Leaving an unfulfilling job isn't always an option.

Sometimes quitting is financially unfeasible. And if you've got a safety net but don't have another gig lined up, the prospect of fielding friends' questions about why you're unemployed can be daunting.

So it helps to have tools for tweaking your current role to be (even slightly) more palatable.

Step 1: Think about how you're contributing to the company's mission

As Microsoft's chief human resources officer, Kathleen Hogan aims to provide all 100,000-plus employees with purpose. Think of purpose as a sense that you're helping fulfill the company's mission, or a compelling reason to get out of bed in the morning.

But Hogan knows too well that not every employee feels that way all the time.

For those who find themselves in that situation, Hogan told Business Insider she recommends "zooming out" to make sure you're looking at the "broader picture."

Hogan said that often people get "stuck," focusing on whatever tedious meeting they're in right now. (It happens to her, too, she said.)

But "when you zoom out and you look at this incredible opportunity we have [at Microsoft] and the people that you get to work with and the impact that you really are having," she added, you might instead feel grateful and reinvigorated.

Read more: A former Netflix exec shares 3 simple questions to ask yourself if you're thinking about leaving your job

Hogan's advice applies beyond Microsoft, to most any company in any industry. It can help simply to remember why you were moved to join your organization in the first place.

In fact, when you revisit your commitment to that mission, you might find that the source of your disengagement is something more easily addressable.

That's what happened to Shannon Sullivan, senior vice president of talent and organization at Hulu. Sullivan previously told Business Insider that she'd been frustrated in her role because she was consumed by a bunch of tedious administrative processes — not because she disliked the substantive work. Once she fixed those, Sullivan said, she started to feel more empowered.

Step 2: Have an honest conversation with your boss about your disengagement

It's possible that you might take a step back and still feel uninspired. In that case, Hogan said, it might be time to have a discussion with your manager, while you "do your own soul searching on what really gives you joy, what gives you purpose."

As intimidating as it might be to initiate that discussion, your boss may be able to help you make a change, even if that's simply moving you to another role or team. Internal mobility (letting employees try out different positions within the organization) is a growing trend, especially at tech companies, largely because it helps retain top talent who might otherwise take a job at another company.

Internal mobility is, ideally, a win-win. If you're in a role that brings you joy and purpose, Hogan said, you'll perform at your best, which in turn will benefit the overall organization.

Consider that you might need a different type of manager

Some top employers, including Netflix and LinkedIn, say they encourage employees to speak candidly with their managers when they're interviewing elsewhere.

Hogan said an employee's ability to have that conversation depends heavily on their relationship with their manager. Still, she said, if you feel that you couldn't have a productive conversation with your manager about your engagement level, then you might want to look for a manager who would be open to these honest discussions.

"I'm not being cavalier" and advising people who are having a hard time at work to immediately jump ship, Hogan added.

But her own experience in people management has taught her that managers play a key role in an employee's experience at work. Indeed, a recent survey found that people are likely to leave their companies when they feel their manager isn't helping promote their career development.

Hogan said it's worth at least thinking about how you could change your job to be more satisfying. She said, "Life is too short to be in a job that doesn't give you purpose and deep meaning and joy."

Apple just unveiled its latest trio of smartphones — the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max— and each phone comes in brand-new color options.

The $700 iPhone 11 comes in six colors: black, white, purple, green, yellow, and Product Red, while the $1,000 iPhone 11 Pro and $1,100 iPhone 11 Pro Max come in space gray, silver, gold, and the new midnight green.

While Apple has released iPhones in colors like yellow and green before, this year's shades are decidedly different. The iPhone 11's colors have a more pastel-like aesthetic to them compared to last year's brightly-colored iPhone XR, and the midnight green color for the iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max is competely new. The iPhone 11 Pro also comes in the more familiar colors of space gray, gold, and silver.

The midnight green color seems to be especially popular, as the iPhone 11 Pro in that color was already backordered by two to three weeks at Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile when preorders launched on Friday, according to Macworld.

Read more: Apple's iPhone 11 Pro launch is proof that the smartphone industry is going through a massive change

Of course, the new colors don't come as a complete surprise, considering many of them leaked months before Apple's iPhone event through the blog Macotakara and Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.

Other than these fresh color options, the iPhone 11 Pro comes with a new textured matte back that looks and feels much different than the glossy exterior found on its predecessor.

Here's a better glimpse at what those colors look like in person.

As a reminder, you can sign up to get more stories like this via BI's weekly healthcare newsletter Dispensed right here.

What have I missed? Get in touch.

-- Matt

Jackal Pan/Getty Images; Jacqueline Larma/AP Images; Samantha Lee/Business Insider

What's going on at WeWork?

The coworking company could now go public with a valuation of as little as $10 billion, down from a private market valuation of $47 billion. Here's our latest:

The WeWork debacle is a black eye for SoftBank. As Troy Wolverton reports, venture investors still aren't sure what to make of the $100 billion Vision Fund. Depending on who you ask, they're either rooting for it, or gleeful that it's struggling with WeWork and Uber.

Finance and Investing

Goldman Sachs is offering buyouts to encourage partners to leave as CEO David Solomon works to shrink one of the most elite clubs on Wall Street

Goldman Sachs is offering buyouts to encourage partners to leave as CEO David Solomon looks to shrink the firm's most senior ranks and restore some exclusivity to one of Wall Street's most prestigious titles.

Meet the 8 Blackstone dealmakers who insiders say are the firm's future

It seems the Blackstone Group, with more than half a trillion in assets, owns just about everything. Whether you're spending a night in a hotel or just going to the office, there's a good chance you're inhabiting space owned, at least in part, by Blackstone.

D.E. Shaw is going to trial over the sale of a litigation finance portfolio company, shining a light on a side-pocket deal at the secretive hedge fund firm

An ongoing legal battle between the high-powered hedge fund D.E. Shaw and a former executive of a portfolio company is shining light on the difficulty of valuing private companies.

Tech, Media, Telecoms

The CEO of NetApp talks about moving to the cloud, transforming the business, and the lessons he learned from his twin brother — who happens to be the CEO of Google Cloud

Growing up in India, George Kurian and his twin brother Thomas enjoyed playing pranks at home and in school by taking advantage of the fact that they look so much alike.

Meet the 14 power players of IBM, playing key roles in CEO Ginni Rometty's bid to dominate the $1 trillion hybrid cloud market — and a few who might take over for her one day

IBM was once the undisputed star of enterprise tech — the company that sold the hardware and software running many of the business world's computer networks.

Insiders say once-buzzy Quartz is on track to lose money again this year as it faces a subscription shortfall

Quartz, a quirky but admired business news startup, made headlines in July 2018 when it sold for $86 million to a Japanese media company.

Healthcare, Retail, Transportation

3 VCs in the hottest area of healthcare explain where they're placing their next bets

Venture-capital firms are increasingly betting that the future of healthcare is high-tech.But what type of tech, exactly?

FedEx is pivoting to e-commerce. A C-suiter explained to us how the delivery giant is doing it differently than everyone else —and what's behind dumping Amazon.

FedEx made waves in the industry recently for dumping Amazon as a partner. To learn more, Business Insider asked Brie Carere, who is FedEx's chief marketing and communications officer. She's been at FedEx for more than 18 years.

Walmart exec Andy Dunn says he's worried that the 'music's about to stop' for a bunch of retail startups

When it comes to startups, Andy Dunn has been on both sides of the table.

ESPN is putting Disney's massive distribution machine to work to help land top-tier sports rights.

The sports network's president Jimmy Pitaro said the network is leveraging its cable channels, as well as its streaming service, ESPN Plus; Disney's broadcast network ABC; and Disney parks, in negotiations with leagues like the NFL and NBA.

"When we sit down with the NFL, yes, we bring a cable channel, but we also bring a broadcast channel," Pitaro said in a conversation with sports anchor Hannah Storm at the Paley Center for Media on Thursday. "How many of our competitors can bring the theme parks to the table?" (Comcast's NBCUniversal also operates theme parks.)

Jimmy Pitaro. Disney Interactive/Reuters/Jonathan Alcorn

Pitaro pointed to the NBA Experience that opened in August at Disney Springs, in Walt Disney World, as an example of how Disney could work with other leagues in its parks. The experience includes an arcade, a court that simulates the experience of playing in a professional game, and other activities.

The competition for sports rights is heating up now that cash-rich tech giants like Amazon have taken an interest.

The competition for sports rights is nearly as fierce as the match-ups on screen now that cash-rich tech giants like Amazon and YouTube are vying against the media behemoths that traditionally broadcasted the major sports leagues.

E-commerce leader Amazon, for example, snapped up the rights to stream Thursday Night Football, in one of the NFL's biggest digital rights deals. Reuters reported that Amazon beat out Twitter and YouTube for the rights.

ESPN already has deals with many of the major sports leagues, from the NFL to the PGA Tour. Its current deal with the NFL includes Monday night games and the contract runs through 2021. The network will likely look to renew.

It may even try to carve out a piece for its subscription-video platform, ESPN Plus. Pitaro did not discuss bringing the NFL to ESPN Plus at the Paley Center event, but said the company is trying to weave the streaming service into every new deal it negotiates.

Read more: The head of ESPN gets candid about the challenges of launching ESPN Plus and explains how he's putting streaming into 'every deal' moving forward

ESPN is also leveraging Disney's broadcast network and streaming services.

Pitaro argued that Disney's scale, legacy relationships with the sports leagues, and production value, would also give it a leg up over newer players that are vying for rights. ESPN's core cable channel reaches 86 million subscribers. ESPN Plus has 2.4 million subscribers. Then, there's broadcast behemoth, ABC.

Disney leveraged ABC in its deal in the NFL draft this year. "The NFL said to us, what's most important to us is expanding our audience," Pitaro said. So, Disney aired two broadcasts: one on ESPN and one on ABC. The ESPN broadcast analyzed the player moves, and ABC went for viewers' heartstrings, interviewing parents of the players and uncovering their backstories.

In the end, Pitaro thinks the negotiations with the leagues will come down to "the power of the Walt Disney Company." He said streaming competitors, meanwhile, still need to prove to leagues that their platforms are reliable and can scale.

"In aggregate, I very much like our hand," Pitaro said.

Growing up in India, George Kurian and his twin brother Thomas enjoyed playing pranks at home and in school by taking advantage of the fact that they look so much alike.

"He has sat in classes for me and I've sat in classes for him," George Kurian told Business Insider. "Occasionally, we'd be found out. Most of the time people couldn't tell…We got into lots of trouble together."

The Kurian brothers are the most famous and most important twins in Silicon Valley, where they are leading two major tech giants. George is CEO of NetApp, the data storage and management powerhouse, while Thomas is CEO of Google Cloud.

The brothers no longer engage in juvenile deceptions, although George Kurian laughed as he pondered the possibility of a prank: "I never got to Google Cloud for a day as CEO and he hasn't come to NetApp as CEO for a day. But that's likely something we want to think about."

He's joking, of course. The Kurian brothers have far more serious matters to think about as CEOs of two tech behemoths going through difficult transitions, which underscore the parallel paths they've taken since leaving India.

'We have common themes in our two journeys'

"We have common themes in our two journeys, him at Google and me at NetApp," George said. "Each of us inherited an organization that was successful in one aspect of the business and we're trying to pivot the organizations to go in a different direction."

That direction is the cloud, the fast growing trend in corporate tech which allows businesses to set up and run their networks on web-based platforms, and, in most cases, doing away with the enormous costs of setting up their own data centers.

Google is challenging Amazon and Microsoft in the battle to dominate the public cloud market. NetApp is reinventing itself from a seller of data storage appliances installed by customers in private data centers to one that offers a broader portfolio of cloud-focused data management products and services.

"He has to take a consumer internet-focused business and make it enterprise ready," George Kurian said of his brother Thomas's challenge. "And I have to take a traditional enterprise systems company and make it cloud-ready."

These are tough challenges, and George Kurian says he has benefitted from the feedback he and his brother still routinely give one another. "We've helped each other think through things," he said.

Coming to America was not easy

It's a bond they shared growing up in Bangalore and in their journey to America.

It was not an easy journey.

"I would not have had such an easy time coming to the US if I had not come with him," George Kurian said.

They came from a close family of four boys. "We have three engineers and a doctor — classic Indian situation," George said. Their father was also an engineer and their mother had worked as a teacher.

"We both stayed up the night before we left," he said. "I'll just tell you that it was not easy to leave."

Their mother was a particularly "big influence in our lives," George said

"She instilled in us the idea of resilience and toughness when you are two immigrant kids who came by yourselves to the US with 300 bucks in our pockets," he said. "You had to learn to make do, to find jobs, and both us worked while we were in college."

That made their bond stronger: "Both of us have been best friends for most of our lives."

They have also followed fairly similar paths in the US. They each earned an engineering degree from Princeton, and got their MBAs at Stanford.

They both worked at McKinsey and Oracle, where Thomas worked for 22 years, eventually rising to become president reporting directly to founder and former CEO Larry Ellison.

George worked for Cisco for nine years, before joining NetApp in 2011. When he was offered the CEO post, he checked with Thomas who he said told him, "Listen, they wouldn't make a change and give you the opportunity to be CEO if everything was going swimmingly well."

In fact, NetApp was wrestling with significant challenges then, George said. It was late in the transition to the emerging solid state storage technology, although NetApp subsequently managed to catch up with other rivals. The cloud trend was also accelerating, but NetApp had "in our go-to-market team a group of tired leaders who were out of ideas," George said.

When Thomas left Oracle in January to become CEO of Google Cloud, it was George's turn to give his brother some advice. "He was curious about how you manage a board and how you manage various stakeholders," he said. George stressed the importance of being transparent and spelling out a multi-year journey for the company.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian Google

The Kurian brothers take on the cloud

The journey and the challenges they each face is strikingly similar. "It is challenging to to take an organization that has been very successful in one paradigm and take it to another paradigm," George said.

At Google, Thomas Kurian is at the helm of a major cloud player, but one that lags two bigger rivals, Amazon and Microsoft. He is also leading a company with a limited enterprise track record. In fact, some of his ideas, including sales strategies based on his Oracle experience, have been met with skepticism.

George Kurian is steering NetApp toward a more cloud-enabled future. When he joined the company in 2011, NetApp was focused "on selling infrastructure to telecom providers and had for the most part not done much with the big cloud providers, like Amazon, Google and Microsoft."

NetApp "made the hard pivot" to the cloud by shifting its focus from data stored and managed "on a few servers in a special location called a data center" to a new model where data is in many more places, from social media platforms to the shop floor.

The bet pays off

The pivot paid off.

"NetApp was an early mover in recognizing the importance of the public cloud and trying to take advantage of building relationships with public cloud vendors," Gartner analyst Roger Cox told Business Insider.

Today, Amazon, Microsoft and Google are "important partners" of NetApp, George said. (He notes that NetApp began working with Google even before his brother became CEO of Google Cloud.)

"We have big aspirations for our cloud business and we're doing it with partnerships with cloud providers," Kurian said. "The lesson we learned. You can't go it alone. It's important to partner. And customers like companies that partner well."

Cox said NetApp has become a leading provider of data storage management systems in which a business "can run applications on prem, on the core, on the edge, using common software," he said.

NetApp's share of the $20.6 billion external data storage market edged up from 11.2% in December 2016 to 13% in June 2019, according to Gartner. NetApp's longtime rival EMC, which is owned by Dell, remains number one with 30% market share in June. But Cox said EMC "does not have anything like what NetApp has."

He gives Kurian credit for NetApp's gains.

George Kurian led major changes at NetApp

"When you look at the turnaround NetApp has had since 2015, you've got to give credit to the person who is leading the parade, that's George," Cox added. "During that period of time, he completely revitalized the leadership of NetApp."

But the company's transformation has also been bumpy. NetApp has reported a year-over-year drop in revenue in the last two quarters. The company's stock has slipped about 9% year to date.

Cox said a big challenge for NetApp is being able to grow its customer base: "Their biggest problem is they don't have enough accounts," he said. "They rely too much on too few very large accounts for their revenue. When those large accounts don't come through, then they have a revenue problem."

Kurian acknowledged that this is a problem for a company that's very successful in the traditional way of selling and using data storage systems.

"You know our success in the old paradigm gives us an enormous install base and franchise, and you can lull yourself into complacency because of all that success we had and continue to have with that traditional customer base," he said.

That simply won't work in the cloud era, where customers are buying and using data storage systems in new and flexible ways. The challenge for NetApp, Kurian said, is "to continue to push people to lean in to the future as opposed to resting on their laurels from the past."

Reconnecting with the past

His role at NetApp has allowed him to reconnect with his past. Two years ago, he led the inauguration of NetApp's new R&D facility in his native Bangalore. It was located just half a mile from where his dad used to work.

"We used to drive by there to go to my dad's office," he said, smiling.

His father died shortly before the facility opened, but George was able to tell him about it before he passed on.

"It was nice to see him smile when I told him about where it was and we talked about the memories of driving by it. It's a sweet memory. I'll always remember that."

He remembers his own journey at a time when immigration has become a hot-button political issue, and immigrants have become a target.

"They're giving up a lot to come here," he said. "They're giving up their families. They're giving up their friendships. They're giving up the comfort of the language and the culture they grew up in to come here. They're not making that decision lightly."

Sharing that journey with his twin brother did make it easier, he said. "It was nice to have your best friend around you."

Got a tip about NetApp or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., message him on Twitter@benpimentel. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Here's the current cocktail and mocktail list:

Financial District: Aylesbury Duck Vodka, raspberry, lychee, rhubarb

The Village: Spring 44 Gin, cucumber, basil, balsamic vinegar, peppercorn, mozzarella, garnish

Theater District: El Silencio Mezcal, roasted sweet corn, peach, cholula, Tajín.

Chelsea: Avua Amburana Cachaca, beet, carrot, allspice, ginger, apple, honey, leeks

Meatpacking District: Rittenhouse Rye, Dry Curacao, toasted rice, blackberry, cacao, mint, Old Fashioned Bitters

There's seasonal wine and beer, too.

Silicon Valley employees work in some of the most luxurious offices as tech companies compete in an arms race of perks to attract top talent. Catered lunches and complimentary dining at company cafes is now the bare minimum which all tech giants must expand on.

Some companies offer increased flexibility and extended leave, like travel stipends and bonuses for parents. Other companies are moving in the opposite direction, minimizing the need to ever leave the office by bringing laundry, entertainment, healthcare, and more right to the workspace.

Much of the anticipation I typically feel leading up to a new iPhone announcement revolves around one question: "Did Apple finally add 'this' feature?"

For the iPhone 11, Apple delivered on some features I expected, like an ultra-wide camera, and a new Night Mode for better photos in low-light situations. And finally, finally, a fast-charger included in the box, at least for the iPhone 11 Pro.

As for other features I was hoping for, like a universal USB-C port and a super-fast and smooth display, the iPhone 11 didn't quite deliver.

I can fully understand why Apple didn't include most of the features below. Many of them might not be ready for Apple's adoption yet. When Apple feels comfortable enough to add these features, the iPhone will be totally different than it is today. That's why the iPhone 11 feels a bit more like a placeholder while the company works on adding some key, modern smartphone features to its iPhone.

Check out the features that some may have expected on Apple's iPhone 11, but ultimately didn't make an appearance:

On September 10, Apple used its annual event to announce new iPhones, as it does every year. Starting at $699, the iPhone 11 is the budget option compared to the more decked-out 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max. All three phones are available for preorder now, and will be available for purchase on September 20.

If you're considered a new iPhone and were already planning to splurge on a Pro version, you might be tempted to max-out on the iPhone 11 Pro Max — but you shouldn't. The iPhone 11 Pro has all the best upgrades of the new phones, without some of the downsides that accompany the iPhone 11 Pro Max.

Here's why you should go with the iPhone 11 Pro.

Executive compensation packages have gotten more complicated over time. To take one recent prominent example, Tesla CEO Elon Musk was "paid" around $2.3 billion last year by one valuation method, while actually receiving $0 in guaranteed value.

Indeed, some CEO pay plans are so complicated that a powerful mathematical technique originally developed to understand the behavior of neutrons in an atom bomb explosion is the most effective way to estimate what they are actually worth.

Monte Carlo methods, named for the famous casino, are a class of mathematical techniques for evaluating the possible outcomes of a complicated process that includes some random element. The basic idea in a Monte Carlo problem is to use a computer to simulate the random process many times — often thousands or millions of repetitions — and compare the various outcomes of those simulations.

According to a retrospective article on the development of Monte Carlo methods in the journal Los Alamos Science, Stanislaw Ulam, one of the lead physicists working on the Manhattan Project to develop the first nuclear weapons, took inspiration from analyzing a solitaire card game.

While many card games lend themselves nicely to straightforward direct calculations — calculating the odds of drawing particular poker hands, for example, is a classic exercise in basic probability theory— Ulam realized that trying to directly calculate the probability of a particular solitaire game being winnable in a similar fashion would be difficult or impossible.

That's because drawing a poker hand is a straightforward one-step process of picking up five cards, while evaluating a solitaire game generally involves looking at what happens to an entire card deck over a large number of steps or turns.

Instead of trying to figure out some elaborate formula for understanding the solitaire game, Ulam realized he could instead just play out a large number of solitaire games and count how many games were winnable and how many weren't. If a big enough sample of games is taken, this will give a pretty good estimate of the probability in question, just from repeatedly running iterations of the game.

Neutrons and atom bombs

According to the Los Alamos Science article, Ulam and his Manhattan Project colleague John von Neumann observed that a similar procedure could be used to understand key properties of nuclear reactions. Neutrons behave in complicated ways in a nuclear reactor or atomic bomb, and that behavior has major implications for how powerful the reaction or explosion is.

To get a better understanding of the statistical behavior of neutrons in a nuclear explosion, Ulam and von Neumann used the early computers available to the Manhattan Project to simulate the random behavior of a large number of individual neutrons, averaging that behavior together to better understand the workings of the nuclear reaction. This was a crucial step in the development of nuclear weapons.

From nukes to CEO pay

In the years since the Manhattan Project, Monte Carlo simulation methods have become very common in many branches of science and finance. One of those applications is estimating the value of complex CEO pay packages. Like Ulam's solitaire games and neutron reactions, many modern executive compensation packages involve several variables interacting with each other to determine what a CEO eventually actually gets paid.

In the last several years, it's become increasingly common for CEOs and other top executives at public corporations to have their compensation packages tied to various financial or market performance goals. A CEO might receive some number of shares or stock options based on the company's stock price or profitability on some given date during their tenure.

A recent prominent example is Tesla's 2018 compensation plan for CEO Elon Musk. Under that plan, Musk will receive an enormous grant of stock options in the company if and only if Tesla achieves some extremely ambitious revenue and stock price milestones. The first of the stock price milestones would require the company to more than double its market capitalization to a value of $100 billion. If Tesla hits none of those milestones, Musk receives no compensation under that plan.

As part of its policies on executive pay disclosure, the SEC requires corporations to publish estimates of the current market fair value of compensation packages. But since stock awards like Musk's are conditional on the future development of the company's stock price, that unknown factor needs to be considered.

The solution is to use a Monte Carlo simulation to see what the possible outcomes are for the compensation package. The basic process is laid out in a recent client note from the executive compensation consulting firm Exequity.

Instead of simulating solitaire games or neutrons in a nuclear reaction, the company's future stock price is simulated thousands of times, following a standard random model for how stock prices evolve over time, using data on the stock's historical performance.

For each of those simulated stock price trends, the CEO's net reward is calculated based on the terms of the conditional compensation package. If the CEO receives, say, 1,000 shares if the stock price is over $100 and 2,000 shares for a stock price of $150, each simulation where those thresholds are met is recorded, and the CEO's compensation is estimated based on the simulated stock price.

Finally, the average of all those future simulated rewards is calculated and discounted to reflect its present value, which gives an estimate for how much the CEO's compensation package is worth.

So, the Monte Carlo method — the basic idea of simulating some complex random process many times originally developed for the Manhattan Project — gives us a method for figuring out what CEO pay might actually be worth.

Regular Business Insider readers know that every weekend, I write a take on something Tesla-related. This time around, I'm going to ask for patience as I preface the effort with a short auto-industry history lesson.

The development of the car business in the 20th century followed a predictable pattern: daring innovators gave way to savvy managers. The early days were the Wild West — or Wild Midwest, and the burgeoning industry was located mostly in the middle of the US, with Detroit as its capital — but after World War II and the emergence of a vast American consumer culture, automotive startups morphed into multinational corporations.

Read more: In the battle of the Tesla Model S and the Porsche Taycan, it' s really no contest

The two most important men in this story were Henry Ford, who needs no introduction, and Alfred Sloan, who does. It was Ford who laid the groundwork for the modern auto industry and pioneered both the effective moving assembly line and the idea of mass-market motorized transport with the Model T. The company that bears his name and that's still run in part by his great-grandson, board chairman Bill Ford, remains the No. 2 US car company.

Sloan, a more obscure personality, created the modern corporation in General Motors. At its peak in the 1950s, GM controlled half the US car market; it still controls about 20%. (The Germans and Japanese weren't really selling vehicles in the US during the Eisenhower administration.)

Henry Ford. Getty Images

The Utopian Ford vs. the pragmatic Sloan

The key distinction between Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan was that Ford was something of a utopian (and, more troublingly, given to anti-Semitic propaganda) who harbored visionary, paternalistic attitudes toward his workforce and his customers. He believed that his workers should be paid enough to buy the cars they produced, and thereby created a virtuous circle, but he disliked credit and figured that there was no reason to sell Model T's that weren't black.

Sloan, by contrast, thought that the buyer was always right — or at least that the consumer should enjoy abundant choice, and that GM as a corporation should provide it. Some of this was expeditious: GM was created by combining brands — Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac — so Sloan was simply managing reality as GM's president. But GM has always concentrated on the pull of consumers, rather than Ford's push to deliver singularly great products.

The symbols of the two American giants capture this distinction. Henry Ford's great achievement was the mighty River Rouge factory, where train cars loaded with iron ore pulled up to one end of the plant and finished cars rolled out the other. Sloan's work of genius was GM's organizational chart, the blueprint for American managerial capitalism.

Read more: With a US Department of Justice move against automakers, the Trump administration is now officially antibusiness

Alfred Sloan.Wikimedia Commons

OK, history lesson over. Now let's see how history repeats itself

The two biggest names in the electric car realm are Tesla CEO Elon Musk (obviously) and a guy you probably haven't heard of, RJ Scaringe, who leads Rivian, a startup electric SUV and pickup-truck maker. In my cycles-of-history framework, Musk is Ford and Scaringe is Sloan. (There's some irony here, by the way, as Ford has invested $500 million in Rivian, while Tesla hasn't seen a major automaker take a stake since Daimler and Toyota bought equity prior to Tesla's 2010 IPO.)

The big difference between Musk and Scaringe is that Musk, the visionary, wants nothing to do with the legacy auto industry anymore, while Scaringe is running Rivian sort of like a junior OEM. When I saw the photo below, of Scaringe and Bill Ford after the Ford investment was announced, I speculated that I was looking at Ford's next CEO.

Scaringe with Ford Chairman Bill Ford. Ford

Like Henry Ford, Musk is preoccupied with the manufacturing process — Tesla's Gigafactories, in Musk's view, are more important than Tesla's cars. They're the "machine that builds the machine," and Musk would like them to become radically automated.

Why Rivian is more like a traditional automaker than Tesla

Scaringe — like Sloan, an MIT engineering grad — is creating an electric automaker that's designed to reach the consumer; he's not trying to reinvent manufacturing. To achieve that, he wants everything to do with the legacy auto industry. Where Sloan had his org chart, Scaringe has partnerships and deals, all intended to make Rivian vehicles easier to manufacture, sell, and service. His most recent investment, of $350 million from Cox Automotive, is representative. (Ford and Amazon have also kicked in, giving Rivian a $2 billion total.)

Cox owns Kelley Blue Book and Autotrader, among other properties. These entities are designed to facilitate the car buying and leasing process and are heavily organized around the consumer. By investing in Rivian, they're getting a piece of the future, the chance to integrate sales not just of EVs, but of SUVs and pickups, the most popular vehicles in the lucrative US market. Rivian is getting a huge pipeline to buyers from the deal.

In the history of the car business, Ford is seen as stubborn and idealistic while Sloan is considered adaptable and pragmatic. Of course, both Ford and GM are still around, so it's not clear that Ford's vision lost out to Sloan's technocracy. Musk likes to note that Ford and Tesla are the only two American car makers that haven't gone bankrupt.

But Ford did have to recruit a cadre of number-crunching efficiency experts after World War II — the so-called "Whiz Kids" who had brought statistical analysis to the war effort — to modernize its business. Nonetheless, Ford has often been home to outside-the-box thinkers, from the brash Lee Iacocca to the former Boeing exec Alan Mulally, who rescued Ford from insolvency before the financial crisis. GM continues to embrace the skilled manager, although in current CEO Mary Barra the company has been making tough call after tough call on issues that the pre-bankruptcy GM had endlessly postponed, such as selling the perennially money-losing European division, Opel.

See also: Apply here to attend IGNITION: Transportation, an event focused on the future of transportation, in San Francisco on October 22.

A contest of engineers

Elon Musk shows off one of this vehicles, with help from a robot. Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

Interestingly, with Musk and Scaringe we also have a contest of engineers. Or more accurately, technologists, as Musk's background is in physics while Scaringe has a PhD in mechanical engineering. Don't interpret that as meaning Scaringe is a superior engineer; Musk likely knows more about electric-vehicle design than most people in the business. But while the auto industry is full of engineers in leadership roles, Musk likes to express engineering in a way that's wonky and unique (as well as sort of irritatingly didactic at times). Scaringe is more low-key. But in Scaringe, Musk has a potential rival who can actually out-engineer him, something he hasn't really had to deal with up to this point.

What we don't have with Musk and Scaringe is a contest of celebrities. Musk is world-famous, the basis for the "Iron Man" Tony Stark character — a real-life billionaire and occasional playboy (Musk gets around, but he also has five kids). Scaringe is unknown outside the car business, and not even that well-known in it. I've been covering cars for over a decade and I'd never heard of him prior to about a year ago.

But obviously, even if you know nothing about cars, you're probably familiar with Henry Ford, while Alfred Sloan might ring a bell only if you live in the New York area and are aware of the Sloan Kettering medical centers or the Sloan Foundation's philanthropy.

Iron Man Musk.Jurvetson / Flickr

The historical comparisons aren't perfect. Musk is a creature of Silicon Valley and its embrace of risk-taking, rapid-iteration, launch-now-and-debug-later ethos. He's been compared with Steve Jobs. The business dynamics of the tech industry in the early 21st century are not the same as the car business in the early 20th. Scaringe, meanwhile, has just begun to hit his stride, after almost a decade of developing and pivoting Rivian. He seems fresher because Rivian missed out on the EV-startup surge of the 2010s — a fortunate thing, as most of those startups, save for Tesla, have vanished. Scaringe is a creature of the next wave, which entails a lot more cooperation with Detroit and recognizes that building vehicles at scale is extremely difficult.

Prior to Scaringe, Musk's main rival was often seen as Henrik Fisker, a car designer who founded Fisker Automotive, which went out of business in 2013 (Fisker himself had resigned by then, and the automaker's decline was due to bottlenecks with its battery supplier and the unfortunate destruction of a load of cars in Hurricane Sandy). If anything, Fisker was a more flamboyant and compelling personality that Musk; I've talked to him on several occassions, and his talents as a raconteur are formidable. He's currently engaged in a wide range of projects, from building a supercar to resuscitating electric mobility with a new company, Fisker, Inc.

Read more: The spectacular story of Ferrari's 7-decade journey from an upstart racing team to a $30 billion-dollar luxury brand

The fox and the hedgehog

Tesla's being built. Tesla

To borrow a famous analysis from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, Fisker is a fox to Scaringe's hedgehog (according to Berlin, referencing from an early distinction in ancient Greek literature, the fox knows many things, while the hedgehog concentrates on one). Musk, too, is a fox, engaged with space exploration, tunneling, and artificial intelligence.

At first glance, Henry Ford might seem hedgehog-like, but in my view, he was probably a fox, or perhaps a fox-hedgehog hybrid (as was the novelist Leo Tolstoy, by Berlin's reading). Foxes function well as entrepreneurs, even though they might be single-mindedly devoted to their companies and their missions; Ford started two failed enterprises before the Ford Motor Company — and maybe even three, depending on how you assess his fortunes.

Sloan, meanwhile, found his glory in melding GM with the American consumer, and in a larger sense, postwar life. The definite GM quote didn't come from Sloan, but he enabled the automaker's World War II-era president, Charles Erwin Wilson, to tell Congress during his confirmation hearings to become Eisenhower's Secretary of Defense, that he could make a decision that would place GM and the US in conflict because "I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa."

We're now watching this business narrative of the 20th century repeated in the 21st. Ultimately, this is important because the gestational electric-vehicle industry needs big personalities to sustain and grow it. The first decade has been a mixed bag, with Tesla stumbling through a decade of infrequent profits and serial controversies while the major automakers approach a market that's still quite weak, with halting steps.

Ford and GM are both producing electric cars, but we really need the new Ford and new GM. In Tesla and Rivian we could have not just that, but the leaders who can do for EVs what Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan did for internal combustion.

This time last year, it looked like Apple seemed to be getting out of the luxury watch game when it quietly discontinued its most expensive Apple Watch, the Apple Watch Edition.

The ultra-high-end 18-karat-gold Apple Watch Editions, which cost upwards of $10,000, were spotted on celebrities including Kanye West and Beyoncé after they were introduced in 2015. That model was discontinued after only one year.

The following year, Apple replaced gold with ceramic, and lowered the price to a still-expensive $1,250. But that watch, too, was discontinued in 2018. Last year's Apple Watch Series 4 only came in stainless steel and aluminum, and started at a more affordable $399. (Apple didn't totally forget about ceramic, though: Every Series 4 Watch came with a ceramic back plate, as part of the watch's improved cardiac monitors.)

Read more: Here's how the new $400 Apple Watch Series 5 compares to last year's model

Now, only one year later, Apple has announced that the Series 5 Watch will come 4 finishes: aluminum, stainless steel, ceramic, and titanium, with the two latter finishes being Edition watches.

The ceramic watches will be available in 40 mm and 44 mm case sizes and priced at $1,299 and $1,349. The titanium finish is a first for Apple Watches, and starts at $799.

Apple didn't say why it brought back the Edition watch this year, but according to Apple, the ceramic finish is more than four times as hard as stainless steel and won't scratch easily.

We'll have to wait and see how the ceramic models fare this time around, but let's hope they live up to that promise, since they still cost three times as much as the entry-level aluminum finishes.

Image: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

SoftBank, which is WeWork's biggest backer, has also become an increasingly important customer of the commercial real-estate company.

The Japanese conglomerate accounted for 2% of WeWork's revenue in the first 6 months of this year, according to documents the latter filed in preparation for its planned public offering. That portion was up from just 1% for all of last year and nearly 0% in 2017.

The company also counts Rhône Group, another one of its investors, as a customer. But Rhône accounted for a much smaller portion of WeWork's revenue.

"We have entered into membership agreements and/or other agreements relating to the provision of Powered by We solutions with SoftBank entities and affiliates of the Rhône Group," WeWork said in its IPO paperwork. "We believe that all such arrangements have been entered into in the ordinary course of business and have been conducted on an arm's-length basis."

WeWork's Powered by We service involves building out and managing office space that other companies own or have leased.

SoftBank declined to comment. Representatives of WeWork did not respond to an email seeking comment. Rhône Group did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

In the first six months of this year, SoftBank paid WeWork $28.2 million for leases and other services, according to WeWork's IPO filing. For all of last year, the Japanese company paid WeWork $18.8 million for such services, according to the filing. In 2017 and 2016, SoftBank paid the real estate company about $200,000 and $100,000, respectively.

The ramp-up in WeWork's SoftBank revenue followed SoftBank's investment in the company. SoftBank took its first stake in WeWork in an August 2017 funding round, according to PitchBook. It has invested $10.65 billion in total in WeWork and is reportedly planning on buying another $750 million worth of its stock in the IPO.

Read this:Venture investors still aren't sure what to make of SoftBank's $100 billion Vision Fund. Depending on who you ask, they're either rooting for it, or gleeful that it's struggling with WeWork and Uber.

Ron Fisher, SoftBank's vice chairman, sits on WeWork's board of directors.

Meanwhile, Rhône Group paid WeWork $1.3 million in all of 2018 and $1.1 million in the first half of this year for leases and other services.

Rhône is a partner with WeWork in a real estate venture designed to acquire buildings that WeWork will lease out to customers. Its cofounder, Steven Langman, is a WeWork director.

WeWork has come under fire for its long list of so-called related-party transactions, which are deals involving employees, executives, investors, or other people that could create conflicts of interest. The company has hired relatives of CEO Adam Neumann, given Neuman numerous large loans, and rented space in buildings he partially owned. WeWork also reportedly struck deals with the family members of other top executives, including hiring the parents of Vice Chair Michael Goss as real-estate brokers for a lease in Miami.

The coworking giant has struggled to line up investors for its public offering. Potential investors are reportedly worried about these related-party transactions, its valuation, business model, and potential resilience in an economic downturn.

WeWork is reportedly considering going public with a market capitalization of $10 billion. SoftBank valued the company at $47 billion in January when it made its most recent investment in WeWork.

Got a tip about SoftBank or WeWork? Contact this reporter via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., message him on Twitter @troywolv, or send him a secure message through Signal at 415.515.5594. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

When a Tesla Model 3 carrying Kristian Henderson and her family slammed into a guardrail on the Interstate 95 median in suburban Maryland this summer, the vehicle's side airbags didn't deploy, according to the victims' attorney.

The George Washington University professor was rendered comatose by the impact, causing her serious brain damage, while her son in the back seat also suffered severe injuries, their lawyer, Ted Leopold of Cohen Milstein, said.

Many of those injuries could have been prevented if the airbag had functioned as designed, Leopold said, alleging that Tesla hasn't made the investigation any easier. The attorney sent a routine preservation letter to Tesla in August, but he said the company has yet to get back to him. The family is considering filing a lawsuit if the electric-car maker doesn't respond, he said.

Cohen Milstein "This case will be, to my knowledge, the first case like this against Tesla," Leopold said in an interview. "They certainly have promoted their expertise in the IT area, and I'll be curious from a safety perspective how strong they are and how their development in that area has been."

"These are routine cases for Ford, General Motors, and others," he said.

A Tesla representative said the company did, in fact, respond and was waiting for more information from the victim's lawyer.

Leopold also pointed to documents revealed last month by PlainSite that showed that the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration had warned Tesla to tone down its language with regard to safety. The agency sent a cease-and-desist letter in October after CEO Elon Musk said there was "no safer car in the world" than a Tesla, according to the documents.

"The fact that they self-promote that it's safe when the government told them they can't do that, first-blush indication is that on this vehicle, the safety mechanisms failed," Leopold said.

A Tesla representative declined to comment on the record for this story but said airbags weren't necessarily designed to fire in all circumstances, depending on the crash, according to NHTSA. The representative also pointed to Tesla's five-star crash rating and a blog post saying that the company's vehicles were "engineered to be the safest cars in the world."

Leopold said that marketing effort was exactly why getting ahold of the crash data should be easy.

"Tesla has the ability to monitor their vehicles out on the roadway. Unlike Ford or General Motors or Toyota, Tesla seems to have that ability. Who owns that data? Is it our client? Is it Tesla? Certainly we're going to seek it, and they should voluntarily provide it to us," he said.

Disney chief executive Bob Iger has stepped down from his position on Apple's board of directors, as the tech giant confirmed the launch plans for its video-streaming platform this week.

Iger's resignation was noted in an SEC filing that was released to the public on Friday. The filing was originally made this Tuesday, the same day as Apple's product event, where the company revealed more information about its subscription streaming service, Apple TV Plus.

The Disney chief exec had served on Apple's board since 2011. His presence on the board, however, had become increasingly complicated as of late as Apple's sluggish hardware business forced it to consider alternative revenue streams, like a subscription news service and Netflix-competitor.

Disney itself recently announced a streaming service of its own in April — Disney Plus — further entangling Iger's commitments.

As the New York Times noted, Iger told reporters earlier this year that he would step out of the room when the board started discussing Apple's plans for a streaming service. Iger said, however, that because Apple's business was mostly focused on hardware, he wouldn't have to step out for very long.

Amid Tuesday's news that Apple TV Plus will launch on November 1st and cost $5 per month, apparently Iger decided it was time to step down.

"I have the utmost respect for Tim Cook, his team at Apple and for my fellow board members," Iger said in the statement, first published by the Times. "Apple is one of the world's most admired companies, known for the quality and integrity of its products and its people, and I am forever grateful to have served as a member of the company's board."

Read more: Apple TV Plus is a 'major shot across the bow' to Netflix and Disney. Here's what Wall Street is saying about Apple's streaming ambitions.

Apple responded to Iger's departure in a statement obtained by the Times: "More than anything, Bob is our friend. He leads with his heart, and he has always been generous with his time and advice. While we will greatly miss his contributions as a board member, we respect his decision, and we have every expectation that our relationship with both Bob and Disney will continue far into the future."

Iger's decision to leave isn't the first time a high-powered executive stepped down from Apple's board over potential conflicts of interest.

Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, used to sit down at the table with Steve Jobs as a member of Apple's board. But as the two company's businesses increasingly converged — namely, as competition between iOS and Android heated up — Schmidt said the situation became too awkward and ultimately, he decided to resign.