Good morning, Quartz readers!
There are only 25 women running S&P 500 companies, and this week one of them said she’s stepping down. Indra Nooyi, one of the longer-serving CEOs by current standards, is a trailblazer in many respects. She took PepsiCo’s revenue from $35 billion to $63.5 billion during her 12-year tenure, and positioned the company to survive in a post-soda world. Would her legacy be even stronger if she had managed to leave the business in the hands of another capable woman?
Nooyi’s successor, Ramon Laguarta, has deep experience running PepsiCo operations in Europe and Africa, and has worked directly alongside Nooyi since his promotion to company president in 2017. Wall Street sees him as a solid pick. But if you’re waiting on meaningful advancement in the fight for gender equality, or just think 5% female representation among big-company CEOs is a smidge low, it’s hard to see PepsiCo’s succession plan as anything but a setback for women.
With the ranks of female CEOs so thin, it’s painfully noticeable whenever a company enlightened enough to have had a woman in charge winds up backsliding. It seems to be happening a lot lately—Irene Rosenfeld at Mondelez International was replaced by a man, as was Meg Whitman at HP Enterprise. Each time, we are left with one less woman advocating, either directly or just through her presence, for women in business.
There are those who argue that, as women, Nooyi and other female S&P 500 CEOs have a moral obligation to groom female talent, to help ensure that the world’s largest companies move forward on gender diversity, or at least won’t slide backward. Sure. But there are 475 other CEOs in their ranks who ought to feel similarly obligated.—Heather Landy
Five things on Quartz we especially liked
Who could take Tesla private? When Elon Musk tweeted on Aug. 7 that he had “funding secured” for a Tesla take-private plan, it set off a global guessing game: Who has the money, let alone the inclination? Michael Coren parsed the data to identify companies and sovereign wealth funds flush enough to raise their hand.
Moving beyond build, measure, learn. Luis Perez-Breva directs the innovation teams program at MIT, where he has observed a lot of confusion over the Lean Startup movement. Writing in Quartz At Work, Perez-Breva explains why entrepreneurs should aspire to create more than just a minimum viable product, and why the companies worth admiring are those that stopped behaving like startups.
The battery that could save the world. There are billions of investment dollars and reams of hype in the battery industry right now, but most startups keep going bust. Not Pellion. Akshat Rathi pays a visit to the Massachusetts-based company, which has already created—and brought to market—a brand-new, vastly more powerful battery technology.
Chinese millennials feel “spiritually Finnish.” A Finnish comic strip about a socially awkward character named Matti is a big hit in China, where many young urbanites identify as jingfen, or “spiritually Finnish.” As Ephrat Livni explains, privacy and personal space are a rare commodity in Chinese cities, making socially phobic Finland—“even the extroverts are introverts”—a dream destination.
Economist on set. The new movie Crazy Rich Asians, adapted from a 2013 novel, centers on Rachel Chu, a female economist contending with her boyfriend’s wealthy family. Intrigued by the overall dearth of economists on screen, Dan Kopf analyzed Crazy Rich Asians’ source material to determine whether the fictional Chu does her profession proud.
Five things elsewhere that made us smarter
The local cost of globalization. As the world’s population and interconnections increase, gaps are widening between those in power and the people impacted by their decisions. What results, Thomas Hylland Eriksen argues in Sapiens, is a “democratic deficit” that only stands to get more dangerous.
One man’s moment in the sun. The Parker Solar Probe set to launch this weekend is the first NASA spacecraft named after a living person. At 31, Eugene Parker revolutionized solar physics with his ideas—but as the New York Times’ Kenneth Chang reports (paywall), no one believed him at the time.
Humans have never cared about truth. Facebook and Vladimir Putin are not ushering in a new era of falsehood. Myths have long formed the basis for propaganda, religion, nationalism, and more. “Homo sapiens,” writes Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari in a book excerpt published by the Guardian, “is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions.”
The Department of Con. US Commerce secretary Wilbur Ross appears to be an inveterate grifter, based on a pattern of behavior documented by Forbes’ Dan Alexander. Lawsuits and government investigations allege that Ross took extra fees from investors, lied to his clients, and even pocketed money from his partners’ accounts.
One thousand dogs cloned, and counting. South Korea’s Sooam Biotech Research Foundation—a company dedicated to the pursuit of dog-cloning—has cloned 1,000 canines since 2007, at a cost of $100,000 per birth. For Vanity Fair, David Ewing Duncan examines the increasingly popular practice, along with the science (and controversy) involved.
Our best wishes for a relaxing but thought-filled weekend. Please send any news, comments, world-saving batteries, and canine clones to hi@qz.com. You can follow us on Twitter here for updates throughout the day, or download our apps for iPhone and Android. Today’s Weekend Brief was edited by Kira Bindrim.