Beth Kowitt

The December before Kent Taylor died, the Texas Roadhouse founder started handing out copies of The Book of Joy to family, friends, and employees. Taylor, an avid reader, was known for giving away his favorite tomes—often including a personal note inside.

The book, an accounting of a weeklong dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, was a departure for the restaurant entrepreneur. He’d mostly leaned toward leadership and management classics—Built to Last, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People—that he had read for inspiration as he built his company into an enterprise valued at more than $5 billion.

But Taylor had been feeling more introspective of late. In November 2020 he had contracted COVID and since then had suffered from tinnitus so severe it sounded like a jet airplane taking off in his ears 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

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In a virtual world, how do you know that no one clued you in on the important Zoom that is happening right now? When you’re physically present, you can walk past the conference room or peer into your boss’s office. “At least then you know you weren’t invited,” says former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi with a laugh.

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There is no formula that can be written, no algorithm that can be tweaked, for the logistically challenging and emotionally fraught act of returning to the office tens of thousands of employees who have spent the last two-plus years working from home.

The only thing certain is that there’s no going back to the beforetimes when we compliantly plodded into the office five days a week to toil away at our cubicles. In a red-hot labor market, the most in-demand perk of office life is not having to go to the office at all. Not even Google’s famous amenities, which came to define the booming rise of Silicon Valley—the free food, the massages, the laundry service—can convince white-collar workers to give up the flexibility that they’ve long craved and are now demanding.

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To have a successful career at McDonald’s, one must make peace with the practice of putting “Mc” in front every noun that will take it. Customers can order Egg McMuffins and McGriddles for McDelivery. Employees at the old corporate campus caught the McShuttle. Executives who leave a frustrating meeting are McOverIt.

But in 2016, “McFamily” was struck from the company’s lexicon. The term was more than a feel-good name for the burger giant’s collection of employees—it embodied the cohesiveness and shared fate of everyone who made up the McDonald’s system.

Former McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook found the word distasteful. To him, it was “soft and represented the past,” says a former executive, and embodied the mindset hindering the company’s performance.

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Like many of corporate America’s ladder climbers, Najoh Tita-Reid first went after an international role with the goal of enhancing her career. But in the years since she made that first move to London, she’s become part of a cohort of Black American expats who have chosen to stay abroad because they’ve found that the professional benefits of working overseas are far more profound than the usual résumé-building check mark.

Working in Europe, Tita-Reid says, has been like wearing an oxygen mask. It’s allowed her to breathe—to lead and perform without feeling the crushing weight of America’s dysfunctional racial dynamics at every moment.

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For all its momentum, the modern fertility industry remains a relative newborn. That freshness is part of its potential, but also its risk. There are medical insiders who say it’s still the Wild West of medicine, under-­regulated and commercially driven, with certain players overpromising what treatment can do.

While some cheer the sector’s focus on women’s health, others say it has reinforced stereotypes that equate women’s worth with their ability to reproduce. And it is women whom the industry targets: Despite the fact that men cause or contribute to infertility in about half of cases, companies have only recently turned their attention to male partners.

There’s no denying that fertility is emotionally complicated in ways most other areas of the health care system are not. “There’s little we care about more than our children, which makes this a particularly fraught and charged area,” says Hank Greely, a professor focusing on bioethics at Stanford Law School. “The stakes are just higher when you play for babies.”

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Roz Brewer, chief operating officer of Starbucks, is not by nature a coffee person. In fact, when she joined the company two years ago, her caffeination vehicle of choice was tea (green and iced, thank you).

Some might think that her apathy toward java could pose a problem for the newly appointed No. 2 of the world’s largest purveyor of the brew—a company where the slurps of tastings regularly echo through its Seattle headquarters and the executive team decamps to its very own coffee farm in Costa Rica for leadership meetings.

But it helps that the company didn’t hire her for her espresso expertise. The Seattle giant already has plenty of coffee nerds on staff. What Brewer, a former Walmart executive, has brought to Starbucks is uncompromising focus—and at a time when the company desperately needed it.

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Google’s promise to remain unconventional is in question. Interviews with 32 current and former employees revealed a demarcation between what several called “Old Google” and “New Google.” At Old Google, employees say they had a voice in how the company was run. At New Google, the communication and trust between the rank and file and executives is in decline. Decision-making power, some say, is now concentrated at the very top of a company run by executives who are increasingly driven by conventional business metrics.

“Who decides what is the soul of Google and what Google is?” asks Lokman Tsui, formerly Google’s go-to executive on issues of free expression and censorship in Asia and the Pacific. “Is it leadership or employees? There’s a real battle for the soul of these companies right now.”

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Everything at Walmart is supersized—including its international business.
Walmart International is bigger by sales than JPMorgan Chase, Boeing, and Google’s parent company, Alphabet. Even Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, and Facebook combined can’t touch its scale.

But here, perhaps, is the most surprising stat of the bunch: Walmart’s $118-billion-in-revenue international operation is the biggest business in the world that no one seems to pay very much attention to at all.

Until this year, that is. Since April, Walmart has undertaken a flurry of deals that are not only transforming the face of its international business, but are, by extension, also rewriting the company’s place in the retail landscape.

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The very thing that makes grocery delivery hard—that food goes bad—is the reason it’s so desirable to a company like Amazon. Because cheese grows mold and meat goes rancid and milk sours, consumers can’t hoard it in their cupboards or refrigerators indefinitely as they might toilet paper or laundry detergent. There’s nothing else you purchase or consume so much or so often. For Amazon, getting in on that frequency is critical to further ingraining itself in our routines and behaviors.

“Food is the platform for selling you everything else,” says Walter Robb, the former co-CEO of Whole Foods. “It’s an everyday way into your life. There’s nothing else that happens quite that way.” Amazon’s quest is therefore about much more than just food.

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For women, taking part in the world of late-night dinners and after-work drinks—where so much of business really gets done—can be risky. It requires a leap of faith that they’ll be treated professionally, not pressured for sex. Investor and former Tronc chairman Michael Ferro betrayed that covenant, say these executives.

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The cutting-edge product the startup was trying to develop? Meat—the food whose more than $200 billion in U.S. sales has come to be the defining element of the Western diet. But what made this company’s work so revolutionary was not what it was trying to make so much as how it was attempting to do it. Memphis Meats, the brainchild that had the startup-investor class salivating, was aiming to remove animals from the process of meat production altogether.

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Handing over control of a company is always tricky—Howard Schultz, 63, officially relinquished the Starbucks CEO job on April 3—and doubly so when it involves a charismatic, longtime leader who all but founded the company.

In Schultz’s case, how does a notorious perfectionist who craves total control apply his perfectionism to the act of ceding control? That challenge is all the more fraught because his most notorious professional failure by far was his last attempt to leave as CEO, in 2000, a slow-boiling disaster that eventually concluded with his triumphant return. Schultz really, really, really wants to nail it this time.

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There is new urgency in the multi-decade quest to find low-calorie sweeteners. And it’s occurring just as the incumbent alternatives face ever more skepticism. 

Think of food companies’ plight this way: The finest scientists in industry have spent decades trying to find or invent a no-calorie sweetener that tastes and feels as good as the stuff extracted from pure cane. And now, after they largely failed to master that complex, arduous task, the level of difficulty is being raised even higher: This improbable concoction cannot appear to have been engineered by scientists.

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Try this simple test. Say the following out loud: Artificial colors and flavors. Pesticides. Preservatives. High-fructose corn syrup. Growth hormones. Antibiotics. Gluten. Genetically modified organisms.

If any one of these terms raised a hair on the back of your neck, left a sour taste in your mouth, or made your lips purse with disdain, you are part of Big Food’s multibillion-dollar problem.

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Perhaps no episode captures what’s ailing the world’s largest restaurant company better than the Mighty Wings Debacle of 2013. 

In September of last year, McDonald’s launched an ambitious program to sell deep-fried chicken wings across its 14,000 U.S. locations. The wings were a staple in Hong Kong, where the crisp cayenne-and-chili-pepper coating was developed. And a similar version tickled palates in Atlanta during testing. And by the end of the heavily advertised eight-week promotion, McDonald’s was left with 10 million pounds of unsold chicken, a whopping 20% of its inventory. The Mighty Wings didn’t flap.

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The demonizing of Monsanto has played out in dark and sometimes comedic ways. It’s at the center of several bizarre conspiracy theories: that it bought private military company Blackwater; that, as it plies the rest of the world with GMOs, it serves only organic food in its headquarters’ cafeteria; that the company and its “biotech mafia” henchmen caused Chipotle’s food-safety crisis through sabotage; and that Monsanto, rather than the Zika virus, is responsible for microcephaly. 

Which brings us to a provocative question: Is it conceivable that the planet’s most vilified company could be the one that feeds it?

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McDonald's seemingly simple change to cage-free eggs involves complex and expensive logistics, and there’s a long, long way to go: Right now only 13 million of the company’s 2 billion U.S. eggs are cage-free.

A company that always viewed efficiency as its alpha and omega is putting that second to the well-being of a hen. For McDonald’s now, the chicken comes before the egg.

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Consider Company X. Its annual sales—now $27.4 billion, or more than those of Estée Lauder, Hilton Worldwide, and Hershey combined—have risen 50% over the past six years. Its profits have almost tripled, to $2.1 billion. Its shareholders have been the beneficiaries of 18 consecutive years of earnings-per-share growth. In its nearly-four-decade history, it has had only one year of negative same-store sales. And it does all this by selling blouses...pots and pans...and bedding, sunglasses, sriracha seasoning, yoga mats, and the occasional $1,250 Stella McCartney dress.

Company X—make that TJX—may well be the biggest enigma in an industry so fragile and capricious that Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz once likened it to the “human condition.”

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Ikea has mastered one of the hardest challenges in the retail universe: selling high volumes of inventory at a consistently low price in vastly different marketplaces, languages, and cultures. Ikea is a model for retail regeneration—though, ahem, some assembly is required.

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Many people expect the worst when they think of Big Agriculture, and sometimes with good reason. Industrial-scale farming practices have made food cheaper and more abundant than ever before, but they have also contributed to pollution, resource shortages, and unhealthy eating habits. 

Fair Oaks Farms is challenging the assumption that big can’t be good by converting the manure from 36,000 cows into fuel that runs their farms and powers a fleet of trucks.

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Allow us, just for a moment , to be completely—and irresponsibly—alarmist: We are in a battle with bacteria. And from the numbers, it might well appear that we are losing.

Each year an estimated 48 million Americans are stricken ill as the result of one food-borne pathogen or another—listeria, E. coli, salmonella, and even a number of stowaway viruses are among the culprits. But in many cases the victims don’t know they’ve been infected.

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The question now is whether green cleaning products company Seventh Generation can substantially grow its ranks of customers without losing the passionate core—what’s more, while being owned by a global $59-billion-a-year CPG giant that sells everything from Axe deodorant to Vaseline. Seventh Generation’s faithful customers tend to be wary of big business to begin with (perhaps even one well-regarded for its commitment to sustainability, as Unilever is).

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You'd think Trader Joe's would be eager to trumpet its success, but management is obsessively secretive.

There are no signs with the company's name or logo at headquarters in Monrovia, about 25 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Few customers realize the chain is owned by Germany's ultra-private Albrecht family, the people behind the Aldi Nord supermarket empire. (A different branch of the family controls Aldi Süd, parent of the U.S. Aldi grocery chain.) Famous in Germany for not talking to the press, the Albrechts have passed their tightlipped ways on to their U.S. business.

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Lululemon, a longtime darling among urbane yogis and momentum investors alike, is having an uncharacteristically unfit year: In March the company pulled a large batch of its signature black yoga pants for "an unacceptable level of sheerness." 

Three months later CEO Christine Day announced plans to resign with little explanation, telling Fortune, "My values include discretion." The management uncertainty shook investors, and the stock fell 20% in the days following the announcement, wiping out some $2 billion in shareholder value.

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David Overton makes a point of trying to get to every one of his restaurant openings. In the 35 years since he founded the Cheesecake Factory in Beverly Hills, only a handful have kicked off without his discerning eye. So it surprised no one when Overton decided to travel halfway around the world for the Kuwait City launch of the 160th Cheesecake Factory.

Beneath the surface, though, restaurant No. 160 was dramatically different. The Cheesecake Factory, known in the industry for its consistency and Overton's attention to detail, owns all its restaurants in the U.S. But the Kuwait City outpost is licensed to M.H. Alshaya Co., a Kuwait-based group operating in 19 countries with more than 70 brands in its portfolio.

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Avon is indeed undergoing a radical makeover: In early April the company announced it was replacing Andrea Jung as CEO with Sherilyn McCoy, a Johnson & Johnson vice chairman. McCoy, 53, inherits a 126-year-old company in disarray. Years of management missteps (compounded by a complacent board of directors) have left the beauty brand bruised -- and vulnerable.

Avon declined to make Jung or members of its board available for this story, but former employees and industry analysts paint a picture of a company unsure of what it wanted to be, and therefore uncertain of how to move forward.

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If there’s one thing to be said about Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, it’s that he has never been afraid of pissing people off. “I am absolutely a contrarian,” he tells me. “You need dissonance, and you need someone who is challenging things. Otherwise you get stuck.”

The same term would certainly apply to Whole Foods itself right now: The company is in a period of dissonance. 

Mackey, once again, seems undaunted. “This is where your philosophy gets tested and when you get tested—your own commitment to it, your own integrity. It’s all in question. It’s all in play,” he says. “If you’re going to wreck your company or values just because you’re being attacked, then you’re not very deep.”

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Whole Foods didn't alter or dumb down its formula for Detroit, and why should it? The Austin-based chain is one of the country's most successful retailers -- its revenue has doubled and profits have tripled since 2007 -- defying dismal grocery industry trends by offering consumers a mix of organics, prepared foods, and an expanding array of staples under its 365 house brand.

Now, having conquered affluent suburbs and trendy urban areas, Whole Foods is out to win over the rest of America, setting up shop in previously unthinkable places such as Detroit and Boise, and opening multiple locations in existing markets both large and small.

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Marillyn Hewson's good nature belies a toughness developed during the course of a 30-year career at Lockheed Martin.

Hewson was tapped to become chief operating officer of the company, a gig she expected to be her last at Lockheed. Then the company's CEO-in-waiting, Christopher Kubasik, was forced to resign amid revelations that he'd had an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate.

The company immediately elevated Hewson to the COO job, and less than 60 days later she became CEO, her 20th job at Lockheed. "Nineteen was a quick turn," she jokes.

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When Google acquired a tiny wireless startup called Android in 2005, few at the search giant had particularly high hopes for the deal -- if they even knew about it.

At that point Google had purchased just a handful of companies, mostly software makers it had quietly folded into its operations. (Big, high-profile deals like YouTube and DoubleClick came later.)

Besides, not many people knew exactly what Android did: The upstart was in stealth mode, and co-founder Andy Rubin, best known for creating the Sidekick mobile device, said little about its product or mission. Executive chairman Eric Schmidt would later joke that he scarcely noticed when Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin bought the company.

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On Sept. 12, 2001, Hearst Corp. executives were scheduled to meet with their board and architect Norman Foster at company headquarters at 300 W. 57th St. in Manhattan.

Hearst had long outgrown its original six-story art deco building, commissioned by William Randolph Hearst in 1926, and Foster had been brought in to come up with a plan to expand. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 waylaid that meeting, but not Hearst's ambitions. Five years later the company moved into a stunning, 46-story cutting-edge tower built within the original landmark structure.

The move is classic Hearst: building a new future on top of its old-media foundation. 

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This year John Krenicki's division, which manufactures things like gas turbines and solar panels, is expected to bring in about $45 billion in revenue, making it the biggest industrial unit in the company.

Krenicki has nearly doubled the unit's size since taking it over in 2005. Last year it had revenue of $37.5 billion, which would have made it No. 67 on the Fortune 500 list if it were a standalone company. He expects revenue to hit $60 billion by 2014 and $100 billion in a decade. Compare that with GE's total revenue of $152 billion in 2010, and you see the size of the bet.

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