fortune--2020-06-25--Former Honeywell CEO David Cote just wrote one of the best guides ever on how to lead a company

Dave Cote just delivered the War and Peace of books on corporate leadership. The former Honeywell CEO’s Winning Now, Winning Later is such a rich, unusual entry in the genre because instead of running through his favorite management maxims, Cote provides a gripping, on-the-scene account of how he deployed a series of bedrock principles to transform a flailing conglomerate. The lessons come to life because the reader witnesses Cote, over 16 years ending in 2018, relentlessly putting them into practice to meet the biggest challenge in corporate America: balancing the short-term success demanded by investors with sowing the seeds for rewards that will only be harvested years hence, but are essential to achieving greatness.
Current and aspiring CEOs should pay close attention, because for Cote, many of America’s big companies are wrestling with how to invest for the future while still generating the quarterly results shareholders expect. “Businesses are little more than a collection of processes,” he says in the book. “And in most companies, the processes can go a long way towards becoming more efficient and effective.” For Cote, remaking those processes to get maximum results from people and assets requires achieving two seemingly conflicting things at the same time. It’s that 3D thinking that brought the big breakthroughs at Honeywell.
It’s fulfilling these “we can do both” imperatives that lifts enterprises to their full potential. And the most important is simultaneously achieving what many managers find vexing if not impossible, “making the numbers” while at the same time making the daring bets to ensure those numbers will be far higher five years from now. As his book’s title suggests, Cote swears the idea that CEOs must choose between winning now and winning later is wrong: They must find a way to do both. Thinking short- and long-term works in concert since you need today’s profits to fund tomorrow’s hits. He shows how Honeywell succeeded in constantly improving its most lucrative existing products, from airline components to gas detection devices, to increase quarterly earnings, while simultaneously plowing billions into next-generation projects that took five or six years to harvest, then paid off big.
The book is packed with other examples of taking two actions that seem to butt heads and getting them to march arm in arm. While many companies think they need big inventories to ensure fast delivery to customers, Cote shows how it’s possible to both reduce stocks and lower shipment times by expertly managing the supply chain.
Cote also believes that companies should advance not in giant leaps but small agile steps. “It’s survival of the most flexible,” he writes. “Revolutionary change is not the key to short- or long-term performance. It’s a huge risk. Revolutions move in unintended directions. The best change is gradual change.” His goal is to stay just ahead of the market as opposed to betting heavily on future trends that may not play out, or falling behind so that only demoralizing, disruptive restructurings can save the company.
For Cote, it’s best to spread plant closures and layoffs over a number of years. Another tenet: Making lots of small targeted acquisitions is more profitable, and a lot less dangerous, than chasing the transformational whales. His contrarian thinking extends to personnel matters. Forget the “praise in public, criticize in private” maxim, says Cote. When a business head makes an inadequate plan for building his or her business, the CEO should uncork the likes of “This is unacceptable, go back and fix it”––and explain why––in front of the assembled peers to demonstrate that he’s setting a high standard.
The official publication date for Winning Now, Winning Later is June 30. But Cote gave Fortune an exclusive first look. I also interviewed him extensively to glean further insights. The overriding theme from both the book and these conversations is that this son of a rural New Hampshire gas station owner regards leadership as both highly intellectual, and highly hands-on. How many CEOs take full days, sans appointments, to think big and hatch bold new initiatives?
David Cote’s new book “Winning Now, Winning Later”. Courtesy of HarperCollins Leadership
Yet Cote insists that “the idea you focus on strategy and outsource implementation to great people is wrong.” At Honeywell, he personally interviewed all candidates for the top 300 jobs, and for the first 90 days after making every one of its 100 acquisitions held monthly meetings to review their progress and quarterly reviews for the next year. At the same time, as one lieutenant put it, he showed the tenacity of “a big annoying bear threatening the livestock” in constantly monitoring the numbers to ensure that each business was adding sales faster than people, investing sufficiently while reaching the right balance in product enhancements and long-horizon projects, and generating strong and growing cash flow.
Winning Now, Winning Later opens by describing the deep-seated problems at Honeywell. According to Cote, the “short-termism” that plagued Honeywell is an issue many companies grapple with. The best argument that Cote’s formula can achieve the dual objectives in the book’s title is its spectacular success at Honeywell. From 2002 to 2018, Cote lifted Honeywell’s sales from $22 billion to $40 billion, took operating margins from 8% to 16%, and hiked the stock price fourfold, swelling the market cap from $20 billion to $120 billion, while spending $10 billion resolving environmental issues, including asbestos claims, and fully funding the underwater pension plan. Here are five original concepts and strategies that formed the Cote blueprint.
Defeating short-termism
In 1999, Cote left GE after a 25-year career, then served for two years as chief of TRW before going to Honeywell in February of 2002. Cote coveted the ultimate prize of running GE upon Jack Welch’s retirement, but departed when the legendary CEO said that Cote––then heading the appliance division––wasn’t a finalist. Had Cote gotten the nod instead of Jeff Immelt, it’s likely that GE would be a far more successful company than what it became by overpaying for acquisitions in power generation, oil and gas, and security systems, and using commercial paper at GE Capital to fund long-term loans, a practice that backfired during the financial crisis. The irony is that at Honeywell, Cote found some of the poor practices that he yearned to fix at GE. And it was by overhauling those crippling methods that Cote got Honeywell roaring while his alma mater sputtered.
Cote recalls that at GE, success was all about “making the quarterly numbers” at all costs. Any given year, the outfit where Cote was working would hire 1,000 people to grow sales. Then in October or November, the managers would discover that they couldn’t hit the targets for the following year without laying off 800 of the folks they just added. “Why, I wondered, hadn’t they thought ahead and only hired 200 people instead of 1,000? We didn’t think we had a choice,” he writes. The layoffs were highly disruptive and required big restructuring costs. For Cote, the better practice was what he did at Honeywell: getting his business heads and staff people to plan for the following year’s personnel and other financial commitments early in the current year, avoiding the need for this wrenching cycle of layoffs and rehiring.
At Honeywell, Cote found a mindset of what he brands “short-termism run horribly amuck.” Managers at the specialty chemicals, aerospace, automotive, and controls conglomerate would offer distributors special discounts at the end of a quarter to boost sales, a practice known as “distribution loading,” that enabled them to hit their targets. The businesses had to quickly inflate inventories to make the deliveries, but the shipping department often couldn’t keep up, creating bottlenecks and delays that antagonized customers. And businesses, wrongly guessing in advance what distributors would want, often filled warehouses with product their customers didn’t want.
Often, 25% of the revenues from aerospace, controls, and specialty chemicals businesses would come in the last week of the quarter. Instead of buying at regular prices in the early weeks, customers waited Honeywell out until the last few days, and in managers’ desperation to ramp up sales, the deals would get better as the quarter drew to a close.
To keep hitting the mark, the business heads would resort to more gimmicks such as selling good businesses to book quick profits, or securing one-time cash payments from suppliers in exchange for guaranteed future business. That locked Honeywell into deals with single vendors that forced them to overpay for components or services over long periods. To his horror, Cote learned as much as 20% of Honeywell’s reported earnings were coming from those one-time items known as “specials”: One plant manager in Louisiana even cut down trees in the forest adjoining the factory and sold the lumber to make the numbers––and received a performance reward for getting it done.
In aerospace, managers would compete for new contracts for wheels and brakes by providing the first hundred “ship sets” of those components for free. That’s standard practice in the industry. The difference was that Honeywell was capitalizing the cost of the ship sets and amortizing it over 20 years. “They did it,” says Cote, “because investors are much less alarmed by things that don’t go in the income statement.”
That wasn’t the only case of super-aggressive bookkeeping. Honeywell would capitalize R&D so that it spent the research dollars now, but spread the reported costs into the future. As a result, Honeywell’s reported profits kept rising faster than its cash flow, signaling that its facade of profitability was about to crumble. For the decade prior to Cote’s arrival, Honeywell was generating just 69¢ for every dollar in earnings, a sure sign of trouble.
It didn’t take long for trouble to strike. After Cote had served just a few months, the finance department revealed that earnings for the second half of 2002 would fall 20% below Honeywell’s forecast to Wall Street. “‘What the hell was going on?’ I asked,” writes Cote. “Their response, ‘Well, the financial goals we were trying to meet were never realistic to begin with.’” The finance chiefs brushed off managers’ complaints, telling them to “Just get it done.” Honeywell’s stock price dropped 25%, and an enraged Cote told everyone to drop the tricks––no more aggressive accounting, no more capitalizing R&D and ship sets, no more distribution loading, and no more “make the numbers” meetings hosted by the finance staff that drove all of those dysfunctional decisions.
Producing both long- and short-term profits
Although the “make the numbers or bust” mindset was hammering Honeywell, Cote still believed that achieving regular quarterly gains in earnings––reaping a healthy crop today, no gimmicks allowed––was essential to success. At the same time, Honeywell would need to start investing now in new products, services, and processes, as well as international expansion, to secure its future, by planting seeds for tomorrow.
“We would have to win today and set ourselves up for tomorrow,” he says. “I realized we could do both at the same time. Short- and long-term goals are more tightly intertwined than they appeared. Short-term results would validate that we were on the right long-term path.” What’s more, he added to me in an interview, each goal reinforces rather than contradicts the other.
To get there, Cote vowed to follow three principles. The first was “Scrub accounting and business practices down to what’s real.” Second came “Invest in the future but not excessively” followed by “Grow sales while keeping fixed costs constant.” The theme was to plow current earnings into the long-horizon projects such as next-gen aircraft cockpits and new molecules for refrigeration that Honeywell was shortchanging, but not invest too much.
Honeywell would maintain sufficient quarterly earnings to demonstrate consistent progress. By expanding sales while holding the fixed costs, consisting primarily of labor, constant, Honeywell could generate the savings to keep raising its spending on both big, multiyear systems and enhancements to existing products and services and still generate the short-term returns investors expected. Those practices would get the flywheel spinning, and a “virtuous cycle” would take hold, which would allow Honeywell to generate even more cash to invest, which would lead to further performance gains.
Growing sales without growing fixed costs
Cote’s plan for restraining costs came in two parts. First, he immediately demanded that the four big overhead functions, finance, human resources, legal, and IT, representing about one-fifth of fixed expenses, hold their annual dollar outlays at 2003 levels, forever. “The goal was to double sales, so that overhead would fall by 50% as a share of revenues,” he told me in an interview. As it turned out, the costs of the four functions actually fell by 30% or $1 billion over 15 years, so that spending rose more like 30¢ for each dollar gain in revenues. “We used part of the savings to improve IT for all four functions, so that we needed fewer managers,” says Cote. “For every 10 managers who retired or left, we only had to replace about seven.”
In line with his conviction to achieve two seemingly conflicting things at the same time, he also demanded that the four functions demonstrate better service to their internal Honeywell customers, as determined by anonymous surveys. Cote also taught the Honeywell brass to take on broader roles, so that he could run the company with far fewer leaders. The leadership ranks over 16 years shrank from 740 to 650 even as sales almost doubled. “I did it for two reasons,” says Cote, “to save costs, but most important, because leaders create work for other leaders, and instead of focusing on markets and customers, focus on satisfying each other.”
The second initiative was an epic campaign to boost productivity in manufacturing. “If you can grow output much faster than you add costs, including for payroll and floor space,” says Cote, “you’re bound to generate the savings that both fuel new investment, and increase quarterly earnings.” In 2005, Cote dispatched a team to study Toyota’s celebrated Toyota Production System, at the automaker’s plant in Georgetown, Ky. Over the next decade, Honeywell gradually rolled out its Honeywell Operating System or HOS, largely based on the TPS practices of engaging workers to recommend and implement improvements in their factory-floor tasks that save costs and improve quality.
The initiative was so successful that Honeywell over that period increased its sales per employee by two-thirds. HOS also enabled Honeywell to keep shrinking factory space as it made more and more product. By 2018, Honeywell was producing far bigger volumes in only 70% of the plant footprint it was using in 2002.
Early in Cote’s tenure, Honeywell was manufacturing sensors in 37 small plants. Cote asked the managers to do a “white paper” exercise imagining the ideal footprint if manufacturing could be redesigned from scratch. The answer was more like 12 factories that each produced much bigger volumes. In a classic Cote “go slow to go fast” maneuver, the sensors unit spent 10 years making that blueprint a reality by packing all production into a dozen plants. “We did it laying off just a few workers a year so that we didn’t disrupt customer service,” writes Cote. “It was part of our philosophy of constant restructuring.”
Cote notes he reached his expense targets while still increasing the number of workers in manufacturing. “We started with around 60,000 in 2002,” he said in an interview. “And we hired about 20,000 or 30%-plus over 15 years. The key was that we doubled the size of the company, so the revenues grew much faster than payroll.”
Those cost-savings plans freed the cash for both short- and long-cycle investments. For Cote, the bigger challenge by far was finding the right mega-bets that would swell earnings anywhere from two to six years hence. “We were already getting lots of enhancements on existing products because people wanted to make their numbers for the quarter,” he says. “HOS enabled us to make those improvements a lot faster, but the big one was the seed planting.” He writes that prior to his arrival, Honeywell was spreading investment dollars across a broad spectrum of projects without carefully assessing their potential profitability, hoping that the more bets you made, the more would win. Cote moved to advancing fewer huge platforms that played to Honeywell’s greatest strengths, especially in aerospace, and that promised the biggest payoff.
One major hit was HFO, a new form of fluorine for industrial refrigeration. HFO was a breakthrough molecule that Honeywell developed in a quest to reduce the global warming caused by previous fluorine molecules. “That was really touch and go,” Cote told me. “It took five years, and there were two or three times when we thought it wouldn’t work.” HFO raises global warming 20% less than carbon dioxide and 1,500 times less than the previous molecule, and it has mushroomed into a highly profitable $1 billion business.
Another haymaker: Experion Orion Console, a monitoring system for oil refineries. “It’s like a jetliner cockpit for refineries,” says Cote. “It collects and processes huge amounts of data from the facility, and controls all the flows to ensure the highest possible productivity and safety.” It was Darius Adamczyk, whom Cote mentored and succeeded him as CEO, who shepherded the Experion Orion. Overall, says Cote, Honeywell now captures three-quarters of the big aerospace projects it competes for, up from half in 2002. And by the way, today’s hits are much bigger than yesterday’s.
Overall, says Cote, Honeywell’s strongest growth engine was the payoff from long-horizon projects. Of the extra $18 billion in sales generated from 2002 to 2018, $6.5 billion came from acquisitions, and the remaining $11.5 from its own products. And three-quarters of that organic growth flowed from Cote’s seed planting.
Why it’s good to criticize in public
In Winning Now, Winning Later, Cote relates that in large meetings, he’d listen to the presentations and encourage everyone to talk. And when the open discussion ended, he’d request opinions on how to proceed from everyone in the room. He always asked the lowest level managers to speak first, and as they talked, he’d show no hint of agreeing or disagreeing. “If their bosses spoke first, the lower level folks would be tempted to just parrot what their bosses said,” Cote told me. “I’d never interrupt and wouldn’t express my opinion until the very end.”
For Cote, teamwork consisted not of the usual groupthink but ensuring that everyone in the room cited facts and expressed opinions. Then Cote, as leader, would make a decision and explain his reasoning. Cote wasn’t looking for widespread buy-in. “Consensus was not the goal. A good decision was the goal,” he says. However, Cote always explained his rationale, to guide the organization on how the leader wanted them to think about problems and let the people who disagree understand that he weighed their arguments and respected their viewpoint. Cote says his goal was to be right at the end of the meeting, which might be different from what he thought at the beginning. And the only way to get as close as possible to “right” was to keep participants from knowing what he thought and getting facts and opinions from everybody.
Once again, Cote thinks it’s constructive to call out a leader who presents a weak business plan so that all present understands what the boss accepts. “Organizations need to learn what is acceptable and what is not,” he told me. “If a business head presents a plan that’s not well thought through, or gives me a great story instead of results, I’ll call them to task. Everyone around the table needs to hear that the work product is not acceptable.”
His technique isn’t to personalize the problem. “I won’t call them an idiot,” says Cote. Instead, he’ll ask the executive to start over and come back with a much better proposal. “The leader will walk out thinking, ‘That wasn’t a good meeting,’” says Cote. “But it creates a good dynamic. It builds respect for you when you tell them what’s wrong. They may panic, but they’ll come back with something a hell of a lot better.” Cote adds that he would always suggest ways the executive could improve his or her plan. “I’d always say, ‘Here are four or five things you need to think about,’” he recalls. “I worked for bosses who’d give you no idea what was wrong and just say, ‘Do better.’ When your people respond to positive suggestions, their business gets better.”
In managing through a downturn, plan how you’ll spring back stronger
During the financial crisis, Cote focused just as much on ensuring that Honeywell could roar back in the recovery as on lowering costs to preserve investment and profits. “An economist said that you’ll most likely come out of a downturn the inverse of the way you went in,” he relates in the book. “That made a tremendous amount of sense to me. If your sales fall 20% in the first six months of the recession, they’ll probably jump by 20%-plus to the same level when the economy bounces back.” Cote orchestrated his response to ensure that Honeywell could handle a huge surge in orders to capitalize during the inevitable recovery.
Cote laid off 3,000 workers, moving up reductions already planned. But for the rest of the 125,000-person workforce, he deployed furloughs to keep everyone employed at the same time his rivals were axing a big chunk of their workforces. Employees were furloughed without pay for four weeks a year. That move saved $200 million, but it wasn’t enough. Cote also reduced the 401(k) match by 50%, used HOS to keep trimming operating costs, and forced management to take some of the pain by scrapping bonuses for 2009. “We performed in line with our peers, with two big differences,” he writes. “We didn’t cut our long-term investment plans, and for the most part, we didn’t cut people. Recessions don’t have to destroy your foundation. It’s best to keep calm while everyone else is panicking.”
Cote pushed ahead with two key acquisitions: One of them, the purchase of bar code scanning specialist Metrologic, landed its leader Adamczyk. He also made special deals with suppliers to ensure that Honeywell got first priority on supplies in the recovery. “If airline hours decline 6%, you go down three levels in the supply chain for parts, and the suppliers cut their capacity by 50%,” he said in an interview. “Then when flights pick up, this avalanche of orders pours in, and you can’t get supplies.” Cote’s solution: Make advance payments to vendors in exchange for a commitment to serve Honeywell first when good times return, and guarantee big future volumes providing the suppliers give Honeywell first dibs.
The strategy proved a winner when sales took off in 2011 and 2012. His workers were ready to go, while rivals struggled to quickly rebuild their workforces and keep pace with orders, and stood in line behind Honeywell for supplies. Over those two years, its sales of aerospace parts soared 30% above pre-crisis levels, largely because the ever-agile Honeywell stole orders from its flat-footed competitors.
Believe it or not, this review only scratches the surface of this book, brimming with original strategies that actually worked. Cote swears that part of being a successful CEO is being a good teacher. Now, readers from around the globe can absorb his lessons.


fortune--2020-06-25--Coming out of a crisis, the boldest companies win

The big question now is how to reopen

Negotiations were not going well in early June as Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi tried to wrap up his acquisition of Grubhub, a major competitor of his Uber Eats food delivery business. He and Grubhub founder Matt Maloney reportedly couldn’t agree on how to handle the inevitable antitrust scrutiny the deal would attract, the amount of a breakup fee, and who would run the combined delivery operation. Frustrated, Khosrowshahi walked away—and within hours a company most Americans had never heard of, Amsterdam-based Just Eat Takeaway.com, swooped in and signed a deal to buy Grubhub for $7.3 billion.
The move was even more audacious than it looked. Just Eat Takeaway is a money-losing startup that agreed to pay a price equal to half its market value. Nonetheless, while no one knows how the overcrowded food-delivery industry will shake out, history says the ambitious Dutch outfit may have done something very smart.
Within hours of a deal soured with Uber, a company most Americans had never heard of, Amsterdam-based Just Eat Takeaway.com, swooped in and signed a deal to buy Grubhub for $7.3 billion. Alexi Rosenfeld—Getty Images
That’s because economic calamities—even tragic, once-a-century global pandemics—require business leaders to find opportunity in the chaos. It’s there to be found. Leaders who can seize it will mitigate the pain for employees, consumers, vendors, communities, and investors. The big lesson from past downturns is that the competitive order within industries will change far more now than it ever will in prosperous times. The big winners will be the bold companies that break from the mainstream, acting courageously and fast.
As economies reopen, the great challenge for business leaders in all industries is to look beyond their immediate operational issues, as critical as they are, and also think strategically about longer-term decisions they can make in this moment—positioning themselves to flourish in the good times ahead.
The results can be dramatic. In the technology bust of 2000 to 2002, 47% of the tech companies that went into the downturn as leaders emerged as laggards, while 13% of those that went in as laggards came out as leaders, as measured by McKinsey. That’s a radical reordering of a giant industry, and it all happened in just two years.
Every downturn is unique, and this one is especially unusual because it wasn’t sparked by economic or financial forces. A new disease combining with a digital, global economy produced truly new conditions. We’ve just had the Snapchat version of the Great Depression, with GDP plunging and unemployment spiking and then abating in a matter of weeks, producing what may have been the world’s shortest economic downturn. Now, although GDP is apparently growing again and the number of unemployed is declining, we’re experiencing the dial-up Internet version of a recovery—it will be maddeningly slow.
The upside: There’s still plenty of time to capitalize on the opportunities of this massive disruption. They’re available to anyone brave enough to follow the lessons of past downturns, unconventional though they may seem. Five principles stand out.
Don’t just cut costs—rethink them
The most timeworn maxim of tough times is “Cash is king,” and the first response to a downturn in many firms is to cut costs with a fervor and hoard cash desperately. Yet the results are surprisingly poor. In a massive study of 4,700 public companies during past recessions, researchers at the Harvard Business School found that the most energetic cost cutters “have the lowest probability—21%—of pulling ahead of the competition when times get better.”
The reasons are many. “Executives and employees start approaching every decision through a loss-minimizing lens,” the researchers found. “A siege mentality leads the organization to aim low… Pessimism permeates the organization.” More concretely, the fiercest cost cutters are most likely to miss investments that would pay off after the recession, leaving them behind the industry leaders and trying to catch up in a hotter environment where costs are higher.
By contrast, companies that come out of downturns most strongly actually increase spending on some items while cutting carefully elsewhere. Consider Apple, which was a much smaller and more troubled company going into the 2001–2002 recession than it is today. Even though revenue fell 33% in 2001, the company increased R&D spending substantially and kept it there for the next two years. Results included the iTunes music store in 2003 and other iPod innovations in 2004, helping to turn the company around and setting it on its historically successful path.
In 2001, Apple increased R&D spending substantially and kept it there for the next two years. Results included the iTunes music store in 2003 and other iPod innovations in 2004, helping to turn the company around and setting it on its historically successful path. Jeff J Mitchell—Getty Images
The most successful companies—industry leaders that remain leaders through recessions—are master managers of operating expenses. Compared with competitors who come out of recessions badly, they actually spend less on SG&A (selling, general, and administrative expenses) in good times but then spend significantly more on it during the downturn, according to McKinsey researchers—“the most dramatic and least expected response of the leaders to the recession,” they say. In addition, those leaders “more than doubled their already higher-than-average level of spending on R&D during the recession.”
A favorite target of cost cutters is advertising because it’s so easy to turn up or down, but the most successful companies don’t cut even that. Compared with their less successful peers, they spend less on advertising in the good times, then spend more in the recession while the competition has cut back, giving them an edge when the economy turns up. De Beers, the world’s largest diamond seller, increased marketing spending in the 2008 holiday season, at the depth of the financial crisis, rather than risk losing its place in the minds of gift givers. Researchers at Boston Consulting Group conclude, “Companies that injudiciously slash marketing spending often find that they later must spend far more than they saved in order to recover.”
To be sure, sometimes cash really is king. When lockdowns virtually close businesses like Hertz, Neiman Marcus, and Gold’s Gym, all of which have filed for bankruptcy protection, a cash obsession makes sense. Everybody else must find what the Harvard researchers call “the elusive balance” between cutting costs, usually through operational efficiency, and spending more, often on R&D and marketing. That’s what the winners do.
Don’t just accept the new normal—embrace it
Step into one of Alibaba’s Hema stores in Beijing and you’ll notice 10 or 15 small restaurants around the perimeter. It looks like a food court until you notice a fresh-foods area plus some dry grocery, “but much greater choice than a convenience store, and better brands,” says Dan O’Connor, a veteran retail consultant and a fellow at Harvard Business School’s Advanced Leadership Initiative. Look closer and you’ll see “people running all around the store with these bags,” which they fill with items and deposit on a conveyor taking them “up and across the ceiling and into a back room,” outside of which are parked 100 motorcycles. “Their brand promise is, ‘Anything here in 30 minutes if you live within three kilometers [1.8 miles] of the store.’ That gives them eight minutes to pick the order. And they’re picking 200,000 digital orders a month out of 40,000 square feet,” he marvels. “This is where we’re going.”
An employee fulfills a customer’s order at an Alibaba Hema store in Hangzhou, China, on Dec. 12, 2018. Qilai Shen—Bloomberg via Getty Images
Many of the most successful retailers in the pandemic worldwide are those that most quickly embraced a new reality: Millions of consumers want everyday items delivered, fast, and as economies reopen, shoppers are not going back to their old ways of buying. That trend was already underway, and the pandemic powerfully accelerated it, as it has done with trends in many industries. The challenge is adapting to these trends in weeks or months rather than years.
Some of the most dramatic shifts are happening in office buildings, many of which have sat almost empty for months and are only beginning to open up. The trend that’s accelerating is what the industry calls community—creating and managing the workplace to offer a building-wide experience through events, amenities, concierge services, and related elements. “The crisis is highlighting this need for community,” says Emma Buckland, in charge of property management at CBRE, a commercial real estate services and investment firm. “We’ve been talking about differentiation through the building experience. Now that’s been taken up to a whole new place, and community will be central. Landlords will win with how they can build it.”
For example, a building’s amenities—restaurant, gym, terrace childcare center—must all be managed differently, or, in future buildings, planned differently. Landlords and tenants at the forefront are rethinking every detail. “How do you solve for coffee?” asks Karen Ellzey, CBRE’s executive managing director. “People are thinking about being able to order it remotely. A machine makes it, and maybe somebody brings it to you, or maybe in the future a robot does because it knows where you are.”
It’s a small thing that exemplifies a larger issue, what Ellzey calls “the service culture” that landlords and tenants are trying to elevate. Reaching that goal has now become more complex. Rethinking coffee is “a way to marry up the need for safety with something that feels like a higher level of service.”
Business leaders in any industry can confidently embrace the new normal because in most cases it was already on the way, just on a much slower schedule. In one of those coincidences that publishers dream about, a book called Healthy Buildings appeared in April. It argues that people are far more productive in healthier environments, based on air quality, temperature, noise, lighting, and other factors, and shows that a trend toward healthier buildings was already underway. Suddenly it’s happening much faster.
But beware: An accelerating trend can derail other trends. “Will we get a vaccine or not, and what happens with the price of oil?” asks John Macomber, a coauthor of Healthy Buildings, former chairman of a major New England construction firm, and now an instructor at the Harvard Business School. “If oil prices remain low and it’s inexpensive to drive, and COVID-19 remains a problem, there’s much more incentive to spread out—a total reversal of the trend of the last many years.”
Update your business model
No one in the hotel industry knows how quickly business will return—before reopening, revenue was down 90% in some markets—but they know one thing for sure: They won’t be making money in the same way they did pre-COVID for a long time, if ever. The problem is that most hotels operate on a business model that includes revenue from many sources in addition to rooms. Guests spend on restaurants, bars, golf, retail shops, parking, spas, meetings, conventions, and other offerings. Even when travelers eventually feel safe again checking into a room, they may balk at some of those other activities.
To make a profit on rooms only, hotels would need far higher occupancy rates. A new analysis by HotStats, a hotel industry data firm, finds that full-service hotels normally break even at 39% occupancy, but without those ancillary revenues they need 46% occupancy—a level U.S. hotels on average aren’t reaching.
It’s time for an updated business model. For example, hotels “could use their meeting facilities with groups from the community to find new revenue,” says Kate Walsh, dean of Cornell University’s famed hotel school. “Green spaces will be more valuable,” so hotels might open their golf courses to the public. As guests remain leery of gyms, “a Peloton in your room” could make sense.
Other industries are adjusting their operating models. Companies that had relied on in-person sales calls were forced to go digital during lockdowns, and an April survey by McKinsey found that 60% of those companies judged their new remote sales model at least as effective as their old model, and often more effective. Those companies won’t be going back as the economy reopens. Companies in almost every industry—food, technology, furniture, toys, pharmaceuticals, and many more—have faced disrupted supply chains. Rather than continue with business models based on lowest-cost suppliers, they’re switching to a more diversified and less risky set of suppliers.
Make strategic acquisitions
Corporate takeovers have plunged in the pandemic, with U.S. deal value down 50% from last year, says Refinitiv. Yet some business leaders are bucking the trend; they think now is a great time to be buying. “M&A is the No. 1 priority in our capital allocation strategy,” VF Corp. CEO Steve Rendle told Yahoo Finance last month. Just to make sure the world knows he’s looking, he told the Financial Times in mid-June, “In times like this, some of the greatest returns could be generated through acquiring.” VF owns apparel brands including Vans, Timberland, and Dickies, all of which were acquired.
This is how winners behave in a downturn. In a study of nearly 1,000 industrial companies, McKinsey researchers found pre-recession industry laggards that emerged from a recession as leaders made far more acquisitions than their less successful peers did, and those acquisitions were much larger. The winning companies made courageous bets, spending much more of their cash than their former peers. And, the researchers observe, the winners “seem to have pursued transactions that offered greater opportunity to shape industries.” That is exactly why canny M&A is so valuable in a downturn.
Tech Companies announced 10 major acquisitions in May, and Amazon was rumored to be acquiring Zoox, a developer of autonomous driving technology. Michael Short—Bloomberg via Getty Images
Tech companies in particular are busy making deals. Microsoft, Facebook, Zoom, and others announced 10 major acquisitions in May, and Amazon was rumored to be acquiring Zoox, a developer of autonomous driving technology. Yes, the biggest tech companies are among this downturn’s most successful businesses, so they have deep pockets. But smaller firms are active, too, and smart deals can be even more transformative for them, especially on terms that may not be available again. Just Eat Takeaway.com’s agreement with Grubhub is only one example.
Steal great people
Financial stress sometimes addles the mind, even in top-level executives. In the midst of the financial crisis, when Boston Consulting Group asked almost a thousand of them about their experience in the previous downturn, they said their third-most-effective action (out of 22) was “hiring high-performing employees of competitors.” But when asked to name the actions they planned to take in the then-current crisis, their No. 1 response was “cutting back on recruiting.” Huh?
Irrational competitors offer a rare chance to build the most valuable capital in your business, the human capital. Now is “an unprecedented opportunity to hire great talent,” says Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, a former partner in the Egon Zehnder executive search firm. “A lot of people are available,” he notes, with record layoffs at every level. The best people may not be laid off but may be reassigned or asked to move. In addition, “people are recalculating their priorities” in this massive reset, “asking, ‘What is my purpose in life?’” And even in the post-lockdown era, “candidates are more accessible than ever because they’re still working from home and can have conversations without the boss looking over their shoulder.”
Ask your company’s leaders to name specific people they’d like to have onboard, and contact them. Identify people you may not know who’ve been laid off in heavily hit industries, not just your own. When trying to close the deal with an attractive candidate, it’s often effective to bring in the CEO to express his or her passion for the business.
One more thing: Don’t forget to assess your own people and protect the stars. In boom times it’s easy to delude oneself into thinking the team is all A players. In tough times you find out who they really are. Make sure they know they’re valued. As Fernández-Aráoz says, “It’s stupid to hire great people if your great people are leaving.”
Climbing out of this economic ditch will be slow, hard work; 86% of Fortune 500 CEOs think economic activity will not return to pre-pandemic levels before the first quarter of 2022. Much of the news will be bad, and business leaders will be easily consumed by immediate, urgent problems. But as former General Electric chief Jack Welch famously said, “Anybody can manage short. Anybody can manage long. Balancing those two things is what management is.”
Keeping an eye on the long term will be hard in this environment. But that’s where wise leaders will find their greatest opportunities.


fortune--2020-06-25--British cinemas are confronting the economics of reopening

The big question now is how to reopen

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Thanks to a bumper crop of megahits, including the South Korean Oscar-winner Parasite and the British war drama 1917, Britain’s cinema scene was experiencing something of a box office renaissance by the start of 2020. A slew of blockbusters plus a yearslong effort to draw visitors back to the big screens were giving the industry a lift it hadn’t seen since the 1970s.
“It was really great,” said Catharine Des Forges, director of the Independent Cinema Office, in London, with a laugh. “It was probably one of the best years.”
Then came the arrival of the COVID-19. The pandemic hit theaters, bars, restaurants—and anywhere else that made up a pre-pandemic social life—like some sci-fi invader. Everything shut down overnight.
Now the British government has set a date for the country’s cinemas to officially reopen: July 4, weeks after movie theaters across Europe began to tentatively open their doors. But can a socially distant cinema offer the same communal experience? And, more importantly, can it help the country’s struggling cinema operators survive?
The British government prepares to reduce social distancing guideline from 2 meters to 1 meter and allow cinemas, museums and galleries to open alongside pubs, restaurants and cafes from July 4 on, but theaters remain closed. Ilyas Tayfun Salci—Anadolu Agency via Getty Image
Back to the movies
Britain has the largest film industry and cinema market in Europe, according to the Motion Picture Association. Its stars, from Emma Thompson to John Boyega, are known the world over, one of the indisputable perks of English-language cinema. But in recent years, South Korea eclipsed the U.K. as the third-largest cinema market outside North America in terms of box office receipts, and homegrown hits like Parasite have made it a formidable creative force.
Even still, British filmgoers were a force of their own. In January, cinema ticket sales were up 20% compared to the previous year, as more than 16.5 million tickets were sold in a country of roughly 66.7 million, according to the U.K. Cinema Association. That followed two years of cinema attendance exploding back up to levels not seen since the 1970s—a time before VCRs began to eat into box office receipts.
That was in large part the result of a major effort to redesign the cinema experience in the age of on-demand streaming, says Des Forges. In the U.K., those efforts included the rise of live screenings from the National Theatre and Royal Opera House, home of the Royal Ballet; specific screenings for customers with special needs; community events; panels; festivals; and director Q&As—all designed to build on the communal, special-event appeal of going to the movies.
Surviving social distancing
Now the problems the country’s cinemas face is much the same as the rest of the world’s—even with an extensive government furlough scheme that has, until now, helped manage the bleeding by allowing cinemas to keep staff on the payroll. Cinemas large and small are confronting a permanent shift, not just in safety, but in how viewers consume films. Universal, for one, decided to bring Trolls World Tour straight to streaming platforms worldwide, violating the sacred theatrical window release and provoking a rapid reaction from theaters wary that studios would start to simply skip over them to get straight to viewers.
Online film clubs and partnerships between theaters and distributors, too, have both helped keep cinemas from going silent under lockdown, says Des Forges—connecting with loyal customers and allowing for some profit sharing when films go to streaming platforms. But those have not brought in comparable revenue. Now that cinemas are eyeing reopening, a scheme with the U.K.’s Cinema Association and the Film Distributors’ Association to offer more than 400 hits from their back catalogues—from the Harry Potter films, to Bend It Like Beckham, to 1917—is one option cinema operators can use to fill screens in the first weeks and months. But Des Forges acknowledges the obvious—that theaters just want to show new material, which has been delayed for months, and might not happen until next year.
“There are not enough quality new films for us to play” in time for a July opening, says Simon Ward, co-owner of the Palace Cinema in Broadstairs, a town in Kent on England’s southeast coast.
There is also a divide between the largest cinema chains and the smaller independent theaters. On Tuesday, Vue, one of the country’s largest cinema chains, said it would reopen on July 10, shortly after the date the government would permit theaters to reopen.
But the lack of material, paired with the constraints of social distancing, added cleaning, and the reduction in capacity to, on average, 35% of the pre-COVID era, mean that it’s hard for small theaters like Ward’s to see a way to reopen, observe the requirements, and be financially viable, he says. That means likely not reopening until September—at the earliest—with the hope that the virus will then be under control.
The Palace Cinema is not alone. A survey by the Independent Cinema Office of nearly 500 independent cinemas, which are often owned by charities and trusts and have thinner margins than larger chains, found that many were not even considering reopening until September, and that many had calculated their long-term future was at risk. With attendance and concession sales expected to be sharply down because of social distancing, and costs up due to cleaning costs, a large number estimated they would survive for only three months after reopening.
Ultimately, Ward noted, the near future of cinemas risked everything that made going to the movies worth it in the first place.
“We don’t want to ask our audience to ignore all the face masks and sanitizer gel and somehow enjoy what should be an entertaining experience despite their environment,” he said. “We want our customers to enjoy the Palace because of our environment.”
This article has been updated to reflect the full title of “Trolls World Tour” and the full partnership behind back catalogue reissue.


fortune--2020-06-25--Bayer agrees to pay $12 billion in legal settlements, in effort to put Roundup scandal behind it

Biden now leads in 6 states key to Trump ’ s 2016 victory

Bayer AG agreed to spend more than $12 billion to resolve thousands of U.S. lawsuits and deal with future claims, taking its biggest step so far in resolving headaches the German chemical giant inherited in its acquisition of Monsanto Co.
Agreements were reached on about 95,000 claims filed over Roundup, part of a Bayer plan to spend about $11 billion to settle all litigation over the widely used herbicide, the company said Wednesday. Bayer also will pay as much as $820 million to settle toxic pollution claims and make a $400 million payment for farmers whose crops were damaged by its dicamba herbicide.
Taken together, the accords resolve a trio of major litigation risks that tagged along with Bayer’s $63 billion purchase of Monsanto in 2018. Roundup claims—the biggest liability—surged after big U.S. court losses, and the share decline wiped tens of billions of dollars off Bayer’s market value. Getting past the legal drama is a top priority for Chief Executive Officer Werner Baumann.
Leverkusen, Germany-based Bayer’s shares rose as much as 3.3% in Frankfurt trading.
Though a Roundup settlement had been expected, Sebastian Bray, an analyst at Berenberg, said deals covering other litigation at a cost most investors will find reasonable were a pleasant surprise. It’s a “big relief,” and “should allow investors to draw a line under the saga of the last two years,” Bray said via email.
The Roundup agreements will resolve 75% of about 125,000 claims that have either been filed or were set to be, the company said in a statement. Bayer said it will pay between $10.1 billion and $10.9 billion to resolve all current lawsuits, including $1.25 billion set aside for future claims handled as part of a class-action lawsuit.
Separately, Bayer agreed after about nine months of settlement talks to resolve most claims by cities and ports over contamination by polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, a chemical solely made by Monsanto that is used as a cooling agent in heavy equipment. The settlement came on the eve of a trial in Spokane, Washington.
Bayer officials also agreed to pay $400 million to resolve claims that its dicamba herbicide drifted onto the fields of neighboring farmers and damaged their crops. No lawsuits are required for the payouts, but farmers must show proof of crop damage or reduced yields tied to dicamba contamination, the company said.
“We believe the settlement will be sufficient to resolve all legitimate claims in this litigation,” Don Downing, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers leading the Missouri-based dicamba cases, said in an interview.
Paying Debt
In the Roundup settlements, Bayer executives said the deal shouldn’t affect its credit rating or dividend policy and that paying down its large debt load from the Monsanto transaction remains a “high priority.” Payments can be funded with cash on hand, future free-cash flow, the sale of Bayer’s animal-health unit and potentially by issuing bonds, company officials said.
Still, the cost of resolving most of the litigation will slow the company’s ability to pay down debt, Moritz Melsbach, an analyst for Moody’s, said in a statement.
Under the terms of the Roundup settlement, Bayer will set up a $1.25 billion fund to cover future cancer claims. That money will also be used to provide financial assistance to struggling cancer patients and support research into whether glyphosate — the weedkiller’s active ingredient — is a carcinogen, the company said.
Individual payouts may range from several hundred thousand dollars per case to less than $50,000.
The accord allows Bayer to continue selling Roundup in the U.S. for use in backyards and farms without any safety warning, and plaintiffs’ attorneys who settled their case inventories agreed to stop taking new Roundup clients.
It estimated there are still about 30,000 current cases yet to be settled. The company also is refusing to settle the three damage verdicts totaling more than $191 million, which are on appeal. Bayer is doing the same thing in dicamba, pressing efforts to have a $265 million verdict on behalf of a Missouri peach farmer tossed.
Ex-Roundup users blame glyphosate for their non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and other cancers. The company denies glyphosate is a carcinogen, a position backed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. A federal judge ruled earlier this week that California officials can’t force companies to place warning labels on glyphosate-based products.
Lawyers representing some of the Roundup users who declined to settle their claims vowed Wednesday to continue bringing cases to trial. Three California juries in a row ruled against the company and ordered it to pay damages to former Roundup users. The next cases could be brought in state court in St. Louis.
“The remaining cases are in the hands of lawyers who know how to litigate, so we’re going to see some more Roundup trials in the future,” said Fletch Trammell, a Texas-based lawyer who held his roughly 5,000 cases out of the settlement. “This litigation is far from over.”
Bayer faced a surge in new lawsuits last year after it lost the U.S. jury trials, and investors issued a rare rebuke to Baumann last spring. Some, including Elliott Management Corp., urged the company to seek a comprehensive settlement.
Since last summer, Baumann has kept Bayer out of more trials while engaging in high-stakes mediation talks. In April, he won the annual confidence vote from 93% of shareholders amid signs that Bayer might soon reach a resolution.
Still, given the Roundup settlement’s hefty price-tag, investors may continue to question whether the Monsanto takeover will ever be worth what Bayer paid, Markus Mayer, an analyst at Baader Bank, said via email. And Bayer’s management team may not be safe, he said.
The consolidated federal case is In RE: Roundup Products Liability Litigation, MDL 2741, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).


fortune--2020-06-25--Two-thirds of Americans think the U.S. government is failing on climate change

The big question now is how to reopen

This is the web version of The Loop, Fortune’s weekly newsletter on the revolutions in sustainability. To get it delivered to your inbox, sign up here.
The majority of U.S. adults think the government isn’t doing enough to tackle climate change. That’s the main takeaway from a report published this week by the Pew Research Center, based on a survey of close to 11,000 Americans.
The survey was conducted in the first week of May, when the U.S. was enduring some of its strictest lockdown measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19. It’s heartening the pandemic hasn’t dampened public concern for the environment but, at the same time, it hasn’t curtailed the Trump administration’s push to roll back environmental protections, either.
Nancy Ketcham-Colwill, a former EPA attorney who now volunteers with Save EPA, a group fighting administration policy, told the Financial Times, “Since the COVID-19 epidemic took hold, Trump has not eased up on efforts to roll back environmental protections. It’s been full steam ahead.”
Since taking office in 2016, the Trump administration has targeted 100 environmental policies for repeal, according to analysis from the New York Times. The affected policies cover issues including industrial and vehicular emission standards, the protection of nature reserves, and the need for federal infrastructure projects to plan for the long-term fallout of climate change. As of May, the New York Times reports, 66 rules have been rolled back, while 34 remain in the dismantling process.
According to the Financial Times, the administration is eager to ram through remaining rollbacks as soon as possible, so it will be harder for Democrats to reverse the decisions if they gain control of the Senate and the White House in November.
The Congressional Review Act permits rules published within the prior 60 “legislative days” to be repealed by a simple majority vote in the House and Senate, with the President’s approval; once 60 days pass, repeal requires the passage of a new law. It’s not clear how many “legislative days” there will be in this year, thanks to the pandemic.
The EPA says the rollback of rules is designed to “pare back burdensome ‘one size fits all’ overregulation for the American people.” The action is presumably not without supporters. Pew Research Center’s report found that, overwhelmingly, it’s Democrats who feel the government is doing “too little” to combat climate change: Only 35% of Republicans would say so, versus 89% of Democrats.
Attitudes about what measures should be implemented to prevent climate change are similarly partisan. Roughly 50% of Republicans favor tougher fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles versus 86% of Democrats; 55% of Republicans approve of carbon taxes versus 89% of Democrats; and 64% of Republicans endorse tougher restrictions on power plant emissions compared with 93% of Democrats.
The one policy where the two sides mostly agree is on tree planting—the solution to carbon emissions that’s perhaps the most dubious. Two reports published in Nature Sustainability this week raised new questions on the efficacy of mass forestation programs, but such schemes are easy PR wins.
In January, President Donald Trump signed the U.S. up for an initiative to plant a trillion trees around the world to absorb carbon emissions: 88% of Republicans approve; 92% of Democrats do, too.
Eamon Barrett
– eamon.barrett@fortune.com
CARBON COPY
Oil slick
British petroleum giant BP issued a $17.5 billion write down of its business as the pandemic hammers global oil demand. BP expects reduced demand for fossil fuels to continue into the post-pandemic era, claiming the virus has accelerated the world’s shift to lower carbon energy. The company write down continues CEO Bernard Looney’s efforts to slim down BP as it transitions to a low-carbon future. Wall Street Journal
Unilever
Unilever plans to make all of its operations and those of its suppliers carbon neutral by 2039, pledging $1.1 billion to climate-friendly initiatives over the next ten years. The consumer goods behemoth—which owns Dove, Ben & Jerry’s, Lux and much more—will also place labels on each of its 70,000 products to show how much greenhouse gas was emitted in the manufacturing and shipping process. Bloomberg
Amazon
Amazon announced it will launch a $2 billion venture capital fund to invest in green tech and sustainable development. The so-called Climate Pledge Fund will invest in sectors spanning transportation, logistics, energy, manufacturing and agriculture. The fund is supposed to help Amazon achieve its goal of becoming carbon-neutral by 2040, as the e-commerce leader set out in its Climate Pledge last year. Wall Street Journal
Overhaul
France’s environment minister suggested the government would ban air travel on the shortest domestic routes to prevent budget carriers from picking up flights Air France-KLM was forced to abandon as part of a bailout package. Air France must make a “drastic reduction” of flights on routes where there is an alternative rail link of less than 2.5 hours. Bloomberg
Rio Tinto
Rio Tinto launched a board-led investigation into the company’s heritage management processes after the Australian miner blew up two sacred Aboriginal caves last month—and then stalled on issuing an apology. Meanwhile, the Minerals Council of Australia launched a new climate plan that is being criticized for lacking discernible targets. The plan sets no date for achieving net-zero emissions, for example. Financial Times
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
For BP, a path to zero emissions is taking shape. It’s going to cost them by Katherine Dunn
Why this analyst says the future of cars is electric—and Chinese by Grady McGregor
Corporate Germany has a race problem—and a lack of data is not helping by David Meyer
‘Personnel overhang’: All the job cuts each airline has announced so far by David Meyer
Tesla sets a new date for ‘Battery Day’ showcase of its new technology and production line by David Z. Morris
Former Unilever CEO Paul Polman wants business leaders to accelerate corporate responsibility efforts by McKenna Moore
The pandemic’s economic crunch is fueling the rise of the resale market by Phil Wahba
CLOSING NUMBER
$300 billion
U.S. shale companies face a potential $300 billion write down of assets in the second quarter this year, Deloitte says in a new report, citing the collapse in oil prices wrought by the pandemic and OPEC price wars. The write down could increase the sector’s leverage from 40% to 54%, triggering insolvencies and restructuring.


fortune--2020-06-24--AOC deftly deployed digital spending to trounce Wall Street–backed rival

The big question now is how to reopen

So far, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is passing her first reelection campaign with flying colors.
The woman they call AOC trounced her challengers in yesterday’s New York congressional primary elections, winning more than 70% of the vote in securing the Democratic nomination for the state’s 14th congressional district (representing parts of the east Bronx and northwest Queens).
The 30-year-old Ocasio-Cortez, whose youth and progressive politics have made her a rising star in the Democratic Party, defeated a notable challenge from former CNBC anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, who positioned herself as a moderate, pro-business alternative to the incumbent.
But Caruso-Cabrera could only muster less than 20% of the vote, despite reportedly turning to Wall Street heavyweights like Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman for fundraising.
Still, as the New York Times notes, Caruso-Cabrera’s $2 million war chest was no match for Ocasio-Cortez, who has raised more than $10 million since the start of the current election cycle—the fifth most among all congressional candidates in that time.
Arguably as important as the amount that Ocasio-Cortez has raised is how her campaign has deployed those funds: with a heavy dose of digital advertising. AOC has spent $3.6 million to date on Facebook ads during the current election cycle, according to the Times, including $2.4 million this year alone. By comparison, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the second-biggest digital advertiser among current House members, has spent only $620,000 online this year.
With digital advertising widely considered a key reason why the Trump campaign was able to deliver a shocking victory in the 2016 presidential election, the rest of the political establishment has sought to catch up. AOC is no exception; in addition to heavy online advertising expenditures, her enviable social media presence (she’s one of the most-followed members of Congress on Twitter) is capable of rallying a vocal base of progressive supporters online.
It has proved enough to secure her district’s Democratic nomination for the second time running, and shown that her 2018 upset of longtime congressman Joe Crowley—which launched her into the national political conversation—was no fluke.
“Wall Street CEOs, from Goldman Sachs to Blackstone, poured in millions to defeat our grassroots campaign tonight,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted Tuesday evening. “But their money couldn’t buy a movement.”


fortune--2020-06-26--CDC: U.S. coronavirus case count is roughly 10x higher than the 2.3 million confirmed so far

Who are the best health care leaders under 40 ?

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U.S. officials estimate that 20 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus since it first arrived in the United States, meaning that the vast majority of the population remains susceptible.
Thursday’s estimate is roughly 10 times as many infections as the 2.3 million cases that have been confirmed. Officials have long known that millions of people were infected without knowing it and that many cases are being missed because of gaps in testing.
The news comes as the Trump administration works to tamp down nationwide concern about the COVID-19 pandemic as about a dozen states are seeing worrisome increases in cases.
The administration also looks to get its scientific experts back before the public more as it tries to allay anxieties about the pandemic while states begin reopening. Since mid-May, when the government began stressing the need to get the economy moving again, the panel’s public health experts have been far less visible than in the pandemic’s early weeks.
Twenty million infections means that about 6% of the nation’s 331 million people have been infected.
“It’s clear that many individuals in this nation are still susceptible,” Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on a call with reporters Thursday. “Our best estimate right now is that for every case that was reported, there actually are 10 more infections.”
Previously, CDC officials and the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, have said that as many as 25% of infected people might not have symptoms.
“There’s an enormous number of people that are still vulnerable,” said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, vice dean at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It still remains a potentially lethal disease. It’s a roll of the dice for everybody who gets the illness. Also, you’re rolling the dice for other people who you may give the virus to.”
The new estimate is based on CDC studies of blood samples collected nationwide — some by the CDC and others from blood donations and other sources. Many infections were not caught in early testing, when supplies were limited and federal officials prioritized testing for those with symptoms.
Administration officials are pointing to the new data to allay public anxieties, claiming that while there have been significant spikes, they have the outbreaks well in hand. They maintained they were not trying to minimize a public health crisis, but said the nation is in a markedly different place with the virus now than when the U.S. last saw similar infection numbers in mid-April, when testing infrastructure was weaker. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity late Wednesday to discuss the matter candidly.
“This is still serious,” Redfield said on the call with reporters Thursday. “But I’m asking people to recognize that we’re in a different situation today than we were in March or April,” with more cases today in younger people who are not as likely to develop serious illness or die from infection, he said.
President Donald Trump, who refuses to wear a face mask in public, has been playing down the virus threat, insisting recently that “it’s fading away, it’s going to fade away.” Vice President Mike Pence, during an appearance in Ohio, said the U.S. had ”met the moment” in fighting the virus.
Redfield said infection prevalence rates ranged from 1% in some areas of the West Coast to much higher in New York City.
Several independent experts said the methods and locations of sampling are key to interpreting the numbers.
Dr. Thomas Tsai, a Harvard University health policy researcher, said 20 million seems reasonable, but “most of these estimates exist in a range” and it’s important to know how wide that is.
“It’s hard to interpret this just from a single number and without the context for it,” such as what locations were sampled and whether it was truly a random slice of a population or areas of low or high prevalence, which can skew the results.
Justin Lessler, a researcher at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said 20 million infected “is about what you’d expect based on the case fatality rate” and the number of deaths that have occurred so far in the U.S.
Despite the phaseout of daily White House coronavirus briefings, the administration has been closely monitoring data on the spread of COVID-19 and has been deploying teams from the CDC to identify and stem outbreaks around the country.
A dozen states in recent weeks have seen a worrisome uptick in new cases, as well as in the more critical measure of the percentage of positive cases discovered in tests performed. Seven states have seen more than 10% of tests come back positive. And troublesome spikes in Sun Belt states have dominated news coverage in recent days, to the consternation of Trump administration officials.
They point instead to more nuanced county-level data, which shows positivity rates exceeding 10% in just 3% of the nation’s counties. Yet they acknowledge that some of the areas with the highest transmission rates are generally the most populous, suggesting tens of millions of Americans could be living in areas with spiking infections.
As states reopen, the administration says it is up to governors and local officials to determine how to respond to the spikes. Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, for example, put a hold on any further steps to reopen and reimposed a ban on elective surgeries in some areas to preserve hospital space after the number of patients statewide more than doubled in two weeks.
The CDC teams, officials said, are working to trace new outbreaks and reinforce protective measures like social distancing and mask wearing in hard-hit areas and to remind vulnerable populations to take extreme precautions. The administration says those efforts have helped slow new infections in North Carolina and Alabama, where they were deployed earlier this month.
One of the hard-hit areas is Phoenix, where Trump held an event Tuesday with thousands of young attendees, nearly all of whom were maskless.
The officials say the nature of the outbreak now is different than months ago, when deaths topped more than 1,000 per day for weeks and hospitals were stretched beyond capacity across the country. The new increase in positive cases, they said, is capturing what has long been there. They say it is only now showing up in data because the U.S. has increased testing and surveillance.
Meanwhile, mortality data has steadily declined, as have hospitalizations in all but a few hot spots.
To the administration officials, that reinforces their hypothesis that millions unknowingly had the virus earlier this year. Through early May, federal guidelines prioritized testing for symptomatic people, those exposed to a positive case and those in high-risk environments.
With testing far more widespread now, officials believe 50% of new cases in Florida and Texas are among people ages 35 or younger, and most of them are asymptomatic.
The U.S. is testing about 500,000 patients per day. On a per capita basis, the U.S. rate falls behind several other countries, including Spain, Australia, Russia and Iceland, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.
There is no scientific consensus on the rate of testing needed to control the virus. But many experts say the U.S. should be testing roughly 1 million to 3 million people daily to catch new cases and prevent flareups. Administration officials said they expect to be able to run 20-40 million tests per month beginning this fall.
Testing is constrained by laboratory supplies needed to run the tests but also lack of demand for tests in some areas.


fortune--2020-06-25--Epstein’s victims get a chance to claim a share of his $600 million estate

CDC : U.S. coronavirus case count is roughly 10x higher than the 2.3 million confirmed so far

Women who accused Jeffrey Epstein of sexually assaulting them can begin filing claims and collecting compensation from his estate, valued at more than $600 million.
The compensation fund opened Thursday after months of back-and-forth between the estate and the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein owned property and took many of the girls and young women he was accused of attacking. The final hurdle was cleared after the estate agreed to set aside funds for future claims, from the Virgin Islands or elsewhere, and strengthened rules to protect the women’s rights and privacy.
The program “provides the victims who were sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein an opportunity to resolve their claims outside of court, beyond the glare of public proceedings and without the cost and confrontation of litigation,” Jordana Feldman, the fund’s administrator, said at a news conference. She said no amount of money could undo their suffering but that the confidential program offered “some measure of justice and validation.”
Among the details she cited: There is no cap on claims, and claimants who, as teens, recruited other girls to Epstein’s circle under duress may be considered.
The latter provision reflects “what we had heard and learned from many of the victims’ lawyers,” Feldman said, “which was that recruitment web of girls telling their friends, ‘You know, hey, you can make some money.’”
Virgin Islands Attorney General Denise George had blocked an earlier proposal by Epstein’s estate, questioning its demand that those who received money from the fund agree to a broad liability waiver. An accord was reached after the estate agreed not to use information the victims provided to defend itself against any other claims that might be filed.
Epstein enjoyed assets spanning at least two continents, including a private island and boatyard in the Virgin Islands, palatial homes in Florida, New York and Paris, and a sprawling ranch in New Mexico. He was listed as the owner of at least half a dozen companies. Epstein killed himself in a Manhattan jail last August after his arrest on federal sex-trafficking charges. At the time of his death, he also had cars, yachts and airplanes registered in his name.
Those applying to the compensation program could collect payouts in the millions of dollars from the estate, which has been valued at about $630 million. The program won’t limit an accuser’s ability to share information with law enforcement or anyone else, Feldman said. The program can be accessed by a website, and claims can be made through March 25, 2021.
Feldman described it as an alternative to litigation that doesn’t have the barriers of a civil claim, such as a statute of limitations or prior settlements.
The program, which worked with George and lawyers representing more than 70 accusers, was designed by Feldman, Kenneth Feinberg and Camille Biros. Feinberg and Feldman oversaw the compensation fund for people killed in the September 2001 terrorist attacks. Feinberg and Biros designed and administered a fund for sexual abuse claims against the Catholic Church.
More than three dozen women have filed lawsuits in federal and state courts seeking damages from Epstein’s estate. Lawyers for many of the women have said in court filings that their clients would consider participating in a compensation fund if it protected their privacy and was administered fairly.


fortune--2020-06-25--Who are the best health care leaders under 40?

Good evening, readers.
Some news for you. In July, The Capsule will be going out more regularly to all of our readers. You’ll be receiving the latest news about digital health, drug development, and the business and policy of public health daily.
We’d love to know if you have any ideas for what we should focus on in our coverage. The coronavirus pandemic has obviously (and for good reason) taken up a lot of space in medical reporting.
But COVID is far from the only issue that needs addressing in U.S. health care. Gene therapies for blood disorders have hit milestones; cancer therapies continue to evolve. None of the public health problems we faced before this bizarre moment have magically disappeared any more than the reality of heart disease or so many other scourges.
And to that spirit of crowd sourcing… Fortune is looking for submissions for our 40 Under 40 list. I urge you to send any suggestions of stars in healthcare my way.
See you again next week (on a more regular basis). Read on for the day’s news.
Sy Mukherjee
sayak.mukherjee@fortune.com
@the_sy_guy
DIGITAL HEALTH
FDA clears Medtronic's brain stimulation impant. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared another product from medical device specialist Medtronic: a deep brain stimulation implant meant to help create more personalized treatments for neurological diseases such as Parkinson's disease and epilepsy. It's linked to a mobile device created by Samsung. "For the first time, this technology gives clinicians feedback directly from the DBS patient’s brain," said Mike Daly of Medtronic. "With such data-driven, patient-specific insights, we believe it can change the standard of care." (FierceBiotech)
INDICATIONS
The NIH is intimately tied to Moderna's experimental COVID vaccine. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has a deeper stake in upstart biotech Moderna's experimental coronavirus vaccine, according to Axios. In fact, having a stake at all could have wide-ranging implications for the treatment since the government could influence its eventual pricing. Moderna's vaccine would be, if cleared by the FDA, the company's first approved or authorized product and uses a unique but as-of-yet largely unproven biological technology. (Axios)
THE BIG PICTURE
Elective surgeries suspended in Texas as coronavirus cases skyrocket. As COVID cases and related hospitalizations skyrocket in Texas, governor Greg Abbott has issued an executive order barring elective surgeries in several of the state's largest metropolitan areas. “These four counties have experienced significant increases in people being hospitalized due to COVID-19, and today’s action is a precautionary step to help ensure that the hospitals in these counties continue to have ample supply of available beds to treat COVID-19 patients,” wrote Abbott in his statement. There were more than 4,400 hospitalized COVID patients in Texas as of Wednesday, and some adult patients have had to be funneled to the Texas Children's Hospital due to the diminished capacity. (Fortune)
REQUIRED READING
Coronavirus CEO pay cuts were short-lived, by Emma Hinchliffe
Coming out of a crisis the boldest companies win, by Geoff Colvin
Why America won't be going cashless anytime soon, by McKenna Moore
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fortune--2020-06-25--Student debt is making it harder to defeat the coronavirus

As our nation grapples with three concurrent crises—a public health crisis, an economic crisis, and a racial justice crisis—we are coming to terms with the serious inequities facing our communities. The COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic downturn have made it even harder for millions of people to make ends meet, including those on the front lines keeping us safe.
The not-so-secret culprit driving the spiraling affordability crisis that working people face is crushing student-loan debt. Workers of color—disproportionately affected by police brutality and other systems of oppression—are more likely to hold those essential worker jobs and more likely to carry the burden of student-loan debt.
Even before the pandemic, U.S. student debt clocked in at a staggering $1.6 trillion. Forty-five million people owe an average of $38,000 on their student loans, and every 26 seconds another borrower goes into default. Because of this, one-quarter of higher education faculty are food-insecure, and 43% put off seeing a doctor for financial reasons. As one adjunct faculty member at Loyola University Chicago put it, “My crushing debt load does not allow me the time or peace of mind to serve students to the best of my abilities.”
This national disgrace prevents many from choosing service professions crucial to defeating COVID-19. And COVID-19 has only worsened the crisis, with more than 38 million jobs lost in two months. Extreme job insecurity, dangerous working conditions, and unmanageable debt combine to throw essential workers into poverty and despair. No other developed country treats its public servants so cruelly, and the horrific drag on productivity affects our collective health, wealth, and public safety.
Take Elise Bowe, for example. Elise is on the front lines of this pandemic, working as a clinical laboratory technician at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, N.Y. She went to college to pursue this career, but since graduation in 2011, Elise has been struggling to pay back student loans. “My husband and I drive a 10-year-old car. I can’t buy work shoes, even though the ones I wear are contaminated with body fluids. I have to work overtime just to make ends meet. I’m doing work that I love and that people depend on, but my debt is a prison sentence that will haunt me and my family for life.” Bowe’s career in public service entitles her to loan forgiveness options—relief she and her family need.
The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has worked to assist members like Elise Bowe. We’ve organized student debt clinics around the country and set up online debt-relief tools to help educators, nurses, and other public employees navigate this complicated process and access the relief to which they’re entitled. We’ve gone to court on behalf of struggling teachers, nurses, and first responders. We’ve supported a bill to forgive student debt for coronavirus first responders. And last week, we hit a key milestone: A court granted preliminary approval of our settlement with Navient, one of the nation’s largest student-loan servicers. Navient agreed to enhance its internal practices and policies and pay $1.75 million to a nonprofit organization that provides student-loan counseling and education. This is a big step forward that will help millions of borrowers access information about loan forgiveness programs and get the relief they need.
Meanwhile, the AFT is continuing to hold the Education Department accountable for grossly mishandling federal loan forgiveness programs and for selling out students by letting for-profit colleges lie about graduates’ employment and career prospects. Selendy & Gay has helped with all of this.
But ending the student debt crisis during a pandemic requires something faster and more comprehensive than even the most aggressive litigation. Borrowers like Elise Bowe need relief now. Every week that passes puts their livelihoods, and ours, in further jeopardy.
Congress must take the game-changing steps put forward by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others to cancel student debt and transform the way we pay for higher education. That would wipe out student debt entirely for three-quarters of American workers. It would also provide for tuition-free, zero-debt education at public colleges and universities. And it would help make America’s economy more competitive again—not by giving billions in bailouts to massive corporations, but by providing critical financial relief to the households that desperately need it.
Student debt is suffocating us, and only immediate, sweeping legislative reform can release the deadly stranglehold on our workers and on national productivity. Initiatives like this work; think of the G.I. Bill of Rights, which helped usher in the golden age of American capitalism, with rapid growth and declining income inequality.
As we look to reopen our country to a forever-changed world, we must not lose this opportunity. We can free our best and brightest to serve their communities and to pursue their dreams. Essential workers struggling with fear, hopelessness, and food insecurity cannot protect us from the grave challenges we face.
We need their help now, not later. Our country has already suffered greater loss of life from this pandemic than on the battlefield in the Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Gulf wars combined. Let’s not lose an entire generation to debt, despair, and grinding poverty. The remedy is obvious, and the cause is just. We cannot afford not to forgive student debt.
Faith Gay is a founding partner of the law firm Selendy & Gay.
Randi Weingarten is president of the American Federation of Teachers.


fortune--2020-06-25--Verizon joins growing list of companies pulling ads from Facebook

Verizon said it is pausing the placement of ads on Facebook and Instagram until the social networks can get better control over posts that spread disinformation.
“We have strict content policies in place and have zero tolerance when they are breached, we take action,” Verizon chief media officer John Nitti said in a statement. “We’re pausing our advertising until Facebook can create an acceptable solution that makes us comfortable and is consistent with what we’ve done with YouTube and other partners.”
Verizon is one of the largest advertisers to pull its ads from Facebook as part of an effort by civil rights organizations to pressure the social-media giant to take action on hate speech and misleading content. Groups including the Anti-Defamation League and Color of Change started the campaign, called Stop Hate For Profit, to encourage advertisers to boycott Facebook ads in July. Verizon’s move follows participation by Recreational Equipment Inc., Patagonia Inc., Upwork Inc., Ben & Jerry’s and other brands.
U.S. lawmakers have also put pressure on Facebook, Twitter Inc. and Google to combat disinformation, including during a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week.
Facebook didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Verizon’s decision. The move was reported earlier by Ad Age.


fortune--2020-06-25--11 states are seeing coronavirus cases grow sharply. Here’s the full state-by-state breakdown

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As America hit its highest-ever single-day increase in coronavirus infections yesterday, new cases of COVID-19 are trending up in 26 states. The picture is especially worrying in 11 states where the number of new cases has grown significantly—by an average of more than 200 more new cases per day when compared to two weeks ago—according to a Fortune analysis of New York Times data.
Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott today announced a “pause” on the state’s reopening because of the surging case numbers, averaged 1,746 new coronavirus cases per day in the week ending June 10; in the seven-day period ending yesterday, June 24, that figure was 4,549. The average number of new cases per day jumped up by 2,527 in Florida; 1,828 in California; and by 1,616 in Arizona over the two-week period.
“The fact that our most populous states are seeing trends going the wrong way is quite disturbing,” says Howard Koh, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and a former assistant secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Koh links the worsening situation to the fact that many states began reopening their economies before they met the government’s criteria to do so. But he notes that California followed the guidelines closely and is among the states being challenged now.
“We’re still very humbled by this virus, and we’re still very deep into the first wave, five months and counting,” he says.
There are a handful of states that have seen new case numbers trending in the other direction. Michigan, which was averaging 912 new cases per day two weeks ago, saw that figure fall to an average of 288 cases per day over the past seven days. Maryland and Illinois also saw significant drops in the number of new infections.
“It’s distressing to see 50 states going in 50 different directions in terms of trends and strategies,” says Koh. “This is the time to double down on public health and prevention because that’s what works.”


fortune--2020-06-25--Lobbyist Jack Abramoff charged in cryptocurrency case, U.S. says

Jack Abramoff, the onetime Washington insider who went to prison in a lobbying scandal, was charged with a criminal conspiracy related to cryptocurrency and lobbying disclosure, a U.S. prosecutor said.
Abramoff has agreed to plead guilty and faces as long as five years in prison, U.S. Attorney David Anderson said Thursday at a press conference in San Francisco.
The alleged fraud was described in a separate lawsuit filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which claimed Abramoff fraudulently promoted a blockchain-based digital token called AML BitCoin, through the NAC Foundation. The company’s founder, Rowland Marcus Andrade, is fighting criminal charges, Anderson said.
The two men claimed the security was an improvement on the original Bitcoin because it had encoded security features, including to prevent money laundering, according to the SEC’s complaint against Abramoff. They raised at least $5.6 million from about 2,400 investors, mostly in the U.S., from August 2017 through December 2018, the SEC said. The agency separately sued Andrade and NAC.
According to the SEC, the security features Abramoff and Andrade promoted were still early in development and required additional funds to include them in the new token.
“They deceived investors by, among other things, making false and misleading statements in press releases, social-media outlets, and other promotional materials regarding the status of the technology and governmental agencies’ interest in using AML BitCoin in their payment systems,” according to the SEC’s suit.
Three years ago, a reality TV series called “Capitol Makeover: Bitcoin Brigade” was in production featuring Abramoff as he leads a group from AML Bitcoin in a “boot camp” that will transform the members “from techies to lobbyists ready to take on Capitol Hill,” according to a 2017 report in the Washington Post.
In the early 2000s, Abramoff was at the center of a scandal that led to 20 convictions or guilty pleas, including two officials in President George W. Bush’s administration, a member of Congress, congressional aides and nine other lobbyists. Abramoff served 43 months in prison before he was released in 2010.
The criminal case is U.S. v. Abramoff, 20-cr-00260; the civil suit is SEC v. Abramoff, 20-cv-04190; both are in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).


fortune--2020-06-25--New bill would bar federal agencies from using facial-recognition technology

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Democratic lawmakers introduced a bill on Thursday that would ban federal agencies from using facial recognition technology for surveillance.
The proposed bill—introduced by Senators Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Representatives Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.)—comes amid a heated debate over policing and racial justice. The killing of black Minneapolis resident George Floyd by a white police officer in May kick-started nationwide protests and reignited concerns about law enforcement using facial recognition and related A.I. technologies, which can be prone to bias or misuse by departments with a history of racial discrimination.
Last week, IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft said they would stop selling facial recognition software to law enforcement. IBM’s policy is in effect indefinitely, while Amazon and Microsoft said theirs are temporary.
“For years, I have called on companies like Amazon to stop selling facial recognition technology that has not only been invasive, inaccurate, and unregulated but has also been unapologetically weaponized by law enforcement against Black people across this country for far too long,” Rep. Jayapal said in a statement.
Several cities including San Francisco, Oakland, Cambridge, Mass., and Somerville, Mass., have already barred police and other city departments from using facial recognition technologies.
Under the proposed federal bill, agencies, including law enforcement, would be unable to use facial recognition technologies. Biometric technologies like voice-recognition or gate recognition, which identifies people by body shape and walking style, would also be banned.
The bill would give individuals the “right to sue” if federal agencies used any of the banned technology against them.
In an announcement about the proposed bill, lawmakers highlighted the recent wrongful arrest in Farmington Hills, Mich., of Robert Julian-Borchak Williams as one reason they believed the prohibition is needed. Earlier this year, facial-recognition technology used by police misidentified Williams, leading officers to incorrectly believe he had committed a crime, the New York Times reported.
“Facial-recognition technology doesn’t just pose a grave threat to our privacy, it physically endangers Black Americans and other minority populations in our country,” Sen. Markey said in a statement. “As we work to dismantle the systematic racism that permeates every part of our society, we can’t ignore the harms that these technologies present.”
It’s unclear whether the proposed bill has enough support to pass. In November, for instance, U.S. Senators Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced the Facial Recognition Technology Warrant Act, which would require federal law enforcement to obtain court orders before they can use facial-recognition technologies. Nothing significant has happened to that bill since.


fortune--2020-06-25--Can’t wait for iOS 14? Download the ‘beta’ version for early access

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Apple previewed its new iPhone software, iOS 14, during its worldwide developers event (WWDC) last week. Its release is expected in mid-September, alongside the debut of Apple’s next generation of iPhones.
However, iPhone fans can get early access to the upcoming mobile operating system by applying to join one of Apple’s “beta” programs, which offer prerelease versions for testing. There are two options to consider.
Impatience is a virtue
The first program is free, open to the public, and provides advance access months before the official rollout.
To participate in the test, you can sign up on the Apple beta program software website. All that is required is a working Apple ID, which consists of an iCloud email address and the relevant password.
Like the date of iOS 14’s commercial release, the release date for the public iOS 14 beta has not yet been set. But based on the company’s timeline in recent years, it is expected in mid-July.
Once the public beta becomes available, registered testers can download it through the usual “software update” tab in the default iPhone “settings” app. Apple recommends that people back up their iPhones before downloading the software, since bugs can cause issues.
If you can’t wait, you can get your hands on iOS 14 beta software as soon as today. But it will cost you.
For the alphas among us
The Apple developer program is designed for people who are interested in developing applications. The program offers the earliest access to iOS 14 beta software.
In addition to an Apple ID, registrants must provide some basic personal information, like a legal name and street address. The developer program also requires an annual membership fee of $99; though some organizations, such as nonprofits, academic groups, and government agencies, can apply for a fee waiver.
If you’ve followed these steps and have become a member, you will then be able to download the iOS 14 beta software here. Navigate the menu and click “install profile,” then select that profile in the “general” tab of the default iPhone “settings” app.
As with any beta, it’s wise to backup one’s device before installing it. Apple offers people early access partly to discover—and resolve—technical issues that the new software may cause.
Why care about iOS 14?
The new iOS represents a major makeover.
Apple calls it “the biggest update ever” to the iPhone home screen. The features include customizable “widgets,” or shortcuts to programs that can be dragged and dropped around a screen (like a weather-at-a-glance tile); an App Library that automatically sorts apps into a convenient gallery view (picture “productivity” and “lifestyle” bundles); and a new kind of temporary, disposable app called App Clips (useful for throwaway downloads, like the app for a scooter rental service in a city you’re visiting just for a weekend).
The enticements are more than cosmetic. The new iOS features privacy enhancements, including informational report cards about the data an app is collecting, a stand-alone translation app, and less disruptive notification for incoming phone calls (a pop-up rather than a full screen).
If you’re going to download an early version of the iOS software, remember that you’re signing up for a tradeoff. You’ll get to try all the whizbang upgrades sooner than your friends, but you’ll be volunteering as a guinea pig while Apple works out the kinks in the system.


fortune--2020-06-25--Amazon gives Seattle arena an unusual name

Amazon.com bought the naming rights to Seattle’s KeyArena, the new home for the city’s expansion hockey team and the WNBA’s Seattle Storm, but the company isn’t putting its own name on it.
The venue will be called the Climate Pledge Arena, a nod to Amazon’s push to get companies to have net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. It unveiled the pledge last year, which requires businesses to reach the goal a decade ahead of the Paris Agreement.
The stadium will be the first net-zero carbon certified arena in the world, Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos said in a post on Instagram. The site will “generate zero waste from operations and events, and use reclaimed rainwater in the ice system to create the greenest ice in the NHL,” Bezos said.
The site was developed in partnership with Oak View Group and the as-yet-unnamed Seattle NHL franchise. The team is slated to take the ice in the 2021-2022 season. The arena, which first opened in 1962, is being extensively renovated — in part to make it eco-friendly.
“Everyone loves to talk about being carbon-neutral, but it’s really hard and really expensive,” said Tim Leiweke, CEO of Oak View. “We’re spending tens of millions of dollars on this. We’re trying to set a precedent others will follow.”
Leiweke said he was inspired by musicians such as Billie Eilish, who have pushed for arenas to reduce their carbon footprint by reducing plastic and embracing renewable energy.
The sports venue will be entirely powered by renewable energy, in part with solar panels. Tickets to NHL and WNBA games will double as free public-transit passes, and fans will be encouraged to take Seattle’s refurbished monorail.
Leiweke reached out to Amazon early on about getting involved with the arena, seeing as the company is the largest business in the city. Amazon was at first reluctant since it didn’t need help promoting its name, he said, but came around to the focus on climate.
Amazon services will be also integrated throughout the area, including in the technology used for food and beverage and parking.
“Amazon will be everywhere,” Leiweke said.
The arena also has the space to accommodate a team from the National Basketball Association, should that league choose to return to Seattle.
The Seattle SuperSonics moved to Oklahoma City before the 2008-2009 season, leaving one of the largest cities in the U.S. without an NBA team.