• Former Disney executive Kevin Mayer, known for leading Marvel and Star Wars acquisitions, advises Amazon to preserve James Bond’s legacy with careful brand management as the tech giant integrates the franchise into its streaming-first strategy.

Amazon’s $8.5 billion acquisition of MGM in 2022 brought the tech giant one of cinema’s most storied franchises: James Bond. But as the e-commerce and streaming powerhouse looks to leverage 007 for Prime Video and beyond now that they’ve wrestled creative control away from the long-time producers, the challenge lies in balancing innovation with franchise integrity.

Kevin Mayer, the former Disney executive who helped launch Disney+ and played a key role in the acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm, told Fortune in an interview at Web Summit Qatar that Amazon’s approach will be critical.

“You have to take great care, you have to make what I would call brand deposits all the time, doing positive things that reinforce the elements of what a brand really means to the consumers of that brand and be very careful to limit the withdrawals that you make,” said Mayer, who is now the CEO and co-founder of Candle Media, a media company backed by private equity heavyweights Blackstone.

For Amazon, this means ensuring Bond’s cinematic legacy remains intact, even as streaming-first strategies reshape the industry.

“The story elements have to coincide with what people expect of James Bond. It’s not that complicated, but you can easily mess it up, too. But I do have a lot of faith in that Amazon team. I think they’ll do a great job with it,” Mayer added.

One area where Amazon appears to be treading carefully is theatrical releases. The Bond franchise has long been synonymous with the big-screen experience, and Mayer suggests that’s unlikely to change, despite temptations to boost subscription numbers with a direct-to-streaming release.

“A James Bond movie is all about action. It’s about visual effects. It’s about the sound. It’s about sharing that experience with the audience,” he said.

“I don’t think in the near term you’ll see James Bond releases not having a theatrical period where they’re exclusively in theaters, and I think Amazon is happy to do that. Those releases actually build brands, build awareness, and the marketing behind the release actually continues to perpetuate the quality and the awareness of that entire franchise. 

“That window might be a little less than it has been in the past, and of course, streaming is going to be a huge bonus to Amazon Prime.”

As for creative direction, Mayer is firm on one thing: “I hope we don’t see an American Bond. Bond is British, period.”

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The power of IP & sequels in box office success

The Bond franchise isn’t the only example of the enduring power of intellectual property (IP). The biggest box office successes of 2024—Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine, Moana 2—underscore how established franchises continue to dominate in an era of content overload.

“People like things that are familiar,” Mayer said. “If you do it right, sequels and known IP give you a huge advantage in cutting through.”

One of the best examples of leveraging IP for sustained success is Ryan Reynolds’ approach to Deadpool. “Ryan Reynolds is one of the hardest working people I’ve ever met,” Mayer noted. “He’s an expert at marketing, social, comedy and not just for Deadpool but across industries—look at Mint Mobile.”

Disney has also refined its IP-driven strategy, with Moana 2 serving as a case study in shifting distribution models.

Originally planned as a Disney+ release, the film was upgraded to a theatrical release once executives, including CEO Bob Iger, stepped in after seeing its potential.

“It’s a fine balance,” Mayer said. “Clearly, the more an experience is only available on streaming, that helps to acquire customers.

“It helps to retain customers. It’s all about customer acquisition, the average revenue per user you can get on a monthly basis, and the churn, reducing people disconnecting from your service. So it’s important to have exclusive content on streaming.

“The Disney franchises are so powerful, and they’re so long-lasting, kids like to watch them over and over and over. So Disney can afford to put and should put these films first in theaters and then on streaming because kids will watch them over and over and over.

“You don’t lose much by putting it on in the theater first, and you gain a lot of awareness. There’s nothing that can replace a theatrical release for creating brand awareness because of the amount of marketing that goes behind it.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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With generative AI rewiring how work gets done, the future of entry-level employment hangs in the balance. But Dan Shapero, chief operating officer at LinkedIn, isn’t ready to declare the bottom rung of the career ladder broken—at least not yet.

“Navigating the transition to an AI economy is probably going to be the issue of the next decade,” Shapero told Fortune in a recent conversation at Cannes Lions. “Not just for companies, but for individuals.”

Shapero acknowledges that there are already anecdotal signs that finding that all-important first job out of college is becoming tougher, as noted by his colleague and LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer, Aneesh Raman, in a recent op-ed for the New York Times.

But unlike previous waves of technology that tended to target specific functions or industries, AI is “a very pervasive shift in how the world of work is happening,” he said.

Rather than eliminating jobs wholesale, Shapero sees the nature of entry-level work evolving.

“I remember when I was at Bain, a lot of the time I spent was making slides and going to the library to figure out research reports. All of that is now automated,” he said.

“Bain still hires scores of recent graduates. They just do different parts of the process.

“If you talk to the partners and ask them what they did when they first joined, they were cutting out squares with a scalpel to make slides on a piece of colored paper because PowerPoint didn’t exist then.”

One of the most significant changes Shapero anticipates in the job market over the next five years is the rise of AI fluency as a core hiring attribute.

“If you talk to companies trying to deploy AI, they’ll talk about how varied the adoption is,” he said. “You’ll have some people using it all day long and others that are slowing down the process because they’re concerned about what it might mean for them.”

Job candidates, he predicts, will increasingly be asked to prove they’re comfortable with AI—not just as users, but as agents of change.

“There’s going to be a lot of pressure to build AI into your operating model, and the bottleneck is unlikely to be the tech,” Shapero said. “The bottleneck is going to be how you teach people how to do it. That’s a talent challenge, not a tech challenge.”

Internally, LinkedIn talks about hiring for “AI fluency and agency”—the former being the ability to use the tools, and the latter being the initiative to find new solutions rather than relying strictly on prescribed processes.

Changing the game in recruitment

LinkedIn itself is leaning into AI to transform the machinery of recruitment.

Shapero described a vision of recruiting where AI handles the repetitive work—generating job specs, matching candidate skills, screening for eligibility—and recruiters focus on the human elements: persuasion, relationship-building, and judgment.

“If you map out what a recruiter does, half the week is automatable tasks that are also the things they like the least,” he said. “The other half is time with candidates. We hear from recruiters: automate what can be automated, and let me focus on the human part.”

LinkedIn’s new “Hiring Assistant,” rolled out to recruiters and early corporate customers last fall, automates much of that front-end process.

“They’re seeing candidates they wouldn’t have seen otherwise,” Shapero noted, pointing out that AI can broaden rather than narrow talent pools. “Every recruiter has habitual search criteria. They exclude a whole bunch of candidates who might actually be a great fit.”

In other words, AI may be more inclusive than the humans it augments.

A hybrid future

Still, none of this automation spells the end of human judgment. If anything, it makes it more valuable. “The right endpoint will be more tech and more human,” Shapero said. “But we’re still a long way from that place.”

Even as AI rewires hiring and flattens the traditional career path, Shapero remains optimistic that people will adapt—if they’re willing to keep learning.

“You don’t necessarily need to be the one that invents the new way to do something,” he said. “But you do need to be aware of what others are doing, what the best practices are, and then be comfortable changing your habits.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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• Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone is leading a multi-phase turnaround of the iconic internet brand, beginning with a ground-up transformation of the company and its products. By rebuilding a team and reconnecting Yahoo to its core mission, Lanzone aims to revitalize the brand for a new generation, including a surprisingly large Gen Z audience.

When Jim Lanzone took the helm at Yahoo in 2021, he saw more than just a legacy internet brand battered by years of corporate missteps—he saw an opportunity. A serial turnaround specialist with stints at Ask Jeeves, CBS Interactive, and Tinder under his belt, Lanzone viewed Yahoo as the “white whale of turnarounds,” a company with deep roots, loyal users, and a product engine needing a serious overhaul.

“This is my third turnaround of a top 10 internet company,” Lanzone said in an exclusive conversation with Fortune at Cannes Lions. “We had to rebuild the team and the company from the ground up.”

Now three and a half years into what he calls a “multi-phase turnaround—fixing to rebuilding to innovating”—Lanzone is executing a transformation strategy that touches everything from product development to cultural renewal, all underpinned by a simple belief: a digital media brand is only as good as the products it delivers.

Product first, always

At the core of Lanzone’s philosophy is a laser focus on product quality.

“Everything for a major consumer internet company has to start with product,” he said.

Yahoo, which still boasts category leadership in properties like Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Fantasy, has refreshed every major product it offers.

“In the past nine months, every pixel on Yahoo is new,” Lanzone noted. “Every single product that we operate… is brand new.”

Only after fixing the user experience, he argues, can a company rekindle affection for the brand.

“You can’t do that until you actually fix the products first,” he said. “Especially at a consumer internet company where these are living, breathing products that people use every day.”

Yahoo poaching talent who wanted to ‘run towards the fire’

The transformation isn’t confined to user interfaces. Lanzone has overhauled Yahoo’s structure, recruiting top-tier talent from Silicon Valley—many of whom, like him, had no shortage of opportunities elsewhere.

“It surprised people how many great people wanted to run towards the fire here at Yahoo,” he said. “We brought in a great team and I think it got a lot of credibility pretty quickly.”

Among those who made the jump were chief marketing officer Josh Line, who joined from Paramount Global, and Rob Wilk, Yahoo’s chief revenue officer, who left Snap.

That credibility was essential to Yahoo’s second act under private equity firm Apollo Global Management, which bought Yahoo from Verizon for less than $5 billion in 2021—a cool 96% reduction from its peak valuation of $125 billion.

Far from being a sunset operation, Yahoo has become one of Apollo’s fastest-returning deals.

“The playbook here for them has been growth,” Lanzone said. “We’re building here—not just trying to extract value from the parts—but build one Yahoo into a sustainable, great company for the next 30 years.”

How Lanzone turns companies around

As a product veteran, Lanzone puts data at the center of every decision. “The first thing you look at is the data,” he explained. “Who’s using it, how often, what do they love about it? What do they hate about it?”

Despite the many pivots in Yahoo’s corporate story—including stints under Verizon and an attempt to become a media and entertainment conglomerate—the company’s loyal user base never wavered.

“What we realized pretty quickly was that in the places we were strongest, it was because they were using Yahoo for the same reason they were 30 years ago,” Lanzone said. “We were the trusted guide to the internet… to help them navigate the digital wilderness.”

The original Yahoo motto—“Always Under Construction”—has taken on renewed meaning. “We always have to be evolving,” he said, “but on behalf of our users—not for some corporate reason.”

A Gen Z surprise for a dot-com darling

Perhaps most surprising, even to Lanzone, is Yahoo’s traction with younger users. “People are surprised that we’re top 5 with Gen Z,” he said. “Half of our audience is Gen Z and millennials.”

At the heart of the transformation is a cultural reset—one rooted in Yahoo’s founding ethos but adapted for the modern age.

In a symbolic move, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang returned recently to speak at a company-wide All Hands meeting, reinforcing the company’s original mission: to guide people through the internet and help them accomplish their goals online.

“That was the mission in 1995,” Lanzone said. “It’s the mission now.”

To get there, Lanzone believes leadership must be aligned and inspired. “You have to bring in great people who share your passion for the project,” he said. “People who want to make Yahoo great again.”

MYGA.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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• Snap president Ronan Harris transformed his leadership approach after his father challenged him to replace impersonal thank-you emails with handwritten notes and face-to-face recognition. The simple act of personal gratitude left a lasting impression on employees—many of whom still remember it years later.

For Ronan Harris, Snap’s EMEA president, the lesson that changed how he led teams didn’t come from a boardroom or a business book. It came from his father.

Years ago, Harris was leading a large, fast-growing team at Google and wanted to show appreciation to top performers.

“Every performance cycle I’d look for the top 5, 10% of people, and I’d send them a little email and go, thanks for all the hard work,” he recalled during an exclusive panel discussion hosted by Fortune at Cannes Lions. It was a well-intentioned gesture—but one that, in hindsight, missed the mark.

When he told his father about his approach, the elder Harris didn’t mince words. “You’re a f—ing idiot,” his dad said. “Go and talk to them and tell them why.”

That blunt critique sparked a change. Harris ditched the emails.

Instead, he began writing handwritten notes, delivering them in person, and spending a few minutes sitting with each employee to explain exactly what they had done that mattered.

“Thank you so much for your hard work. I know you did this, this and this, and you’ve gone above and beyond,” he would say. It became a ritual, one that followed him through the rest of his career, from nearly 18 years at Google to his current role at Snap.

Years later, Harris still runs into people who kept those notes. Some are now in senior leadership roles.

“They absolutely remember it,” he said. “They remember the fact that some boss, several layers up, actually gave enough of a hoot to actually come and sit down and thank them for the thing that they did.”

The experience left Harris with a lasting conviction: “Never underestimate the power of gratitude and recognition that you have, and go out of your way to make it count.”

It was a fitting final thought in a discussion that had also touched on empathy and intentionality in leadership.

Mars President Anton Vincent spoke of the importance of leading with compassion, especially in moments of change and uncertainty.

“At the end of the day, we’re going to ask people to do really big things,” he said.

“Get great results, do some transformation, so if you don’t really have personal leadership credibility, it’s going to be hard to ask other people to do big things.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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