Fortune June/July 2021

The first substantive feature on Amazon.com that Fortune published was in December 1996. The title of that piece—“The Next Big Thing: A Bookstore?”—seems almost quaint in retrospect. Amazon.com, as the article explained, was “leading a wave of digital shops out to invade established industries,” a slew of upstarts taking on everything from publishing and stock trading to that most impregnable of advertising businesses, the telephone yellow pages. Amazon, the young prince in this domain, had no storefronts or pricey inventory to stock—back then, the company didn’t procure a title from a publisher or book distributor until after the customer had ordered it. Jeff Bezos, a former hedge funder who’d quit his Wall Street job, moved to Seattle, and managed to raise a tiny bit of seed capital to get his Internet…

THIS EDITED Q&A HAS BEEN CONDENSED FOR SPACE AND CLARITY. Tackling inequities like the digital divide is about “getting people an equal chance, regardless of where they live or were born.” A C-SUITE REPEAT When you left Ericsson 1 in 2016, was the plan to take another corner office job? And so soon? VESTBERG: My dream was to work with sports, so I became the chairman of the Swedish Olympic Committee. That was my focus. But the focus went away pretty fast, because I got called by Verizon. In the beginning, we discussed my becoming a board member; it turned out pretty quickly to be an offer to run technology and IT. I did that [starting in April 2017] and commuted almost for a year. I went back and forth to Sweden, maintaining the…

Americans experienced a magnitude of job loss in March and April of 2020 not seen since World War II. Early in the crisis, economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics earnestly wrote there was hope that “with government support, employers and employees could quickly return to pre-pandemic employment arrangements.” Now we know better. People are vaccinated, offices are reopening, mask mandates are lifted. But workers are making it clear that they expect something more than a “return” to the status quo ante-COVID. Instead, many are hunting for better opportunities, and companies face an intensifying war for talent—to retain and appease current employees and woo the best of the seekers. In the initial days of the pandemic, employers held the upper hand, as workers of the world united in fear and paralysis. The seesaw…

IT’S PROBABLY fair to say that bringing on a new CEO in the midst of the most vital and high-profile moment in your company’s history is usually, well, not ideal. But when Karen Lynch became head of CVS Health in February, just as the company’s role in the COVID-19 vaccination push ramped up, neither investors nor industry watchers batted an eye. The former Aetna president, who joined CVS in 2018 through its acquisition of the insurer, struck many as perfectly suited for the moment. Throughout her career at Cigna, Magellan Health Services, and Aetna, Lynch made a name for herself as someone capable of both wrangling complicated projects (she ran the Aetna-CVS integration) and handling crises (she led CVS’s early response to COVID-19). Now, four months into the job, she has…

WHEN WE CONDUCTED this survey in the spring of 2020, Fortune 500 CEOs were pondering just how badly COVID-19 was poised to damage their businesses. This year, many find themselves marveling at the speed of their recovery and at how robust the U.S. economy looks. The CEOs’ biggest concerns now include grappling with a transformed workplace culture in which more employees want or need to work remotely—with all the risks to cohesion, creativity, and cybersecurity that will entail. COMING BACK FROM THE PANDEMIC CEOs of the Fortune 500 say 2021 is turning out to be a better year, in terms of both revenues and profits, than they would have predicted during the pandemic. But their answers also suggest that how (and where) their companies work has profoundly changed. THE MARKET TO BE IN The…

KURTIS MINDER HAS some advice about how to negotiate with criminals who extort millions of dollars by crippling companies’ computer systems and stealing their data: Don’t call them “bad guys.” “The bad guys know they are bad guys—they are trying to pretend to be businesspeople,” says Minder, who, as CEO of cyber-intelligence specialist GroupSense, has negotiated on behalf of at least two dozen organizations targeted with so-called ransomware. “As long as you pretend with them that this is just a normal business transaction, it goes better.” Imagine the nightmare scenario: You start work one day but can’t access crucial customer information on your computer because hackers have encrypted your files and are demanding big money in exchange for the decryption key. In most cases, the attackers also steal sensitive company data and…