I was reminded of this warning when I visited Memphis, the home of FedEx and its CEO, Raj Subramaniam, to interview him for our Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast. The 35-year company veteran is leading the logistics giant through multiple transitions—cutting billions in structural costs and retooling the company for the AI age. Openness to change is fundamental to FedEx’s culture, Subramaniam told me, remarking, “If you don’t like change, you’re going to hate extinction.” My story about our conversation can be read here.
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Across global business, we see again and again that the leaders who are winning are those who embrace change. Take Amazon: Founder Jeff Bezos once dubbed his mentality “Day 1”—holding on to the scrappiness of an ambitious startup, where the priorities are growth, innovation, and survival. “Day 2 is stasis,” Bezos wrote in a 2016 shareholder letter. “Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”
Three decades after its founding, it still seems to be Day 1 for Amazon—even though it’s now literally the biggest company in the world: Amazon has topped the Fortune Global 500, knocking Walmart off its pedestal. The company has continually reinvented itself across new businesses and bold bets—including a $200 billion capital commitment, largely to building its capacity for AI and cloud computing, in this year alone.
If you ask Bezos about reaching that milestone, as Kristin Stoller did in “No. 1 on the Fortune Global 500: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos on how his garage startup became the largest company in the world by revenue,” he will admit the news wasn’t exactly a surprise. That doesn’t mean he saw it coming in his Bellevue, Wash., garage in 1995. “You could not…have predicted the magnitude of change that would occur,” Bezos told Kristin. “And anybody who did predict that magnitude of change would probably have been quickly institutionalized.”
Running toward change to avoid going the way of the dodo is a theme throughout this issue. Case in point: GE pulled off one of the most impressive transformations of the century under CEO Larry Culp, who broke up the stagnating behemoth in order to save it (“How GE CEO Larry Culp pulled off the turnaround of the century“). As billionaire activist investor Nelson Peltz told Fortune’s Shawn Tully, “I was sure GE was going to file for Chapter 11. Then Larry arrived and performed the most amazing rescue.”
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Change is also afoot at Apple: With a CEO succession underway, the company that rose on the strength of its paradigm-shifting design in the Steve Jobs era is trying to rekindle some of that magic under a product-forward new leader, John Ternus. With the AI race accelerating, the stakes couldn’t be higher, as Sebastian Herrera writes in “Can Apple’s incoming CEO bring back the product design mojo of the Steve Jobs era?“
Finally, Jeff John Roberts catches up with Pershing Square founder Bill Ackman, who has ridden out booms, busts, and personal heartbreak without losing his faith in the possibility of change—or his determination to be the one driving it (“The American Dream according to Bill Ackman“).
May these stories give you ideas for your own next chapter. Thank you for being a Fortune subscriber.
This article appears in the August/September 2026 issue of Fortune.
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