2022 will be a year of continuing transformation

As I wrote before the holidays, 2022 is destined to be a year of continuing transformation for business, fueled by: 1) a technology revolution; 2) a post-pandemic imperative to reinvent office work; and 3) a continuing drive to put purpose at the center of business. The most successful companies will be those that embrace these three interlocking waves of change. And the performance gap between those that do and those that don’t will grow.

At Fortune, our goal for 2022 is to help business leaders and investors successfully surf those waves.  As always, this begins with our journalism. Under the guidance of new editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell, the team is staffing up to cover these historic transformations and continue Fortune’s 92-year tradition of informing and inspiring the best in business while exposing the worst. In addition, we’ll continue a 67-year-old tradition of providing the leading benchmarks for business success with our rankings that include the Fortune 500, 100 Best Companies to Work For, Most Powerful Women, Change the World, Future 50, 40-Under-40, and more. If you aren’t already a subscriber, this is the year to become one. CEO Daily readers can get a special New Year’s discount by going here, and using the code CEODAILY.

In addition, we’ll be building on our more recent efforts to educate a new generation of business leaders through Fortune CONNECT, our leadership and learning community that now includes more than 1,000 senior executives from Salesforce, Workday, Accenture, PayPal, IBM, GenPact, and some 20 other leading companies that recognize the transformations ahead demand a new generation, and a new style of leadership. We will be opening the community to qualified individual applicants this spring. If you are interested in exploring membership, check it out here. And we will continue to grow Fortune Education as a reliable source of ratings, rankings and reviews for those who recognize lifelong learning is increasingly key to business success.

Pandemic permitting, we will be hosting in-person convenings of our best-in-class executive communities including Brainstorm Health (Marina del Ray, CA, May 10-11), Brainstorm Design (Brooklyn, NY, May 23-24), Brainstorm Tech (Aspen, CO, July 11-13), Most Powerful Women Summit (Laguna Niguel, CA, Oct. 10-12), as well as the CEO Initiative Summit and Most Powerful Women Next Gen (dates and times in the fall TBD.) Having honed our hybrid skills over the last two years, we also will offer a steady stream of virtual gatherings for these communities and others, including the Fortune Global Forum and the CFO Collaborative. You can learn more about our executive communities here.

For my part, I’ll continue to chronicle these changes at CEO Daily along with my colleague David Meyer; I’ll join co-host Ellen McGirt for a third season of our weekly podcast Leadership Next; and in May, Public Affairs will release my book attempting to explain what’s driving business to change: Tomorrow’s Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business. You can preorder here.

A busy year ahead. Stick with us and help make business better.

Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com

TOP NEWS

Good start?

Judging by European trading and U.S. stock futures, today will provide a positive start to the year. In this handy piece, Fortune's Bernhard Warner looks back at 2021's market activity and examines the outlook for 2022. Fortune

Flight cancellations

More than 4,400 flights (over half of which were in the U.S.) were grounded yesterday, as the pandemic and winter conspired to cause mayhem in air travel. Saturday's cancellation tally was even worse, though not by much. Fortune

Tesla shares

Tesla's Q4 deliveries smashed the company's previous record (308,600 vehicles, up from 241,300 in Q3) and blew way past analyst estimates of 263,000-ish deliveries. Tesla's share price was up more than 6.5% in premarket trading this morning. CNBC

Evergrande latest

China Evergrande Group, which carries the unwelcome title of World's Most Indebted Property Developer, has halted trading without explanation. The move reportedly follows an order to tear down scores of apartment blocks in Hainan province. Fortune

AROUND THE WATER COOLER

Ukraine crisis

The U.S. is trying to help ward off another Russian invasion of Ukraine. President Joe Biden told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky yesterday that the U.S. and its allies would "respond decisively" to such a move, whatever that means. Financial Times

Green energy

A row has broken out in the EU over the European Commission's plans to label nuclear and natural gas as "green" energy sources that can serve as a bridge to a renewables-centric future—a move that would have big implications for investments. Germany seems set to join Austria, Luxembourg and Denmark in opposing the classification decision, though there probably won't be enough momentum to stop it entirely. Politico

U.K. COVID

The U.K.'s health system is being stretched to its limit by the current, Omicron-fueled wave of hospital admissions. While Omicron does appear to generate milder cases of COVID, the sheer volume of infections—and the staff shortages that are also resulting from infections—is already leading some hospitals to turn people away. So far, the government has held back on reintroducing restrictions. (PS: Things aren't looking much rosier stateside.) Sky News

Twitter ban

U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has been permanently banned from Twitter over misleading COVID claims—at least, her personal account has been permanently suspended; her official account remains active. Greene is the first member of Congress to have any Twitter account permanently shuttered. Reuters

This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.