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

So many us work for organizations where don't feel valued and appreciated. We only live once and we all deserve to work for organizations that genuinely care about us and create environments where we genuinely want to show up. Don't you want to work for this type of an organization?

Heather McGowan is the Co-Founder, Author and Advisor for Work to Learn. She speaks internationally on the future of work and the future of learning. She advises and partners with education and business leaders to most effectively prepare for rapid and disruptive changes in learning, work, and society. In higher education, McGowan advises presidents and senior leaders to develop students’ learning agility as well as critical thinking skills in order to prepare graduates for jobs that do not yet exist. McGowan also guides corporate executives to re-think and re-frame their business models, and their understanding of team and organizational structures, to be resilient and successful in changing markets. She is the co-author of the book Disrupt Together: How Teams Consistently Innovate  and numerous well-received articles. In looking at the future of work, which skills will benefit future students and educators? McGowan suggests seeking to understand, to learn and adapt.  Work on upgrading your “Operating syste

Peter Walmsley, the Chief People Officer at GSN Games, is an experienced and committed leader with extensive Executive Human Resources experience in multi-national organizations across the USA; Europe; Asia and North Africa. He has a track record of success in setting the strategic direction, driving organizational change, providing leadership for the function, developing and influencing critical business relationships and delivering results aligned to business goals in places such as American Express and Fidelity. GSN Games is a leading provider of cross-platform entertainment, including social casino games and skill tournaments designed to fuel every player’s inner winner. They are based primarily in the US and India. Part of GSN, - Wheel of Fortune on TV. About 500 people, it is the design and development of these games. Founded in 1999 as skill games site WorldWinner.com, the company has evolved into a premier social, mobile and online games company. Working at GSN involves an open workspace with game con

Jenny Dearborn is the Chief Learning Officer and Senior Vice President at SAP,  a global software company. Dearborn leads an internationally-acclaimed and award-winning team recognized as the #1 performing corporate learning department in the world by eLearning Magazine. As global Chief Learning Officer for the 67,000 employees at SAP, Dearborn is accountable to design, align and drive SAP’s overall learning activities to enable measurable business impact. She is also an author of a new book, The Data Driven Leader. Before SAP, Dearborn began her professional career as a high school teacher. After a brief stint in that role, she moved into education in the business world. She was Chief Learning Officer at SuccessFactors for two years where she won numerous industry awards for the measurable business impact of her sales enablement initiatives. She was at Sun Microsystems for 6 years where she was the global Chief Learning Architect across all corporate content and was the Chief Learning Officer for the Americ

My conversation today is with Rebecca Chandler, the Chief Learning Officer and Global Director of the Learning Group at Steelcase. We are talking about real life examples of what Steelcase is doing to promote learning and development, how learning has evolved over the past few decades and how leaders and managers can role model the desired learning behavior in their organizations. Rebecca Chandler is the Chief Learning Officer and Global Director of Learning and Development at Steelcase. Steelcase is a global organization that provides furniture solutions that reflect what they’ve learned about human behavior. It employs about 14,000 employees. Chandler is charged with making Steelcase the pacesetter for learning organizations worldwide. Steelcase looks to her team for learning solutions that are linked to the needs of the business, and to progress in creating learning that is globally integrated and holistic in nature. Learning is embedded in the culture of their organization, Steelcase views it as just anot

Marc Goodman is one of the world’s leading authorities on global security and the New York Times Bestselling author of Future Crimes: Inside the Digital Underground and the Battle for Our Connected World —selected by the Washington Post as one of the 10 Best Books of 2015 and by Amazon.com as the best book of 2015 in Business & Investing. Goodman founded the Future Crimes Institute to inspire and educate others on the security and risk implications of newly emerging technologies. He also serves as the Global Security Advisor and Chair for Policy and Law at Silicon Valley’s Singularity University, a NASA and Google sponsored educational venture dedicated to using advanced science and technology to address humanity’s biggest challenges.   Beginning his career as a police officer, over the past twenty years Marc Goodman has built his expertise in next generation security threats such as cyber crime, cyber terrorism and information warfare through work with INTERPOL, the United Nations, NATO, the Los Angeles

Susan Steele is the former CHRO at Millward Brown, the former CHRO at Deloitte Consulting and currently she is an Executive Partner of Global Talent & Engagement at IBM. Steele has had repeated success at building and turning around the HR function, driving new sources of revenue, enhancing client care and improving business results. With IBM’s more than 350,000 employees around the globe, there is a great deal of innovation in HR. For example, when a candidate is using a cognitive tool called Watson – a job finder or candidate fit tool - it can assist them in the application process.  In fact, anyone can use Watson, just go to IBM.com and look for the career site. Watson is part of the career page. Most recruiters are working on filling 10 -15 roles at any one time. Using Watson to prioritize the candidates is very useful. Recruiters also use Watson to use to see which candidates will be successful. Even with all the Watson technology, it is still only making recommendations to humans. It isn’t handing o

Bill Schmarzo, author of “Big Data: Understanding How Data Powers Big Business” and “Big Data MBA: Driving Business Strategies with Data Science”, is responsible for setting strategy and defining the Big Data service offerings for Dell EMC’s Big Data Practice. As a CTO within Dell EMC’s 2,000+ person consulting organization, he works with organizations to identify where and how to start their big data journeys. He is a University of San Francisco School of Management (SOM) Executive Fellow where he teaches the “Big Data MBA” course. Big Data is a term. The adjective ‘big’ has no meaning. Most companies are interested in looking at the ‘boat load of data’ they have but are not sure what to do with it. Right now, companies are only looking at the data to see ‘what happened’. “The biggest challenge from IT side and business side is to understand how they can understand data to effectively power their business model.” Dell is using data to do predictive maintenance on their equipment. The goal is to fix devices b

Jacob Morgan is an author, speaker and futurist living in the Bay Area. He recently started a new Facebook group called, The future if. This group is a global community of business leaders, authors, and futurists who explore what our future can look like IF certain technologies, ideas, approaches and trends actually happen.   Jacob is also working on a new course called The Future of Work Crash Course. This will go live in a few weeks. It is a companion course for his newest book, The Employee Experience Advantage.   He is looking at writing another book, sometime in the next few years. In addition, Jacob is looking at creating more interesting podcasts and interviewing new, fascinating guests.  What themes have stood out for Jacob from hosting this podcast?  First of all, Jacob says he’s learned a lot in the past 3 years and it turned out that a lot of people also enjoyed learning along with him. The podcast gets about 4000 – 5000 listens per episode, about 30,000 downloads per month.   One thing

Today’s guest is Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, author of Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. During our conversation Seth talks about what it was like to work at Google and why he left, how he went about analyzing the data for his book, why he believes we are all liars, and what he learned about our true human nature.   Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has used data from the internet -- particularly Google searches -- to get new insights into the human psyche. A book summarizing his research, Everybody Lies, was published in May 2017. He worked for one-and-a-half years as a data scientist at Google and is currently a contributing op-ed writer for the New York Times. He is a former visiting lecturer at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Seth received his BA in philosophy from Stanford, and his PhD in economics from Harvard. The area of big data that Seth researches is ‘social science questions about what people want and need’. It is very straight

Michael Bungay Stanier is the founder and senior partner of Box of Crayons, a company that works with organizations, ranging from AstraZeneca to Xerox, to help them do more great work. A Rhodes scholar who earned both arts and law degrees with highest honors from Australian National University and an Master’s degree from Oxford, he is a popular speaker at business and coaching conferences, and was named Canadian Coach of the Year in 2006 He is also the author of a number of books, his latest book, The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever, was published in February 2016 and is a bestseller. Bungay Stanier talks about how it is possible, in 10 minutes or less, to ask strategic questions to drive changes in behavior, have a more engaged, smart, autonomous team that will allow you to work less hard and have more impact …if you stay curious. The 7 essential coaching questions that he talks about in his book are: What’s on your mind? This open ended question brings up things t

Cathy O’Neil is a mathematician who has worked as a professor, hedge-fund analyst and data scientist. Cathy founded ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing company, and is the author of Weapons of Math Destruction.  Cathy says she was always a math nerd. She loves the beauty of mathematics, and says it is almost an art – the cleanliness of it. One of her favorite things is that math is the same no matter what country you go to. She also had had an interest in the business world, which led her from academia to work as a hedge fund quantitative analyst.   Big Data is both a technical and marketing term. The technical term depends on the technology you are using. Big data used to mean that it was more data than you could fit on your computer – now it means more that you can perform in a simple way – that it needs to be put it into another form before it can be used.  The marketing term, ‘big data’ is misleading. However, it represents the belief that you can collect data for one thing but then the same data can be

Perez-Breva, PhD is an expert in the process of technology innovation, an entrepreneur, and the author of Innovating: A Doer’s Manifesto for Starting from a Hunch, Prototyping Problems, Scaling Up, and Learning to Be Productively Wrong. (MIT Press 2017). Currently Perez-Breva directs the MIT Innovation Teams Program, MIT’s hands-on innovation program jointly operated between the Schools of Engineering and Management. During his tenure, i-Teams has shepherded over 170 MIT technologies to discover a path to impact. He has taught innovating as a skill worldwide to professionals and students from all disciplines; and has gotten them started innovating from pretty much anything: hunches, real-world problems, engineering problem sets, and research breakthroughs. There is a lot of confusion around the term Artificial Intelligence – AI. What is it? “Today AI is essentially an aspiration. What we do have is – a lot of – automation, machine learning, data learning and robotics.” The dream is to have a partner. Google s

Blake Morgan is a keynote speaker, a Customer Experience Futurist and author of the new book, "More is More: How The Best Companies Work Harder And Go Farther To Create Knock Your Socks Off Customer Experiences.”  She is also my wife. Blake is an adjunct faculty member in Rutgers University’s executive education MBA program. She contributes to Forbes, the Harvard Business Review and the American Marketing Association. She hosts The Modern Customer Podcast and a weekly customer experience video series on YouTube.  More is More is about hard work. Blake says that companies today cannot sit on their laurels. “The only thing that will differentiate themselves from their competitors is customer experience.” Customer experience is what the customer thinks of the brand. It doesn’t matter what a company thinks, the customer has        preconceived ideas of what it is.  The book discusses – a ‘D.O. M.O.R.E.’ framework.  This is not just spending more money but making customers lives easier and better.  Do More comes

Nilofer Merchant is the author of The Power of Onlyness and the recipient of the Thinkers 50 #1 Future Thinker Award. Nilofer began her career in business 25 years ago as an administrative assistant, and quickly rose to division leader, to CEO to board member of a NASDAQ-traded company.  She has personally launched more than 100 products, netting $18B in sales and has held executive positions at Fortune 500 companies like Apple and Autodesk to startups in the early days of the Web (Golive/ later bought by Adobe).  Logitech, Symantec, HP, Yahoo, VMWare, and many others have turned to her guidance on new product strategies, entering new markets, defending against competitors, and optimizing revenues.   The term ‘Onlyness’ was coined by Merchant because it captured something that couldn’t be characterized in any other way. The way in which ideas are becoming the nucleus of all valued creation, it’s no longer about organizations or the capital that comes from that – it’s about ideas. ‘Onlyness’, is the spot in

Leena Nair is the Chief Human Resources Officer for Unilever. Since 1992, when she joined Unilever as a trainee, Leena has had many firsts to her credit. Prior to her current role, she undertook a wide range of HR roles in India  and currently, she is the first female and youngest ever CHRO of Unilever. Unilever is a Dutch-British transnational consumer goods company co-headquartered in Rotterdam, Netherlands and London, United Kingdom. Its products include food, beverages, cleaning agents and personal care products. It is the world's largest consumer goods company and is also the world's largest producer of food spreads, such as margarine. With 170,000 employees, Unilever is one of the oldest multinational companies; its products are available in about 190 countries. “I can’t talk about being ‘more human’ if I am not living it every minute of the day.” Leena’s commitment to creating a more human experience is embodied in the way she functions each day. She gives 100% of her attention to the people she is mee

Dr. John J. McGowan,  is a PhD and he serves as the NIAID Deputy Director for Science Management. In this position, Dr. McGowan provides leadership for scientific, policy, business, and administrative management of the Institute and conducts senior-level interactions with the extramural community, other National Institutes of Health (NIH) components, and the NIH Office of the Director.   The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It is comprised of 27 separate institutes and centers of different biomedical disciplines and is responsible for many scientific accomplishments, including the discovery of fluoride to prevent tooth decay, the use of lithium to manage bipolar disorder, and the creation of vaccines against hepatitis, Haemophilus influenzae (HIB), and human papillomavirus (HPV).  NIH represents a different world than private sector organizations – the public sector. For example, they are requi

Nolan Bushnell is a technology pioneer, entrepreneur and engineer. Often cited as the father of the video game industry, he is best known as the founder of Atari Corporation and Chuck E. Cheese. Currently, he is Co-Founder/Chairman at Modal VR, HearGlass Inc. and Brainrush, where he is devoting his talents to enhancing and improving the educational process by integrating the latest in brain science.  Atari was started in September 1970. Everything about it was hard. This was before the microprocessor was invented. It was a ‘paranoid’ company; it always felt like others were at their back. Mostly, there was a sense of urgency to get things to market within the shortest time possible.   It was also a very innovative culture. Perhaps the first to have a beer tap in the office! The ‘beer light’ was lit every night at 6 pm – people were encouraged to come in and share their problems and also their ideas. This informal communication style was purposeful; there were no executive parking spots. This egalitarian

Georgia Collins is the Senior Managing Director and Co-Leader of the Workplace Strategy Practice at CBRE. CBRE is a Global commercial real estate company that ‘helps clients identify opportunities to reduce and/or reallocate their costs, more effectively manage their resources, improve employee engagement and make decisions faster’.  With specific responsibility for research and development, Collins’ focus is on enhancing and expanding their service offerings so that clients can better understand, and more effectively deliver, environments and services that improve employee effectiveness and act as competitive differentiators in the war for talent. Collins has more than 15 years of experience in the field of workplace consulting. A recognized leader in the industry, Collins’ project experience spans a wide range of markets and industries. Prior to joining CBRE, Collins led strategic business consultancy DEGW’s North American practice where she led significant engagements for companies like Autodesk, Cisco, eB

John Hass is the Chairman, President and CEO of Rosetta Stone, a language and literacy company with around 1,000 employees in the U.S. and around the world. Prior to Rosetta Stone, Hass spent two decades at Goldman Sachs both in New York and in Chicago. He was in the advisory part of the company working with Fortune 500 companies around the world on strategic initiatives.  Learning another language has a lot of benefits, whether you are taking a language class in school as a 4th grader or whether you are learning some key phrases in another language for business purposes as a 40 year old. Some of the impacts that go beyond just learning another language, are creating a cultural awareness, inspiring empathy and rewiring your brain to make it easier for you to learn in general. Hass says learning another language is, “a demonstration of a willingness to meet someone halfway, when you’re working with someone cross border, cross culturally, your willingness to speak their language, to be part of their environment