Lisa i am here with the assistant manager of Bloomberg Businessweek, 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 who i wanted to hear from, and so when i thought get all ofcan i these people from billionaires to Public Officials and 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 used that is my trigger and that is what led me to put the big changes were whether in business, the cloud, the public life, the big change on politics and changes with the way life is which is why i got alicia garza from black lives matter. We can gethange behind is the idea of a threeday workweek. Carlos seem to advocate. That was an interesting interview because so many people want to talk to carlos about being the richest man in the world, but instead, he has unusual view that we should only work three days a week. The reason is, the free such so many more jobs. He is really worried about this notion that there are, that productivity is growing stagnant and more more people are going to be deemed unnecessary, and so his idea is, if you basically cut on the workweek, you can prolong retirement for somebody people and they make up money that they spent by having extra workers and not having to pay Retiree Benefits were for much longer. Lisa you also spoke to one of them british innovators. He is the big brain. He is in charge of the Company Google bought for half 1 billion to basically get the smartest people in Artificial Intelligence under their belt. What they are trying to do is figure out how to get machines to learn. It is amazing. They are basically looking for ways to make machines intelligent and that will change the way many things that we do happen. I mean, basically that will free us up to do other things. I dont know whether thats eating bonbons or whatever. 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 fascinating. So maybe you have to only make the bed a couple times and then the leadleave out cover story, head of ibm. What did you think of the interview . Jim i thought it was interesting because with ginni, i. B. M. Is the ultimate technology company. It has been a technology for over 100 years from back in the day when scales were considered technology, and it is interesting because unlike facebook and google, she sort of use idms producing technology that is more serious, that you come therefore apply technology that allows for lifechanging things like keeping the air Traffic Control systems in flow, keeping Banking Systems together. It is a piece of everything, and now with their initiative toward Artificial Intelligence with things like watson, it is preparing for the future. Yet again, it is reinventing itself. Lisa i spoke with matt chapman who did the interview. This is what he had to say. Matt she joined as an engineer in their Detroit Office working on banking and insurance stuff in the early 1980s. She kind of worked her way up 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. How are they trying to compete or are they . Max i. B. M. Is 105 years old and what they are doing is trying to be a little bit more start ups. I spoke to ginni in an sort of openplan building in Downtown Manhattan and not what you think about when you think of i. B. M. They are marketing this ai thing which is watson and you have seen commercials where he is talking to bob dylan and various other celebrities. They are trying to be cool, i guess. When you asked her about her political position in the selection which was incredibly polarized, especially in light of meg whitman, a republican candidate coming out for Hillary Clinton. You think there is any chance she could change of you . I doubt it. She is very definitive. I asked who she was going to vote for and she said, ibm works with all leaders, and that kind of makes sense because they are a Global Company and they come with have to get along with everybody. I do think if she were to endorse, it will be a big thing. Just as yet another sort of prominent Business Leader getting into the fray. I think it is very unlikely. She brought up are so saying ibm have been there for 100 years and he worked with everybody and so is kind of like in a special mess and if they are not willing to weigh in there, it is hard to see how she would weigh in in our own election. Lisa i was struck by this feeling as i read your fantastic interview about how she kind of use ibm is the grownup company, any good way, not in a sort of pejorative way, but and she said people from google and facebook want to have an impact on serious things. What are the 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 interesting pitch. The other thing, this cognitive computing platform, if it plays out it could be bigger than siri. Her view is siri and alexa and these kind of natural language processors are not that impressive compared to what they have cooking. Although what they have cooking is not yet in very many consumer products. Lisa there are so many photographs of top people in business in this issue. We spoke with a photo editor to talk about what it was like to be in the room taking pictures with them. She has a great team around of and they were very sort conscience of how we were going to represent her being a woman ceo and also because of our previous stories have been a little bit more critical of ibm in the company. They were a little hesitant, and so i think initially it was hard and then once she got there, i andk she was really warm amenable to being photographed. We got some really nice natural responses from her. Lisa what did they want her to come across as as a female . What were they going for . I think it is always tricky working with pr people because they have some ideas of how they want someone to be portrayed and then your job on the editorial side is to sort of say, sort of dismantle that, and portray something that is a little bit more honest. I think what you see in these photographs are in more honest sco,ayal of her and her not necessarily a woman ceo but the ceo of a major company. Lisa this is somebody who is extremely focused on managing time. During the photo shoot, did you get the sense he was counting down the seconds . I think most ceos are sort of always counting on the seconds because it can be a comfortable when you are in front of a camera. Overall, they were very, very gracious. It was one of the earliest cover shoots. He sent a fantastic photographer who has shot a lot of really shotant photos for us and the twitter cover for us and other things, and so i think they were very gracious in giving us the time that he had. Lisa up next, microsoft ceo in the making of a Company Cloud first. Nba commissioner adam silver on how social media is changing the game. All of that i had on Bloomberg Businessweek. Lisa welcome back to Bloomberg Businessweek. Im in for carol massar and david gura. You can find us on the radio. In this weeks special interview issue, bloomberg reporter dena bass sat down with c. E. O. From microsoft to talk about how he is going to take his company so they can keep it moving for. I sat down with him to talk about it. He is very datadriven in general, so he rigorously tracked many things in his life, and one of the things he tracks is something that he does with every minute of his day, time spent in meetings, time spent at home, all sorts of Different Things personal and business life. One of the things he is trying to figure out is whether he is using his time in the most efficient way as ceo and so he talked to me about trying to balance how much time he spends outside of the company because of course a ceo needs to be doing things inside the company but also needs to be reaching out to the broader Technology Community and the augurs also how muchy tracks time he spends in meetings and how productive the meetings are. Not just how many, but only worthwhile, are there too many layers of people in each meeting . How many meetings gets bombed from one meeting . If you set up a meeting with the ceo, does i create 15 other meetings that people have to go to an end winds up being a waste of time . Lisa but he figures out the situation, im sure she can find a way to sell it. This brings me to the next question which is really culture. You asked the menu spoke to him about how he plans to change the culture at microsoft. Can you explain . Sure. He took over as ceo in 2014, the culture in general use was not as a good place. The company was a little beat out. He had missed some significant technological trends and failed to capitalize on them. Mobile comes to mind. People felt that meetings were something that they were going to with layers of bureaucracy and Product Development which is been moving too slowly. There was a lot of concern about the way the culture had become. He spent a lot of time trying to reset and one of the key lessons for him has been from a book called mindset and it focuses on the idea that somebody who is a learned all is always going to come out ahead from someone who is a know it all. The idea is you have to have a mindset, the willingness to question yourself, the willingness to learn and grow. Trying to change that, he looked at it through a personal lens and said to me, he comes home every night its us, what did i do today where i was to fixed, to stock in some way and not willing to learn and open up my mind . He sort of feels if he can fix of himself and then fix it only company level, the companys culture will be in a better place. Lisa nba commissioner adam silver set down with a bloomberg reporter and talked about how basketball was planning to change the way it broadcasted itself considering the changes online. I thought i would take advantage of the opportunity to ovek about, i lvo sportscaster ball and i thought that maybe they could have fewer timeouts and kept them earlier the game it would work better as an entertainment product, so i brought that to him and he said, look, we are aware of the problem and we are working on. We are not sure how to fix it. They have done some things as he pointed out. Actually made the time that a timeout takes standardized. You thought this would have been a long time ago, but they actually used to have coaches, tv partners that would kind of push them and then we get longer and longer especially during the nationally televised games. Now they have a caulk in the arena and Everybody Knows and it is standardized. They have been working on it. They know that it is something people complain about. Lisa kerry diplomatic answer to your question. That brings me to my next question. He is to be a negotiator when dealing with the union and a lot of people were talking about a freeze in playing disruption to the schedule this fall. Did you get a sense of how far he is negotiating with unions . The way it is set up, there is an agreement that has both sides. It could be as early as january that they are in a lockout. If either side ops out and they cannot agree, he says they are already, he and the unions and their directors are already informally talking about this. He expressed a lot of confidence that there would not be any kind of lockout or anything like that. At this point, he would say that. I mean, there is a lot of money that just came in, especially with the new tv deal with tnt, espn that have seen huge revenue theres an air force huge increases and contracts to players. Everyone is getting rich but there is a lot of attention about Player Movement and the size of contracts. Lisa up next, are you better stuffing cash under your mattress rather than your savings account . We take a look at the rate. 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 economic editor 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 . Kit is strange. It is the first time in World History it has ever happened, so the fact that we are asking this question is entirely reasonable. The answer . Well, there are a few. Loan, say,ll make a lets say it is a bond in the loan in the form of a bond where people are, you are giving somebody 1000 and they are going to pay you back 990. You would do that because you might have even less money if you did not do it. For example, if you had deflation of 2 , and your bond lost only 1 , well, then you are better off taking would have been. Lisa ok, deflation and the other scenario would be the stock market blowing up in a you are just going to get your money back and that is better than nothing. Why would that stimulate growth . It would stimulate growth. I will just tell you the theory, not to say whether i agree with ,hat or not, if you can borrow the lower the rate you can borrow, the greater incentive you have to borrow. Because projects that were not reasonable to do with 0 might become reasonable to do at 1 , for example. Conversely, if you were saving money before and hoarding it somewhere, now you will think, maybe i should go for a riskier project that will not have been reasonable for but with the giving so little money under safe investment, it gives you incentive to reach up for more risk just to make something on your money. Words, forher companies and governments encouraging them to borrow cheaply to do things, and for the investors, it encourages them to lend to potentially more speculative borrowers in order to get some sort of income. What is the verdict . Has been working . You never can be too sure. You cannot run the experiment twice. We do not have these in country trying negative rates are not trying negative rates. You can get some clues by looking at, well, how strong is the economy . And the u. S. Which has positive rates is doing better than europe and japan which has negative rates, so that would be an argument that it is not working, but again, you do not know how that europe and japan would have been if they had not tried negative rates. Lisa up next, the europeans making sure americas tech giants are playing by the rules. Marissa mayers next career move. Everything is awesome everything is cool when youre watching a screen everything is awesome, when youre sharing a meme a voice remote, show me angry kings you know whats awesome . Everything apps that please, more selfies, endless hours of the best tvs brand new apps, shows to go, awesome internet thats super whoa. Everything is awesome xfinity. The future of awesome. Hohey s woiit ghong, estcak . Hoestcak. Th lais p hceotas hkeca hyso wn arett ey llsekeg lica hotkes . Cwithstomcain business tean fid wi, pro cthey bould e. Ju ddst aus a czetomid ey age yltowiour rofi pas splgeh pa an ud yo ll year cusomerer wheie thesr ey a aredylrea ju ddst aus a czetomid ey age on dheiresevic pas splgeh pa. Or upder its hare tstn jui, wif c itelan howp grr younebusiss. U ydone t se ethat dveryay odintrg ucin pwifiwiro, fi hthatelyorow usur bs. Ines ascomct. Ness t builbufor sssine lisa welcome to Bloomberg Businessweek. Iran coming from inside the new york take orders at the magazine. I am coming york headquarters at the magazine. To leaders of black lives matter and ringo starr and why he voted for grexit. All of that brexit. All of that coming up on Bloomberg Businessweek. I am here with assistant managing editor of Bloomberg Businessweek who really came up with this issue. There are so many must read interviews. One thing i have to mention is air asia ceo. I am fascinated. His dream was always to become the head of an airline. That was a funny anecdote in the interview where he says, he wanted to be in airline executive. He told that to his father and his father said, hey, if you do better than the doorman at the hilton, i am ok with that. Lisa what child once to be the head of an airline industry. . This is a man that loves airlines. He loves airplanes. When he was a kid, he would go out to the airport and watch them take off. And although he has worked all over the world at. Irgin, warner music he has been around. But he decided to do, he saw what happened with Southwest Airlines and figured, why not do the same thing for asia, bring lowcost carriers in and is, was, there are only 6 of the people in malaysia that have actually flown. Gettinge him a 94 of lots of business and it worked. They are the largest carrier in nation. Lisa he does not like getting dressed up . Know, and he did not to dress up with a photo which is fine for us. Lisa taking on some pretty big companies, disney, amazon. Can you talk about that . That is one of the reasons we were interested in her. She has sort of brought a lot of American Companies over. It isof people say because they are american but what was interesting about the interview, she said it is not about being american or any national, but it is the companies that are leaders in a particular space, even when they do very good business, you have to be careful they are not using their power to take other new interpleaders from picking up. Whether those intervenors are european or not, and that is a very different way of looking at it because we had a question, why stop people at google . She said, what is to say the good service of tod