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CHAPTER 3Digital Empowerment

Technology has the ability to be the great equalizer and so we really need to focus on this as a society, and on how we do this the right way.

—Jacky Wright, chief digital officer, Microsoft

Donna Morris was less than a month into her role as Walmart's chief people officer when the retail giant saw its first stateside case of Covid. Late on a Friday night, Donna was in her rental apartment in Bentonville when she got the call to come to the company's Emergency Operations Center (EOC) in northwest Arkansas early Saturday morning. Located in the company's home office, the EOC is where associates physically and virtually gather to deal with any kind of emergency, whether a natural disaster, a fire, or, in this case, a pandemic. With her bags and boxes not yet unpacked from her recent move from California, Donna immediately pivoted to crisis mode, preparing to head back to the offices in the early morning with no idea what she was about to face. When she arrived at the massive complex, she found her way to the situation room in the back, where about 40 colleagues were studying an entire wall of digital screens. The monitors were live streaming data from Johns Hopkins that showed the number of Covid cases across the country and the virus's rapid, state‐by‐state projected trajectory.

“We immediately started thinking about how we were going to run our stores, distribution, and fulfillment centers while protecting the 1.6 million associates who worked ...