The Future Of Work Podcast With Jacob Morgan | Futurist | Workplace | Careers | Employee Experience & Engagement |

Barbara Humpton is the CEO of Siemens USA, a global company that operates in several areas including industry, energy, healthcare, and infrastructure. They have almost 400,000 employees around the world in 190 countries and Barbara is responsible for over 55,000 of those employees and the company’s largest market with over $23 Billion in revenue and $5 billion in annual exports.     Her journey to becoming CEO has not been a typical one, but it certainly is an interesting one. She studied mathematics in college and initially thought she would be a math professor, like her parents. But after college she got an offer to join IBM in software programming. In 2008 she became the Vice President at Lockheed Martin where she oversaw biometrics programs, border and transportation security, and critical infrastructure protection. She also worked as the Vice President at Booz Allen Hamilton, managing the program performance and new business in the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security, prior to movin

Business leaders at companies around the world are always asking, “how can we standardize corporate culture across all of our locations?” My response is, “do you really want to do that?” Standardizing corporate culture is a subject that comes up quite frequently during my conversations with business leaders at companies around the world. They want to know how they can make it so that whether a person walks into their company in Australia, Japan, England or the U.S., they see and feel the same things. But my question is, “do you really want to do that?”. People across the world are all going to have different behaviors, customs, beliefs, etc…and that’s okay. People in your organization should be able to be themselves at work. So if your office in Sydney, Australia looks different than the one in London, England that’s to be expected. What we really want to standardize across all of our organizations is our values--doing good, collaboration, fun, trust, transparency, integrity--these are the things that should

Wade Foster is the Co-Founder and CEO of Zapier, a company that allows you to connect the apps you use daily in order to automate tasks and save time. The company was started back in 2011 as a side hustle for Wade and fellow founders, Brian and Mike. They now have 200 employees all over the world and over 100,000 customers. All 200 employees work remotely from different locations, they don’t have any office buildings. Some managers might worry about leading a remote team, but Wade says there’s really no difference between leading an in person team versus leading a remote team. Whether or not you can see your team, the only way to know if your team is getting work done is to see the work, not the people themselves. You may have employees showing up to an office space everyday, sitting at their desks all day long, but it doesn’t mean they are being productive. Wade says all managers, whether they have a remote team or not, need to understand the company’s goals, they need to know how to put teams together, and

The game of Chess has been around since the 6th Century AD and it has been a huge part of my life for as long as I can remember. I think all business leaders should learn how to play because there are so many business lessons we can learn from Chess. I am quite obsessed with the game of Chess. It has been a huge part of my life for as long as I can remember and it is something that I really enjoy doing. Chess is not only a fun and challenging game, but it also provides many life lessons. I think all business leaders should learn how to play chess because it can teach us a lot about business. Here are the 6 biggest business lessons I have learned from playing chess: 1. How to work with AI 2. How to look at the big picture 3. Patience 4. How to look at several different situations and figure out what outcomes each may bring 5. How to identify patterns 6. How to be comfortable with the unknown All of these lessons are important to learn and will help you be a better leader. So, if you have some extra time on yo

Kenny McDonald is the President and Chief Economic Officer of Columbus 2020, an economic development organization for the 11-county Columbus, Ohio region. This initiative was started back in 2010 by a team of more than 20 economic development experts who wanted to actively do something to improve their area after the ‘07-’08 recession. At the beginning, in 2010, the team behind Columbus 2020 came up with four main long-term goals that they would focus on over the next 10 years. The goals were: Add 150,000 net new jobs Generate $8 billion of capital investment Raise personal per capita income by 30 percent Earn recognition as a leader in economic development They didn’t want to just recover from the recession, they wanted the city of Columbus to do better than it ever had before. And this strategy paid off, in 2018, just 8 years into their 10-year plan, they had already met three out of the four goals. Now a big focus for Columbus is preparing the workforce of the future. One of the major trends around the f

When we think of traditional HR functions we typically think about hiring, firing, policies, training and rules/regulations. But in the future of work we need a shift in the role that HR plays in the organization. We need HR to not be like HR. I know we cannot ignore the traditional HR duties, but I think those duties should make up a small percentage of time compared to how much time is spent on driving change in the organization. That is what HR should be focusing on. It should be called Human Transformation instead of Human Resources. Why? Because their role should be centered on helping the organization grow, evolve and move forward. HR should be a part of the company, not because legally it has to be there, but because the organization wants and needs transformational growth.

Greg Hanover is the CEO of LiveOps, a virtual call center company that provides services for a wide variety of industries including healthcare, retail, travel, hospitality, and insurance. LiveOps has a little over 200 full-time employees and they have 14,000 independent contractors who work virtually from home. Having a team of virtual agents has allowed LiveOps to be more cost effective, flexible, and innovative than a traditional brick and mortar call center. Having flexible and remote work options is becoming more and more valuable to employees, no matter what industry they are in. But a lot of executives shy away from giving these options because of the concerns that come with leading a virtual workforce. How do you know if they are actually working? How do you measure productivity? How do you create a cohesive corporate culture when not everyone is in the same building everyday? Greg says it ultimately comes down to your communication strategy. Having effective and consistent communication is critical wh

There are many things that make up a great manager or leader. But I have identified one key characteristic that all truly great leaders and managers should have. It is something that employees all over the world consistently ask for and want. It is the ability to think in terms of a coach or mentor. I have been inside a wide variety of organizations all across the world and have found that a lot of organizations say that they encourage and train their leaders to be mentors and coaches, but the truth is the coaching and mentoring only goes up to a certain point. A leader who actually believes in being a mentor or coach to their employees doesn’t stop once the employees get to a certain level of success. The leaders goal is help others be more successful, even if it means the employees become more successful than the leader. But what I often see is that leaders mentor/coach employees up until they reach a certain level of success and then the leader holds the employees back or pushes them down, so as not to be

Dr. Marc Brackett is the Founding Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and Professor in the Child Study Center at Yale University and Dr. Robin Stern is the Associate Director of Partnerships for the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, a licensed psychoanalyst, educator, and author. Dr. Stern is a licensed psychoanalyst, with over twenty-five years of experience treating individuals, couples, and groups, holding a doctorate in applied psychology from New York University. She is on the faculty of Teacher’s College, Columbia University. Dr. Brackett  is the lead developer of RULER (an acronym for the five key emotion skills) which is an evidence-based approach to social and emotional learning that has been adopted by over 1,500 public, charter, and private pre-school to high schools across the United States and in other countries. Dr. Brackett has published 125 scholarly articles and has received numerous awards for his research on social and emotional learning. What is emotional intellige

In this new world of work skills are vitally important. One of the most crucial skills that we can possess is one that could help provide job security even as AI and automation continue replacing jobs. In this rapidly changing world of work and life we live in, one of the most crucial skills we as individuals can possess, is motivation. We have to have the motivation to learn how to learn new things, the motivation to speak up at work and the motivation to experiment. It is such an important skill that the CEO at AT&T told his employees that if they don’t have the motivation to take matters into their own hands--to learn how to learn and to be responsible for their own professional development--then they don’t belong at the company. If we want to succeed, grow and thrive in this new world of work and life we have to take things into our own hands. Are you motivated enough?

DeLisa Alexander is the Chief People Officer at Red Hat, a role she has held since March 2011. She is responsible for leading Red Hat’s global Human Capital team, including Red Hat University College of Leadership and Management. She joined Red Hat in 2001 and served in the office of General Counsel until 2006. In that role, DeLisa was responsible for equity and executive compensation and employment matters. Prior to Red Hat, she was associated with the law firm Kilpatrick Stockton where she focused on mergers, acquisitions, venture capital and licensing. DeLisa graduated with a BBA from James Madison University, holds an MBA from University of Baltimore, and earned her Juris Doctor from George Mason University. Red Hat is a leading software company in the business of assembling open source components for the Linux operating system and related programs into a distribution package that can be ordered and implemented.  They currently employ about 13,000 associates, with about 25% of the population working remot

We all have moments in our lives that stand out from the rest, moments that matter. For me personally some of the moments that matter are the day I got married, the day my daughter was born, and the day I bought my first house. But there are also moments that matter that relate to work, such as the 1st day at a new job, the day you get a promotion or even the day you leave a job. Quite often organizations miss out on celebrating these moments that matter for their employees. Instead of thinking of employees as individuals they think of them simply as workers. In this new world of work where we have such an integration between work and life it is so important to acknowledge these moments that matter and make them special. These moments are what allow us to create amazing experiences for our employees. One example of a missed opportunity is the first day at a new job. If we could set up our employees for a great first experience this could be a moment they truly remember, even 10 or 15 years down the road. But

Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University and the author of a brand new book called Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. He earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, specializing in the theory of distributed systems.  He has two other books, entitled Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World and So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love. What is Digital Minimalism? Cal says It's a movement. And it's a like a rebellion. It's a rebellion against this idea that these small number of companies in Northern California (Twitter, Facebook, Google) should really dictate how we spend our time, and how we feel, and how we think. In recent years people have come to realize it is a problem to be so wrapped up and addicted to social media and technology in general. And people say, "I wanna create my own life, and I'll use technology on my own damn terms." When asked why  he wrote hi

The pace of technology in our world today is faster than it has ever been. We go out and buy the newest phone out on the market with all of the bells and whistles and the newest innovations and then a few months later it is obsolete as there’s a newer, better phone available. We always hear about how technology is benefiting our society. It boosts productivity and innovation, it provides greater accessibility to products and services and it allows for greater opportunities. Technology provides great benefits, but are we using it in the right way? According to a chart created by Our World in Data showing the price changes in consumer goods and services over the last 20 years, we may not be using technology in the best way. The chart shows that the price of TVs, clothes, software, toys and cars have either stayed the same or plummeted. At the same time the cost of things that everyone really, truly needs-- such as healthcare, tuition, and childcare-- has skyrocketed. Are we taking all of the benefits from techn

Aaron Levie is the Co-Founder and CEO of Box, a company that specializes in helping companies securely share and manage their information. The company was started back in 2005 while Aaron was in college. Back then it was him and one other person, but now 14 years later they have over 2,000 employees who serve 90,000 customers around the world. But the road to success wasn’t easy. Aaron dealt with a lot of rejection along the way. When they were initially trying to start Box they received around a dozen rejections, but instead of giving up Aaron kept a positive attitude. He claims, “that was a good week for us, what are you talking about? That was like wow! The fact that people responded saying no was actually a good thing. We were like, “All right, we finally got a rejection””. This is what makes him a great entrepreneur, he held to his convictions and never gave up.    When it comes to leading Box, Aaron works hard to create a culture of openness and transparency. He explains that because the company began w

In my newest book, The Employee Experience Advantage, Airbnb was ranked one of the best organizations for employee experience and there is a rather odd practice they implement that may be helping them create such a successful corporate culture. During every one of their regular company-wide meetings they bring up elephants, dead fish and vomit. Elephants are the big things inside of most organizations that no one dares to bring up, dead fish are the things that are in the past but the employees just can’t seem to forget about them and let them go, and the vomit is the things we need to just get out into the open, the things we want to vent about. Most companies shy away from these topics, but Airbnb is not just addressing them, they are throwing them into the front and center of their company wide meetings. What are your organization’s elephants, dead fish and vomit? Perhaps you aren’t a huge fan of the labels given, but in the end it is all about creating a culture of transparency and trust. So what can your

Douglas is a bestselling author of 20 books, including his most recent, Team Human. He is a research fellow of the Institute for the Future, and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at The City University of New York/Queens, where he is a Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics. Douglas’ work explores how different technological environments change our relationship to money, power, business, and one another. He coined such concepts as “viral media,” “screenagers,” and “social currency,” and has been a leading voice for applying digital media toward social and economic justice. Douglas believes organizations are trying to make humans act more like algorithms when what we really need is to be more human. When asked why he wrote the book he said, “I wanted to write a book in the digital age that helped us really identify and retrieve what makes human beings special, so that we don't accept this incorrect Silicon Valley premise that human beings are the problem and technology is the solution. I

AI and Automation doesn’t have to create the job apocalypse that some people are worried about. We have a choice to make--will AI replace your workers or will it augment them? I have heard both sides of the AI and Automation debate over the past few years. Some people think that our future is doom and gloom and that all human jobs will be replaced. Others feel more optimistic about the subject and they are excited to see how AI and Automation can augment human workers to do their jobs better. One of my recent podcast guests was Tim O’Reilly, the Founder and CEO at O’Reilly Media and Author of WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up To Us. During my interview with Tim, he brought up a really interesting point about AI and Automation and jobs. He believes that what we do with AI is a choice. We can choose to design our organizations in a way that allows AI to replace all the human jobs, or we can change our business model to figure out how AI can effectively augment human jobs. There are many current companies w

Loren Shuster is the Chief People Officer at the Lego Group. He joined the LEGO Group in 2014 from a position with Google as Managing Director of Brand Solutions, Asia Pacific. Loren was also previously with Nokia for 10 years where he worked across Asia and Africa before assuming a global marketing role as Senior Vice President of Go-to-Market in Helsinki. In his current role, he is responsible for The LEGO Group's People Operations and Development. As Chief People Officer, he is mainly responsible for People Strategy, Culture, Leadership Development, Talent Acquisition & Retention, and Reward & Recognition. Loren’s focus is on building the right culture, leadership and talent platform so that LEGO can reach more children around the world and 'inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow'. Loren holds an MBA and Masters in Organizational Psychology from INSEAD. The Lego Group has been around for 86 years; with 18,000 employees, they are a privately-held enterprise, still held and owned by the Christi

Many conversations these days revolve around AI and Automation and whether or not there will be any jobs left for humans in the future. But the truth is, jobs were made to be automated. Our problem is that we are focusing too much on jobs instead of skills, when really skills are greater than jobs in the future of work.  When you focus on a job you typically only give yourself one career path. You may be able to grow in that career path, but it is still a solitary career path; you really limit yourself. Skills cannot be replaced by AI. If you focus on skills you open up many job options for yourself and you secure your place in the future of work.  If we want to future proof our lives, the mentality we have to have is that skills are greater than jobs.