fortune--2020-08-20--‘Work to your strength’: Huawei’s CTO weighs in on U.S. efforts to build a Huawei alternative

China telecom manufacturer Huawei Technologies is facing new sanctions in the United States. On Monday, the U.S. Department of Commerce tightened restrictions on Huawei, limiting the company’s access to commercially available chips.
The new order built on existing restrictions announced in May and blocked global semiconductor manufacturers that use U.S. technology from selling chips to Huawei without obtaining a special license.
What’s more, India is reportedly keeping Huawei out of its 5G network, following the lead of the U.S., U.K., Japan, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand, which have all barred Huawei because of security concerns.
Amid the onslaught, Huawei continues to defend itself and champion its technology. It argues that national security worries are unfounded and dismisses the assertion that it’s an arm of the Chinese government.
Paul Scanlan, chief technology officer for the Huawei Carrier Business Group, repeated those refrains in an Eastworld Spotlight conversation with Fortune‘s Clay Chandler last week. (The interview took place before the U.S. announced its latest restrictions on Huawei on Monday.)
“What’s a shame is that Huawei has arguably the most efficient 5G products,” said Scanlan, citing Huawei’s 20% to 30% efficiency in 5G rollout compared to competitors. “It would be a shame if that couldn’t be brought to bear across the whole planet.”
U.S. opposition to Huawei, a leader in 5G technology, has led to American efforts to build alternatives. Instead of starting from square one, Scanlan argues, the U.S. should use its expertise in data collection and analysis to improve existing 5G technology. Building a U.S. alternative to Huawei that’s “mature, stable, and reliable” could take years, he said.
In the interview, Scanlan also touched on the importance of worldwide collaboration in rolling out 5G, metrics in evaluating the development of the network, and China’s position in the global 5G race. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.
Fortune: The Trump administration has imposed restrictions on American companies from selling their technology to companies that are on the entity list including Huawei. Are we creating a digital iron curtain between these two countries, and how does that restrict Huawei’s ability to do business?
Paul Scanlan: For 32 years, we have demonstrated that our customers can trust us. They trust us to improve their business through technological innovation. That’s what Huawei has done through and through. And it’s unfortunate that [with] this geopolitical war that’s going around the world, and nationalism in many countries, [people] fail to understand that. We’ve got a virus at the moment, and the only way you fix those things is through collaboration, not through isolation. So, personally, the way I feel and the way Huawei feels is that collaboration is far better than isolation or division, to share information…share use cases and experiences of what can be done with this technology called 5G in collaboration with cloud and A.I.-based solutions. And that’s not something that Huawei does alone. These things need to be done within a broader ecosystem, not just within a country but across the globe. That’s how you fix problems.
What’s a shame is that Huawei has arguably the most efficient 5G products. If you want to look at the very first low-hanging use case for 5G, it’s really really around the efficiencies that come from an operator deploying a technology like 5G. And if Huawei is running somewhere around 20% to 30% more efficient than our competitors’ rollout of 5G, then it would be a shame that couldn’t be brought to bear across the whole planet.
Where are we right now in terms of rolling out 5G, and what are the metrics to evaluate it?
As of earlier this year, Huawei had shipped about 600,000 of these 5G base stations. If you were to compare 4G back in 2014…at the end of the first year, China had 720,000 4G base stations; the combined total of Europe was about 60,000. You’re seeing something of the same order now. One city here in Guangdong province has more 5G base stations than Europe.
But does that matter? You could measure it [using] traditional standards of 2G, 3G, and 4G, where governments were always measuring [the development based on] population coverage. And that was a typical measurement for over three years, because the objective then was to provide a mobile service, that was the target at the time. But if you look at what’s the real use cases for 5G, then deployment per coverage area or per coverage of population density may not necessarily be the target you’re looking for. Telecom operators are rolling it out in what we call macro sites outdoors, the big cell towers, and that’s to get coverage of the population. The frequencies we’re using in 5G initially don’t penetrate buildings very well, if at all. So you can see that if I wanted to measure 5G industrially, in other words its ability to transform industries, then those metrics are not really suitable.
So I would rather measure 5G really by what’s the contribution, how many telcos have achieved zero carbon emissions, or being 100% green for example. Another measure might be how many industries have we successfully started to transform. How many hospitals are using the benefits of, getting the benefits of, demonstrating the benefits of 5G. How many manufacturing facilities have demonstrated the ability to be transformed. I think that would be very good metrics.
Are Chinese companies ahead of the game compared to global competitors?
I’ve been working in Huawei for 12 years, and just my experience in certain countries—it’s not just China—but I really do believe that China is, personally I do, China’s ahead of the game.
Just use the COVID-19 experience over the last five months, and look at a couple of facilities that have been constructed. Over here in Wuhan, it’s been well documented that 1,000-bed hospitals have been built within 10 days. We built proper 5G networks in these hospitals within two or three days; we built advanced cloud-based A.I. solutions within a couple of weeks. [Rotating chairman] Mr. Guo Ping mentioned since 2018, some of the hospital collaboration that China has been doing allows up to about 40,000 remote diagnosis of patients in Morocco, in other parts of Africa and in Asia. So that embryonic learning back in 2018, together with the pointy end of the stick that came with COVID-19 in February, led to or accelerated the thinking. Not just in China, but we demonstrated it here in China.
In China, you can see in universities you teach, anywhere relating to education, you can see that in manufacturing industries, and Huawei is one of the ones that are doing this in manufacturing. But largely led by health, understanding that if we can connect and get sensor devices, collect information, analyze this. We can fix problems, we can improve life, we can improve society. And I really believe that that’s what China’s done.
Is China far ahead of the U.S. in moving toward a 5G world?
The U.S. is releasing another 100 megahertz of spectrum, more spectrum in this thing called C-band. But countries like China have had 100 megahertz and more for operators for some time. And if countries like the U.S. are only starting to allocate more spectrum, then that’s one of the challenges that operators will have in trying to deploy broadly. And deployment is the key to making all this work.
In China, it’s quite normal for us to deploy 5G, not in big cell towers but on lampposts…So every second or third or fifth lamppost has 5G solutions built on them, and that’s because the government understands that you need to share infrastructure. That’s their deployment considerations. And some countries understand this better than other countries. Coming back to those use cases…I’m not sure how many hospitals are [5G-enabled] in the U.S. or how many [5G-enabled] manufacturing plants are in the U.S., but there are many, there are a number of them here in China that are heading in that direction if they’ve not already been connected.
There’s been a lot of talk in the U.S. lately about strengthening the government’s involvement in rolling out 5G. Could the U.S. government create an American alternative to Huawei?
What I would advise, [and] what the U.S. does really well, is analytics. Personal opinion, work to your strengths. The floor price of a 5G radio is probably going to head toward a commodity-based price in the near future. By the time you try to build up any alternative technology, it doesn’t matter how good your software and hardware engineering capabilities are, you still have to go through proof of concept, you still have to do interoperability testing, you still have to comply with standards. If you want to write a new standard, it’s going to take years to get that agreed. You still have to have a product that is mature and stable and reliable with the right go-to-market price here. So those things don’t happen in a year or two or three years. By then, a lot of the infrastructure globally will have been built out, a lot of the opportunities will be well underway.
I would have thought the U.S. [would have] said, “This equipment from Huawei is terrific. Let’s deploy it faster because we know how to do that in the U.S. Let’s connect everything; let’s get all the information, the data. Let’s analyze and let’s improve industry and develop our economy and grow.” That’s where its strengths really are, and that’s where the business opportunity really lies, rather than trying to build up an alternative 5G technology supplier.
You mentioned the possibility that 5G hardware would be relatively quickly commodified. What does that imply for Huawei?
We took a decision many years ago to start diversifying. We rolled all the R&Ds into one, and we started having different go-to markets in the energy sector and manufacturing sector, in the financial sector, in education, etc. We could also see networks becoming terribly complicated. The information within a network just to run it as we went from 2, 3, 4, now to 5G, the amount of data just to run it and optimize it [and] make it better for users was enormous. So we understood that some A.I. capability would be better. And that’s…one of the reasons why we headed toward the A.I. chips that we were developing.
Huawei isn’t just focusing on 5G…on building and optimizing the best networks in the world. But just look beyond that. Huawei has capability [in] A.I., Huawei has capability in cloud. We are diversifying to a lot of these areas where we can understand, we can see what’s happening in different industry sectors and then we try to provide cost-effective, reliable, and innovative solutions to customers in those sectors.
This story is part of Eastworld Spotlight, a series of conversations on matters of business, tech, and finance with executives, experts, entrepreneurs, and investors in Asia. Subscribe to Fortune’s Eastworld newsletter to get them in your inbox.


fortune--2020-08-20--In the 5G race, the prize remains unclear

It would cost $ 1 trillion to move global supply chains out of China—but the long-term gains could be worth @

This is the web version of CEO Daily. To get it delivered to your inbox, sign up here.
Good morning. David Meyer here in Berlin, filling in for Alan.
My first full-time journalistic gig was writing about cellphones and telecommunications, and it began in mid-2006, a fascinating time for the sector. Just over half a decade previously, many network operators had spent eye-watering amounts on securing radio spectrum for 3G mobile-broadband networks, but they still had little to show for it.
The technology’s big use case was a mystery—there were smartphones and apps of a sort, but the announcement of the first iPhone was still months away; Apple was yet to revolutionize the presentation of mobile programs in a way that would lead to mass-market adoption.
I was reminded of this situation by two pieces of commentary in the last day, this time regarding 5G.
One was Tae Kim’s Bloomberg piece on Apple’s historic $2 trillion valuation, which noted that—in the context of the pandemic—it could prove difficult for the company to convince economically-insecure Americans to buy expensive 5G iPhones. “Further, I’m still skeptical there will be new apps anytime soon that will need the faster fifth-generation wireless speeds, making phone upgrades less compelling,” Kim wrote.
Personally, I suspect many phone users will be keen to upgrade their devices if only because relentless disinfection with potent chemicals has damaged their screens. But the argument is valid; early adopters will usually have to wait a while for that choice to bear fruit.
The other piece came this morning from Iain Morris, news editor at telecoms trade outlet Light Reading, who noted that early deployers of 5G in East Asia are still waiting to see results. In Japan, takeup is low. In South Korea, a lot of people have bought 5G phones, but they aren’t spending more on mobile services as a result. Looks like a similar story in China, too—and as for the much-vaunted business applications of 5G, he wrote, “there are few real-world examples that cannot squeeze into 4G or Wi-Fi.”
Morris’s point is that, for all the hype about 5G being the prize in some grand, global race, its rewards are “far less obvious” than those in the arms, space or vaccine races.
While some politicians see 5G as “central to the way economies will function in the future and the way our countries will secure themselves”—the words of hawkish U.S. Senator Tom Cotton, backing the American assault on Huawei—Morris argues that the technology is already at risk of fragmentation, and the pandemic could “hinder app development and service innovation for years.”
In short, 5G really isn’t as important as some make it out to be, and won’t be for a good while yet—something worth bearing in mind when governments use it as a rallying cry in their geopolitical squabbles, and when smartphone makers try to get you upgrading to the latest and greatest.
News below.
David Meyer
@superglaze
david.meyer@fortune.com
TOP NEWS
Markets wobble
Asian and European markets have fallen, and U.S. futures are down, after members of the Federal Reserve said the rebound in employment was slowing and additional easing may be needed. In China, shares fell after the People's Bank of China dampened expectation for additional monetary easing. And in Australia, the markets took fright due to concerns over worsening ties with China. Reuters
Trump vs Goodyear
The latest brands-vs-politicians squabble comes courtesy of Goodyear, which reportedly told employees they couldn't wear pro-Trump "MAGA attire" to work. Goodyear insists that it discourages employees from any political campaigning in the workplace. Either way, the President urged his supporters to boycott the company, and said he might change the tires on his presidential limo. The boycott announcement caused Goodyear's stock to drop as much as 6%. Fortune
Share buybacks
The pandemic nearly halved stock buybacks in the U.S. in the second quarter. Provisional figures put the quarterly total at $89.7 billion, down 46% year-on-year, on pace for the lowest quarterly total since Q1 2012. Financial Times
Walk away
The financial sector can have an "enormous positive impact on the climate movement," Citi CEO Michael Corbat wrote in a CNN op-ed. Corbat said the sector should develop standards that let companies "identify and disclose the potential impacts of their businesses on the environment and the potential impacts of climate change on their businesses," and banks should "have the courage to walk away" if clients won't reduce their emissions. However, he rejected calls for Citi to divest entirely from the fossil fuel industry, as "we believe in working with them, not against them." CNN
AROUND THE WATER COOLER
MediaTek woes
Chipmaker MediaTek was set to do well out of the loophole that let Huawei buy off-the-shelf chips designed by third parties, even if those third parties used U.S. technology. Now, with the U.S. Department of Commerce having closed off that route, the Taiwanese firm's stock price has plummeted—as has that of other processor manufacturers in a similar boat, such as Novatek and Realtek. Fortune
Californian fires
Residents in parts of California's Lake and Napa counties have been told to evacuate, as dozens of wildfires spread across the state. Lightning strikes have been blamed for the majority of the fires, though a man has also been arrested over suspected arson. A helicopter pilot fighting the fires died when his craft crashed, causing yet another fire. New York Times
Oh, Canada
Canada's government had a heck of day yesterday. Finance Minister Bill Morneau quit in the midst of a conflict-of-interest probe that is also targeting Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Morneau's successor, Chrystia Freeland—a former journalist who has served as foreign and international trade minister—is the first woman to hold the post. Then Trudeau suspended Canada's parliament for five weeks, saying he needed the time to reshape his pre-pandemic agenda into an "ambitious" recovery plan. His critics say the suspension is about that ethics probe. Washington Post
Navalny poisoning
Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner, has apparently been poisoned again. Last year he suffered a suspected poisoning while in police custody; this time he seems to have ingested poisoned tea while on a place from Siberia to Moscow. His spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, says he has fallen into a coma. Deutsche Welle
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.


fortune--2020-08-20--The Fed’s bearish outlook puts the global stocks rally on pause

This is the web version of the Bull Sheet, Fortune’s no-BS daily newsletter on the markets. Sign up to receive it in your inbox here.
Good morning. Stocks were cruising to another day of gains on Wednesday when the Fed went and spoiled the party—well, spoiled it for most stocks not named Apple. The Fed minutes from the July meeting show the central bankers are not nearly as bullish as investors. That’s enough to put the global equities rally on pause today.
It’s looking like a risk-off Thursday. Here’s what’s moving markets.
Markets update
Asia
The major Asia indexes are all in the red, with Hong Kong’s Hang Seng leading the way lower, down 1.5% .
are all in the red, with Hong Kong’s leading the way lower, down . The pandemic has put globe-spanning supply chains in the spotlight, and a new analysis puts a price tag on just how much it would cost non-Chinese firms to repatriate their manufacturing operations currently in China. How much? $1 trillion over a five-year period .
has put globe-spanning in the spotlight, and a new analysis puts a price tag on just how much it would cost non-Chinese firms to repatriate their manufacturing operations currently in China. How much? over a . Australia’s Qantas reported a $1.4 billion full-year net loss, its first since 2014, and said it expects international travel to be in the doldrums for a while. It will take three years for Qantas to get its Airbus A380 fleet back in the air.
Europe
The European bourses were off significantly at the open, with Paris, London and Frankfurt all down at least 1% .
were off significantly at the open, with Paris, London and Frankfurt all down at least . Spain recorded a four-month high in coronavirus cases yesterday, signaling trouble ahead for Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez . The economy is already in deep recession and the spike in cases is hammering the vital tourism sector.
recorded a four-month high in coronavirus cases yesterday, signaling trouble ahead for . The economy is already in deep recession and the spike in cases is hammering the vital tourism sector. Scandal-plagued Wirecard will be booted from the blue-chip Dax, replaced by a stay-at-home stock, Berlin-based Delivery Hero.
U.S.
The U.S. futures have been falling all morning, pointing to a weak open. The markets sunk in the last hour of trading on Wednesday after the Fed shared its doubts of further economic recovery without government support.
have been falling all morning, pointing to a weak open. The markets sunk in the last hour of trading on Wednesday after the Fed shared its doubts of further economic recovery without government support. Apple shares are flat in pre-market trading after the tech giant made history, joining briefly the $2 trillion valuation club. Which stocks are next to hit that mark? Fortune‘s Aaron Pressman runs the numbers.
valuation club. Which stocks are next to hit that mark? Fortune‘s Aaron Pressman runs the numbers. The big retailers are reporting big numbers. Yesterday, it was Target unveiling a big top-line sales beat last quarter, “by far the best performance in the 58-year-old company’s history, ” Fortune‘s Phil Wahba writes. E-commerce was the big catalyst.
” Fortune‘s Phil Wahba writes. E-commerce was the big catalyst. It’s Thursday, which means we get our weekly check-in on the labor market. Economists forecast today’s number will come in at an additional 920,000 unemployment insurance claims. “The numbers have been trending down,” writes UBS economist Paul Donovan in an investor note this morning, “but the economic consequences of claims are larger than they were—because the loss of additional unemployment benefit increases the cost of being jobless.”
Elsewhere
Gold is down, falling below $1,950/ounce .
is down, falling below . The dollar is up a tick.
is up a tick. Crude too is down again, despite more bullish outlooks that demand will recover by year-end.
***
The making of a bull market
The markets may be nudging downwards this morning, but there’s still plenty to say about Tuesday’s record close for the S&P 500.
It wasn’t quite the fastest bottom-to-top jump in the history of the index, but it was notable for other reasons.
To recap, the S&P hit its previous all-time high on Feb. 19 and then bombed downwards. You no doubt remember what came next. It lost 34% over the next month, the fastest drop of this severity in bear market history.
Over the course of the next five months the U.S. economy entered a devastating recession and unemployment rates hit highs last seen during the Great Depression.
But the markets started to come back, helped by trillions in fiscal stimulus spending and the Fed’s super-loose monetary policy. The result was a five-month rebound back to record territory.
As today’s chart shows, courtesy of LPL Research, the rollercoaster ride we’ve been on is truly rare.
Firstly, bear markets tend to be a grind. Equities usually lose steam and then bounce back over several months, not weeks.
Historically speaking, the average recovery period from a bear market bottom to a new high is 10 months when the economy is seeing some level of growth. When the economy is in recession, as we are now, the bounce-back takes, on average, 30 months.
This time around, it took roughly six months to go from top to bottom to top again. That it occurred during a recession, a pandemic and record unemployment is a startling feat.
“This will go down as the fastest bear market ever, but also one of the fastest recoveries ever,” LPL Financial Chief Market Strategist Ryan Detrick, explained in an investor note. “Then again, we’ve never quite seen a recession and recovery like this, so maybe it isn’t a shock to see new highs this quickly.”
The rapid rise and fall of the S&P has a lot of veteran market watchers uneasy. Yesterday’s sharp, late-day sell-off was but one reminder that the economic recovery lags well behind that of the markets recovery.
We’ll probably get another reminder of that fact before the open of today’s market when the latest unemployment claims are announced.
***
Have a nice day, everyone. I’ll see you here tomorrow.
Bernhard Warner
@BernhardWarner
Bernhard.Warner@Fortune.com
As always, you can write to bullsheet@fortune.com or reply to this email with suggestions and feedback.
Today's reads
"Stakeholder capitalism." It's been one full year since the Business Roundtable made its landmark announcement that captains of industry should put all stakeholders—yes, shareholders; but not just—at the center of their decision-making process. Fortune's Geoff Colvin revisits that pledge and what it really means.
Home on the stock exchange. The most anticipated tech IPO of the year moved a step closer to reality yesterday when Airbnb submitted to the SEC its filing paperwork. Could it be the next blockbuster tech stock? (It hardly qualifies as the stay-at-home variety). Fortune's Danielle Abril talks to analysts and lays out what you should know about this imminent public offering.
What's the opposite of travel and leisure stocks? Home improvement stocks, you might say. We know the former are having a rough pandemic. The opposite is true of home-improvement retailers such as Home Depot and Lowe's. How much growth is on the horizon for these DIY wonders? Fortune's Anne Sraders breaks down their prospects here.
Some of these stories require a subscription to access. There is a discount offer for our loyal readers if you use this link to sign up. Thank you for supporting our journalism.
Market candy
A Netflix tax?
It's no secret local governments are in a world of hurt as tax revenues have fallen precipitously during the pandemic. Could one solution to this shortfall be a streaming tax? In a much-watched lawsuit, Indianapolis and four other Indiana cities are pushing the courts to make streaming services such as Netflix, Disney and Hulu pay a "right of way" tax for accessing municipal telephone infrastructure like cables and telephone poles.


fortune--2020-08-20--A prime minister said a COVID-19 vaccine might be mandatory. Hours later, he backtracked

The Australian government will not make a coronavirus vaccine compulsory for its citizens, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Wednesday, backtracking on an earlier remark that he expected a COVID-19 vaccine “to be as mandatory as you could possibly make it.”
“There are no mechanisms for compulsory [vaccination]. I mean we can’t hold someone down and make them take it…that doesn’t happen anywhere in Australia today under any of those systems, and that’s not what people are proposing,” Morrison said on Australian radio station 2GB on Wednesday evening.
Morrison had suggested earlier on Wednesday on 3AW, another Australian radio station, that a coronavirus vaccine might be mandatory, saying that medical grounds “should be the only basis” for vaccination exemptions.
Karen Andrews, Australia’s minister for science and industry, echoed Morrison’s remarks on Wednesday, saying on 2GB, “The Prime Minister’s made it clear that we are looking at it being a mandatory vaccine.”
But hours later, after online backlash from anti-vaccination groups in Australia and elsewhere, Morrison backtracked on his earlier remarks, telling 2GB the vaccine would not be compulsory. Morrison also said there was “a bit of an overreaction” to his remark about a mandatory vaccine.
The swift public reaction to Morrison’s comments underscores the politically fraught nature of population-wide vaccination campaigns, and the delicacy with which governments will need to handle the issue if and when a COVID-19 vaccine is ready.
Vaccines are some of the safest medicines in existence; distribution of a coronavirus vaccine, once one proves safe and effective, will be key to saving lives and ending the pandemic.
Australia on Tuesday reached an agreement with British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca to produce and distribute 25 million doses of the AstraZeneca- and Oxford University–developed coronavirus vaccine candidate, AZD1222, for the Australian population.
AZD1222, widely considered the global frontrunner for a coronavirus vaccine, is currently undergoing human clinical trials. Morrison said he hopes to make the vaccine doses free and available to all Australians in early 2021 if the trials are successful.
Hundreds of anti-vaccination protesters rallied across cities in Australia in May, calling the pandemic a “scam,” breaching social distancing regulations, singing anti-vaccination songs, and holding up placards that opposed “mandatory” vaccines.
Morrison has long been associated with vaccination efforts. When he served as Australia’s minister for social services in 2014 and 2015, Australia passed national and state legislation called “No jab, no play” that required children to receive certain immunizations in order for their families to be eligible for childcare fee assistance and other benefits.
The immunization requirement originally exempted people with medical reasons, people who submitted a conscientious objection to immunization, and members of the Church of Christ, Scientist. In April 2015, Morrison announced that the Christian Scientist and conscientious objector exemptions would be removed.
Morrison pointed out that he had established “No jab, no play” while speaking to 3AW earlier on Wednesday, raising speculation that the government might introduce similar measures to encourage uptake of the coronavirus vaccine.
“There will be no compulsory vaccine, but there will be a lot of encouragement and measures to get as high a rate of acceptance as usual,” Morrison told 2GB.
The Prime Minister did not specify what the measures might entail. He said he hoped Australia would achieve at least a 95% vaccination rate for the coronavirus, and he cited the country’s high immunization rates for other diseases as evidence that it would be able to achieve a similar rate for coronavirus vaccination.
In the U.S., by comparison, 35% of Americans say they won’t take a coronavirus vaccine, according to an NPR–PBS NewsHour–Marist poll released last week. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Tuesday he does not see the U.S. government making a coronavirus vaccine compulsory.


fortune--2020-08-20--This chipmaker was a winner in the U.S. crackdown on Huawei. Now, it’s another victim

The Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek was poised to be one of the largest beneficiaries of the United States’ yearslong campaign against Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant. Now it finds itself as a likely victim of the latest round of the U.S.-China tech war.
On Monday, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that it would restrict Huawei and 38 of its affiliates from obtaining any semiconductor chips that are produced with American technology or software.
The U.S. government argues that the measure is in the interest of national security; it accuses Huawei of feeding data directly to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). “We will not tolerate efforts by the CCP to undermine the privacy of our citizens, our businesses’ intellectual property, or the integrity of next-generation networks worldwide,” U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement in support of the new order.
In response to the ban, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said on Tuesday that “China firmly opposes the deliberate smearing and suppression of Chinese enterprises including Huawei by the U.S.” He also said U.S. allegations that Huawei poses a threat to U.S. national security are “totally baseless.”
Previous actions had already restricted Huawei’s access to semiconductors, but the new order aims to further starve Huawei of chips by eliminating work-arounds that allowed it to buy chips designed by third parties.
The measure escalates the Trump administration’s crackdown on Huawei, with some seeing it as a “death sentence” for the tech giant, but it also places chipmakers like MediaTek in the crosshairs of U.S. regulators for the first time.
The MediaTek loophole
In May, the U.S. government issued an order that banned U.S. technology from being used to produce chips designed by Huawei. The world’s largest chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), endured the brunt of that edict, since it custom-made chips for Huawei with a manufacturing process that relied on American technology.
TSMC complied with the U.S.’s order and signaled it would drop Huawei as a client, despite Huawei accounting for 13% of its revenue.
The May directive severed Huawei’s supply of custom-made chips, but it still gave Huawei a fallback option: buying off-the-shelf chips designed by a third party.
Enter MediaTek. MediaTek also uses U.S. technology, but it designs its own chips, whereas TSMC manufactures chips designed by the end user, in this case, Huawei. That key difference made MediaTek a possible lifeline for Huawei. Instead of sourcing custom-made chips from TSMC, Huawei could order generic chips from MediaTek and put them into Huawei devices.
On a July 31 earnings call, MediaTek CEO Lih Shyng Tsai declined to speak about its business with Huawei. But on the same call, Tsai said that MediaTek expected to supply chips to 40% of all 5G phones in China by the end of the year.
Achieving that ambitious feat could only happen if MediaTek’s chips are “widely adopted” by Huawei, Brady Wang, a semiconductor analyst at Counterpoint Research in Taipei, wrote in a note about the call.
MediaTek did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Investors certainly saw the loss of Huawei’s custom chips as MediaTek’s gain. Company shares, listed on the Taipei stock exchange, nearly doubled from April to July this year.
The chip crash
That was then.
MediaTek’s fortunes changed dramatically with Monday’s order, which essentially closed the loophole that MediaTek fit so nicely into.
The new directive says that any overseas chipmaker that uses U.S. technology and sells chips to Huawei—no matter if the chips are specifically designed for Huawei or generic chips for Huawei’s use—must obtain a U.S. license.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the ban was specifically meant to target Huawei chip suppliers that hadn’t been addressed in previous U.S. actions.
“As we have restricted its access to U.S. technology, Huawei and its affiliates have worked through third parties to harness U.S. technology in a manner that undermines U.S. national security and foreign policy interests,” said Ross. “This multipronged action demonstrates our continuing commitment to impede Huawei’s ability to do so.”
MediaTek’s stock plunged by nearly 10 percentage points in Taipei on Tuesday after the announcement. That day, MediaTek said in a regulatory filing that the ban would not have a “significant impact” on the company’s short-term operations. But investors appeared to remain skeptical; the company’s stock price continued its downward slide on Wednesday.
“After the new U.S. restrictions, Huawei’s travails are now also the travails of MediaTek,” Wang told Fortune. Among Huawei’s chip suppliers, MediaTek will be hardest hit, Wang said, as it was expected to design the largest share of chips in Huawei’s 5G phones.
The new U.S. order slammed MediaTek, but it wasn’t alone. Shares of other Asian chipmakers similarly fell on Tuesday. In Taiwan, stock of chipmakers Novatek and Realtek, which both supply Huawei, each dropped by more than 6%.
The fate of MediaTek and its peers reflects the enormous scope of the new U.S. order. Virtually every chipmaker depends on U.S. technology or equipment at some point in its supply chain. Policing the use of U.S. technology is aimed at withholding more chips from Huawei, but, in doing so, it also cuts nearly the entire chipmaking market off from Huawei, the world’s third-largest chip buyer.
“Every foreign-made semiconductor of any type anywhere in the world is now subject to U.S. license requirements if a Huawei company is in any way involved, directly or indirectly, in the transaction,” Kevin Wolf, a former senior Commerce official, told the Washington Post.
The U.S. government must still decide whether or not to grant MediaTek and its counterparts the special licenses to supply Huawei with chips. In the meantime, however, it’s clear that as the U.S. expanded its dragnet in pursuit of Huawei, it also ensnared plenty of smaller fish.


fortune--2020-08-20--Craft distillers have lost out on more than $700 million in sales because of the pandemic

Craft distillers across the country were forced to shut down their tasting rooms and tours at the start of the pandemic. And while those moves were necessary to help curb the spread of the novel coronavirus, the shutdowns have had a severe impact on what was becoming a burgeoning industry that generated $3.2 billion in retail sales last year.
A new study from the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS) published on Thursday revealed startling figures about lost sales and jobs within the domestic craft liquor industry due to COVID-19 closures. The study was based on data from a June 2020 survey conducted by the American Distilling Institute, a trade association for craft distillers, with feedback from nearly 300 distilleries across all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Approximately 41% of sales evaporated—worth more than $700 million—and 31% of employees—roughly 4,600 jobs—at craft distilleries have been furloughed. A significant portion of these losses was attributed to the shutdown of on-site sales from tasting rooms and other on-premise sales. Approximately 40% of craft distillers reported that their on-site sales were down 25% or more, and more than 15% said that their tasting rooms were completely shut down.
“Distillers started 2020 with a sense of relief and guarded optimism after the last-minute extension of the federal excise tax reduction at the end of 2019. But then, starting in March, quarantines around the country shut down restaurants, bars, and tasting rooms, removing major sources of revenue for craft distillers,” says Erik Owens, president of the American Distilling Institute. “Some distillers went months with no income from their spirits. This will be the first year in over a decade we will end with fewer craft distilleries than we started with.”
Craft distillers rely heavily on sales through on-site tasting rooms, which have been hit hard by the pandemic as many states have shut down tasting rooms and other indoor services to curb the spread of COVID-19. In 2019, approximately $919 million of craft distiller revenues stemmed from on-site sales. And more than 40% of craft distillers derive over half of their business from tasting rooms sales.
Craft distillers are considered small businesses within the hospitality industry. Approximately 60% of craft spirits makers sell less than 2,500 cases per year. There are more than 2,000 craft distilleries operating in the U.S.—45% of craft distillers operate in just one state; only 12% of craft distillers operate in more than 10 states—collectively funding more than 15,000 direct jobs. Seventy percent employ 10 or fewer employees; 55% employ one to five workers.
Many states have enacted innovative measures to provide some much-needed financial support to craft distillers following the closure of their tasting rooms and tours. Since COVID-19 hit the U.S., eight states are permitting in-state distillers to ship products to in-state consumers as a temporary economic relief measure, and dozens more are now permitting the sale of to-go cocktails, notes Chris Swonger, president and CEO of the Distilled Spirits Council.
“These measures have been a critical lifeline for small craft distilleries, and a number of states are now considering making some of these policies permanent based on the positive feedback from consumers and distillers,” Swonger says, also pointing toward the number of independent businesses that pivoted quickly to contribute to the front lines. “At the start of the pandemic, more than 800 distillers quickly switched gears and jumped into action to make hand sanitizer for their local first responders and communities. This benefited their communities and also helped to keep some distillery workers on the job.”
The Distilled Spirits Council has been working closely with state guilds to urge Congress for additional economic relief. Key to the craft distilling industry’s survival is the passage of the Craft Beverage Modernization and Tax Reform Act. The federal legislation would lower the federal excise tax on the first 100,000 proof gallons from $13.50 per proof gallon to just $2.70. “This reduces the tax burden for craft distillers by over $20 per case,” Swonger explains. “If the legislation is not extended or made permanent by year’s end, craft distillers will face a 400% tax increase in January, which could be the final blow for many of these struggling small businesses.”


fortune--2020-08-20--Trump’s call for a Goodyear boycott might mean new tires for the presidential limo

Donald Trump said Wednesday that he’ll change the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. tires on the presidential limousine after calling for a boycott against the company for allegedly banning his trademark MAGA hats at its workplaces.
“I would swap them out based on what I heard,” Trump said of the tires on the bullet-proof limousine, known as The Beast. “We’ll see what happens.”
Earlier in the day, the president demanded a boycott of Goodyear after after an image circulated on social media that appeared to show an employee training session deeming Trump campaign apparel “unacceptable” for the workplace.
Don’t buy GOODYEAR TIRES – They announced a BAN ON MAGA HATS. Get better tires for far less! (This is what the Radical Left Democrats do. Two can play the same game, and we have to start playing it now!). — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2020
Shares of Akron, Ohio-based Goodyear fell as much as 6% shortly after Trump’s tweet. The stock pared losses later in the day and closed down about 2% at $9.50.
The image appears to show an employee training session addressing appropriate attire. Examples of “acceptable” attire or messaging included “Black Lives Matter” and LGBT statements, while “unacceptable” messaging included “MAGA Attire,” referring to Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan.
Goodyear said in a statement that the “visual in question was not created or distributed by Goodyear corporate, nor was it part of a diversity training class.” The statement didn’t explain the origin of the image.
To maintain a work environment free of harassment and discrimination, according to the statement, Goodyear asks “that associates refrain from workplace expressions in support of political campaigning for any candidate or political party, as well as similar forms of advocacy that fall outside the scope of racial justice and equity issues.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump’s re-election challenger, said that the president had placed his own grievances above the welfare of Goodyear’s workers.
“Goodyear employs thousands of American workers, including in Ohio where it is headquartered,” Biden said in a statement. “To President Trump, those workers and their jobs aren’t a source of pride, just collateral damage in yet another one of his political attacks.”
In a briefing Wednesday before Trump’s news conference, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the company failed to clarify its policy in the statement, pointing out that the image also labeled as unacceptable “Blue Lives Matter” — an expression in support of police that is used in opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement.
“They came out and said equity issues,” McEnany said. “As far as I’m concerned, Blue Lives Matter is an equity issue.”
Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, slammed Trump for his tweet. “It’s absolutely despicable that the president would call for a boycott of an American company, based in Akron, that employs thousands of U.S. workers,” Brown wrote.
Goodyear tires have been seen on a range of government vehicles, including the presidential limousine and others maintained by the U.S. Secret Service.


fortune--2020-08-20--COVID-19 has spurred rapid transformation in health care. Let’s make sure it stays that way

An F-16 pilot took on A.I .
in a dogfight .
Here ’ s who won

There is no doubt that the year 2020 has evolved in ways none of us could have imagined. The uncertainty of living with COVID-19 has called everything into question—how we work, seek health care, learn, shop, travel, and connect with each other.
During a crisis, it’s natural to look at the past with nostalgia and focus on the short term. However, the situation the world now faces requires cross-sector, future-focused innovation and provides opportunities to make transformation happen much more quickly.
Until there is a definitive therapy or vaccine for COVID-19, we must adapt to the virus—it won’t adapt to us. Therefore, industry leaders must empower creative problem-solving among staff to develop innovative methods of doing business that truly meet the new needs of customers today. Here are three ways we’re using the pandemic as a springboard to reshape health care.
Leaving the past behind
The pandemic highlighted many longstanding systemic flaws in the health care system, including fragmentation, inaccessibility, high costs, and health outcome disparities. We should not pine for a past that was so far from perfect, let alone plan a return trip.
Instead, we must seize the disruptive force of the pandemic to do the transformational work necessary to address these chronic issues and create a future that’s better for our patients. COVID-19 has given us an unexpected jump-start toward this goal.
Regulatory changes at the onset of the pandemic—many of which need to be made permanent—provided new opportunities for delivering virtual care. With this enabler, we accelerated our digital plans several-fold while ensuring safety, privacy, and optimal outcomes.
For example, our critical care specialists in Minnesota used eICU remote monitoring technology to support staff and patients at a New York City hospital during the height of the city’s surge, doing virtual rounds with the New York City medical staff, helping manage patient medications and ventilators, and freeing up doctors in the hospital to care for more patients. The COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated the power we have to transform—not simply evolve—and we must seize opportunities to streamline regulatory processes and decision-making before the crisis abates.
Building barriers to maintain gains
Every organization wants to remove barriers when it seeks to execute a new direction or strategic plan. But that’s not enough. We actually need to create barriers to regression to the status quo. Most organizations are like stretched rubber bands, snapping back immediately back to normal once the tension is gone. It’s a leader’s job to stop that from happening—to reinforce the new state and purposely make it harder to go back.
Mayo Clinic is deliberately countering backsliding into a mostly in-person care model by establishing a minimum number of virtual patient visits for each department every week. At the same time, we’re carefully resisting the rush to eradicate traditional care models outright. That would overstretch and break the rubber band.
Instead, we’re merging the old and the new into a spectrum of options, allowing them to collide and coexist as long as they meet the needs of patients and allow us to advance toward an optimal state of functioning.
Seeking partners with different, yet complementary, skills
While the pandemic has had a significant impact on revenue, retreating from innovation is not an option. In fact, we have to double down on investment in research and development and empower people to innovate through nontraditional collaboration. In an increasingly complex and interdependent world, much more can be accomplished by working with partners who have different, yet complementary, skills.
The coronavirus pandemic has confirmed this for us. Partners with whom we were not aligned simply stopped collaborating with us. Partners with skills that significantly overlapped with ours turned inward to manage the same issues we faced. However, partners with similar values, but different skill sets, markedly accelerated their work with us.
Response times shortened vastly as Mayo Clinic and these partners focused on an immediate shared goal. We cooperated to solve complex problems simultaneously rather than one at a time.
Our partnership with Google, for instance, has given us the technology and data security expertise that have formed the cornerstone of our digital transformation efforts. Our collaboration with nference, an augmented intelligence company, has shown that prior influenza and measles immunization provides partial protection against COVID-19, and we’re working with the company over the long term to identify new cures for patients with rare diseases. Our alliance with Medically Home has powered our new advanced home care model, which launched 14 months earlier than planned and allows some patients to receive hospital-level care at home in the middle of a pandemic. Collaborations with government agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration also have flourished, confirming the idea that having partners with shared values and different skills trumps traditional relationships in times of crisis.
The pandemic’s disruptive force has spurred transformational change in our organization, as well as in many others. We must actively resist a return to the old way of doing things, maintain the improvements we’ve made, and continue to invest in research and strategic collaborations that will produce a health care system that serves everyone better.
Gianrico Farrugia is president and CEO of Mayo Clinic.


fortune--2020-08-20--Ex-Uber security chief accused of covering up hacking

COVID-19 has spurred rapid transformation in health care .
Let ’ s make sure it stays that way

Uber‘s former chief security officer Joseph Sullivan was charged with covering up a 2016 data breach that comprised the personal information of 57 million drivers and users.
Rather than report the breach to the Federal Trade Commission, which was investigating an earlier hack at the company, Sullivan paid the hackers $100,000 in Bitcoin, according to a statement Thursday from U.S. Attorney David L. Anderson in San Francisco. Sullivan is charged with obstruction of justice and failing to report his knowledge of a felony.
“Silicon Valley is not the Wild West,” Anderson said in the statement. “We expect good corporate citizenship. We expect prompt reporting of criminal conduct. We expect cooperation with our investigations. We will not tolerate corporate cover-ups. We will not tolerate illegal hush-money payments.”
A spokesperson for Sullivan said there’s no merit to the charges.
“This case centers on a data security investigation at Uber by a large, cross-functional team made up of some of the world’s foremost security experts, Mr. Sullivan included,” Bradford Williams said in an email. “If not for Mr. Sullivan’s and his team’s efforts, it’s likely that the individuals responsible for this incident never would have been identified at all.”
Sullivan, 52, joined Uber in 2015. He started his career as a federal prosecutor in computer hacking and intellectual property law. He’s been a quiet fixture of Silicon Valley for more than a decade, with stints at PayPal and EBay Inc. before becoming the chief security officer at Facebook in 2008.
The U.S. attorney’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for information about who is representing Sullivan in the criminal case.
”We continue to cooperate fully with the Department of Justice’s investigation,” an Uber spokesperson said in a statement. “Our decision in 2017 to disclose the incident was not only the right thing to do, it embodies the principles by which we are running our business today: transparency, integrity, and accountability.”
Sullivan was contacted by one of the hackers in November 2016, about 10 days after he had given testimony in an FTC inquiry about Uber’s cyber security related to a 2014 data breach, according to the U.S. attorney’s statement. He didn’t disclose the new hack to the FTC and sought to pay off the hackers through a bounty program that rewards “white hat” hackers who let a company know about security flaws without stealing data.
The two hackers behind the 2016 breach pleaded guilty last year to computer fraud conspiracy charges. They both targeted and hacked other technology companies after Sullivan failed to alert law enforcement about the 2016 Uber hack, according to Anderson’s statement.
Williams said in his statement that Sullivan and his team collaborated closely with others at Uber and followed written policies.
“Those policies made clear that Uber’s legal department — and not Mr. Sullivan or his group — was responsible for deciding whether, and to whom, the matter should be disclosed,” according to the statement.


fortune--2020-08-20--The Venice Film Festival will require participants to wear face masks during screenings

The Venice Film Festival, the first major in-person cinema showcase of the COVID-19 era, is requiring participants to wear face masks during screenings and take a coronavirus test if they are arriving from outside Europe.
According to guidelines published Thursday, fans and the general public will be kept away from the red carpet during the Sept. 2-12 festival, and movie-goers will have to buy tickets and reserve seats online to ensure every other seat is left vacant.
Nine gates set up at various points around the Venice Lido will take temperatures of movie-goers and media, and stars will have transport and red carpet arrivals arranged by festival organizers to prevent crowds from forming even within official delegations.
Festival-goers attending indoor events will be tracked to guarantee contact tracing if necessary.
The film festival will be the first in-person movie event since the pandemic began and it is one of the first major international events that Italy is hosting after becoming the onetime COVID-19 epicenter in Europe. After getting infections under control with a strict, 10-week national lockdown that ended in May, Italy is now dealing with a rebound in cases as a result of summer vacation travel.
The Toronto and New York film festivals that follow Venice will be largely virtual this year, and the Telluride festival has been reborn as a drive-in series in Los Angeles.
In Italy, movie-goers must wear face masks to enter movie theaters but can remove them once seated. Biennale, organizers however, are requiring masks indoors and out as well as throughout the screenings.
In addition, anyone arriving from outside Europe’s open-border Shengen area must take a virus test before arriving and will be tested again courtesy of the Biennale once in Venice, the guidelines said.
Biennale organizers said the guidelines were worked out with local health care officials.


fortune--2020-08-20--An F-16 pilot took on A.I. in a dogfight. Here’s who won

A computer program easily beat a top U.S. fighter pilot in five rounds of simulated F-16 flight combat during a competition intended to spur the development of artificial intelligence that helps pilots during aerial dogfights.
The A.I. program won all five rounds in under two minutes, showing the technology’s promise.
The “AlphaDogFight Trials” were sponsored by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, more commonly known as DARPA, which is exploring the use of A.I. for a variety of military applications. DARPA played a key role in developing the Internet and has focused on encouraging A.I. in recent years.
The agency helped stimulate the development of self-driving cars with a series of obstacle course challenges starting in 2004. More recently, it helped develop an autonomous ship that sailed from San Diego to Hawaii without human intervention.
In the simulated dogfight, the F-16 aircraft—one piloted by an Air Force officer who went by the name “Banger” and another by A.I.—exceeded speeds of 500 miles per hour and pulled 9 Gs as they twisted and turned through the virtual airspace. Each craft was armed with essentially a laser beam that simulated the use of machine guns.
The combat appeared on a video screen with small blips for each aircraft. The human pilot wore a virtual reality headset that gave him a view of the combat as if he were in the cockpit of a real plane.
Although technology scored a resounding victory, the controlled conditions of the F-16 simulation doesn’t mean that the program could have beaten a human in real combat. Col. Daniel “Animal” Javorsek, who oversees the A.I. piloting program at DARPA, said the results come with “plenty of caveats and disclaimers.”
“We pilots never trust anything that’s in simulation and modeling alone,” he said.
One of the program’s goals is to develop A.I. technology that could be used by human pilots to enhance their flying abilities in combat, Javorsek said. An app could react more quickly than a human to what an enemy aircraft does, for example. The programs could also be used to enhance the capabilities of the military’s drones, which generally still require a remote pilot on the ground to maneuver.
One strength of the winning program, created by a small defense contractor called Heron Systems, was its ability to aim its guns more accurately during the high-speed dogfight than the human pilot. The company reached the final by first beating out rival programs earlier in the week from seven other competitors, including apps developed by Lockheed Martin and Georgia Tech.
There was no prize for Heron beyond bragging rights and Javorsek’s old flight helmet with their corporate logo added.
Speaking during a video broadcast between rounds, Banger admitted that the Heron program was a tough opponent. “Standard things we do as fighter pilots are not working,” he said. For instance, he tried to duck out of the way when the A.I. craft flew straight towards him, but the A.I. was able to twist around behind him more easily than a human pilot could.


fortune--2020-08-20--Why female leaders are faring better than ‘wartime presidents’ against COVID-19

When COVID-19 surged in March, Donald Trump described himself as a “wartime president.” Emmanuel Macron of France solemnly proclaimed that “we are at war.” Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines even threatened to treat citizens who defied lockdown orders as enemy soldiers and shoot them.
The military imagery was understandable. In response to an unprecedented threat, emergency mobilization on a wartime scale seemed necessary. The politicians knew that nations tend to rally around military heroes and war leaders, and the charisma and masculinity they seem to embody. More than half the men elected to the American presidency have either had distinguished military records or led the country successfully in a war.
Yet, today, months after the brash declarations of a war on COVID, the pandemic has shown once again that military-style leadership is poorly suited to contemporary crises. Instead, the most successful responses to COVID-19 have come from women leaders—Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, Angela Merkel of Germany or Mette Frederiksen of Denmark—who combine public empathy with political skills and technocratic know-how. Is the age of the hyper-masculine, charismatic war leader at its end?
The human tendency to associate charismatic leadership with masculine, military-style heroism is ancient, of course. Long before the modern age, those perceived as the greatest leaders—from Alexander the Great to Charlemagne—protected their people from conquest and made glorious conquests of their own.
Democracy changed little about this perception. The great revolutions out of which modern democracies emerged were all accompanied by significant bloodshed and were led by generals who became founding fathers: George Washington in the United States, Toussaint Louverture in Haiti, José de San Martín in Argentina, and Simón Bolívar across South America.
In the 20th century, the American presidents seen as most charismatic had a macho strength associated with international conflict: the war hero John Kennedy, and his Cold War successor Ronald Reagan. But the spell they cast has worn off. Importantly, the strategy of treating any intractable challenge as if it were a foreign enemy has worked less and less well. Nixon’s “war on crime” and “war on cancer,” Reagan’s “war on drugs,” and George W. Bush’s “war on terror” produced few victories, and disastrous side effects.
Despite these conspicuous failures, climate change too is now being described with the rhetoric of warfare. Last year, former U.S. Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, and former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a California Republican, announced an initiative they called “World War Zero” to fight for a target of zero carbon emissions. But the news sank with barely a ripple. How do we declare war on CO 2 ?
The COVID-19 pandemic is another crisis poorly suited to be treated as a war. “Victory” will happen when an effective vaccine has been developed, produced, and distributed. Beyond providing money to the vaccine developers and preparing manufacturing and distribution facilities, there is little that governments can do on this front except wait for the science.
China, Europe, and New York City have all shown what it means to win an initial “battle” against COVID-19: shutting down society and reducing human interaction to the point that the virus stops spreading and comes close to dying out. During the initial shutdowns, health care professionals, standing on the “front lines,” were treated as military heroes of a sort.
But these shutdowns have come at massive cost, and were followed not with victory parades but by difficult choices. How can citizens be persuaded to alter fundamental sorts of behavior over an indefinite period of time? What risks are tolerable in return for rescuing an economy?
Heroism of a different kind
In the newest phase of the crisis, it is less evident who the heroes are. Not surprisingly, the politicians most eager to claim the mantle of war leaders have performed poorly and lost public support. Donald Trump has frenetically oscillated between declaring premature victory and insisting that the entire crisis is a hoax perpetrated by his political enemies. Trump, along with Macron and Boris Johnson, has seen his approval levels drop precipitously in polls.
A different sort of charismatic leadership has proven far more effective, with women leaders shining. Ardern, Merkel, Frederiksen, and Tsai Ing-Wen of Taiwan have emphasized compassion and patience, rather than war and victory. They have not posed as commanders dispatching brave conscripts off to the front, but rather as mothers and daughters sharing the fears and privations of their fellow citizens.
Ardern has hosted Facebook Live videos from her living room, dressed in a sweatshirt, after just putting a child to sleep, driving home the point that everyone has an equal role to play in containing the virus. Frederiksen, the Danish leader, posted a clip of herself singing Danish pop songs while doing the dishes, injecting much-needed humor into the grim diet of daily news. Each of these women has calmly refused to sugarcoat the threat, or to predict easy victory in the manner of Trump. Merkel shocked her citizens near the start of the crisis when she predicted that 70% of Germans would ultimately come down with COVID-19. Most importantly, each of these women has emphasized the absolute priority of saving lives.
These approaches have won cooperation from the citizenry when it comes to wearing face masks and other behavioral changes. As a result, the countries with women leaders have had far lower levels of COVID-19 mortality than countries led by would-be strongmen like Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil. While New Zealand is now struggling with a new surge in cases, Ardern herself now has the highest approval ratings of any New Zealand prime minister in the last century—since the First World War, in fact.
Political charisma is an elusive phenomenon. It is usually spoken of as a personal quality. But in fact, charisma is more of a relationship. It depends on the public recognizing a special quality in a leader and feeling an intense attraction as a result. Perhaps, by the time the crisis ends, worldwide understandings of political charisma will have changed. The figure of the compassionate mother may come to have greater appeal than that of the aggressive wartime commander.
David A. Bell is a historian at Princeton University and the author of Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution.
This was written for Zócalo Public Square.


fortune--2020-08-20--The lack of Black doctors is killing Black babies, new study finds

The case for greater diversity in medicine can’t get much more stark than this.
Black newborns are three times more likely than white newborns to die when cared for by white physicians, according to a new study tracking 1.8 million hospital childbirths over more than two decades. But when they are cared for by Black doctors, Black newborns are far more likely to survive, as their mortality rate is roughly cut in half.
The study, published this week, provides stunningly concrete evidence of the lethal toll that racism and sexism in health care takes on Black patients from birth. And it underlines the serious health problems exacerbated by medicine’s lack of diversity among doctors, only 5% of whom are Black and only 5.8% of whom are Hispanic.
“If we disagree about all of the other things, we should be able to agree that infants should have the opportunity for a fair start to life,” says Rachel Hardeman, one of the study’s authors and a reproductive health equity researcher and associate professor at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health.
But Black children, and their mothers, have long been denied that opportunity. The reasons are complex, given the pervasive nature of systemic racism, which affects patients’ socioeconomic status as well as their physicians’ unconscious—or conscious—bias.
Whatever the race of their doctor, Black newborns are already more than twice as likely to die as white newborns, and Black women are at least three times as likely to die in childbirth as white mothers—two extreme examples of the widespread health disparities that damage the lifespans of Black patients and other people of color.
“We should be able to agree that infants should have the opportunity for a fair start to life,” says University of Minnesota’s Rachel Hardeman. Courtesy of UMN School of Public Health
“Our health care system has not yet grappled with the fact that it has been built on a history of racist ideas that we have to name and explosively dismantle,” says Hardeman. “These ideas of racial inferiority … may not be explicitly taught in medical school, but they’re certainly not debunked—and there’s a significant body of curriculum and education that’s missing in how we’re training our health care providers.”
These longstanding health inequities have gained more attention in recent months, thanks to the national reckoning over racism and the brutal toll of COVID-19 on Black and Latinx communities. But as I reported for Fortune this month, the disproportionately low numbers of doctors from those communities have long worsened the care that patients of color receive, and their subsequent health outcomes.
“We haven’t done a great job of diversifying our health care workforce; 5% of the physician workforce is Black while 13% of the US population is Black, and that really hasn’t changed over time,” says Hardeman. “We have to be thinking about how do we create a critical mass of providers from diverse backgrounds that are in tune with communities of color, who understand that lived experience, and who can really build relationships and trust that seems to be missing right now.”
The study, which was published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America or PNAS, was based on 1.8 million Black and white children born in Florida between 1992 and 2015. It was led by Brad N. Greenwood of George Mason University’s School of Business, and also co-authored by Laura Huang of Harvard Business School and Aaron Sojourner of University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management.
Its findings in some ways raise “more questions than answers,” Hardeman says. For example, although Black children were more likely to die under the care of white doctors, their mothers’ mortality rates were unaffected by the race of the doctor. Hardeman calls this “one of the most surprising findings,” and did not have an immediate explanation for it.
The research also illuminated other ways in which it’s needlessly difficult to study the impact of racism in health. In order to conduct the study, Hardeman and her co-authors first had to track down and compile racial data on the nearly 10,000 physicians in their data set. Florida’s state Agency for Healthcare Administration, which provided the data, recorded the race of the patients studied but not the race of their doctors. So the researchers enlisted a team of trained research associates to find publicly-available photos of all 10,000 physicians, and to do further research and analysis to assess their race and ethnicity.
About 2,000 physicians whose race could not be determined were dropped from the data set—an outcome that, as Hardeman points out, demonstrates the need for better demographic data around race as a first step.
“Part of how structural racism and, frankly, white supremacy operate in our country is that we are not asking these questions, and not collecting data,” she says. “How hard would it be to ask physicians to self-identify on all of their board exams and all the ways they’re certified, so that we actually have solid data? But we don’t do that.”


fortune--2020-08-20--Are these big discounts enough to get you back into a movie theater?

Movie theaters are reopening in many U.S. states starting this weekend. They face an uphill battle attracting customers: Sitting in a room full of strangers for hours on end is among the most risky behaviors imaginable during the coronavirus pandemic. To help patrons feel safer, theaters are taking extra precautions, including admitting fewer customers to allow for social distancing, requiring masks, and improving their ventilation.
But they’re also betting on a tried and true incentive: discounts. In some cases, very big ones. Here’s what’s on offer if you’re eager to return to movieland.
What discounts are available at movie theaters this weekend?
The most aggressive discount is almost certainly at AMC Theaters. Starting Thursday, Aug. 20, the chain is celebrating reopening by offering “Movies in 2020 at 1920 prices,” which means tickets are just 15 cents. However, the movies are older, too: opening night’s showings include Jaws (1975), Ghostbusters (1984), Grease (1978), and Black Panther (2018). After Thursday night, AMC will continue showing a selection of older films for $5.
AMC has several other discounts, too. The most interesting is probably a month of the chain’s subscription service, AMC A-List, for $5. The service lets you see three movies per week, and normally runs about $20 per month, depending on where you are. Until Oct. 31, AMC is also offering discounts on concessions, including $5 popcorn and fountain drinks.
Regal Cinemas, the second-largest theater chain in America, is doing something similar. Regal theaters will reopen starting Aug. 21, with a changing lineup of what it calls “Flashback Movies” for $5 per showing ($3 for kids). For the first week, the lineup includes Inception (2010), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), The Force Awakens (2015), and Black Panther as well—just the sort of technicolor effects spectaculars that make going back to the theater sound almost worth it. You can find the rest of Regal’s “Flashback” lineups here.
The Cinemark chain has been a bit more aggressive than competitors, with a number of theaters across the U.S. already reopened, and more coming throughout August. And like competitors, they’re offering $5 tickets for classic popcorn movies such as Jurassic Park (1993) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), along with discounts at the concession stand including $5 popcorn.
Smaller chains and independent theaters will also be reopening, but discounts and other incentives are scarcer. Alamo Drafthouse, which pioneered the dine-in movie theater concept, will reopen some theaters on Friday, Aug. 21, including those in its home state of Texas. While Alamo hasn’t announced broad discounts, it is offering free screenings of the new Bill & Ted Face the Music on Aug. 26 with a food purchase. That’s one day before the movie opens nationally in theaters and on demand.
Where are movie theaters reopening?
Some states still aren’t allowing movie theaters to reopen. At the time of writing, those include California, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, and Michigan.
Even in states that are allowing movie theaters to reopen, though, not all of them will be welcoming guests back this weekend. AMC, for instance, is only reopening around 100 of its 600 nationwide theaters. So be sure to check local listings.
That limited reopening will in part help the big chains gauge demand before committing resources to full-scale reopening. Nearly half of theaters around the world have reopened, with considerable success, and surveys of Americans have found willingness to return with strong safety precautions in place.
Cheaper popcorn could help nudge willing customers back to the silver screen. Theater operators will certainly be on the edge of their seat this weekend as they wait to find out: AMC has narrowly avoided bankruptcy during the pandemic, and the National Association of Theater Owners is warning that many theaters are at risk of closing permanently if they can’t reopen successfully.


fortune--2020-08-20--The COVID vaccine arms race and the struggles of the supply chain

Good afternoon, readers. And welcome to another edition of The Capsule.
When the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) speaks to a health catastrophe afflicting the entire world, it’s probably prudent to listen. Whether or not we’ll actually do so is another question.
But WHO chief Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus isn’t mincing words about the arms race to secure coronavirus vaccine doses—and what it could mean for global health.
“We need to prevent vaccine nationalism,” he said bluntly in press remarks last week.
Readers know that supply chain constraints have sucked up resources around the world as private firms and national governments struggle to provide everything from protective gear to basic supplies such as plastic pipette tips and plate to conduct coronavirus tests.
The battle to secure as many vaccine doses as possible, once approved, could prove an even messier fight given that a limited number of companies are trying to address the problems of the entire world.
“Supply nationalism exacerbated the pandemic and contributed to the total failure of the global supply chain,” said Tedros. “This is not charity. We have learned the hard way that the fastest way to end this pandemic and to reopen economies is to start by protecting the highest-risk populations everywhere, rather than the entire populations of just some countries.”
As I wrote earlier this week, we’ll see if the world listens.
Read on for the day’s news, and see you again next week.
Sy Mukherjee
sayak.mukherjee@fortune.com
@the_sy_guy
DIGITAL HEALTH
Color, Mass General Hospital: Genetic information is more important than we realized in cancer care. Digital health firm Color, the Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Broad Institute of Harvard & MIT have published a new study suggesting that collecting genetic information may be even more important for treating cancers than we previously thought. Color has an obvious business stake here as a genetics company. But here's what the study found: A difference between "monogenic" risk versus "polygenic" risk. In simpler terms, there are a whole lot of subtle genetic mutations beyond the ones we commonly know of which can help diagnose a cancer. “We’ve found that the traditional approach of only looking for monogenic risk variants misses an important part of the picture. A person’s polygenic risk also plays a crucial role in predicting the development of disease. I suspect that evaluating both will soon become standard in clinical practice," said Amit V. Khera, associate director of the Broad Institute’s Program in Medical and Population Genetics, in a statement about the study.
INDICATIONS
AstraZeneca's lead in the COVID vaccine race. My colleague Jeremy Kahn has an in-depth look into British pharma giant AstraZeneca's efforts to develop a coronavirus vaccine—and the manufacturing challenges that it will face going forward as it attempts to produce 2 billion doses of its experimental vaccine, which is being created in collaboration with Oxford. And then there's the business side, as Jeremy writes, which is, well, a bit morbid in the face of such an outbreak. "On average, developing a new vaccine takes more than a decade. In this case, it is being done in about six months," he says. "Even if it works, AstraZeneca, which brought in $24.4 billion in revenue last year, will make no money at first. It has agreed to provide most of those initial 2 billion doses, and perhaps billions more, at cost. The vaccine will boost AstraZeneca’s bottom line only if COVID-19 proves to be an endemic, seasonal menace, like the flu, for which people require regular vaccinations." (Fortune)
THE BIG PICTURE
The postal service crunch is hitting prescription deliveries. There are already worries abound that a lack of resources for the U.S. Postal Service could disrupt the upcoming presidential election. But the USPS serves such an outsize role in America that it may be easy to forget the other services it provides—including for prescription drug delivery. NBC reports on the stories of multiple patients who have had to rely on mail service to get their drugs during the pandemic but faced delays due to the crunch on USPS funding. These patients says they've never experienced such delays before for important medications.(NBC News)
REQUIRED READING
The president is going postal, by Jeffrey Sonenfeld
Airbnb's 3 biggest challenges on its road to an IPO, by Danielle Abril
Inside China's drive for digital currency dominance, by Robert Hackett


fortune--2020-08-20--Uber, Lyft win delay on converting drivers to employees

Uber Technologies and Lyft were spared from having to rapidly convert their California drivers to employees after a state appeals court agreed they can keep their business models in place while challenging a judge’s order to comply with a state labor law.
The decision Thursday is a big reprieve for the ride-hailing companies, whose leaders said they might need to temporarily shut down in their home state if forced on short notice to provide drivers with costly benefits including health insurance and overtime. The appeals court scheduled arguments for Oct. 13.
Lyft shares rose as much as 8.6% on the news, while Uber’s stock gained 7.75%.
The delay buys time for the companies as they campaign for a ballot measure set for a statewide vote in November that would free app-based transportation and delivery companies from the sweeping requirements of the law known as Assembly Bill 5.
Proposition 22 exempts the companies from paying for full benefits that employees currently get under California law, such as unemployment insurance and complete workers compensation, while requiring them to pay 120% of minimum wage, health care contributions and medical and disability coverage, among others.
San Francisco Superior Court Judge Ethan Schulman had refused on Aug. 13 to indefinitely pause the injunction he issued earlier in the week.


fortune--2020-08-20--A guide to giving gifts for postponed and shrunken weddings

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The pandemic has shaken up plans for everyone, and weddings are no exception. According to a 2020 OnePoll and Indochino survey of 2,000 Americans planning to wed, 93% have had to change something about their wedding due to the coronavirus pandemic.
For couples who have been planning their dream wedding, the pandemic forced those dreams to change. Some have been able to roll with the punches. For others, it’s been heartbreaking.
But wedding guests are also dealing with new protocols to wade through. With couples slashing their guest list to follow social distancing guidelines, COVID has more and more people uninviting guests. Then there’s virtual wedding showers and postponed celebrations. Additionally, the pandemic has created financial challenges with millions unemployed, so gift giving might be even more stressful. What’s the etiquette for something the country hasn’t been through before?
Fortune talked to wedding experts to weigh in on how to show up for your loved ones during this very unusual time.
Should I send a gift if I’m uninvited because the guest list shrank?
When bridal showers go virtual and weddings are now reserved for the closest family and friends, it can be hard to determine the kind thing to do. According to Zola, a wedding planning and registry company, about 90% of wedding guests are planning to give a wedding gift no matter what, even if the couple has to reduce their guest list or goes virtual. But experts stress that it’s still up to each guest to determine what feels right.
Heather Thomas, CEO of event design company HeatherLily, says opinions on gift giving vary—and did even before COVID.
“A wedding invitation should be acknowledged with congratulations beyond your RSVP card, no matter how close you are to the couple. Post-COVID, you should do what makes you feel comfortable based on the closeness that you share with the couple,” she says. “Ultimately, it’s up to the guest to decide whether or not to send a gift when they’re not attending the celebration. COVID or no COVID, that doesn’t change.”
Lizzie Post, the co-president of etiquette consulting firm The Emily Post Institute, agrees if you’re not particularly close to the couple, you probably don’t need to send a gift. “My personal stance right now would be that I think you’re absolved of having to send a gift,” she says. “Some of us get invited only to our closest inner circle wedding, and we would, of course, send a gift anyway just because we have such a close relationship with the person. But a lot of people also get invited to a wedding that they are very far removed from, and I think that if you get them uninvited from that wedding, it just seems unnecessary. ”
If you are close to the couple and want to send a gift, Elaine Swann, founder of the Swann School of Protocol, says the gesture can go a long way.
“Be sensitive to the fact that the couple is probably not going to get to experience the wedding that they had dreamed about earlier. So it would be nice to send some well wishes and good cheer, to provide them with a gift,” she explains. “If you’re uninvited, it’s not because of what they’re doing–– I mean, they’re not responsible for the virus. We should be doing our part to try to encourage them and put forth an effort to lighten the load of disappointment that they’re experiencing.”
What should I do if the wedding was rescheduled after I bought a gift?
This one’s for the friends and family who always think ahead. With a gift in hand and the wedding now postponed months or years, here are some options for what to do with purchased gifts.
“If you’d rather hold onto your big gift, it’s still a nice gesture to send something to the couple on their original date,” says Emily Forrest, the director of communications for Zola. “My husband and I were supposed to attend two weddings in May, both for couples who came to our wedding a few years ago. To celebrate them, we sent them each a small wedding gift through their Zola registry on their original wedding date, knowing that we will purchase a larger gift for each of them when they get married in 2021.”
But if you don’t feel strongly about holding on the gift—or you don’t want to store it for a year—Forrest says there’s nothing wrong with giving it early. “If you send the gift now I am sure that the couple will be thankful to have a few extra months using it, especially since we are all home,” she notes.
And if you’re worried that the newlyweds will forget about their early gift, Katelyn Stanis, professional vow writer, and owner of Wedding Words has an easy way to remind them.
Here’s what Stanis says to write with the gift you send immediately: “We’re so excited to celebrate your wedding next August but we can’t wait to shower you with your wedding gift now. We hope you enjoy using this espresso machine leading up to your big day and throughout your marriage.”
And when their wedding day rolls around: “Congratulations! We are so happy to celebrate your love today! We hope you’ve been enjoying our wedding gift, the espresso machine, and we wish you many years of happiness together.”
I sent my gift before the wedding was rescheduled. Should I get another?
Some couples lost their wedding venue or faced county regulations just weeks––or even days––before their big celebration. If you sent a gift ahead of time, Post says you have nothing to worry about.
“You could also send flowers on the day of the wedding or bring a card to the wedding and give them that instead,” she says.
What should I do if I don’t have the biggest gift budget right now?
Post won’t be surprised if the obligation of a gift for a wedding or bridal shower stops being the cultural norm.
“I think people end up in that space where they can’t go to all these weddings and events and still send expensive gifts,” she says. “Really, you don’t have to send expensive gifts at all. Budgets are a genuine consideration, and no one should feel like they have to send something they can’t afford.”
Of course, no couple would turn down a gift card or an envelope full of cash. According to Zelle, 80% of newlyweds would prefer to have money as their wedding gift. But if your have to watch your pockets, Swann has a suggestion.
“If you’re watching your dollars, you could also snag a photo of the couple off of their social media site and have it framed from them. A lot of times, we post a lot of photos, and we keep them in our phone but rarely do we ever get around to framing them in our home,” she says. “And the great thing about that is that those particular photos are obviously something that they liked, because otherwise, they wouldn’t have posted it.”
Whatever you decide to do, from buying a traditional gift to bringing a bottle of bubbly to a postponed celebration to showing love and support through difficult decision, Post encourages wedding guests to remember her number one etiquette rule: “Be understanding and respect whatever decision the couple makes. It is okay to decline a wedding invitation if you do not feel comfortable traveling or wait on a gift if you’re budget can’t afford to right now. The most important thing is to celebrate the couple, no matter what.”


fortune--2020-08-20--Tesla’s soaring stock pushes the company’s market value past Walmart’s

Tesla market value has surpassed retail behemoth Walmart after an astounding surge in the electric-vehicle maker’s shares over the past five months.
The stock, which touched a low of about $350 in March, has almost quintupled since then and briefly crossed $2,000, nearly 10 times the level it was trading at this time last year. Tesla shares jumped as much as 6.6% on Thursday, reaching a record intraday high. The stock has closed at records on three of the past four trading days.
The relentless rally led Tesla to announce plans to split the stock in order to make it more accessible to individual holders, a move that can drive up demand for the shares. The stock will start trading on the five-for-one split-adjusted basis on Aug. 31. Each stockholder of record by the close of business on Friday, Aug. 21, will receive four additional shares of common stock for each one they currently own.
Tesla’s valuation is currently about $372.5 billion, while Walmart is hovering around $370.8 billion, according to Bloomberg data.


fortune--2020-08-20--The President is going postal

The President is going postal

The Marvelettes’ 1961 chart topping song “Please Mr. Postman” pleads, “Deliver the letter, the sooner the better.” Now 60 years later, this group’s surviving singers, all in their late seventies, might join a chorus of others worried about their U.S. mail service as voters who are older and who have impaired health increasingly rely on voting by mail. In fact, while mail-in voters made up roughly 25% of the voters in 2016, the number of such voters is expected to increase this year, given the public health warnings over COVID-19 transmission.
Thus the public was alarmed over the sudden removal of hundreds of high-speed letter sorters (which can sort 35,000 letters an hour), the removal of hundreds of collection boxes by the U.S. Postal Service just 70 days before the election, the cancelation of overtime payment to workers needed to process pandemic-caused backlogs, and the firing dozens of USPS managers. This not only was seen as election sabotage, but it pointlessly jeopardized paychecks, Medicare payments, and deliveries of needed pharmaceuticals to patients.
In the aftermath of bipartisan outcry from political leaders suspecting a Trump administration effort at voter suppression of mail-in ballots, including a summons for the U.S. postmaster general to appear before Congress next week and lawsuits in 20 states, the USPS promised Tuesday to pause these service degradations. “We will not allow Donald Trump to steal the election by sabotaging the United States Postal Service,” Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said in a statement. “The president greatly misjudged the anger his unlawful policies would unleash across this country.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reported Wednesday, “The postmaster general frankly admitted that he had no intention of replacing the sorting machines, collection boxes, and other key mail infrastructure that have been removed and that plans for adequate overtime, which is critical for the timely delivery of mail, are not in the works.”
Last weekend, a Wall Street Journal editorial supported the USPS cutback, claiming the post office has not broken even for years, with total losses over the past 15 years at $78 billion—and with another $2.2 billion lost just last quarter. The Journal cited a recent Government Accountability Office report calling the USPS’s current business model “not financially sustainable.”
President Trump has threatened to block $25 billion in emergency assistance to the Postal Service. The goal of those funds is to help the quasi-independent agency recover its lost revenue from the pandemic and fortify it in time for the election. But Trump has charged, without evidence, that mail-in ballots would result in massive election fraud favoring Democrats. Some Republican congressional leaders, such Sen. Roy Blunt (R- Mo.), have indicated support for financial assistance to the USPS to help ensure the election can successfully take place during the pandemic.
The charges of massive election fraud by mail-in ballots are not matched by evidence, with states long relying on mail-in ballots almost exclusively for years. While President Trump has called absentee voters cheaters, the only significant mail-in ballot fraud in decades was a Republican ballot harvesting scam in North Carolina, which led to the court overturning the election and sending the felons to prison. Ironically, even President Trump and his family vote by mail while continuing to assault this very process.
As to the President’s charges that the post office business model is broken, so what? We have fine alternatives in UPS and FedEx.
If the nation wants the post office to make money, perhaps charging $5 a letter would help. But then, making money was not why First-Class Mail was created. As Walter Isaacson pointed out in his biography of Benjamin Franklin, Franklin proposed the postal system as a vital network to bond together the 13 disparate colonies. This is why Franklin wisely pushed to certify this national institution in our Constitution, where Article I, Section 8 reads: “The Congress shall establish Post Offices and Post Roads.”
As seen with rural electrification, the national park system, the interstate highway system, and the Internet’s parent ARPANET, the federal government provides services that supplement private markets. That’s how it’s supposed to work.
When President Richard Nixon recast the U.S. Post Office as the U.S. Postal Service in the 1970 Postal Reorganization Act, his goal was to give the organization a clear public service mission not driven by profitability. The act reads: “It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities. The costs of establishing and maintaining the Postal Service shall not be apportioned to impair the overall value of such service to the people.”
The disparaging term “going postal” was derived from an unconnected series of killings by postal workers in the 1980s thought to be suffering from stress. It may be that it is the President going postal today.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated the number of letters that a high-speed sorter can process.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is senior associate dean for leadership studies and Lester Crown professor of leadership studies at the Yale School of Management.