Jimmy Guterman — We lost the author of this newsletter (and NewCo’s Executive Editor) last week, a terrible blow to family, friends, colleagues, and NewCo. Read more about him here.
Uber Rides Shotgun With Didi in China — Maybe partnership is the new black. After spending billions trying to win at all costs, Uber has decided to work with its Chinese rival (Bloomberg). The company will combine its Chinese business with Didi Chuxing (China’s version of Uber), and by default the Chinese government, which just so happened to legalize ride sharing the week before. Didi will also invest $1 billion into Uber globally. Oh, to be a fly on that particular Chinese wall….
Capitalism For The Many, Not the Few — She’s just a few weeks into her job, but the new Prime Minister of the UK is already talking a good game when it comes to corporate responsibility. In the wake of a major scandal involving department store chain BHS, Theresa May is getting a chance to put one of her major election planks into action. As the Guardian and others point out, the CEO of the now bankrupt company managed to become a billionaire many times over on the back of the company, but now more than 30,000 workers face destitution. In this piece in the Guardian, May lays out new policies she suggests to address a broken capitalist system. One of them in particular should sound familiar, as it was noted by Rana Foroohar in last week’s Shift Dialogs: Put a workers’ representative on the board — it forces all manner of better behavior as a result.
Science For the Win — Researchers at the University of Illinois have demonstrated a solar cell that is capable of pulling CO2 (Science Daily) from the atmosphere and converting it to fuel. And over at MIT, a portable device capable of creating drugs on demand (MIT) has researchers dreaming of upending traditional, monolithic models of big Pharma.
Google Pushes the Food Envelope — Everyone knows Google is famous for its artisanal cafeterias. But shrimp made with algae? Yep (Wired). Also, Google is using NewCo Freight Farms’ shipping containers to grow their own leafy greens (PSFK)—and it’ll need a lot of containers to feed its main campus of 20,000 people across 30 cafeterias.
10 Ways BigCos Innovate — New in NewCo Shift, consultant Jeremiah Owyang lays out the many ways big companies are integrating innovation into their organizations.
And because sometimes, you need a few minutes of WTF?!, please enjoy (most likely your second or third helping of) a man jumping out of a plane at 25,000 feet, without a parachute.