Fortune’s Post

Insurance isn’t sexy. If you ask Zurich Insurance’s Chief Customer Officer Conny Kalcher, she’ll tell you otherwise. But it didn’t start that way for her. Kalcher joined the company after a 33-year career at the toy giant Lego. The industries are like chalk and cheese—and their customers, too. Yet Kalcher saw an opportunity for Zurich to educate Gen Z about all things finances. It was the company’s chance to turn insurance’s cold and distant approach into something more accessible. “I did think it would be men in suits, being very formal and doing things in a particular way. But that’s not at all the case,” Kalcher told Fortune in an interview. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eTizABqD

Nothing, a British startup seeking to challenge Apple’s smartphone dominance, is hauling its employees back to the office full-time in the quest for growth. In a lengthy email disparaging remote work, which had been a tenet of Nothing CEO Carl Pei’s workplace policy since its creation four years ago, Pei explained why his 450 employees needed to come to the office five days a week.  “Remote work is not compatible with a high ambition level plus high speed,” Pei said in an email to staff, which he shared on LinkedIn. Pei gave three reasons for the strict return-to-office mandate. Read more: https://lnkd.in/ed8wvgJQ

The best and the brightest on Wall Street don’t have a great track record when it comes to beating the S&P 500, but Research Affiliates Chairman Rob Arnott may have found an answer and has launched an alternate index to prove it. In a report titled “Nixed: The Upside of Getting Dumped” that was co-authored with Forrest Henslee, he said stocks that get booted off indexes eventually outperform them while stocks that are added underperform. “As it turns out, getting dumped by an index can have an impressive upside, just as a romantic breakup can sow seeds for personal growth,” they wrote. “Dumped companies and their shareholders fare surprisingly well on average, better even than the stocks that replaced them.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/eKYxS8u4

Companies are sweetening the pot for incoming executives: No move to company headquarters? No problem. Starbucks’ incoming CEO Brian Niccol, who lives in California, will not be required to relocate to the coffee chain’s headquarters in Seattle. Hillary Super, Victoria Secret’s incoming chief executive, will also be permitted to work remotely, pioneering an apparent trend of a company’s top brass working from afar. It’s a mouth-watering prospect for executives wanting to retain some day-to-day flexibility and spend some extra time at home with family. But some remote CEOs could get a massive wake-up call, some future of work experts say: Not only will their employees resent their boss’s absence from the office, it could be hurting the company itself. Read more: https://lnkd.in/esrZ9MXk

There’s likely no shortage of people who would pay to work for Rihanna, a global superstar and the wealthiest female musical artist in the world. Victoria’s Secret just found out how expensive it is to poach a chief executive from one of her companies. On Wednesday, America’s largest seller of lingerie announced it had hired Hillary Super—the CEO of Savage X Fenty, the singer-songwriter’s body-positive lingerie brand—to be its new CEO, effective Sept. 9. According to her employment agreement, Super’s compensation package could exceed $18 million. Read more here: bit.ly/4dtzKHW

It was 2am on one night in 2011 when Mark Zuckerberg was “hanging out with all the interns,” including playing a couple of chess matches with Sophie Z. Novati (who claims she won). “That was the vibe of the company at the time,” Novati says, adding that it was the first time she was able to ask him the million-dollar question: How’s the social network going to make any money? Of course, today, Facebook—or Meta—is a $1.3 trillion social media giant with Instagram and WhatsApp under its wing. However, up until 2012, the year Facebook went public, its mobile app didn’t actually make money. It didn’t feature ads and the move to incorporate them was considered risky.  In the end, the company was able to turn likes and shares into profit, by turning its users into the product. “His response to me was, if you can figure out a way to capture people’s valuable attention, you can always figure out how to turn that into money later,” Novati, now the founder of Formation recalls to Fortune. Read more: https://lnkd.in/g9J3g-Sf

A survey of annual reports from the biggest U.S. corporations are increasingly highlighting artificial intelligence as a possible risk factor. According to a report from research firm Arize AI, the number of Fortune 500 companies that cited AI as a risk hit 281. That represents 56.2% of the companies and a 473.5% increase from the prior year, when just 49 companies flagged AI risks. “If annual reports of the Fortune 500 make one thing clear, it’s that the impact of generative AI is being felt across a wide array of industries—even those not yet embracing the technology,” the report said. “Given that most mentions of AI are as a risk factor, there is a real opportunity for enterprises to stand out by highlighting their innovation and providing context on how they are using generative AI.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/gY39uNFM

Critics have ridiculed 21-year-old’s Avi Schiffmann's new product, called “Friend”—an A.I.-powered, always-listening necklace that chats with you through text messages—throughout its development. At first, media outlets questioned Schiffmann’s decision to spend $1.8 million of his $2.5 million in capital he’d fundraised to buy the domain name “friend.com.” He initially said he did it for the publicity, because we’re “talking about it.” He’s since changed his mind: “The true answer I have for you is that it keeps the artwork consistent. It’s simple. I like it.” Then, he released the product’s first commercial on July 31, World Friendship Day, on X. It went viral, but not in the most favorable way for Schiffmann.  Read more here: bit.ly/3SRJ0NG