Fast Company October/November 2020

In 1995, I was a cub reporter at The Wall Street Journal covering small businesses and venture capital. I thought it was the best job in journalism, writing about entrepreneurs and their backers, but my work wasn’t exactly front-page stuff. The Journal, like the corporate leaders and investors it served, valued news about the public markets, scoops on companies such as General Electric and AT&T, and profiles of star CEOs who maximized profits for their shareholders. That same year, editors Bill Taylor and Alan Webber, entrepreneurs in their own right, unveiled a new magazine with a thoroughly different view of capitalism. “We want to shape the conversation about business at its best and the real meaning of success,” they wrote in the premiere issue of Fast Company, published 25 years ago…

A day after the August NBA strike in response to yet another police shooting-this time, Jacob Blake, in Kenosha, Wisconsin— Uber’s head of diversity and inclusion, Bo Young Lee, tweeted out the company’s new billboard campaign. “If you tolerate racism, delete Uber,” the sign read. Lee added, “Now is the time for all people and organizations to stand up for what is right.” Corporate America had already been examining its complicity in furthering systemic racism and inequality in the wake of a summer rife with police killings of Black people. Uber, for its part, was one of many companies standing up for what’s right—so long as it didn’t have to change too radically. Several weeks earlier, Uber had committed to anti-racism education for riders and drivers, established that it had no…

MOST MEANINGFUL WNBA players Before the season opener, Layshia Clarendon and Breanna Stewart leave the court in protest of Breonna Taylor’s killing. Players later strike because of the Kenosha shooting. Delta Air Lines The carrier establishes a strict enforcement policy for passengers to wear masks, ejecting more than 100 people for not complying. Sony Interactive Some gamers trash the sequel to the video game The Last of Us because of its inclusion of an LGBTQ character, but Sony dismisses the criticism and the game sets sales records. Walmart It commits $100 million to create a center for racial equity, improve access to Walmart for minority suppliers, hire nonviolent former prisoners, and recruit more at HBCUs. Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier, a Black man, expresses outrage at the George Floyd killing, saying it could have been him. He doesn’t announce any new…

THE COMEDY BUSINESS, LIKE SO many others, has a diversity problem. Phoebe Robinson believes that the only way to fix it is to start at the beginning. The podcaster, author, and TV host, who got her start in stand-up before joining fellow comedian Jessica Williams to create the 2014 podcast 2 Dope Queens, is working to develop a fresh wave of talent via her new production company, Tiny Reparations, and a book imprint of the same name under Penguin Random House. Finding diverse writers and producers “is not going to work if you’re only looking for white guys named Scott!” she says. “No offense to all the Scotts out there.” Robinson recently debuted an advice podcast, Black Frasier (after the TV psychiatrist), and her new Comedy Central show, Doing the…

For the past 80 years, eggs have been a main ingredient in vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, the flu, and others. Typically, modified genetic material from a virus is inserted into an egg’s proteins, and those proteins are then in- troduced into the human body to “teach” it an immune response. But since each egg must be modified individually, the lag time for egg-based vaccines can literally be a killer. In the U.S., for example, the CDC must predict in January what strains of the flu will erupt nearly a year later, to give drugmakers time to manufacture enough inoculations. A handful of companies, however, are pioneering vaccines developed in plants, which can be grown and treated in bulk. Using a cousin of the tobacco plant (nicotiana benthamiana),…

Once a pot of water is boiling, it takes less than 10 minutes to turn a box of Annie’s mac and cheese into a bowl of warm, creamy goodness. But that convenience belies a complex ongoing effort on the part of the organic food pioneer’s parent company, General Mills, to enable the product to do vastly more. The 154-year-old consumer packaged goods giant has emerged as a leading champion of regenerative farming practices, which sequester carbon in the soil rather than releasing it into the atmosphere, where it contributes to global warming. As climate change imperils food systems around the world, disrupting the supply chains that General Mills relies on to make Cheerios cereals, Yoplait yogurts, and more, the company’s executives, looking to mitigate risk, have found themselves taking a closer…