Fortune

Around the world in 2024, voters chose change: in South Africa, France,?Britain, and Japan. But nowhere does the anti-incumbent trend matter more than in the United States. The global uncertainty created by an oscillation of power between left and right—from Barack Obama to Donald Trump to Joe Biden and back to Trump—in the world’s only military superpower has again left political and business leaders in every region of the world scrambling to spot opportunities and risk. Trump’s comeback victory comes in a dramatically more unstable—and dangerous—geopolitical environment. Trump must manage two wars and a U.S. relationship with China that has grown?much more confrontational. For business leaders navigating the next four years, there are critical questions that must be answered. Read the full magazine story here: https://lnkd.in/ezGa_JH7

Kelly Ortberg took over the top job at embattled plane-maker Boeing a little over three months ago—and it appears he’s not massively impressed with some aspects of the company’s culture. https://lnkd.in/grz2-ci9 In an all-hands meeting this week, Ortberg gave his staff some brutal feedback, telling them to cut back on complaining and focus on beating competitor Airbus. “We spend more time arguing amongst ourselves than thinking about how we’re going to beat?Airbus. Everybody is tired of the drumbeat of?what’s wrong with Boeing. I’m tired of it and I haven’t been here that long,” he said. Read more: https://lnkd.in/grz2-ci9

Tom Brady was speaking to some 200 CEOs, telling them how he became football’s greatest quarterback of all time. ? ? He was at the recent?#FortuneGlobalForum?in New York City, but he made only fleeting connections between his career and the CEOs’ jobs. ?That was clearly fine with the CEOs. He’s a football god with a great story to tell, and just hearing it was a thrill.? ? Still, let’s hope the CEOs listened carefully. Whether they knew it or not, Brady’s story of a football career was a detailed tutorial on great performance at a CEO’s job. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/eeFHJHyK

“Everybody’s asking me about it, ‘Is there a bubble here?’ Absolutely there’s a bubble. It’s huge." Over the last two years, analysts have?pondered?whether AI companies, both public and private, could possibly?live up?to their lofty valuations. To Thomas M. Siebel, who built his career in Silicon Valley as a sales executive at?Oracle?before leaving to start his own company that he eventually?sold back to his former employer?for $5.8 billion, the current state of AI reminded him of the?dot-com bubble. Even then a great and wondrous technology—the internet—couldn’t save a host of companies from coming crashing down.? “So we have this similar thing going on with generative AI that we’ve seen with previous technologies,” Siebel said. “The market is way, way overvaluing.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/d8TC9ADA

Successful gold mining today bears little resemblance to the storied era of America’s first gold boom: rough-and-tumble 19th-century boomtowns cropping up overnight to accommodate speculative prospectors, chasing gold veins and rumors. It’s also nothing like the gold industry that has prevailed since the 1980s, when dozens of mostly small companies competed to mine gold deposits as quickly as they could, often overextending themselves and failing once the market receded. What’s going on right now is methodical, measured, even cautious in comparison. The key players in the mining industry aren’t enterprising individuals or small firms anymore: They’re multinational corporations guided more by share prices and boardroom politics than the dream of striking it rich. Read more from the latest issue of Fortune Magazine: https://lnkd.in/dVgVDRAE

Over the past several years, Big Tech firms like?Google?and?Microsoft?have trumpeted ambitious plans to go carbon-neutral, or even carbon-negative, by 2030. But then the generative-AI boom came along and?threw a giant wrench in their plans. AI models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini, which underpin this latest tech craze,?suck up vast amounts of energy. In the race to develop better models, with the help of more data centers to train and operate them, companies will need a lot more power to come online, and soon. One way Big Tech hopes to achieve this, while also keeping its commitment to carbon-free emissions, is by tapping a source that has been much maligned in the U.S. Read more: https://lnkd.in/dyX9j5b6

Starting in January, Deanna Strable will be 145-year-old Principal’s first female CEO and president.?https://lnkd.in/ezwDGPva Since the late 1980’s, Strable has worked her way up through the ranks at Principal starting as an intern.? Her husband, who was also an executive at Principal, retired ahead of her promotion since he would’ve had to report to her (which Principal does not allow). Other bosses throughout her three-plus-decades at the company pushed her outside of her comfort zone and told her she was capable of more. Read more: https://lnkd.in/ezwDGPva

It’s hard not to notice the new wave of RTO mandates that took over corporate America this autumn. CEOs have cited all kinds of reasons for the return, including better?collaboration, connectivity, and an easier environment for employees to?grow their skills. But a different explanation for the WFH rollback has been bumping around management circles for some time: executive nostalgia. It’s unclear exactly where the term came from, but Taryn Brymn, a former head of executive programs at Slack’s Future Forum (a remote work think tank that was shut down in 2023), is often credited with coming up with the phrase after hearing business leaders describe how challenging it was to lead distributed teams. “They kept going back to this idea of what used to be,” Brymn, who currently works as an advisor for consultancy firm McChrystal Group, tells?Fortune. “And I was just like, yeah, this is nostalgia.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/dCrfWFWd

President-elect Donald Trump says he is nominating Dr. Mehmet Oz, who hosted a long-running television talk show, to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “Dr. Oz will be a leader in incentivizing Disease Prevention, so we get the best results in the World for every dollar we spend on Healthcare in our Great Country,” Trump said in a statement. “He will also cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency, which is a third of our Nation’s Healthcare spend, and a quarter of our entire National Budget.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/eqb3Nwkb

The VC firm Quiet Capital has raised at least $377 million toward a new fund, representing one of the largest raises of the year for an early-stage fund, per an SEC filing. Quiet Capital has backed companies like Rippling and MasterClass: https://lnkd.in/eFA87KAj