August 5, 2016
Want to know what Marissa Mayer thinks about making good choices, how Ringo Starr feels about Brexit, or the thing that surprises Satya Nadella most? Read the new special double issue of Bloomberg Businessweek – in addition to Mayer, Starr and Nadella, icons including Carlos Slim, Jeff Bewkes, Ginni Rometty, Misty Copeland, Stan Lee, Alicia Garza and more (39 in all) dish on their successes and stumbles, the best and worst advice they’ve received and where their industries are going.
Bloomberg Businessweek’s editors created five covers for the the issue. See them all below, with highlights from each cover interview. And don’t miss the full issue!
Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer discusses motherhood, shareholders with competing priorities, and the struggle to make good choices great: “There was a time earlier this year when I was running the company, selling the company, bringing on six new board members, while I had infant twins, and also a husband and a 3½-year-old son. Each of those is a fulltime job.” And “There are always a lot of good choices, and then there’s the one you pick, commit to, and make great.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says he wants to turn a PC-centric company into one focused on the promise of cloud computing. “The cloud is perhaps one of the most defining democratizers because it makes it possible, both with the business model and the ability of the friction being lowered, for any small business to enter the world of digital [commerce] without the costs,” Satya told Bloomberg’s Dina Bass.
Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, wants Americans to understand that racism is about much more than people being mean to each other. She also says: “The emergence of Donald Trump, and the phenomenon around him, is really a backlash against how successful this movement has been. There’s millions of people backing a fascist ideologue.”
Elizabeth Warren, U.S. senator for Massachusetts and darling of the progressives, talks to Businessweek’s Joshua Green about Donald Trump and financial reform. “I don’t see [the financial industry’s larger donations to Clinton rather than Trump] as a swing back to Democrats so much as I see it as supporting sanity,” she says. "The financial-services people, as much as many of them would like to see more deregulation, are also deeply frightened by the prospect of a Trump presidency. Nuclear war is bad for business."
Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, has tried to push Big Blue onto the cloud and make its artificial intelligence, Watson, appealing to a broad range of businesses. Rometty, who is the first woman to lead century-old tech giant, said: "I wanted my tenure to be defined as being the CEO of IBM, not about being the woman CEO of IBM.”
Read more: Bloomberg Businessweek: The Interview Issue
– Jen Robinson | August 5, 2016