Financial Mindset

In the White House Situation Room, the hardest calls were never the obvious emergencies. What kept me up were the nights when a fragment of information came in and the debate wasn’t about what to do. It was about whether anything concerning was happening at all. In 2023, my team and I were assessing the nation’s pandemic influenza plans when the Situation Room notified me that H5N1 influenza had infected a father and killed his daughter in a remote Cambodian village. Was the virus spreading between people – the start of a pandemic that could kill millions? The national security adviser asked whether to brief President Biden immediately. If these cases were the first signs, we would need to commit billions of dollars to vaccines and treatments within days. I told him to wait. Not because I thought it was nothing, but because we had already agreed, before the alert came, on what would tell us it was something: sustained human-to-human transmission. We worked with health official...

Hello from Santa Barbara. It’s day two of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit . I sat down with Sarah London, CEO of Centene , on Monday. She offered her perspective on health care’s AI boom. Much of the AI being deployed at scale today, London said, goes toward what she calls “inflationary use cases,” tools that generate more revenue in a fee-for-service system rather than reduce the underlying cost of care. AI can make billing faster, automate paperwork and help providers capture more revenue. But those gains don’t necessarily make health care less expensive. London believes the bigger opportunity lies in changing how care is delivered and who can access it. Centene, a $33 billion company operating Medicaid plans in 29 states alongside marketplace and Medicare Advantage coverage, serves 26 million members. They are, London said, “among the poorest, sickest” people in their communities. Yet those populations are often left behind by health care innovatio...

Asia runs on hierarchy. Nearly every major market in the region scores highly on what psychologist Geert Hofstede called “power distance”—the degree to which people accept that power is distributed unequally—and the landmark GLOBE study of 62 societies found those rankings hold across Asia and outpace the West. And in AI, that’s an enormous lever to get companies to embrace this new technology. Organizations often run the same AI playbook: Tell people to try it, reward those who show curiosity, and see what sticks. That approach may have worked for the first phase of AI adoption. It won’t work for the second. The gap is widening between companies using it mainly for productivity, and those embedding AI into how they operate. The former are simply making existing tasks faster or cheaper; the latter are redesigning workflows and business models. Both may become more efficient, but only the second category is preparing itself for growth. Soon, the gap...

Peter Lee, who recently announced his departure as president of Microsoft Science, plans to join the Mercedes Formula 1 team in a newly created AI advisor role, he told Fortune . Lee spent 16 years at Microsoft shaping its science and research efforts, exploring how AI can help doctors and scientists crack hard problems in the physical, biological, and medical sciences. At Mercedes, he said, he’ll focus on four main goals: using AI to tackle physics problems for the team’s car, breaking down organizational and data silos across departments, building financial and predictive data models, and advising the team on how the sport’s regulators might govern AI use. His exact title is still under discussion, but he’s expected to join on a one-year contract with an option for a second. “I have always wanted to be a racer. When I was young, I grew up racing carts,” Lee said. “I’m completely thrilled, and I’m in disbelief that they would think of me for something like this.” The...

At many large companies, CEOs are squared away in plush corner offices, where they take meetings and receive elaborate lunch orders. But when midday rolls around, Ancestry employees find their CEO Howard Hochhauser taking his meal in the office’s eating area. It’s a habit he picked up from Ace Greenberg when Hochhauser worked at Wall Street investment bank Bear Stearns in the late 1990s. He held multiple positions within the equity research department, ultimately serving as a vice president and equity research analyst. And when it came time to step away from the keyboard and sit down for their midday meals, the company’s longtime CEO, Greenberg, would eat among his employees.  “Ace Greenberg, who founded the firm, sat on the floor every day, and it stuck with me. Like, gosh, that’s really a visible statement. He’s really accessible,” Hochhauser tells Fortune . “You could talk to him. He wasn’t sitting in some glass office that’s untouchable.” He...

Christina Zhu , the head of Walmart’s China business, remembers when Chinese shoppers did not have much choice. As a child, she watched her parents wake up at 4:30 a.m. on Sundays to go to the wet market. “They had to haggle, and high-quality produce wasn’t always guaranteed,” Zhu, born in 1973, recalled at the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau in September. Today, Chinese shoppers are “probably the group with the most choices [in the world],” and they have become “the most demanding customers,” she said. Meeting those rising expectations has become the defining challenge for retailers in China, and Walmart has managed it better than most. It entered China in 1996 with a Supercenter and a Sam’s Club in Shenzhen. Three decades later, the U.S. retailer is thriving in the world’s second-largest economy even as other foreign brands struggle. China represents 3% of Walmart’s overall business, but it is growing, generating $24.6 billion in sales in its past fiscal year, a 19.3%...

The Jessica Chastain horror  “Other Mommy”  topped the North American box office this weekend with a bigger audience than expected, while  “The Social Reckoning”  got off to a lackluster start. ‘Other Mommy’ is another win for horror “Other Mommy,” released by Universal Pictures, earned $27.5 million in its first few days in 3,365 theaters, according to studio estimates on Sunday. The movie, about a sinister supernatural creature that terrorizes a young girl who thinks it’s her mother, got dismal reviews from both critics and audiences. It also joins the ranks of “Megalopolis” and “Hereditary” with a D+ CinemaScore. But with a production budget of around $19 million, it’s also another win for the horror genre and producer Blumhouse Atomic Monster, which was behind  “Backrooms” and “Obsession.”  “Other Mommy” opened in 50 international markets as well, boosting its global debut to $45.2 million. Jim Orr, Universal’s head of domes...