Содержание выпуска: February 1, 2016 — Fortune

LEWIS LIU HAS BEEN GUIDING travelers in China for over a decade. Now the chief concierge at the new Rosewood Beijing hotel, Liu has amassed a sterling list of must-see recommendations and unforgettable experiences in this metropolis of 21.5 million people. Here's where he sends his guests. • Best new restaurant: TRB Bites @ the Courtyard is the latest dining destination in Beijing. Its location in the Forbidden City is iconic, along the former Imperial Palace's eastern moat. The venue is a three-story experience in modern international cuisine. • Toughest dinner reservation: At Duck de Chine, the cuisine incorporates Chinese and French duck-roasting traditions. Reservations are made one day in advance and are available only for a 6 p.m. or 8 p.m. time slot. Otherwise expect to queue for at…

AGE: 35 FROM: Arlington, Texas NO SLACKER: As vice president of product, Underwood aims to turn Slack's popular messaging software into a destination for workplace collaboration. "For any fire drill that takes place. Any new opportunity." PICK UP THE SLACK: At Underwood's behest, Slack is investing $80 million in third-party apps that complement its technology. One example? Awesome, an app that summarizes chat threads so people don't miss updates. SLACK-JAWED: Underwood's résumé includes Google, Travelocity, Twitter, and all-female investor group #Angels. "I fell in love with Slack for personal reasons. They were working on a problem I was passionate about—information overload in the workplace." FROM STATS TO CHATS: Underwood's first childhood software project: a catalogue for her baseball cards. CUT HER SOME ...: When she loses perspective, Underwood unfurls her…

IF YOU WERE to judge the current corporate era solely on the basis of business jargon, you would think we're in a time of hyperspeed change. Silicon Valley gurus talk rapturously about "failing fast," and words like "agility" and "acceleration" dot the titles of seemingly dozens of popular business books. But look closely at how things truly work in most organizations today, and "speed" and "agility" are likely to be the last adjectives that pop to mind. Across my travels, I get to talk to hundreds of top managers at the world's largest companies, and they share a common complaint: "It's just so hard to get stuff done." Such bureaucratic frustrations probably date back to the Medicis. But at CEB we've collected a wealth of data that indicates a clear…

When we published our inaugural unicorn list in February 2015, we counted slightly more than 80 privately held, venture-backed companies worth $1 billion or more. That number has since exploded: By our count there are now 173 unicorns, collectively worth more than $585 billion. But the pace of anointing new unicorns is slowing, and ongoing economic uncertainty is pressuring the group to justify their lofty valuations. [The following text appears within a chart. Please see hardcopy or PDF for actual chart.] SOFTWARE AIRBNB UBER 25.5 UNICORN MINTED SINCE FEBRUARY 2015 CHANGE IN UNICORN VALUATION, FEBRUARY 2015--16 -100% 0 20 50 100 200 300 400% $62 BILLION DOCUSIGN 3 MACHINE ZONE 3.1 DELIVERY HERO 3.1 CREDIT KARMA 3.5 UCAR 3.6 GARENA ONLINE 2.5 HELLOFRESH 2.9 SLACK 2.9 ELE.ME 3 SOGOU 3…

IT IS MY PLEASURE TO announce the latest winners of the National Association for Serious Studies' Annual Admiration Award for the Supreme Leaders of the Business Cosmos, recognizing icons of management that we all seem to idolize at the time. The jury that accords this prestigious prize—which, despite its name, is given out roughly once a decade—is made up of journalists from the mainstream business media, a panel of high-middle managers at a variety of Fortune 100 companies, and a significant number of confused employees, including me. Before we reveal the 2016 recipients of this coveted accolade, however, let's review our past winners. 1956: The first gold medal was awarded to the Organization Man, that faceless operator in the gray flannel suit who was in at 8 a.m., out at…

THE BIGGEST RESIDENTIAL real estate developer in China, and for that matter the world, is having a banner year. Revenue rose 31% in the latest quarter, to 27.3 billion yuan ($4.3 billion), and profit by 22%. "Vanke is doing well," founder and chairman Wang Shi tells Fortune. "It's not affected at all by the difficult economy." Wait, what? Wang may sound blasé, but his optimism isn't unwarranted. China's economy is a two-headed dragon right now. Some heavy industries and their home provinces are in recession, struggling under the weight of debt and facing less demand for their stuff—steel, coal, concrete, exports. But retail sales, consumer services, and the coastal-province economies that rely less on big industry are still growing at close to double-digit rates. Talk to a Chinese consumer—or to…

AS THE NATION'S attention turns to the caucuses and primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire, some Democrats will have Scandinavia on their minds. The small nations of the Nordic region like Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland are rich and technologically advanced. But they also feature exceptionally generous welfare states and are more economically egalitarian than the rest of the wealthy world. During a time of rising income inequality, the American left is increasingly invoking Scandinavian countries as models for how to maintain the economic growth that capitalist competition allows while achieving more security and stability for the middle and lower classes. Vermont senator and Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders has been at the forefront of the new Nordophilia. He has name-checked Denmark and Sweden in interviews and debates, arguing that the…

CONSIDER WALMART, the leading 20th-century retailer, and Amazon, the leading 21st-century retailer. By one metric they're strikingly similar; their total market value is the same, about $250 billion each, according to consulting firm EVA Dimensions. But by another measure—one that goes to the heart of corporate performance—they're radically different. Walmart needed $154 billion of capital to create that market value. Amazon achieved the same result using only $35 billion of capital. That contrast illustrates a profound reality: The 21st-century corporation is forming a new relationship to capital. Traditionally defined capital, the financial and physical kind, is losing importance as the economy evolves. Today's best-performing companies—Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook—use little of it relative to their size. Some, such as Uber and Airbnb, use practically none. As the McKinsey Global Institute recently noted,…

ONE DAY LAST FALL, a drone lazily circled above Hahn Estate Winery, home to 1,100 acres of grapes in California's Santa Lucia Highlands. The drone, a five-pound model airplane, wasn't there merely to take photos. Fitted with visual and multispectral sensors, it was collecting various kinds of data—information to help Hahn monitor the health of its vineyard and resist the effects of California's fourth consecutive year of drought. Winegrowers worry about two things: the quality of their grapes and how many they can produce. By running software algorithms made for monitoring crops, a drone can help the winery determine both. Welcome to the connected agriculture business. Yes, even the Internet of things has gone farm to table. In November, Hahn volunteered a patch of its vineyard to test the concept.…

IT'S HARD to name a category of startups that has struggled to produce big, billion-dollar exits more than e-commerce. Competing with Amazon isn't easy, it turns out, and aspiring Davids have turned to ever more novel strategies to differentiate themselves from Goliath. The problem? Like anything trendy, each new twist on the e-commerce model eventually goes out of style. Perhaps you remember the great subscription commerce wave of 2012—as I called it, stuff-in-a-box. It was a clever way to score recurring revenue by sending subscribers a container of curated stuff they didn't even know they wanted. It didn't take long for each new stuff-in-a-box startup to feel increasingly ridiculous: subscription perfumes, dog toys, cured meats, even stilettos hawked by Kim Kardashian. Investors quickly realized the model was little more than…

IMAGINE THIS SCENE: A group of aliens, pursuing their lifelong dream of making a movie, descend on Tinseltown. Their first stop? The majors, a.k.a. studios like the Walt Disney Co., 20th Century Fox, and Comcast's Universal—the deep-pocketed creative forces behind Hollywood's biggest blockbusters. "We've got a great idea," the extraterrestrials tell the respective studio heads. "It's a movie about a hodgepodge team of space fighters trying to save the galaxy from an evil army!" Disney passes because, well, it's got Star Wars. But the other majors pass too. "Is it a sequel?" they ask. And upon hearing that it is not: "Have you considered independent financing?" The interstellar visitors ask around, then hit up the financing divisions of major talent agencies, smaller independent studios, and even high-net-worth individuals. But they…

WHEN IT COMES to Super Bowl beer ads, consistency is key, in the form of sturdy Clydesdales and manly men. But last year Budweiser conjured up a new theme: trash talk. "Let them sip their pumpkin peach ale," a 2015 ad teased, mocking craft-beer lovers who have scorned domestic lagers. "We'll be brewing some golden suds." Snobby it may be, but the craft-beer industry is having the last laugh. The Brewers Association estimates that craft brands more than doubled their share of the $100 billion beer market, to 11%, in the past four years, while sales of mass-market beer stagnated. How have the big brewers combated the trend? By guzzling the competition. In 2015, 19 craft-beer deals worth $13 billion were announced in the U.S., according to research firm Dealogic.…

BETWEEN NETFLIX'S Jessica Jones, Amazon's Man in the High Castle, and iTunes' on-demand anything, an ever-expanding roster of must-watch streaming video means consumers have more excuses than ever to cast off the yoke of the big cable bundle. Nearly 1 million Americans cut the cord through the first nine months of 2015, and a PricewaterhouseCoopers trend analysis estimates that roughly 20% of U.S. consumers don't see themselves subscribing to cable this year. But it's too soon to dance on the grave of the bundle. Many viewers are transitioning from cable packages to streaming packages, in a process analysts call rebundling, as streaming platforms team up with premium cable channels. In July, Hulu unveiled streaming access to Showtime for an extra $9 a month, joining Dish Network's Sling TV, which lets…

IF WE COULD SEE disasters coming, they wouldn't become disasters. Oil's price is down 71% since June of 2014, and while some factors that triggered the tumble seemed obvious at the time, others hit our blind side. Most investors assumed that China's slowdown would hurt oil. But most also believed that Saudi Arabia and U.S. producers would put a floor under prices by cutting production; that didn't happen, in part because the Americans needed to keep cash flowing to service hefty debts. Shawn Driscoll, natural-resources portfolio manager at T. Rowe Price, told Fortune in November that oil could go to $30 this year. He says the low 20s now look realistic, and adds, "I don't think 2016 will be the ultimate low" for oil. Price of Crude Oil BARREL OF…

SOSI SETIAN was a professor of Armenian studies when she decided to pursue a Ph.D. While supporting herself as a courtroom interpreter, she caught the eye of DEA agents, who asked for help with a money-laundering case. Setian, now 72, parlayed her language skills and work ethic into SOS International, which today produces $200 million in annual revenue from government contracts for translation, intelligence analysis, logistics, and more. Her story: I was born and raised in Bulgaria by Armenian parents and grew up under the Communist regime. My father had a textile trading business. Any successful business owner was tagged as a member of the "old bourgeoisie," and the family faced discrimination. My father often referred to the Communists seizing large amounts of money from him. I was not able…

FOR HOURS EACH DAY, members of MasterCard's marketing team huddle in an open-plan office and watch money disappear before their very eyes. Not literally, of course. At the company's Purchase, N.Y., headquarters, product managers gaze at a 40-foot display that broadcasts feeds, visualizations, and performance metrics for more than 60 markets. When they want to dive deeper into the data, they retreat to Insights Alley, a clutch of casual lounges with 55-inch touch screens. And when they want to watch narratives unfold, they visit the Real-Time Marketing Lab, where eight more displays—nearly an entire wall's worth—highlight trending stories from services like NewsWhip's Spike and analysis from sources such as Prime Research. The official name of this elaborate array of tools, as well as the space in which they're housed, is…

OF ALL THE SILICON VALLEY IPOS in the past couple of years, Lending Club's might have been the surest bet of all. ¶ The San Francisco peer-to-peer lender is a star in the world of "fintech," a growing sector made up of financial technology companies bent on disrupting the traditional banking sector. Its backers include venture capital royalty such as Kleiner Perkins and Union Square Ventures, not to mention Google and Alibaba. The startup's gold-plated board of directors includes luminaries such as John Mack, the former CEO of Morgan Stanley; former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers; and Mary Meeker, the one-time doyenne of Internet IPOs who is now a Kleiner partner. In other words, Lending Club had assembled a very smart-money crowd. Its much-buzzed-about offering was viewed, understandably, as a slam…

On Jan. 9, 2015, the executives of the newly consecrated Walgreens Boots Alliance came together to ring the opening bell at the Nasdaq stock exchange. Standing in the center was CEO Greg Wasson, a onetime pharmacy intern from Indiana who had worked his way to the top of Walgreens, the 8,000-plus-location American drugstore chain with $76 billion in sales. Wasson had spearheaded the company's biggest ever acquisition. Next to him, grinning widely, was the man who had assembled the acquired company: Stefano Pessina, an Italian billionaire who had started with one local pharmaceutical distributor in 1977 and, through shrewd and voluminous dealmaking, built it into the $40 billion, 4,600-store Alliance Boots. As the bell clanged and the ticker tape fluttered from the ceiling, the two embraced, now officially partners in…