Transcript

#92 Business Revolution: Tech, Talent, Purpose with Fortune Media CEO Alan Murray

From 3 Takeaways · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 30 min · 5,045 words · 31 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "#92 Business Revolution: Tech, Talent, Purpose with Fortune Media CEO Alan Murray", an episode of 3 Takeaways published July 31, 2024 (30 min, about 5,045 words). It mentions 16 people, works and ideas, including Tomorrow's Capitalist, Fortune Media, Black Lives Matter, Larry Summers, Apple Inc..

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 5:00: Fortune Media, Airbnb, Alan Murray, Amazon
  2. – 10:00: Black Lives Matter, Net Zero 2050
  3. – 20:00: Larry Summers, Tomorrow's Capitalist
  4. – 25:00: Michael Porter
  5. – 30:00: Tomorrow's Capitalist

Notable quotes from "#92 Business Revolution: Tech, Talent, Purpose with Fortune Media CEO Alan Murray"

  • Careers and now your host and board member of schools at Harvard Princeton and Columbia Lynn tomman hi everyone it's Lyn toen welcome to another episode today I'm excited to be…
    about Lynn Tomman · at
  • Business are Allan is the CEO of Fortune media which includes Fortune Magazine and his new book tomorrow's capitalist is excellent welcome Alan and thanks so much for our…
    about Tomorrow's Capitalist · at
  • Commitments to climate change action the number of Fortune 500 companies that have adopted Net Zero 2050 plans in the last two years is stunning so all this stakeholder action…
    about Net Zero 2050 · at
  • Government directed one I love the quote that you have in your book from former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers who's also been a guest on three takeaways let me quote…
    about Larry Summers · at
  • And he talked in that speech about the need for a more creative capitalism Michael Porter the famous business school professor at Harvard Business School started talking about…
    about Michael Porter · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

Books & papers

Companies & orgs

  • Fortune Media — Company · 2 mentions · first at
    It's Lyn toen welcome to another episode today I'm excited to be with Alan Murray CEO of Fortune media I'm excited to find out the ways business has changed due to the rise of…
  • Apple Inc. — Company · 2 mentions
  • Exxon — Company · 2 mentions
  • Airbnb — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Out the ways business has changed due to the rise of platform companies like Amazon apple and Airbnb as well as the ways that business has changed due to the pandemic remote…
  • Amazon — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Out the ways business has changed due to the rise of platform companies like Amazon apple and Airbnb as well as the ways that business has changed due to the pandemic remote…

Concepts & topics

  • Black Lives Matter — Concept · 2 mentions · first at
    Amazon apple and Airbnb as well as the ways that business has changed due to the pandemic remote work black lives matter and global warming it used to be that business's only…
  • Net Zero 2050 — Concept · 1 mention · first at

Full transcript with timestamps

welcome to the three takeaways podcast which features short memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers Business Leaders writers politicians scientists and other newsmakers each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers and now your host and board member of schools at Harvard Princeton and Columbia Lynn tomman hi everyone it's Lyn toen welcome to another episode today I'm excited to be with Alan Murray CEO of Fortune media I'm excited to find out the ways business has changed due to the rise of platform companies like Amazon apple and Airbnb as well as the ways that business has changed due to the pandemic remote work black lives matter and global warming it used to be that business's only objective was profit but now business has much broader responsibilities to its employees its customers its suppliers and its Community I'm looking forward to finding

out what the new responsibilities of business are Allan is the CEO of Fortune media which includes Fortune Magazine and his new book tomorrow's capitalist is excellent welcome Alan and thanks so much for our conversation today thank you Lynn it's great to be with you great to be with you as well let's start with a brief overview of the changing Arena of business and how the largest companies such as the iconic Fortune 500 of changed to begin with who's in the top 10 now of the Fortune 500 versus 10 years ago oh that's a very dramatic change you have many more tech companies like apple and Microsoft and alphabet all making up the top 10 and a company like Exxon that was at the very top for a long time has fallen down to the bottom of the top 10 so what you see is a change from companies that were involved in physical Goods making things selling things or extracting things and today they're replaced by technology

companies platform companies companies that are much more about software and intellectual property I was shocked at how dramatic that change was that just 10 years ago the top 10 were four energy companies and two car companies GM and Ford so that's a huge change yeah and let me give you a statistic that puts another light on it there was some research done recently that went back and looked at all of the 500 The Fortune 500 in the 1970s and what it found was on their balance sheets more than 80% of the value was physical stuff it was plant it was equipment it was oil in the ground it was inventory on the shelves more than 80% you do the same exercise today and more than 85% of the value is intangibles it's intellectual property it's soft where it's brand value and the human emotional connection that comes from Brand value and I think that just gives you a picture of how much the world has

changed and as I've spent time trying to figure out I think it explains a lot of the change that you see in the purpose of Corporations as well so that dramatic change in the value of for in 500 companies coming from intangible assets as opposed to the physical ones means that there's a much greater premium on people on talent and ideas is that right absolutely I mean if you think about all that physical stuff that required Financial capitalist support you had to buy the the big plants and the equipment or the oil fields or the inventory and so that required huge amounts of financial Capital so it makes sense in that kind of world your focus would be on returns to financial capital on returns to shareholders but intangibles which is where the value lies today those are things that are much more closely tied to people it's human Ingenuity that creates the intellectual property it's human emotion that creates

the brand value and the brand connection and so it makes sense that we now live in a world where Business Leaders are paying much more attention to people than they are to the financial returns so that also means that capital is less important as well absolutely Capital has not been a constraint in the economy in recent years it's plentiful it's easy to find I have a unique opportunity to talk to a lot of Business Leaders and I often ask them what's top of mind for you what's your biggest concern I can tell you that for the past six months the number one issue that they've mentioned when I asked that question is talent and I can also tell you that it's been years since somebody has said to me oh my problem is access to Capital and the pace of business has also become much faster as well as the competitive Arena and the competitors have changed as well I think the pace point is really important things are changing so fast

you know in a way the corporations of the 20th century were like these giant information hierarchies and you'd have people in the field who were selling or servicing or doing whatever passing up information that would make its way up to the top and you'd have a CEO and a seite team that would take that information and come up with a strategy and then they would pass orders back down the chain here's what everybody has to do no one can operate a business that way today it's just too slow and too cumbersome you have to empower people in the field to make decisions because you don't have time to wait for it to go up to the top and be turned into a new strategy and what that means is for the folks who are running these large corporations their job has changed dramatically it's much less about telling people what to do than it used to be and much more about creating inspiration defining the North Star

creating the moral guard rails that people have to operate under attracting Talent retaining Talent so it's just a very different job so it's more about curating community and motivating people absolutely right yes exactly and the competitive Arena has changed as well it used to be if you were a car company like a Ford you could look at the other car companies the GMS the lexuses but these days the competitive Arena has changed as well yeah so another question that I have over the course of my career asked CEOs when I had the opportunity to talk to them is who do you consider your biggest competitor and sure 20 years years ago JP Morgan would have said Bank of America and Ford would have said GM but that's not the answer you get today I mean what they all recognize today is that industry boundaries are collapsing and technology is creating these new opportunities and so GM and Ford have to

be looking at Tesla or maybe some company that hasn't even been created yet and Bank of America and JP Morgan have to be thinking about the blockchain or all these fintech companies that are trying to just disrupt their their very industry disruption has become the mode of the day and every good CEO is looking over their shoulder wondering who's going to disrupt my business and now on top of all of these changes we have the changes from the last few years with the pandemic black lives matter Rising inequality and even the Russian invasion of Ukraine let's talk about each of these and how they've affected business starting with the pandemic I know you've thought about it a lot Alan how has the pandemic changed business when the pandemic first hit a couple years ago my first reaction was oh my God we're heading into a recession and all these companies are going to say you know this stakeholder capitalism

stuff it's nice but we can't afford to pay attention to that right now because the bottom line is eroding so I thought stakeholder capitalism would move to a back burner as they focused on Shoring up their finances but in fact the opposite happened because of the nature of the crisis it was a stakeholder crisis their employees were endangered their lives were endangered their customers in many cases were endangered and so the nature of the crisis forced companies to pay more attention to people and put aside in a way the finances for a while because they knew they were going to have a bad year and the other thing that was also surprising was climate became part of that as well there was a sense of collective vulnerability I think that came out of the pandemic and so you saw this explosion of companies making commitments to climate change action the number of Fortune 500 companies that have adopted Net Zero 2050 plans in the

last two years is stunning so all this stakeholder action actually accelerated during the pandemic rather than decelerated and then of course Lynn the other thing that happened was we just had to rethink how we worked look I've spent the greater part of four decades covering business and the intersection of business and society and what's so fascinating about the current moment is you have this huge technology Revolution that is disrupting so many Industries side by side with a huge purpose Revolution companies rethinking why they do what they do and how they deliver returns to society and then the cherry on the cake is we're thinking how we work people are not going back to the office 5 days a week or even four days a week so we're rethinking all of that office work and what holds people together when they aren't in the same office and those three huge revolutions happening simultaneously I've never seen

anything like it in my career it's stunning it is absolutely stunning because business hasn't changed in the decades or even a hundred years before that business barely changed ellan why do you think the murder of George Floyd by the police had so much more impact than earlier murders of black men such as the murder of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson Missouri six years earlier which was also similarly filmed by bystanders why was there so much more impact now it's a really great point I mean you go back to Ferguson and Michael Brown and try and find a statement by a big company CEO at the time it doesn't exist I've tried there just was no outpour there might have been for local companies but there was no outpouring of corporate sentiment with the killing of Michael Brown and yet when George Floyd happened there were hundreds of CEOs with very heartfelt statements about how this can't continue so I think part of

what was different was the change in the nature of corporate leadership that we've already talked about I mean this really built up over the course of the decade in the 2002 to 2005 I hosted a television show on CNBC a nightly show and was often in the position of trying to find a CEO to come on and talk about some controversial topic of the time and none of them would do it they'd say look it doesn't affect my bottom line I'm not going to talk about that I'm not going to get into a big controversial fight but starting probably around 2014 one of the first examples was Mark Benny off at Salesforce when Indiana passed the religious Liberties law that was viewed as being discriminatory towards gays Ben off said I'm going to stop doing business in Indiana and a bunch of other businesses joined it then there was another example in North Carolina a law restricting transgender access to public

bathrooms and a bunch of companies including Bank of America which is the largest employer in the state of North Carolina said to the state you can't do this and then you had this outpouring Ed Bastion at Delta took away a discount program for the NRA convention after the Parkland shootings Ken Frasier of MK LED this revolt against all of President Trump's advisory councils so this whole CEO activism that we've seen most recently in the reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine has really only existed for about six or seven years so I think that's one very big difference between then and now Alan what do you see as business's responsibility for racial Equity inequality and opportunity I think they have big responsibility and I spent a lot of time talking to Business Leaders about this it's not just making sure you have a diverse and Equitable Workforce it's that something has gone wrong in our society and the Society of

industrialized countries that the escalator of opportunity if you want to call it that isn't working the whole John Kennedy notion that a rising tide lifts all boats well there are a bunch of boats that aren't rising and and probably a couple of decades ago most Business Leaders would have said well that's not my problem that's the government's problem you fix that create training programs create education programs whatever I think that's changed I think businesses now realize look we're the ones who create jobs and if we aren't creating jobs that if there's a huge part of the population that can't access the jobs we're creating we got to do something different so there's been a real effort on the part of businesses to do things like redefine their job postings so that they don't all require four-year degrees because obviously a lot of people in this country don't have four-year degrees and often that was

just a kind of a credential not really a necessary skill again Ken Frasier and Ken Chenal the former CEO of American Express started this 110 program that's designed to create new Pathways for disadvantaged people into good jobs there's a lot of talk among the best companies now about apprenticeship programs where they can bring in someone who doesn't quite have the skills they need but they can do the final Skilling up necessary to give them jobs so I think that probably more than any issue that's the one that the CEOs feel a certain degree of personal responsibility for they recognize that the government isn't doing the job but they also feel like they have a responsibility and by the way it's not just we need to do this because it's the right thing to do it's also we need to do this because we need the workers we need a better pipeline of talent in order to survive and thrive in the future I also had a great conversation

with former American Express CEO Ken chanal who you mentioned about that 110 program and creating opportunity for black men and women Alan with the Russia Ukraine war we now have an additional area of responsibility for business geopolitics what do you think the responsibility of business is toward Russia it's a complicated question not in the case of Russia I mean it's so outrageous what Russia has done and each day the outrage grows greater as we see the attacks on civilians so I think the call that hundreds of businesses made in the first couple of weeks after the invasion to say we're going to stop doing business with this country as long as this is going on was absolutely the right call they had to do it even though Lynn we've never seen anything like that in modern history the only thing that's like remotely close were the boycotts of South Africa for the apartheid regime and that was a much slower boil it took

place over decades this happened in two weeks so I think it's a good thing but it gets pretty complicated we had an interesting oped piece in Fortune recently from a couple of Business Leaders who said that ESG should have an F in front of it for freedom and businesses should stop doing business with countries that don't support democracy and freedom well that has massive implications as you can imagine for countries in the Middle East for countries in Asia and for most of all for China so if I could just back up for a setep what's going on here is that as businesses shift to a more human mode they feel like their human organizations made up of people they have to have values and they have to stand up for those values and so getting involved in social injustice they're getting involved in climate change and saving the planet and they're getting involved in Geo politics but those are complicated issues difficult issues and

they're often conflicting mandates or they may conflict with the business imperatives this is not an easy game and if I can just give one more example the ultimate example of how difficult it is is the CEO of Disney Bob chaik in Florida where when Florida passed the law that restricted discussions of gender and sexual identity in schools his Instinct was to just keep his mouth shut which is what every CEO would have done a decade ago it's like I have a big business in Florida my business depends on the support of the government I'm not going to get involved but his employees revolted literally revolted they said this is outrageous this company has always been supportive of lgbtq employees you have to stand up for us you have to express your values speak out against that law in Florida and So eventually chaik did spoke out and now the State of Florida is revoking a set of laws that make it possible for Disney

to operate in the state so this whole notion of stakeholder capitalism that companies are getting caught up in is difficult it's not easy and there are tradeoffs involved but I think it's inevitable and chaik found that out you can't hide anymore you don't have the option of getting below your desk and waiting for the cont rsy to blow over it is a much more complicated world with many more pitfalls ellan let's talk about capitalism since your new Buck is called tomorrow's capitalist George Will who is recently a guest on three takeaways has pointed out that capitalism as an economic system was named by Carl Marx father of Communism and George argues that a better name for capitalism is a market economy with a freedom to choose rather than a government directed one I love the quote that you have in your book from former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers who's also been a guest on three

takeaways let me quote it and then I'm going to ask you your perspective quote from Larry Summers if you think about it it cannot be an accident that it is the same 15 years when communism fell when command and control corporations like General Motors and IBM had to be drastically restructured when when planning Industries through the developing world were closed down and when the Japanese model of industrial policy proved to be a complete failure there is something about this epic in history that really puts a premium on incentives on decentralization on allowing small economic energy to Bubble Up rather than a more top- down more directed approach unquote 100% agree with that quote from Larry Summers who is a good friend look you can't deny the huge gains in society from the shift towards market economies over the course of the last four or five decades call it capitalism call it market economies George Will can call it

whatever he wants to it's had enormous benefits and of course the biggest benefit is that there are close to a billion people in the world who were in abject poverty who no longer are so it it was the biggest alleviation of poverty ever in the history of the world which can largely be traced back to the Embrace of free market economics so nobody wants to get rid of well nobody there are people who do want to get rid of it but no one in the business World wants to get rid of the market system the market system has worked pretty well but what started to happen after I think really after the Great Recession because the Great Recession was kind of a wakeup call said you know what okay yeah markets do a lot of things well but they don't do everything well and this was massive failure of markets that occurred in the Great Recession and you began to hear very smart business people talk about capitalism in a different way Bill

Gates I think in some way started it he gave a famous speech in 2008 at Davos it was his last year as CEO of Microsoft and he talked in that speech about the need for a more creative capitalism Michael Porter the famous business school professor at Harvard Business School started talking about shared value capitalism John Macky who created Whole Food started talking about conscious capitalism Mark Benny off at Salesforce called it compassionate capitalism somebody else called it inclusive capitalism but all of a sudden more and more people were starting to put a modifier in front of capitalism says wait a minute we have to do this better than we're doing it now or we run into the risk of losing our operating license and that's the sentiment that as a journalist I building and building over the course of the last decade until we've gotten to the point where we are now where I think it's widely accepted

that companies just have to step up and take more responsibility for things like social justice and climate and geopolitics in part because governments aren't doing a very good job of it in a Milton Freedman world the responsibility of business was profits and that was very clear and also very measurable in this new world of business where business has much greater social responsibilities how should Business Leaders decide what policies to pursue how aggressively to pursue social environmental challenges and how should CEO performance against these broader goals be measured yeah wow there's a lot in that question Lynn but let me start with this point a lot of the difference between the most fervent Advocates of Milton Friedman saying the social responsibility of business is to make a profit and the ad of stakeholder capitalism really has to do with time frame any of us who have ever been in a

business know that if you're living quarter to quarter there are lots of things you can do that will add money to the bottom line that will hurt your employees could hurt your customers could hurt the communities they live in and could hurt the climate but if you're looking at a 50 or 100 Year time frame most of those things don't work you cannot survive as a business if the planet is on fire you can't survive as a business if you've spent decades abusing your employees you can't survive as a business if you pushed out faulty products to your consumers so a lot of the conflict between the Milton Freeman View and the stakeholder view goes away as you increase the time frame if your goal is to make profits for a hundred years then you're G to have to pay attention to social injustice and climate and geopolitics because those things are all existential threats to your ability to operate 10 years out the

road so I think that's a part of it but having said that there is a measurement problem I mean I already talked about how focusing on financial metrics and returns to shareholders may have made sense 50 years ago it makes less sense now we've got to come up with a whole new set of metrics the SEC recently came out with a 500 page rule on companies requirements to disclose their progress on their climate commitments in and of itself just the climate piece is Mass mive I mean it took us a hundred years to build up the financial reporting infrastructure that we have today so that we had a consistent fairly consistent framework that you could rely on to measure how you were doing in terms of your financial returns we're gonna have to have something similar to deal with these climate commitments because right now the numbers are all over the place so so they're going to have to figure out a consistent way to

measure it they going to have to be new standards and I think the same thing's going to start to happen around the social equity piece you see more and more companies still a minority but more and more companies publicly releasing their diversity data so that they can be held accountable for their commitments I wouldn't be surprised if sometime in the next couple of years the SEC requires every company to do that so all of these things are going to change the way we measure manage and hold companies accountable it seems very easy and clear at a very top level to talk about the responsibilities of business whether on climate or on inequality and opportunity but the issues become much more complex at the margin for example how do you decide who to provide opportunity to the poor immigrant from Egypt or the poor person from Appalachia or the Native American Indian and if you support Freedom of Choice as a company in

partners and in gender should your company heal care plan include gender transition all of these are such thorny issues when you get into the details or geopolitics yeah okay I think autocratic regimes like Russia companies should stand up to them when they invade Ukraine but what about China China's an autocratic regime that's making huge amounts of money for a lot of these companies are they going to do the same thing with China difficult issue again look at Disney CEO Bob chaik in Florida I mean there's one point of view that says well what's he supposed to do his employees are demanding he stand up for the rights of the lgbtq employees but his business depends on these laws that were put into place 50 60 years ago in Florida that they need to survive so no one says this is easy it's a much more complex world that these companies are operating in much more complex before I ask the three

takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today Alan is there anything else you'd like to mention what should I have asked you that I did not I thought your interviewing was brilliant you asked all the right questions and if there's anything more I have to say I'll try and get to it in the three takeaways well that is High Praise coming from you Alan thank you what are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today the first is that this is real it's not just a fad it's not a bunch of wokey trying to Curry favor with Elizabeth Warren that there are fundamental changes in the ways business operates that is forcing them to pay more attention to people in the planet they have no choice they have to do it and so I don't think it's gonna stop I don't think it's going to go away but then the second thing I would say on top of that is this doesn't mean that greed is dead or corporate corruption

has disappeared or that businesses alone can say the planet and the world we need effective governments in order to address the biggest most complicated problems so it's a move in the right direction but it's not a silver bullet and then the third thing I just reemphasize is this is really about all of us becoming much more human in the way we approach work in life I have a colleague Jeff culvin who wrote a book a few years ago and he said that and I think think this is correct the business sped most of the 20th century trying to make people into the equivalent of machines that's what scientific management was about right you had these big factories where people are asked to do repetitive jobs and repetitive activities over and over again so there was a huge focus on working together in lock step like a machine we've now reached an era where the machines are going to take care of themselves thank

you very much they're going to become smarter they're going to be more effective and what we're going to need to survive and thrive over the coming decades is for people to be better people much greater Ingenuity much greater empathy all the things that make us distinct as human beings are the qualities that business is going to need for the future Alan this has been terrific thank you very much I really enjoyed your book tomorrow's capitalist although I had one very small quival I thought you could have called it days capitalist but I really enjoyed it I thought about that I don't think we're quite there yet I think we've made massive progress but I think we're still in the early days so keep an eye on tomorrow that sounds great thank you Alan thank you if you enjoy today's episode and would like to receive the show notes or get new Fresh weekly episodes be sure to sign up for our newsletter at 3 takeaway.com or follow

us on Instagram Twitter and Facebook note that three three takeaway.com is with the number three three is not spelled out see you soon at three takeaways decom

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "#92 Business Revolution: Tech, Talent, Purpose with Fortune Media CEO Alan Murray"?

In order: 0:00 Fortune Media, Airbnb, Alan Murray, Amazon; 5:00 Black Lives Matter, Net Zero 2050; 15:00 Larry Summers, Tomorrow's Capitalist; 20:00 Michael Porter; 25:00 Tomorrow's Capitalist.

What is mentioned in this 3 Takeaways episode?

16 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Tomorrow's Capitalist, Fortune Media, Black Lives Matter, Larry Summers, Apple Inc., Exxon. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "#92 Business Revolution: Tech, Talent, Purpose with Fortune Media CEO Alan Murray"?

The episode runs 30 min; the transcript is about 5,045 words in 31 timestamped sections.

More from 3 Takeaways

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.