Tabla de contenidos para January 2020 en Fortune

WHEN THE CONCEPT of “flying shame”—embarrassment over flying owing to its carbon footprint—began to catch on, the CEO of Air France wasn’t new to the idea. Anne Rigail had already faced pressure at home from her “three activists”: her two children and her husband. “It’s very good, because I was not at all surprised by this whole thing about ‘flight shaming,’” she says. “I think it’s our biggest challenge.” Call it the Greta Thunberg phenomenon: When it comes to taking action on climate change, kids—in particular—may well be CEOs’ greatest critics. “I’m hearing it from many [executives],” says Christiana Figueres, founding partner of the NGO Global Optimism. “Because some of these kids are out in the streets, demonstrating—and some are demonstrating over the dinner table, asking their parents what they’re…

NEW HIGHS IN THE STOCK MARKETS are great for those who already own stocks. But there is a downside when stocks seemingly do nothing but rise. Any investor who’s been holding cash, waiting for lower prices and a better entry point, has had to keep waiting. And those deploying new savings into the markets have had to do so at higher and higher prices. Those rising prices are also a catch-22 for long-term investors, because pricey markets today make impressive future gains less likely. The S&P 500 currently trades at about 30 times its average inflation-adjusted earnings over the past 10 years (the so-called CAPE ratio). Historically, levels anywhere near that high have almost always preceded periods of disappointing returns. That’s why many investors are more comfortable buying shares when…

In the next decade, companies will stop relying on the outdated notion that you need a four-year college degree to be qualified for a decent job. At JPMorgan Chase, more than three-quarters of the jobs posted last year did not require a bachelor’s degree. A FOUR-YEAR COLLEGE degree is not the only path to a well-paying job. This outdated thinking is partially to blame for holding back America’s growth and blocking many people’s access to opportunity. We must consider more inclusive means of hiring the best and most talented people to meet the needs of our rapidly changing economy. The reality is the future of work is about skills, not just degrees. To be clear, we continue to value college and advanced degrees, and there’s no question of their relevance.…

DIVISION IS ALL around us today. Rural versus urban. Heartland versus coasts. Boomer versus Gen Z. Republican versus Democrat. To ensure prosperity a decade from now, we need connection. Literal connection, enabled by technology and investment, and human connection, enabled by all of us. Less than 2% of the population provides the nation with safe and affordable food. And, argues Ford, these people are in danger of being cut off. Today, 24 million Americans, 80% of them in rural areas, do not have access to high-speed Internet—the greatest enabler of human connection in our lifetime. It is to our times what electricity and transportation were to our grandparents. In 10 years, all America must be connected. We must address accessibility in rural areas and affordability in urban areas. Less than…

FOR AIRBNB, HALLOWEEN STARTED OUT FESTIVE—AND QUICKLY TURNED FRIGHTENING. Inside the company’s San Francisco headquarters on the morning of Oct. 31, employees wore costumes and smiles. Cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky was grinning in chef’s whites, handing out “Chesky’s Chips” cookies to staffers. One of tech’s best-known CEOs was role-playing as a pastry chef in a nod to an upcoming product launch—a new category of “Experiences,” centered around cooking, that travelers could book through Airbnb. But even as they snacked, employees were hearing about an exposé published earlier that morning, one that was inching closer to virality with each furious retweet. The website Vice had uncovered an Airbnb scam that spanned at least eight cities and nearly 100 listings. A shady management company was relying on fake identities to…

AMERICANS DON’T HATE WEALTH. They hate injustice. Those facts are worth remembering as we enter this election year and try to understand America’s schizoid attitude toward billionaires, three of whom are running for President. It’s an attitude worth understanding because billionaires are certain to symbolize crucial issues for the next President, whoever he or she may be. It’s a bizarre political moment. Two of the top three Democratic candidates in national polling, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, routinely vilify billionaires as more or less the root of all evil. Sanders has said, “I don’t think that billionaires should exist.” The top-polling Democrat, Joe Biden, sends a more subtle message: “I don’t begrudge anybody making a million or hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said in February, leaving unspoken that…

A GROWING NUMBER of bankrupt or failed retailers seem to be discovering an afterlife this year—with some beloved brands returning to the land of the living in notably snugger incarnations. Le Tote, which recently bought the struggling Lord & Taylor from HBC, opened a pop-up shop for the department store chain in New York City for the holidays, its first Manhattan presence since the store closed in early 2019. Kids’ apparel brand Gymboree, which filed for bankruptcy in early 2019 for the second time in two years, will live on in the form of shops within 200 Children’s Place stores. And Barneys New York, once it is done liquidating its stores, will have a presence at a number of Saks Fifth Avenue stores, including the fifth floor of the chain’s…

WHEN A FACTORY in Rwanda’s capital of Kigali debuted Africa’s first made-in-Africa mobile phones in October, their provenance wasn’t the only surprise: The devices also came loaded with higher-end features like fingerprint sensors for unlocking the screen that many rival phones used across the continent lack. It wasn’t just a push for African tech but also for African quality. The factory, owned by Rwandan company Mara Group, was a major milestone for Kigali, which has spent a generation emerging from the ashes of the nation’s genocide in 1994 by refashioning itself as a tech hub. Already, the city is home to several tech incubators, a Carnegie Mellon University engineering campus, and local startups that produce such items as drones and cashless payment systems. “It boils down to our turbulent…

THERE’S A REASON Silicon Valley worked from the moment it premiered on HBO in 2014: It was only about the pursuit of tech greatness and never ever about icky stuff like office romances or boring backstories. The critically acclaimed comedy, which aired its finale Dec. 8, centers on programmer Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch), who develops software featuring an unparalleled data compression algorithm and founds the startup company Pied Piper with an eccentric group of coders. For Richard, Gilfoyle (Martin Starr), Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani), Jared (Zach Woods), and Monica (Amanda Crew), nothing mattered more than creating something indelible and good, away from the predatory glare of Big Tech. And they did. Until they didn’t. And they did again. Until they didn’t. (And so on.) A week before the finale aired, Fortune sat…

The moon landing could not have happened without government partnering with major corporations. Mazzucato has struck a bipartisan nerve with her calls for business and government to tackle ambitious projects—together. WARNING SIGNS that the capital markets aren’t functioning properly are everywhere. Take corporate profits. Long term, they’re up. But investment is down. Now look at the levels of income inequality and youth unemployment: Young, able-bodied people lack the skills to compete in the job market, while companies are desperate to find skilled workers. According to Mariana Mazzucato, an economist and founding director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose in London, paradoxes like these point to the fact that the public and private sectors have lost their way. There was once a fairly smooth running partnership between the…

Enabling women to exercise power and influence in their workplaces, homes, and communities will change everything. THROUGHOUT OUR history, the face of power and influence in the United States has been overwhelmingly white and male. Over the next decade, that will change. Women—and, more important, women of all backgrounds—will increasingly be the ones making decisions, controlling resources, and shaping perspectives in all spheres of society. We’ll see this shift play out in homes, in workplaces, and across public life. It will lead to new narratives, products, and policies that reflect a much broader range of perspectives. And it will enable more women to fully participate in solving the challenges that will require our collective brainpower, like structural racism and rising inequality. This shift will not happen by accident. It will…

Employees work on the assembly line for the production of the ID.3 electric car at the Volkswagen plant in Saxony, Germany. IN THE 2020s, we will see the beginning of the end of the internal combustion engine. That is quite remarkable because the entirety of our economic growth over the last 150 years has come on the back of this technology and the fossil fuels that feed it. Over the past few years we have been investing heavily in electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles, and this is just going to accelerate exponentially over the next decade. Regulators at the city, state, and national levels are beginning to understand that the internal combustion engine is both a global and locally polluting technology. Our cities are heavily polluted mostly because of the burning…

U.S. TARIFFS NEAR GLOBAL, HISTORIC LOWS WHETHER THE CALM in trade hostilities between the U.S. and Beijing will hold or not, the current tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on Chinese goods are already being felt by businesses and soon, by consumers. But while China is the United States’ single biggest trading partner, neighbors Canada and Mexico are a close second and third, and they combine for more than $1.1 trillion in annual trade. With NAFTA replacement USMCA enjoying bipartisan support, aggregate tariffs look certain to remain around historic lows. CO2 EMISSIONS: A STARK WARNING THE PLANET is in peril, and the world’s largest economies need to take drastic action to save it. That’s the message of a recent UN climate report, which showed that greenhouse gases continue to…

THE NOVEMBER unveiling of Tesla’s Cybertruck was met with raised eyebrows, and not all were about its bizarro postapocalyptic design. Tesla revealed impressively low pricing—the Cybertruck will start at $39,900—but a stunt intended to demonstrate the truck’s toughness ended with two “bulletproof” windows shattered. All in all, hopes were dashed that Tesla could move aggressively into the wildly lucrative (and currently gas-guzzling) American truck market with such a radical design. Credit Suisse analysts said legacy truckmakers could “breathe a sigh of relief.” Tesla’s stock fell more than 6% after the unveiling. But in the following days, CEO Elon Musk announced “orders” for the Cybertruck had reached 250,000. Impressive, non? Well, that depends on how you define an “order.” Musk was actually citing fully refundable $100 deposits, or 0.25% of the…

IN 2014, FIVE STUDENTS from the cycling club at Peking University had an idea to build new, technologically savvy bicycles. The bikes would allow customers to scan a code with their smartphone, pay a small fee for a short ride, and then park basically wherever they pleased, where the next user would repeat the process. In just a few years, this bike-sharing idea became a countrywide phenomenon, and by 2016, millions of new bicycles could be found in cities across China supplied by companies with billion-dollar-plus valuations. By the end of 2018, however, several leading bike-sharing companies had gone bankrupt, and now the bicycles that were once viewed as one of the country’s great disruptive inventions have largely become inconvenient and colorful stains on city streets or have been…

When people tell Charlotte Jorst she can’t do something, she gallops right past them. When told she couldn’t sell beer in America, she did just that, and founded her own watch company to boot. When skin cancer threatened her equestrian career, she started a new line of UV-resistant ride-wear. Here’s how she got started and kept competing. How I Got Started I ALWAYS WANTED TO GO into business. Growing up in Denmark, I dreamed of being wealthy, which probably came from being teased and bullied in school as a young girl. After high school, I went to France to work as a hostess at a ski resort. I was tall, blonde, and big-chested, and people made inappropriate passes at me. I saw what the world was like without a college…

JENNIFER DOUDNA may well be the queen of Crispr. The UC–Berkeley professor and world-renowned biochemist is one of the pioneers behind the gene-editing technology, which could be used to fight conditions from cancer to blood disorders to many inherited diseases. But this genomic revolution also raises fundamental questions about ethics and the cost to consumers. Crispr, a gene-editing technique that borrows from a biological trick that bacteria use to fight off viruses, is already transforming the way we treat and cure existing diseases. But its increasing use in preventative health care will revolutionize the field, says Doudna. What will gene editing and genomic sequencing look like 10 years from now? I think that 10 years from now, we’re likely to see much more high-quality prediction about health outcomes for people…