Wal-Mart Saves the Planet, by Marc Gunther, page 42
Lee Scott is no tree-hugger. But Wal-Mart’s CEO says he wants to turn the world’s largest retailer into the greenest. The company is so big, so powerful, it could force an army of suppliers to clean up their acts too. Wal-Mart, you see, has decided to help save the earth. Just listen to Scott. “To me,” he says, “there can’t be anything good about putting all these chemicals in the air. There can’t be anything good about the smog you see in cities. There can’t be anything good about putting chemicals in these rivers in Third World countries so that somebody can buy an item for less money in a developed country. Those things are just inherently wrong, whether you are an environmentalist or not.” In a speech broadcast to all of Wal-Mart’s facilities last November, Scott set several ambitious goals: Increase the efficiency of its vehicle fleet by 25% over the next three years, and double efficiency in ten years. Eliminate 30% of the energy used in stores. Reduce solid waste from U.S. stores by 25% in three years. Wal-Mart says it will invest $500 million in sustainability projects, and the company has done a lot more than draw up targets. It has quickly become, for instance, the biggest seller of organic milk and the biggest buyer of organic cotton in the world. It is working with suppliers to figure out ways to cut down on packaging and energy costs. It has opened two “green” supercenters.

PLUS: It's not easy being green-but big business is trying, by Jia Lynn Yang, page 54
Wal-Mart isn't the only company that's gotten religion on the environment. As GE's Jeff Immelt put it so succinctly last year, “Green is green.” Here's what a handful of FORTUNE 500 companies like Dupont, GE, Goldman Sachs, Intel and UPS are doing to improve their environmental practices.

 

Last Call for a Union Town , by Ellen McGirt, page 60
Delphi's bankruptcy has Kokomo , Ind. , hurting. People here know the auto industry's in trouble—but that's about all they agree on. Kokomo, it turns out, is a good town to visit for a close-up look at how 21st-century globalization is redefining not just business practices and the myth of the American dream but the social contract between workers and employees—and between neighbors forced into competition with each other. After all, it is in places like Kokomo (pop. 45,000) that the big abstract stuff that has long been roiling American business—from the huge costs of health insurance and pension plans to the decline of organized labor—moves from the theoretical to the painfully real. What Delphi 's controversial CEO, Robert “Steve” Miller, calls the “necessary bitter pill of restructuring” is not a sound bite here. It is a fact of life that has exposed once-hidden divisions of class, age, and outlook in a town that has long defined itself as solidly and proudly middle class. “ Kokomo always had the appearance of a boomtown, with high wage levels and stable jobs,” says William Mello, a professor of labor studies at the University of Indiana at Kokomo . “Reality is knocking on Kokomo 's door now.”

SPECIAL REPORT: THE FUTURE OF COMPUTING

Server Mania, by Stephanie N. Mehta, page 69
Behold the server farm! Glorious temple of the information age! They're ugly. They require a small city's worth of electricity. And they're where the web happens. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and others are spending billions to build them as fast as they can. Most people don't think of it this way, but the Information Age is being built on an infrastructure as imposing as the factories and mills of yore. The industry term for the vast rooms full of humming, blinking computers inside each of these complexes is “server farms,” but “work camps” would be more accurate. Consider that every time you conduct a web search on one of Yahoo's sites, for example, you activate roughly 7,000 or more computers—and that doesn't count at least 15,000 others that support every query by constantly poking around the Net for updates. “When you go to certain parts of a data center, it looks much more like a factory than something high-tech,” says Urs Hölzle, a senior vice president of operations at Google. The Great Planting of these server farms has only begun, thanks to a revolution currently taking place in the $120 billion software industry. The true sign of the times: Microsoft, a company that has become synonymous with desktop software, has pledged to move a big swath of its applications to the online world.

Quantum Leap, by Peter Schwartz and Rita Koselka, page 76
Brain prosthetics. Telepathy. Punctual Flights. Science fiction, right? Sure—just like satellites, moon shots, and the original microprocessor once were. To scientists on the quantum computing frontier, this scenario is conservative. “The age of computing has not even begun,” says Stan Williams, a research scientist at Hewlett-Packard. “What we have today are tiny toys not much better than an abacus. The challenge is to approach the fundamental laws of physics as closely as we can.” Traditional computing, with its ever more microscopic circuitry etched in silicon, can take us only so far. If we want to keep computer progress on track after that, we have to figure out how to manipulate the brain-bending rules of the quantum realm—an Alice in Wonderland world of subatomic particles that can be in two places at once. FORTUNE presents a futurist's vision of where computers will take us.

Departments

FIRST Bunker Mentality Even with bombs falling, it's business as usual in Israel . Americans should watch and learn, because five years after 9/11, U.S. companies are still unprepared. Executive Search, NFL-Style The race is on to replace football commissioner Paul Tagliabue. 60-Second Briefing How Bush's stem cell veto affects U.S. science. On the Radar Private equity eyes the breakup of Henry Silverman's Cendant, Dell fights off HP, and the Army puts out a contract. The Big Debacle Boston —the town that can't build straight. The Web's New News Thing Is Digg.com, a “social news” site, the next MySpace? Question Authority Siemens CEO Klaus Kleinfeld is remaking the German telecom giant. DISPATCHES My Hedge Fund, Myself Ah, the hedgie life … How hard could it be? To find out, FORTUNE goes to a start-your-own fund conference. Making Connections Biofuels, online romance, and Chinese valuations: At FORTUNE's Brainstorm 2006, the ideas just kept coming. COLUMNISTS Politics The Senator from Starbucks: Howard Schultz wants CEOs to step up on health-care reform. Street Life Stop whining about SarbOx! INVESTING Too Big for Its Own Good? American Funds has overtaken Vanguard and Fidelity. But its steady performers are showing signs of strain. The 100 Fastest-Growing Companies Update Why we still like oil and gas producer Apache. BUSINESS LIFE Twelve for the Road Don't forget the tech when you make your summer trek. Gadget guru and FORTUNE senior editor, Peter H. Lewis, picks a carload of the best new travel gear, from a lightweight laptop to iPod accessories. Plus: Don't let hotels “walk” on you, Life After Work, and more.

 

 

FORTUNE is available in digital format. To access this version go to:
http://mag1.olivesoftware.com/am/welcome/Time/Fortune/TFM-07-Aug-2006.asp  

 

For further information please contact:
Susan Brown Williams
212-522-0133
susan_williams@timeinc.com

Phil DiIanni
212-522-6282
phil_diianni@timeinc.com

 

 

Back to index