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Julie Swetnick, Brainstorm Reinvent, Maven: Broadsheet September 27

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Kristen Bellstrom
Kristen Bellstrom
and
Emma Hinchliffe
Emma Hinchliffe
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By
Kristen Bellstrom
Kristen Bellstrom
and
Emma Hinchliffe
Emma Hinchliffe
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September 27, 2018, 8:03 AM ET

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Julie Swetnick comes forward with even more disturbing allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, Maven raises $27 million for women’s health and breast milk shipping, and we hear from executives adapting to the future at Fortune’s Brainstorm Reinvent. Have a terrific Thursday.

EVERYONE'S TALKING

• Reinventing the wheel. I spent the last couple days in Chicago for Fortune’s first-ever Brainstorm Reinvent, a gathering devoted to exploring the ways companies are attempting to adapt to better compete in the digital age.

While the Reinvent stage was graced by too many women to namecheck them all, here are a few moments that stood out:

Ariel Investments president Mellody Hobson challenged attendees to create real business consequences for companies and divisions that fail to make progress on diversity. “People lose their jobs over failing to hit earnings targets or missing production deadlines,” she said. “But these sort of repercussions are absent when it comes to diversity initiatives.”

The urgency of diversifying corporate America also came up in my discussion with Bank of America’s Ebony Thomas and IBM’s Deb Bubb. Thomas, BofA’s global talent acquisition executive, said that, for everything you hear about the fierce competition for talent, companies are still overlooking qualified candidates. “The myth is there’s a pipeline issue,” Thomas said. “The reality is it’s not a pipeline issue, it’s about how to deploy the right people, resources, and technology to help us execute on that diverse talent.”

Peggy Johnson, Microsoft’s top dealmaker, shared her perspective on the tech giant’s dramatic revitalization under CEO Satya Nadella.

Jennifer Bailey, Apple VP of internet services and Apple Pay, talked about the explosive growth of the payment platform—the company expects that Apple Pay will be in 60% of U.S. retail locations by the end of 2018. She also previewed the rollout of Apple Wallet as student payment and ID, which debuts at three colleges (including my alma mater Duke!) next week.

The same day she announced the company's rebranding as WW, Weight Watchers CEO Mindy Grossman talked about going from a dieting business to a wellness business. She also weighed in on what it was like to try to galvanize a company that was just clawing its way back from a massive disruption: “It was like someone who’d had a heart attack and was in bed, telling them they’re going to run a marathon.”

ALSO IN THE HEADLINES

• New allegations. There's a third accuser against Brett Kavanaugh, adding extremely disturbing allegations to the growing pile. Julie Swetnick, a high school student in the D.C. area at the same time as Kavanaugh, says she learned that he and other boys spiked girls' drinks and witnessed them—Kavanaugh included—lining up outside a bedroom "waiting for their turn" to gang rape a girl who was targeted. Swetnick says she was a victim of this pattern. Swetnick is represented by Stormy Daniels's lawyer Michael Avenatti, who submitted a sworn statement on her behalf Wednesday. Kavanaugh again denied all allegations of sexual assault and said he was "not perfect" in high school. New York Times

• Milk on the move. Maven, the healthcare startup geared toward women and led by CEO Kate Ryder, raised $27 million for it's women's health platform and breast milk shipping. Read Michal Lev-Ram's story on the investment, spearheaded by Sequoia's Jess Lee.  Fortune

• Sandberg's take. SurveyMonkey went public on Wednesday, opening at $18.75 a share. That means that Sheryl Sandberg, who has a 10% stake in the company left by her late husband, SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg, came away with as much as $200 million. Sandberg, as she announced a few weeks ago, plans to donate those shares or their proceeds to her foundation, the Sheryl Sandberg and Dave Goldberg Family Foundation.  CNN

• Uber goes in reverse. Uber has focused on cleaning up its act under CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, but at least one misbehaving executive seems to have slipped through the cracks. Cameron Poetzscher, head of corporate development, was found in an outside investigation to have had a pattern of describing which coworkers he wanted to have sex with and had engaged in an affair with a more junior employee. Poetzscher has been accused of sexual misconduct outside of the office too: his former nanny filed a lawsuit in 2015 alleging he masturbated in front of her. He was disciplined last November—including a "formal warning"—but he was promoted months later to acting head of finance.  Wall Street Journal

MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Jennifer Musselman and founder Maile Pacheco are the new co-CEOs of beauty startup beGlammed. Julie Rapaport joins two colleagues as co-head of movies at Amazon Studios.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

• Miserable multitaskers. We've all heard that women are supposedly better multitaskers—a backhanded compliment that can leave women with extra busywork in the office and at home. And according to new research, it's not even true. Researchers at Norway's University of Bergen created a simulation of "serial multitasking"—the kind of multitasking that most resembles what we do in the workplace—and women and men fared equally poorly.  Harvard Business Review

• More to come at MSU. Michigan State University faced a reckoning after the prosecution of Larry Nassar, the sports doctor who assaulted more than 150 women and girls through the university's gymnastics program, leading to the ouster of the school's president, Lou Anna K. Simon. But MSU's board of trustees is still intact. All eight members—some of whom have direct connections to Nassar—remain in their positions despite calls for their resignations. The Atlantic

• Political twist. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) is the Democratic nominee for John McCain's Senate seat in Arizona, and her campaign represents a total 180. A three-term member of the House, Sinema is now running on her experience of being homeless as a child—something she never emphasized when she entered politics in the early 2000s. Sinema's new image has attracted some scrutiny, with contradictory details surfacing about her representation of her childhood.  New York Times

Today's Broadsheet was produced by Emma Hinchliffe. Share it with a friend. Looking for previous Broadsheets? Click here.

ON MY RADAR

How feminist bookstores changed history  Broadly

Jane Mayer has been reporting alongside Ronan Farrow. So why isn't she getting branded as a hero of #MeToo?  Slate

The sisterhood of NBA moms  The Atlantic

QUOTE

I remember this pressure when I was leaving the company, like ‘I should learn how to cook, I should learn ceramics, I should take tango lessons.' I realized that I didn't have to.
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Emma Hinchliffe is Fortune’s Most Powerful Women editor, overseeing editorial for the longstanding franchise. As a senior writer at Fortune, Emma has covered women in business and gender-lens news across business, politics, and culture. She is the lead author of the Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter (formerly the Broadsheet), Fortune’s daily missive for and about the women leading the business world.

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