FortuneApril 2020的目錄

ON SEPT. 17, the U.S. Naval War College and the National Center for Disaster Medicine & Public Health began a war-game simulation they called Urban Outbreak. Benjamin Davies, a researcher and game designer at the college, gathered 50 experts in disaster response from the government, military, academia, and the private and nonprofit sectors for two days of exercises at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Md. The aim, Davies told me, was to see how people would respond in real time to “a profoundly dangerous and complex problem set”—the sudden arrival of a deadly pathogen in a dense metropolis. The question, in short: Would we be ready? Within three months of that exercise, the first cases of illness from a novel strain of coronavirus were being identified…

THINK BACK TO a simpler time. For instance, January and February. Though it seems distant now, the S&P 500 hit its all-time high of 3394 on Feb. 19. “The stock markets previously had priced in a Goldilocks scenario and entered the year with an elevated price-to-earnings multiple, providing little cushion,” says Jared Franz, an economist at investment giant Capital Group. Then came the coronavirus. As the effects of the coronavirus continued to spread throughout late February and March, the stock market sustained a series of blows. Investors were not only plagued by uncertainty, they also began to reassess the rich premiums they had been paying for all sorts of assets. And once they started asking “How much is this market really worth?” the answer was bleak indeed. “In the past…

EDWARD BREEN’S four-year tenure heading DuPont was one for the corporate history books. He reshaped the centuries-old industrial giant through a series of acquisitions, including a merger with Dow Chemical. Then he engineered the slicing of $86 billion DowDuPont into three separate public entities. In June 2019, after the splits were finalized, Breen relinquished the CEO role, becoming chairman of DuPont de Nemours, the newly formed specialty chemical company. But shares in the new DuPont soon tanked, as weak demand for auto parts and U.S.-China trade tensions ate into earnings. The board’s solution? Bring back Breen. He’s CEO again, as of Feb. 18. It’s a common tactic among companies in dire straits: rehiring an old friend. CEOs who return for a second stint don’t have a learning curve, the thinking…

THE FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY faces a classic business problem: Someone else has come up with a better technology. Over the past decade, engineering advances have helped drive down the price of solar panels and wind turbines by some 90%. Clean energy is now the cheapest way to generate power in most of the world. And today, storage batteries are on the same plummeting price curve—so that, increasingly, the sun’s habit of going down at night is no big deal. Even the car, which has helped define our culture and consumes vast quantities of fossil fuel, is changing fast. No honest person who has driven a Tesla will dispute that it’s a superior machine: fast, with few moving parts, and a quiet elegance that makes a rumbling muscle car seem more…

THERE IS an optimal temperature, believe it or not, at which economic performance peaks: 55° F. That’s according to researchers at Stanford and UC-Berkeley who examined long-term economic data from 166 countries to project the impact of changing climate on the global economy. New York City and Palo Alto, it’s worth noting, both have average annual temperatures near 55°. For cooler countries, rising to the mid-50s can boost output. But the hotter it gets above that, the more productivity slides, thanks to factors such as increased energy demand, lower crop yields, and even declines in cognitive function. (It’s hard for humans to concentrate when it’s scorching.) The same trend applies to the U.S. economy: Places where it’s already relatively hot are likely to be hit harder as temperatures rise. A…

IN 1959, FORTUNE PUBLISHED a “fascinating and brash” project that set out to discover the 100 best-designed products of the modern era. The list was compiled by Jay Doblin, the director of the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), based on a survey sent out to 100 of the era’s top designers, architects, and design teachers. The result is a fascinating document for modern eyes—perfectly illustrating mid-century design philosophy, yet often mirroring contemporary tastes: sleek sports cars by Porsche and Cisitalia, and even sleeker armchairs by Eames, Aalto, and Saarinen. Domestic appliances with forms foreshadowing Sputnik and the start of the Space Age. Above all, a deep appreciation for the aesthetic beauty not just of luxury goods but also of the practical items that improve…

THIS EDITED Q&A HAS BEEN CONDENSED FOR SPACE AND CLARITY. “Large companies are looking at this as the decade of delivery on the promise of technology.” THE DIGITAL DECADE Prior to being named CEO of Accenture in September, you were CEO of the firm’s North American business. (2) How have your daily conversations changed? SWEET I’ve spent the last six months traveling the globe, meeting with over 70 CEOs and 100 other C-suite leaders and our clients in Europe, Asia, and North America. It’s been an incredibly intense time but exciting because when you do that in such a compressed time period, you hear consistent themes around the globe and across industry. One theme is that we are at an inflection point. For large companies, they are looking at 2020…

FROM THE MOMENT it erupted in Wuhan, China, the COVID-19 virus has proved particularly lethal to patients with the prior, chronic illnesses often described as “underlying health conditions.” Now the contagion is having a similarly grim effect on the U.S.-China economic relationship—where accumulated mistrust and resentment have created unhealthy conditions of a different kind. As the virus shakes the world’s business community, sending global stocks into or close to bear-market territory, it’s easy to forget that many of the first economic warning signs came from U.S. companies with significant China exposure. Apple and Nike reported supply-line disruptions. Ford, General Motors, and Tesla shuttered factories in China and fretted over shortages everywhere else. Starbucks and Walmart closed Chinese stores, while Disney suspended operations at parks in Shanghai and Hong Kong. At…

MY FIRST JOB was at Mike’s Subs in Point Pleasant, N.J., a small beach town on the Jersey Shore. My older brother worked there the summer before I did and got me the job. I was 14, and I would sprinkle the subs as they came down the line, wrap them, and work the cash register. I did everything, except I wasn’t old enough to work the slicer. The owner was great. He ran the business like a tight-knit family. Even though I was a teenager, he gave me the feeling that my voice mattered. I made $1.75 an hour, which was big money in 1971. I worked full-time in the summers and part-time through the school year. Back then, there were no McDonald’s or Burger Kings in town. Mike’s…

At its core, business is about meeting needs. Your local deli is a neighborhood fixture because people crave delicious sandwiches. The tax prep industry exists because people hate to fill out 1040s. Big Oil was built to serve a modern world hungry for energy to power our cars and trucks. Before Netflix, we didn’t grasp how essential streaming movies could be. Whether big or small, timeless or newly imagined, these urgent demands are what drive businesses to innovate and grow. Today, the world is confronting a colossal unmet need unlike anything we’ve grappled with in the past. The warming of our planet thanks to human activity is causing dramatic changes to the climate. According to the Global Carbon Project, emissions hit a new record of 43.1 billion metric tons in…

• For two decades, Klaus Lackner has been fixated on trees and how they pull carbon dioxide from the air. What if, the Arizona State University engineering professor theorized, you could create a machine that worked like a tree—but a thousand times more efficiently—thereby reducing the effects of climate change? In January, Lackner’s first such artificial tree—which looks less like a real tree and more like a supersize lamp—came off the manufacturing line in Boston, and, along with more than 250 others, will be installed near Phoenix. Unlike a real tree, which absorbs 10 tons of carbon in its lifetime, these mechanical trees may one day collect up to 32 tons of CO2 each in a single year—the equivalent of what seven passenger vehicles emit annually. “We need to…

SINCE BILL CLINTON WON THE WHITE HOUSE IN 1992, his adviser James Carville’s famous dictum that pocketbook issues drive voting has endured as an electoral truism. To get a sense of how voters are feeling about their finances in this year’s election, we looked state by state at six economic indicators since President Trump took office. The numbers point to a close race: For example, Michigan—a key battleground state and one of 11 decided by less than five percentage points in 2016—is in the bottom quartile in income growth (3.8% annualized vs. a national average of 4.1%) but just above the mean in property value gains. Ohio’s homeownership growth (5.1%) doubled the average while its employment figure (1.7%) lags badly. The new economic X-factor? Coronavirus fallout. SOURCES: BUREAU OF…