lisa: welcome to "bloomberg businessweek." i'm lisa abramowicz in for carol massar and david gura. in this week's special interview issue, we talk to some of the top you know what i mean business. the head of i.b.m. talks about where she sees the company positioning itself in the a.i. revolution. we talk to the head of microsoft about where this company will go in its middle age and we talk to the beatles great ringo star and why that band benefited by not being part of the digital revolution. that and more ahead on "bloomberg businessweek."

leasta: i'm 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 it's 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 non-politics and the changes of the way life is which is why i got alicia garza from black lives matter. lisa: one thing carlos slim, mexico's rit67est --

advocate.y, seemed to talk about that. >> 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 -- to one of the most innovative

british creators. >> 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. it's 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 don't know whether that's eating 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 can't leave out jenny are metty, the head of i.b.m., what did you think of the interview? jim: i thought it was interesting because with ginni, i.b.m. is the ultimate technology company. from back in the day when scales

were considered technology, and it's 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 life-changing things like keeping the air traffic control system in flow and banking systems together. it's a piece of everything and now with the shift towards artificial intelligence like watson, it's preparing for the future yet again it's re-inventing 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 1980's. 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 start-up y. i spoke to ginni in an sort of open-plan 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 a.i. thing where watson is talking to bob dylan and other celebrities.

so they are trying to be, like, cool, i guess. lisa: 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 it's hard to see how she would weigh in, in our election. lisa: i was struck as i read your fantastic interview as she kind of views i.b.m. as the

grown-up in a not in a pejorative way but said people come here because they want serious things. max: it's 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. that's 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. we talk with photo editor air

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 re-sent 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 it's 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 nadella 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." abramowicz in for

carol massar and david gura. you can find us on the radio. in this week's special interview issue, bloomberg reporter dena bass sat down with c.e.o. from microsoft sasha nadella. >> he is tracking thing 234s missouri 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 outside 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. when he took over as c.e.o. the 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 been from a thing called "mindset" and folkses on that somebody who is a learn it all is ahead of somebody who is a know-it-all. 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 company's 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 i'd talk to him -- i love to watch basketball and they get stopped for time-outs 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 didn't get to include it all in what i printed but they have, for instance, made the time a time-out 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 time-out now they have a clock in the arena and everybody knows and it's standardized. so they have been working on it but they know it's 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, there's 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 can't 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, there's 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 there's a lot of tension about player movement and the size of these contracts. so we'll see. lisa: next, are you better off stuffing your mattress with cash instead of investing? and melissa meyer on turning yahoo around and staying with the times. ♪

lisa: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." i'm 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 it's ever happened and the fact we are asking this question is entirely reasonable. the answer? you will make a loan, say let's say it's a bond and the loan in the form of a bond where people are, you're 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 didn't do it. so for example, if you had deflation of 2%, and your bond

lost only 1%, well, then you're better off than you would have been. lisa: so the other scenario would be if the stock market and everything blew up and you're just going get your money back or something back and that's better than 2340g, so why would that stimulate growth? 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 wouldn't 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 what's the verdict? how is it working? peter: well, you never can be sure. you can't run the same experiment twice. we don't 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 it's not working but again you don't know how bad europe and japan would have been had they not tried negative rates. lisa: up next, making sure america's tech giants are playing by the rules, and

marissa mayer's next career move. ♪

>> welcomed by business week. i'm coming to you from inside the new york headquarters and in this week's issue, we speak to black lives that are cofounder and a fashion designer who truly believes people can come in all shapes and sizes and then, ringo starr and why he voted for brexit. all that coming up in bloomberg businessweek. ♪

i'm here with jim ellis who really came out with this issue. there are so many must-see interviews in this edition. dream wasia ceo, his always to become the hair that is head of an airline. like that was a funny anecdote in that interview where i wanted to know what did you want to be in he said he wanted to be an airline executive. he told that to his father and his father said if you do better than a doorman at the hilton, i'm ok with it. >> but what child wants to be the head of an airline industry? >> this man loves airlines, airplanes. when he was a kid, you would go to the airport and watch them taking off. he has worked all over the world at virgin, warner music.

he's been around. what he decided to do was he saw what happened with southwest and figured why not do the same thing for asia, bring low-cost carriers in and his comment was there are only 6% of the people in malaysia. chance of a 94% getting business and they are now the largest discount carrier in asia. >> he doesn't like getting dressed up. >> he didn't want to dress up for the photo, which is fine with us. >> you also talk to the european commissioner for competition. there are some pretty good -- big companies. reasons i one of the was interested in her. brought a lot of american companies. now a lot of -- what is interesting about the interview being says it's not about

an american or any nationality, it the idea that companies that are leaders in a particular's days even when they do very good business, you have got to be careful they are not using the power to keep other new innovators from picking apples that whether those are european or not, that is a different way of looking at it. when people have really good service like google. what is to say the good service of today could hold us back? if you had allowed them to stop car companies from coming up, the world would be worse for it. .> we hear from don crafter does he think we will see a driverless car soon? >> he does think we will see it someday. it --ed to beat out for he used to be at ford, the guy who ran hyundai in the u.s..

she believes that eventually, we will think so much about the brand of cars but transitioning b and that is how you make a lot of money in this is this, suddenly make transportation the issue as opposed to that mystical deal of sitting behind the wheel. >> in other words, why even have a car? wherever you want. >> i would go for it. >> i would too. and you talked with marissa mayer who hasn't had a easy time of it. >> she has had a tough time running the company, trying to turn around the company at the same time she was trying to sell it and surprisingly was able to do both. she came out the other end a stronger person? >> she seems to think this is a good experience for her and she is an extremely hard worker.

matt to talk with about the challenges of running sell it.ile trying to >> he met with marissa mayer, one of the most written about women in technology. where did you meet her? >> at the yahoo! headquarters about a week after the announcement. it was kind of a capstone on this very controversial four-year tenure she had asked ceo. >> did she seem stressed out? >> she honestly probably seemed more relaxed and more comfortable than i think i have seen her in any interview i had seen. somewhat pleased with the outcome and also may be at peace. she has been may be doing battle with all these different constituencies, also former yahoo! employees who had been monday morning quarterbacking.

all the while, yahoo!'s business has performed poorly. so it's kind of a terrible or difficult for years and she kind of looked like someone who would come out on the other end. it felt like a reasonable outcome. >> did you leave the interview feeling differently about it then you entered it? >> i feel like it always been more sympathetic to yahoo! and her tenure. we did a cover story earlier in the year about all the things that had gone wrong. i think there is a strong argument to be made that it was an uphill climb and she did as well as she could have done given all of the adversity the company faced. what i thought was most interesting coming out of the interview was just talking to her about what it was like to run yahoo! while trying to sell it while having three kids, which she did going through this

crazy thing. amazingt sort of an and i in any ceos life doubt this is the last we both the upper and i think this will be one of these formative experiences in her career. >> talk about that. she has said before she plans to stay at yahoo!. a lot of people say that seems unrealistic. what do think is next for her? >> they have to unwind the agent assets. it is -- agent assets. -- asia in assets. i think she will at least stick ,round for six months to a year overseeing the transition to verizon, trying to get things figured out on the alibaba side and at some point, she will move on.

she said she plans to stay at verizon indefinitely. her.i also asked she said that she felt like she really developed a lot of skills as ceo and would like to use those. she would domors some sort of investing thing. five years from now, she will be the ceo of the company. >> you talked about that busy time of her life with three children and the yahoo! assets. do you have a sense of exactly how she did that? >> she's a very hard worker. i asked her what did you learn larry andand she said sir gay are amazing thinkers but also said people forget that we were super hard at google.

she said she basically did an all nighter every single week for the first five years. this was just to work like crazy. >> marissa mayer is known for her fashion sense and she's no stranger to photo shoots. i talked with the editor here at bloomberg businessweek about what it was like to work with her. like that is her actual office, what we were hoping for. they graciously and kindly agreed. it does feel like a real picture of someone who has been in the news a lot. it's a much more natural way of presenting her. >> let's take a look at the alesia gars a pictures. she comes across looking very strong, focused, and control. >> we did two shoots of her.

when we first photographed her, it was early in the portfolio and we were sure who would be covered and who would not be covered. when it was decided she would be in one of our covers, we approached her again to do a shoot. this time in studio and we really wanted something that was humanizing andl approachable and i think that portrait is so striking. garzanext, what alesia once to bring to life or black lives matter.

>> welcome back to bloomberg businessweek. andcan find is on the radio

a.m. 1200 in boston and a.m. 960 in the bay area. in this week's special interview garza, cofounder of black lives matter, sits down and talk to us about what exactly inspired her. he or she is in her own words. >> people tune out. their being -- i'm like a they are being really loud right now and i will come back in when they are a little calmer. so hopefully people are leaning in to try to figure out what is going on. i'm one of the cofounders of black lives matter.

to say all lives matter in response and to black people saying black lives matter is actually saying that black lives don't matter. what is important for you to know is that it's only a threat to you if you believe that black inferior, if be you believe black people are living in the conditions they are because of their own choices and decisions. movement thatt a is focused on police violence and police brutality. the reality is for black people in this country, we have been plagued by a pervasive and atinant system when we look issues of housing, employment, education, health care and health care access. black people are at the bottom of those disparities.

over the last three years, we have grown from a cash cad to an international organizing network. a lot of people think it is going out in the streets with able mourn and organizing really is not that at all. none of organizing is glamorous but some of it is rewarding. we can build a world where all lives matter together if we acknowledge that we live in a world that all lives don't matter. re-freeze black lives matter and the black lives matter nightk goes back to the that george zimmerman was exonerated after killing trayvon martin. it again with a facebook rant or a love letter to black people as she put it to me. it tried to push back on some of the kind of conversations she sawpeople having that she

as too much, either responding to george zimmerman being responded by saying of course this happened or by responding by saying well if black people just behaved differently, they wouldn't be subject to this kind of violence. that letter turned into a hash tag. she put it out and encouraged people to start organizing around it, to use it in their only and to connect it not to police violence but to a broader set of issues around systemic and structural racial inequality in the united states. >> as she points out, racism is a very nuanced people in our society that she said even great people can perpetuate in the system that institutionalizes racism. what are they asking for? >> they are pushing for changes in a range of policies in the justice.and criminal

one of the parts of our discomfortn was the and ambivalence she and some other activists had in pushing for the criminal justice system to be part of the solution to racist violence. for exampleut hillary clinton for not fully supporting a $15 minimum wage as something that would make a difference in this fight to make all lives matter by making black lives matter. redefiningext, beautiful. we hear from a fashion designer who wants to wear out sizes and why ringo starr was all in for brexit. ♪

>> and nepalese clothing designers using fashion to make a bigger statement. pablo is a fashion designer born in singapore but grew up in nepal. over the past few years, he's gotten really popular on red carpets with celebrities and got into mainstream america with a fashion line in collaboration with target. >> one thing that was interesting to me was this feeling throughout the whole thing that he fundamentally felt like an outsider from his youth to even coming here. he definitely seemed not to be in the mainstream.

here, he is very much in the mainstream. >> he told me when he was growing up, he felt like an outsider in school. he went to a british catholic school and always felt like he wasn't a part of the group, but he wasn't outsider, and that it really affected his psyche. thatold himself overtime the popular opinion is not always the right one and if he , thatto pursue his dreams he should do it this way. >> how did that influence the way he worked? but it influences his creative process. to be actually global.

a good mainstream example is gg boots. like u they have a lot of trouble selling something that isn't boots because they're so well known for that thing and even if high-end fashion designers get known for one thing, it's hard to pull yourself away from that. >> one thing he does do is design for lane bryant. he spoke about that with you, the idea of trying to design for people that are little bigger. >> it's such an underserved many thoughtshas on sizes and fashion. he said there is definitely a ,roblem with sizes and fashion

just not selling these people those goods. i think that comes from decades comingdown information from fashion magazines and the is whates to say this beauty is supposed to be. these days, that conversation is changing every moment and you see a lot more acceptance of different body types and this is a conversation he wants to have. >> ringo starr's unapologetic when it comes to why he voted for britain to leave the european union. he was one of the more approachable celebrities i've encountered. he goes to capitol records every year for his birth day. he sits down for a series of interviews with different reporters and the first thing he

asked me was about my shirt. i was wearing a polo shirt i had gotten at coachella that had these bears in spacesuits and he thought they were raccoons so we sat a minute and talked about that. you talked about britain's vote to exit the european union. i was pretty surprised given the fact the beatles were pretty progressive and ringo starr says he voted for brexit. >> i was surprised by that also, which is why are brought it up in the interview which was otherwise about streaming music and the state of the music business. one thing that struck me is that he no longer can it is the u.k. home. he says america is his home and that theis sense european union has in some ways hurt the u.k. and it would be

better on its own. the one thing that makes some sense about it is he does have this belief in unity and helping everybody out and considering everybody's interests and his take on how the eu has been functioning recently is all the different countries are looking out for themselves and that has led to that policy. >> he seemed pretty negative on the music industry. >> you are right. i guess it is because if you have been in an industry for 40 or 50 years, you tend to glorify the way it was before. he remembers what the music 1960'ss was like in the and 1970's. there is this sense of camaraderie with your other artists and i don't think he feels that anymore. i don't know if that's a byproduct of where he is in his life or the music industry is just something he doesn't like. >> bloomberg business week is available on newsstands and online now.

we will be back next week. ♪