Bloomberg businessweek. Leasta im here with assistant managing editor jim ellis. Jim, you are the brainchild behind this edition. You came one all these ideas of who to get and how to frame this. What was your thinking behind this issue . Jim well, i knew if i was going to do this i wanted to do it with people i wanted to hear from. So how do we from billionaires to just regular people together, the best way to do that was change. Everybody sort of responds to change whether its a change in their business, politics, so i use do so that as my trigger and that led me to what the changes were. Whether in business, whether in public life, the nonpolitics and the changes of the way life is which is why i got alicia garza from black lives matter. Lisa one thing carlos slim, mexicos rit67est that was an interesting interview because so many people want to talk to carlos about being the richest man in the world but he has this view that we should only work three days in a week because that frees up jobs that will keep other people employed. He is worried about this notion that productivity is growing so fast that more and more people are going to be deemed unnecessary so his idea is if you cut down the workweek you can actually prolong the retirement age and by not having to pay Retiree Benefits for much, much longer. Lisa you also talked to he is the big brain. Basically he is the c. E. O. Of geep deep mind which is the Company Google bought to basically get the smartest people in Artificial Intelligence under their belt. What their charge is, is to figure out how to get machines to learn. Its amazing. They basically are looking for ways to make Intelligent Machines and that will change the way that many things that we do happen. I mean, basically that will free us up to do other things. I dont know whether thats ting bonbons but they have the team of researchers there trying to figure out how the human brain works and can you put it in a machine . Lisa so maybe you have to only make the bed a couple times and then we cant leave out jenny are metty, the head of i. B. M. , what did you think of the interview . Jim i thought it was nteresting because with ginni, i. B. M. Is the ultimate technology company. From back in the day when scales were considered technology, and its interesting because unlike a facebook or google, she sort of views i. B. M. As technology that is more serious. That you come there for a an applied technology for lifechanging things like keeping the air Traffic Control system in flow and Banking Systems together. Its a piece of everything and now with the shift towards Artificial Intelligence like watson, its preparing for the future yet again its reinventing itself. Lisa i spoke with matt chapman and this is what he said. Matt she joined as an engineer working on banking and insurance stuff in the middle 1980s. Max and was promoted in 2012 to the big role. Lisa Ginni Rometty has been with the company for 25 years and this is an old company especially compared with the googles and facebooks of the world. Max i. B. M. Is 105 years old and they are trying to be a little more startup y. Sort of ginni in an openplan building in Downtown Manhattan and not what you think about when you think of i. B. M. In new york and they are promoting this sort of 24i7k where watson is talking to bob dylan and other celebrities. So they are trying to be, like, cool, i guess. Sa you, max chafkin asked what her political views were and especially with coming out and saying she was for clinton. Max i asked her who she was going to sthrothe vote for in 2016 and she said i. B. M. Works for all leaders so i understand because they have to sort of get along with everybody. I do think if she were to endorse, it would be a big thing as yet another sort of prominent Business Leader getting into the fray. She specifically brought up brazil saying i. B. M. Had been there for 100 years and worked with everybody and brazil is like in a special mess so if they are not willing to weigh in there its hard to see how she would weigh in, in our election. Lisa i was struck as i read your fantastic interview as she as the views i. B. M. Grownup in a not in a pejorative way but said people come here because they want serious things. Max its an interesting spin because i. B. M. Is still building these back Office Things for Like Delta Airlines but the point of view she is saying is you could work at google and work on an app or move jet planes around. Thats an interesting pitch but the other thing is this cognitive computing platform, if it plays out it could be bigger than siri. Her view is siri and alexa and Natural Processing things we are using in our everyday lives are sort of not impressive compared to what they have cooking. Lisa there are so many photographs of top people in this issue. Air lk with photo editor yell brown about what it was like to be in the same room with these people. She has people around and they were sort of conscious of how we were going to rep resent her being a woman c. E. O. And because our stories have been a little more critical of i. B. M. And the company. So they were a little bit hesitant. So i think initially it was hard, and then once she got there i think she was really, you know, warm and amenable to being photographed. Ariel brown so yes, we got some sort of natural responses from her. It was nice. Lisa what were they going for . Air yell i think its always tricky working with p. R. People, because they are they always have ideas of how they want someone to be portrayed but then your job on the editorial side is sort of to portray something more honest so i think what you see in these photographs are a more honest portrayal picture of her and of a c. E. O. , not just as a woman c. E. O. But of a c. E. O. Of a company. Lisa and during the photo shoot did you get sense he was counting down the seconds . Air yell i think most c. E. O. s are sort of always counting down the seconds but overall they were very gracious. It was one of our earlier cover shoots and we sent a fantastic photographer who shot a lot of poignant covers for us and who shot the twitter cover for us and some other things and so i think they were very gracious in giving us sort of the time that he had. Lisa up next microsoft c. E. O. Sasha in a jella on making his cloud first and adam silver on how social media is changing the game. All that ahead on Bloomberg Businessweek. Lisa welcome back to Bloomberg Businessweek. m Lisa Abram Wicks in for carol massar and david gura. The radio. Us on in this weeks special interview issue bloomberg reporter dena bass sat down th c. E. O. From microsoft satch i dont know in a della. Tracking thing 234s issouri life and one thing Satya Nadella tracks is time spent in meetings and at home and all things personal and business life. One thing he is trying to figure out is if he is using his time efficiently so he tracks how much time he spends utside the company because a c. E. O. Needs to be doing things outside but inside and tracks how much time he spends in meetings and microsoft and metrics are working on how productive these meetings are so not just how many but are they worthwhile and are there too many layers of things in one meeting and how many meetings get spawned from one meeting so if you set up a meeting how many other meetings do people have to go to . Lisa i bet they deal with you asked him and talked senseably it seemed about how he plans to change the culture at microsoft. Can you explain . Dina sure. C. E. O. The over as ethos at microsoft was a little beatdown. They had seen ethings but failed to capitalize on things and meetings was something people complained about. People felt they were going from meeting to meeting and the brock cri was moving too slowly and there was a lot of concern at how particularly the one of the key lessons for him has en from a thing called mindset and folkses on that somebody who is a learn it all is ahead of somebody who is a knowitall. So you had to have this outlook of learning. He said he comes home every night and thinks what did i do today where i was too fixed, to stuck and unwilling to learn and open up my mind and sort of feels that if he can makes the himself and fix it on a company level, the companys culture would be in a much better place. Lisa adam silver, the nba commissioner sat down and talked about how basketball was planning to change how it broadcast itself. I talked with ira a little bit about that interviewer. Ira i thought id talk to him i love to watch basketball and they get stopped for timeouts so often, and i know they need them but i thought if they had more and fewer and kept they want i brought that to him and he said, look, we are aware of the problem. We are working on it but we are not sure exactly how the fix it. They have done some things i pointed out. I didnt get to include it all in what i printed but they have, for instance, made the time a timeout takes standardized. You would have thought this would have been long ago but they actually used to have coaches and tv partners would push them and they would get longer and longer and a minute 1 2 would be the timeout now they have a clock in the arena and Everybody Knows and its standardized. So they have been working on it but they know its something people complain about. Lisa very diplomatic answer, when he is dealing with the union, a lot of people are concerned about a possible sort of freeze or playing in disruption this fall. Did you get a sense from him in how far he was in negotiating . Ira well, theres an agreement that has an opt out for both sides this year so it could be as early as january if either side opts out and they cant agree. He said he and the ewan jan the new executive director Michele Roberts are informally talking now and expressed a lot of confidence that there would not be a lockout. Now, of course at this point he would say that. I mean, theres a lot of money that just came in, especially to the new tv deals with tnt and abc that have seen a huge revenue boost and therefore a huge increase in contracts being handed tout players so serve getting rich but theres a lot of tension about Player Movement and the size of these contracts. So well see. Lisa next, are you better off stuffing your mattress with cash instead of investing . And melissa mire in turning yahoo around and staying with the times. Lisa welcome back to Bloomberg Businessweek. Im Lisa Abramowicz. In for carol massar and david gura. For the first time in recorded history, zero and negative Interest Rates are the status quo. I sat down with economics ed xx peter coy to talk about what the implications were. Why would anyone in their right mind pay a government or bank money in order to have the privilege of lending to them . Peter it is strange and the first time in World History its ever happened and the fact we are asking this question is entirely reasonable. The answer . You will make a loan, say lets say its a bond and the loan in the form of a bond where people are, youre giving somebody 1,000 and they are going to pay you back 990. You would do that because you might have even less money if you didnt do it. So for example, if you had deflation of 2 , and your bond lost only 1 , well, then youre better off than you would have been. Lisa so the other scenario would be if the stock market and everything blew up and youre just going get your money back or Something Back and thats better than 2340g, so why would that stimulate rowth . Peter it would stimulate growth. The theory, not that i agree with it or not but if you can borrow, the lower the rate you can borrow the greater incentive you have to borrow. And because projects that were not reasonable to do at 07 might become reasonable to do at negative 1 . Conversely if you were saving money before, hoarding it somewhere, now, you will think maybe you should go for a riskier project that you wouldnt go before, because when they are giving you so much on your Reasonable Risk it gives you lisa so for companies and governments encourages them to borrow cheaply to do things and for investors it encourages them to lend to potentially more specktive borrowers just to get more income. So whats the verdict . How is it working . Peter well, you never can be sure. You cant run the same experiment twice. We dont have the same country running negative rates and not running negative rates so you can get a clue on well, how strong is the economy. So the u. S. That has positive rates is doing better than europe and japan that has negative rates so that would be an argument that its not working but again you dont know how bad europe and japan would have been had they not tried negative rates. Lisa up next making sure americas tech giants are playing by the rules and Marissa Mayers next career move. Welcome to Bloomberg Businessweek. I am coming from the inside headquarters of the magazine, and we speak to black lives matter founder, and also a Fashion Designer who believes people can come in all shapes and sizes. And ringo starr and why he voted for brexit . All of that coming up in Bloomberg Businessweek. Haslinda i am here with managing editor who came up with this issue. There are so many must reads in this issue. The one thing i have to mention is tony fernandez. His dream was always to become the head of an outline. That was a funny anecdote where he says, i wanted to know, he said he wanted to be an Airline Executive and tell that to his father, and his father said, hey, if you do better than the doorman at the hilton, i am ok with it. Be thehat child was to head of an Airline Industry . [laughter] this is a man who loves airlines. 11 airplanes. When he was a kid, he would go to the airport in muslim taking off. When he was a kid, he would go to the airport and want to them take off. Het he has decided to do was saw what happened to easyjet and Southwest Airlines and figured, why not do the same thing for asia and bring lowcost carriers in. His comment was, there are only 6 of the people in malaysia that actually own. They are now the largest discount carrier in asia. He does not like eating dressed up and he does not he does not like getting dressed up. You also talked to margaret. Talking disney and amazon. That is one of the reasons i was interested in her. Wrong a lot of American Companies over the polls. It what is interesting about the interview is said it is not about being american, it is about the idea that companies are leaders in a particular space. Even when they do very good business, you have to be very careful they are not using their power to keep other new intervenors new innovators from picking up. About whenn what people have really Great Service like google, why stop them . She says what is to say that the good service up today could hold us back . Stopu had allowed them to our companies from coming up, the world would be worse for it. Chick, do weaft think we will see driverless car . This is a man who has car guts. Hes to be afford, he used to be the guy who ran hyundai in the u. S. He has true car cred. He thinks he wont think about the brand of cars, but transitioning from point a to point the point eight to point b. You will make transportation the issue as opposed the mystical 1950s view of sitting around and waiting. Lisa so why have a car when you can have a dry of course, you talk to yahoo ceo who is not had an easy time of it. She has had a tough time running a company trying to turn around a company at the same time she was trying to sell it. Surprisingly, she was able to devote. Do you think she did it effectively . Did she seem beatendown . She thinks it is a good experience for her and she is extremely he is actually hard worker. I talked about the challenges that i talked about max. You met with melissa myers, one of the most written about women in technology. Where did you meter . At the yahoo headquarters after a week after the announcement that yahoo would be selling itself to verizon, which is a capstone on this very controversial fouryear tenure that she had a ceo. Did she seemed stressed out . She seemed more relaxed and sort of more comfortable than i think i have seen her in any interview on tv or whatever. He seems somewhat, i guess, pleased with the outcome and also maybe just that piece. Been doing battle with all of these different constituencies, mailing investors, but also warmer yahoo employers employees quarterbacking everything she has done. All the while, yahoo S Performance has been for. It has been difficult. She kind of look like to come out on the other end and the like it was a reasonable outcome. Lisa did you leave the intergroup interview coming differently about her the her . We did a cover story about all the things that have gone wrong. There are things that have gone right in there is a strong argument to be made that it was an uphill climb, and that she did as well as she could have done given all of the adversities that the company faced. When i thought was most interesting coming out of the interview was talking to her about what it has been like to run yahoo while also trying to sell it, while also having three kids, which he did while she was going through this crazy thing. It is just sort of an amazing period and any ceos life. I doubt this is the last we will see of her. I think it will be one of these formative experiences in her career. Sonialisa talk about that. She said she plans to say that yahoo some people say that sounds realistic unrealistic. They have to unwind the asian assets, alibaba, which is the best thing that ever happened to yahoo and the worst thing because it basically ended up swapping the iconic internet company. I think she will at least stick around for, i dont know, six