CEOs predict which COVID-era business trends will outlast the pandemic

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Stacey Abrams fundraises for a startup, Black female professors rally behind Nikole Hannah-Jones, and CEOs reflect on a year unlike any other. Have a lovely Thursday.

– Time for reflection. An audience from 165 cities, six continents and sixteen times zones assembled this week for the Fortune Global Forum to hear from some of the world’s most powerful CEOs. At this moment in time, when COVID-19 is receding in many parts of the world, it was an opportunity for chief executives to reflect on a year unlike any other.

Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman talked about how roadshows for IPOs had gone virtual, a shift that turned out to be “much more efficient.”

Accenture CEO Julie Sweet shared that she’s a fan of the “delayed send” feature on emails that keeps employees’ inboxes from chiming at all hours. The tool, she said, is a simple way to ease COVID-era burnout. Without it, “most likely, your teams are working longer hours or checking their email when they shouldn’t.”

I was especially interested in the trends that leaders think might outlast the pandemic.

Revathi Advaithi, CEO of electronics maker Flex, said the manufacturing delays caused by COVID revealed the risks of global supply chains and may encourage companies to set up more local operations.

Liz Hilton Segel, McKinsey’s managing partner in North America, says COVID shredded the boundaries between work and personal life, and they may never be restored. That has an upside: “Hopefully one of the positive sides of this COVID-19 moment is that the mental model from before, which was, ‘My personal life lived behind a curtain, and I didn’t discuss it and I didn’t even acknowledge that it existed,’ is a thing of the past.”

And, to my relief, Kohl’s CEO Michelle Gass said the uber-casualization of our wardrobe is here to say.

Claire Zillman
claire.zillman@fortune.com
@clairezillman

The Broadsheet, Fortune’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women, is coauthored by Kristen Bellstrom, Emma Hinchliffe, and Claire Zillman. Today’s edition was curated by Emma Hinchliffe. 

ALSO IN THE HEADLINES

- Academic solidarity. Black female professors are rallying behind Nikole Hannah-Jones in the journalist's dispute with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill over her denial of tenure. These academics know how hard it is to secure tenure; only 1.9% of tenured jobs at doctoral universities belong to Black women. Washington Post

- Multi-hyphenate. Stacey Abrams is a politician, activist, author, and...startup founder? In 2010, Abrams launched the B2B financial services company Now. The startup just raised $9.5 million in Series A funding. Fast Company

- Primary results. Before Terry McAuliffe announced his bid for a return to the Virginia governorship, two leading candidates for the Democratic nomination were Jennifer Carroll Foy and Jennifer McClellan. Both lost out to McAuliffe when he clinched the primary on Tuesday. CNN

- Board diversity. Twenty-four percent of board seats at companies listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange went to female directors in 2020, according to Heidrick & Struggles. But Hong Kong businesses are still behind U.S. companies on board diversity; 37% of boards were all-male. South China Morning Post

MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Longtime Facebook exec Carolyn Everson is stepping down as head of global advertising sales. Stella Bugbee will leave New York to become editor of the New York Times' Styles section. Annette Thomas quit as Guardian Media Group CEO. Carbon Health hired Nita Sommers as chief growth officer. Francesca Sally was elected president of the Graduate Business Council at Georgia Tech's Scheller School of Business. Plant-based milk company Perfect Day hired Laura A. Peter, an alum of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, as global head of legal and general counsel.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

- Activist effort. Who convinced Goldman Sachs to change its stance on conducting a report on forced arbitration at the bank? That was a small activist shareholder called Nathan Cummings Foundation (associated with the founder of Sara Lee). A foundation exec says the bank initially "spent a lot of time talking to us, but didn’t actually really want to do anything." Bloomberg

- Dinner party. Sens. Barbara Mikulski and Kay Bailey Hutchinson started the longstanding Senate tradition gathering female senators for quarterly dinners. But those get-togethers slowed over the past few years thanks to both a partisan and divided Senate and, more recently, the pandemic. Vice President Kamala Harris is bringing them back; she's scheduled to host the 24 female senators for dinner next week. Politico

- Family planning. Yashu Zhang, a Chinese writer based in Shanghai, writes about how she and her friends are reacting to China's recent decision to lift its one-child policy and encourage couples to have more children. Zhang wants a large family—but she's an anomaly, she says. Most of her peers don't plan to have more than one child because of factors like the cost of raising a child in a city like Shanghai. New York Times

ON MY RADAR

Inside Jeffrey Epstein's decades-long relationship with his biggest client Vanity Fair

Students at an Oxford college remove the Queen's portrait, citing colonialism NPR

The real Zola Vulture

PARTING WORDS

"Bosses wear Prada, workers get nada!"

-New Yorker union members as they protested outside Condé Nast chief content officer Anna Wintour's house this week. The magazine's workers are preparing to strike over contract negotiations.