Fortune

Business travel, long a vital part of a CEO’s job, is rebounding to pre-pandemic norms despite the increased use of videoconferencing tools. And for good reason, says J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who admits he’s constantly on the road because executives must prioritize face-to-face interactions with their employees, customers, and clients. “Leaders have to get out. They have to get out all the time. They have to be curious; ask a million questions,” he recently said on LinkedIn’s "This is Working" series. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eU34dgyt

If you’re a bit stumped by where the economy’s headed, don’t worry—you’re not the only one. A recent note from Goldman Sachs highlighted that even economic forecasters have been “humbled” by the economy over the past five years, proving their predictions wrong, repeatedly, on massive scales. Of course, forecasters—like policymakers and the public—were navigating the fallout of the black-swan event of COVID, so some errors here and there are perhaps to be expected. But, as chief economist Jan Hatzius highlights, forecasters did—en masse—make three “big” errors—and that’s discounting the “initial collapse [of the pandemic], which was the definition of an exogenous shock.” The first “big error” Hatzius outlines was actually a welcome surprise. Read more:

The CEO of Whole Foods Market doesn’t believe in skimping on PTO. Jason Buechel, 46, took the top job in 2022, just five years after Amazon bought the high-end grocer for over $13.7 billion. As chief executive, Buechel works on a tight schedule consisting of frequent business travel and a “minimum of 10 meetings per day”—but that doesn’t stop him from taking care of himself. “I highly prioritize PTO,” Buechel tells Fortune in a recent interview. “So I do use all of my allocation each year.” Read more:

Sallie Krawcheck is not a fan of the “work-life balance” question. The Wall Street veteran, whose illustrious career has spanned nearly three decades, recently told Fortune she still remembers sitting on a panel in the mid 2000s. Then Citigroup’s chief financial officer, Krawchek sat alongside C-suite executives from other Fortune 500 giants including IBM and GE. But while her male counterparts were asked about “balance-sheet management,” Krawcheck was asked about how she balanced her responsibilities while being a working mother. “I remember thinking, ‘it’s not enough that I made it to this table as a CFO,’” she told Fortune. Now 59, Krawcheck is the founder and CEO of Ellevest, an investment platform she launched in 2016 that was “founded by, funded by, built by, built for, investing in investing through women,” she says. Under her leadership, the robo-advisor has grown to over $2 billion in assets under management and has enjoyed support from backers like Melinda French Gates and Penny Pritzker. After spending years of her career at traditional firms “looking to make change from the inside out,” Krawcheck is now on a mission to break the “boys club of Wall Street” and help introduce women to investing. Read more:

With fears of mass unemployment and even societal destruction, we’re currently in an AI panic. But scientists and popular culture have been discussing the impact and risks of artificial intelligence for decades. Back in 1964, Fortune’s Gilbert Burck spoke with prominent computer scientists to get their predictions on what AI would be capable of in the years to come. So we took a look back at that 60-year-old article to see what they got right and wrong. Watch the full video here: bit.ly/3WxLT7q

With hundreds of medals won and a lifetime of glory to follow for winning athletes, the 17-day-long Paris Olympics is officially coming to a close. Athletes train for years, if not decades, in anticipation of the Games—as do its host cities. It’s no small feat to have 329 medal events across 32 different sports, about 10,000 athletes and even more while welcoming millions of visitors. The stakes were high in Paris’s case as it was the event’s venue for the first time in 100 years. It hoped to do things differently by being the “greenest” iteration of the Olympics to date, turning to renewable energy sources, plant-based foods, and rented sports equipment. Paris’s investment in the games didn’t stop there. The French capital undertook to tidy up the Seine River to use it for open-water swimming events—a move that, er, didn’t go to plan. It also built a new train line to help improve connectivity to the Olympic venues. While Paris adopted a novel approach in some areas, it faced the same baggage that host cities inevitably struggle with: cost overruns. Read more:

When you think of Canada Goose, you probably picture its trademark fur-trimmed parka, which is designed to keep people warm in sub-zero temperatures. But today, the $1.5 billion winterwear company’s logo can actually be found on sneakers, T-shirts, socks and more. “We don’t just make outerwear anymore,” CEO Dani Reiss tells Fortune. Soon, you’ll even be able to buy Canada Goose for your home. But the leap from the safety of clothing retail—the space the brand has operated in since 1957—to the highly competitive market of homewares is a gamble, experts tell Fortune. Read more:

Whole Foods Market’ prices have never been more accessible to consumers and the chain has Jeff Bezos and Amazon to thank, said its founder. John Mackey, who founded Whole Foods in 1980 with a staff of 19 people, said after Amazon acquired the company in 2017 it shed its “whole paycheck,” reputation for sticker shock. “Amazon let us drop our prices four times,” Mackey told Fortune. “I hardly ever hear the ‘whole paycheck’ narrative any longer—that’s due to Amazon.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/eVzjDS_2

Newer AI programs are better at understanding what customers need, searching for the right information, and displaying it in a legible way. During #BrainstormAI Singapore speakers shared some examples of how new AI programs could revitalize customer service. Generative AI programs can deliver better answers than official customer service chatbots, Joon-Seong Lee, senior managing director at Accenture’s Center for Advanced AI, claimed. Lee said that Google’s Gemini AI program helped him figure out how to navigate a bank’s system to link one account to another; the bank’s chatbot failed to understand the question. Lee argued that websites needed to move away from a search model, where users have to go digging for answers themselves. “You’re not searching for answers. You want the answer,” he said. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eYm-6bau

Ten years ago, Susan Wojcicki drew on an historical example of epic failure and a more recent example of smashing success for key lessons in leadership. The former YouTube CEO passed away on Friday after two years of living with lung cancer. A Silicon Valley pioneer, she spent more than two decades leading various parts of Google and its parent company Alphabet. Read more: