out during COVID

Tesla ’ s addition to the S & P 500 on Monday could be a shock for these big name @

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Plenty of teams have switched to working remotely since March. Now enough time has passed that many are starting to ask: What’s actually working?
That was the topic of a recent virtual panel presented by Fortune and Slack’s Future Forum called “Reimagine Work: New Ways to Lead.”
Brian Elliott, who leads the Future Forum, said that his company’s research showed a stark divide in terms of how different groups of employees are experiencing—and adapting to—remote work. When it came to having stress at work and wrestling with social isolation, “middle managers stood out,” he said. According to his company’s survey of 9,000 knowledge workers around the globe, middle managers were 91% more likely to say they were having trouble working remotely when compared to individuals and senior executives. And while more junior and more senior team members largely felt that they were more productive working remotely, middle managers were 36% below individual contributors on that scale, with only 60% feeling that they could manage their workload.
To blame? While many middle managers lack the extensive networks of their more senior counterparts, they may also have less control over their own schedules, leading to “meeting burnout.” Because of their ages, these mid-career execs are often working parents who are trying to balance caregiving responsibilities that have bled into the workday. Overall, they are “feeling the squeeze even more in this remote work environment,” said Elliott.
Raj Choudhury, a Harvard Business School professor who just authored an HBR cover story on remote work, made the case that the responsibility falls on companies to help mitigate the challenges and opportunities brought about by “work from anywhere,” and doing so successfully involves a rethinking of productivity, communication, and even socializing. He argued that socializing virtually can actually be more effective than relying on the “watercooler,” because it allows you to expand your network far beyond the people you’d generally see day to day at the office. The key, he thinks, are “planned randomized interactions” whereby a company draws a group together for short bursts of time, cutting across hierarchy and geography.
That tracks with what Jenny Johnson, president and CEO of global investment firm Franklin Templeton, has found as well. She says giving individual team leaders the freedom to set their own priorities and processes when it comes to WFH has been key. She’s told her CIOs to “use this time to push the envelope on how you can flexibly work so you’re the one that is poaching talent.” They’ve also experimented with encouraging networking within the company with specific asks. For instance, they’ll say, “We want you to reach out virtually to five people you don’t know before your next meeting.”
Finally, all the panelists endorsed the idea that when you can’t physically work together, you have to work harder to let everyone know what people are working on. Darren Murph, whose job title is head of remote at GitLab, says this kind of transparency is radically important right now. “With no office, people recognize gaps and silos. If you can’t see what people are working on, you feel like you belong less,” he said. Seeing other teams’ goals and progress and status, “makes us feel like we belong to a team.”
Slack’s Elliott added that, especially when faced with those overtaxed middle managers, “don’t be afraid to get super tactical.” He said at his company they’ve “built opportunities for middle managers to get together” to discuss and compare obstacles and solutions. “Private conversations about your workload plus public conversations about your [company] priorities really help with the stress level,” he said.