Good afternoon, readers. I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend!
There’s no shortage of COVID news from the past several weeks. For one, Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine was cleared for use in the U.K. and doses could begin reaching certain Americans in a matter of weeks.
On the flip side, U.S. cases and hospitalizations are absolutely skyrocketing. Wednesday saw America reach the grim milestone of the most COVID deaths, more than 2800, in a single day.
Of course we’ll be delving into all of that in detail. But for once, I’m going to focus on non-depressing news: There at least some corporate leaders out there who are revolutionizing their business strategies for the better in the midst of the COVID pandemic while becoming more attached to their workforces despite not even being in the same offices.
And it’s all thanks to technologies which have become essential such as Slack and Zoom.
“The [tech] CEOs have kind of come together, and we’ve been able to share best practices, learn from each other, get through the pandemic as we’re running our businesses,” said Box CEO Aaron Levie during the Fortune virtual Brainstorm Tech conference on Wednesday, referring to a Slack channel which the Silicon Valley crowd uses to brainstorm ideas about dealing the pandemic.
Those kinds of brainstorms may range from business strategy to how employees are dealing with work from home, as well as the best way forward.
The idea of corporate America crowdsourcing coronavirus ideas with software they were already using is the definition of making the best of a horrible situation. But another comment which stuck out to me was from Jennifer Tejada, the CEO of PagerDuty.
“We acquired a company [during this period], and I think that transaction went through faster than it normally would have,” she said.
Read on for the day’s news, and see you next week.
Sy Mukherjee
sayak.mukherjee@fortune.com
@the_sy_guy
