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

So in this EM world, what would EMs do? In Hanson’s view they would take over all of the work form the humans. Some EMs would do virtual jobs and some would do physical jobs, therefore they would be able to switch from a physical form to a virtual form in an instant as we are able to get in and out of our car to go somewhere. EMs would live mostly in city centers and interact with each other as humans do. And what would humans be doing during this time? Well, first they would all have to retire. After EMs are around humans wouldn’t be able to compete for jobs so they would retire to live off of their savings and live a life of leisure. Hanson believes some humans would have money from creating EMs, because in the beginning the people who are the best in their fields would be sought out to scan their brains for EMs earning big money. Later on younger people would most likely be sought out to create EMs as they would be able to learn new things the quickest. Some may also make money from investments or have mon

Arun Sundararajan is the author of The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism. He is a professor of business at the Stern School of Business at NYU. He is interested in researching how digital technology brings about change in our economy and he has published over 50 scientific papers and over 30 op-eds on subjects related to this research.   The sharing economy is a very hot topic at the moment. How will the sharing economy evolve? How will it impact traditional jobs? How many vendors will succeed in this type of economy? Although we are still in the very beginning stages of this type of economy, Arun Sundararajan’s extensive research allows us to take a deeper look into what a sharing economy actually is and what the future of this space looks like.   When asked what the sharing economy actually is, Sundararajan says he believes that a sharing economy has at least 5 characteristics. One of the characteristics is that a sharing economy takes an activity that was on

Thomas Davenport is the President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College in Massachusetts. He is an author, the co-founder of the International Institute for Analytics, a Fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and Senior Advisor to Deloitte Analytics. He has spent the last 30 years focused on the Sociology of Information, studying and teaching about how people and organizations use information. He currently teaches MBAs at Babson College about Analytics, Cognitive Technologies, Big Data, and Knowledge Management. Thomas is the co-author of the new book, Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines. In the book Thomas and co-author Julia Kirby discuss the rise of job automation and how humans can secure their place in the workplace in the midst of this shift by using the 5 alternative strategies they lay out. The move towards automation in the workplace, while not new, is a controversial subject that is becoming a large part

Jennie Carlson is the Executive and Chief Human Resource officer at US Bancorp.  They are the 5th largest bank in the US, with 67,000 employees.  Jennie has been with the company for 15 years and able to provide valuable insight in this week's podcast. The HR department has a pyramid of shared services.  The normal HR functions such as payroll, employee relations, and recruiting are along the baseline. As the pyramid climbs higher, talent development, advancement opportunities are the focus.  At the very top, the message of how US Bancorp can use people and talent to drive the strategy of the organization cascades down and drives the actions of the entire department.  Other topics this can include are organizational design and fostering a great employee experience to lead to a great customer experience. The role of HR has evolved over the past few years.  The department has seen a shift from an ‘order taker’ mode to become strategic partners that help set the corporate strategy and the organizational design.

Anka Wittenberg is the SVP and Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer at SAP, a software firm based in Walldorf, Germany.  She holds master’s degrees in economics and international business and is a mother of three.  That last note is what helped launch her career since holding two master’s degrees was not enough to get her an interview with the larger firms in Germany just because she also had small children.  This one difference between Anka and the rest of the workforce is what opened her eyes and showed her the need for more diversity and inclusion in the workforce.   This observation has helped Anka become a guest lecturer, author and advocate for true diversity and inclusion in the workforce.   Being the Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer for SAP means that Anka oversees the sustainability of people and the diversity and inclusion of everyone.  What exactly does that mean? That it does not matter the sex, culture, ethnicity, age, or physical ability of a person but ALL types of people need to be i

Beth Taska is the EVP of Human Resources for 24 Hour Fitness, which was founded in 1979 and has over 400+ locations and over 23,000 employees serving 4 million club members.  She has held the CHRO (Chief HR Officer) title and Senior HR positions for corporations such as Clearwire, Gap and Sears.  Beth’s career path was not of the norm, she holds an undergraduate degree in Political Science and a graduate degree in Public Administration and worked for several municipalities around the Chicago area before beginning her career in the HR world.  The CHRO role at 24 Hour Fitness includes onboarding over 17,000 people each year from the very inception when someone begins with 24 Hour Fitness and training these people.  There is a duality with recruitment here because there is a large part of the 24 Hour Fitness workforce that uses their position as a stepping stone and part of the workforce includes people that want a longer tenure with the company.  24 Hour Fitness practices relationship based leadership and pract

Bask Iyer is the chief information officer of VMware and serves as the company’s senior vice president. Prior to VMware Bask was the chief information officer for Juniper Networks and held the same position at Honeywell and GlaxoSmithKline Beechcam. He is an industry veteran with more than 25 years experience within the Silicon Valley based technology firms and more traditional Fortune 100 manufacturing companies. VMware was founded in 1998 in Palo Alto and is a global leader in cloud infrastructure and virtualization software services with approximately 20,000 employees and 6 billion in annual revenues but they manage to retain that “start-up” feel. With that in mind VMware strives to stay on top of the latest technology “wave” and to do that you need talent, the right talent. More to the point with today’s technology and millennial talent: “Yesterday’s news wraps fish”, what you did last year doesn’t matter today. So VMware and Bask are constantly changing with the times and needs to recruit and retain grea

Andrew Wilson is the Chief Information Officer at Accenture.  He leads the company’s global IT operations, where his work helps Accenture enable businesses with increasingly advanced technology. Andrew also aids all of Accenture’s 400,000 workers (this includes guest and contract workers) by making sure all of the technology is running, keeping them connected, productive, and happy as well. Post- Millennial digital services, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat, has set the bar on what Enterprise services must deliver for their employees and customers. Legacy technologies, such as email, are still being used, but are not the focus as the digital experience grows. Accenture offers their own report on the state of technology industry and what it means for enterprises.  This is released in an annual report called Technology Vision Report.  Building and elaborating on prior year reports, new major themes and trends are brought to focus.  Enterprises can navigate this report and apply new technologies to their

Frank Tucker is the Chief People Officer of Taco Bell.  Working with the company for the last 23 years, Frank has made his way through the human resources department.  He has worked in designing employee processes, methods, tools and technology, and has become the Chief People Officer in 2012.  Taco Bell owns approximately 900 stores, which represents 40,000 employees.  A huge part of their business is with their many franchisees.  This adds another 6,000 stores, employing an additional 160,000 people.  Because they are located in all 50 states, it is hard to imagine anyone not being familiar with Taco Bell. Taco Bell looks for really great people to start working with them. In some cases, they understand this may only be a stepping stone for certain employees in their careers. In other cases, there are many employees who want to grow and develop within the company. This includes employees who develop into managers and leaders who run their own franchise.  Education is also a key component for many employees.

Mihir Shukla is the CEO of Automation Anywhere, an enterprise software company.  They are redefining how work gets done by introducing the idea of a digital workforce platform and digital workers that work alongside human employees.  This combination is designed to help the human employee accomplish more than they ever could alone.  Automation Anywhere has 300 hundred employees in 10 offices worldwide.  Mihir’s goal is to become one the world’s largest employer without having any employees. How will they accomplish this? Projections show in the next four years, Automation Anywhere will reach 3 Million software bots worldwide which are producing at the capacity of 3 Million people. While they are a software company, the production levels are so high that they are the world’s largest employer in the digital age. Software bots are digital workers. They can complete mundane tasks, and also tackle more complicated problems as well.  Many employers want their workers to complete today’s problems and tomorrow’s chal

Francine Katsoudas is the Chief People Officer of Cisco, one of the most forward thinking organizations on the planet when it comes to designing employee experience and thinking about the future of talent.  Cisco was started in 1983, and now has 70,000 employees in over 170 countries. It began as a networking company and moved into collaboration/video. They are a very philanthropic organization... one of the current projects in Francine's sector is called Corporate Social Responsibility. It offers networking academies around the globe that help students learn technology. In the last year, they trained a million students!   Francine has been with Cisco for 20 years, the first half of that being in the business field. She was always fascinated with human resources and finally made the move for a few different reasons, including the fact that HR at that time had a wonderful team that she wanted to work with. Francine has been CPO at Cisco for almost 2 years now. The role was originally CHRO until they developed

Kathrin Winkler is the Chief Sustainability Officer at EMC, a massive global organization that offers products that enable customers to store, manage, protect, and analyze data. EMC started with helping businesses store data but evolved as the economy has transformed into the digitization of everything. It is a $25 billion company with 70,000 employees all over the world. Kathrin is a self-proclaimed geek with a pre-med background that ended up in the technology industry. She started in hardware, then worked her way into software, and eventually into networking. She joined EMC 13 years ago in the product management field. Kathrin helped create an informal sustainability program, working on how EMC could reduce its impact and make a more positive effect on the world. In early 2008, the CEO made the program official and established the position of Chief Sustainability Officer that Kathrin now holds.   Sustainability is more than just being green. It can mean many different things to different people but is bas

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith is one of world's top business and leadership experts. He is the author of 35 books, including the most recent bestseller ‎Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be. This and another of Marshall's books were ranked by Amazon as two of the top 100 leadership and success books of all times. In fact, he is the number one leadership thinker in the world! Around 1,500 people around the globe are certified in the process he uses for leadership coaching, and tens of thousands use the process.   Marshall has flown 13 million miles and been to 92 countries on his journey as an executive coach. He got his PhD at UCLA in organizational behavior and accidentally fell into his field of executive coaching while working as a college professor. He is generally hired by the current CEO to coach the future CEO, by the board to coach the current CEO, or by the CEO to coach themselves. He offers a guarantee that if his client's behavior isn't changed after an agreed to peri

Jessica Mah is the founder and CEO of inDinero, one of the bay area's hottest companies. We met in Israel in 2009 when Jessica was just getting started building the company's software with her computer science background. Today, inDinero has 200 employees across 5 locations. Their purpose is to help businesses with accounting and taxes, like an outsourced finance department. One of Jessica's goals for her organization as it expands is to handle growth gracefully and retain culture along the way.   One thing that sets inDinero apart from other companies is their interesting and unique talent practices. Jessica coined ABF talent as a way of rating team members and their performance. A employees are ones that she would enthusiastically rehire given what she knows about them today. B employees are ones that she might rehire but need to show improvement. These team members are put on a program to enhance their performance. Then at the end of the quarter, they will either be fixed or be fired. Jessica is a firm bel

Miguel Gamino is a self-proclaimed "accidental public servant" now working as the Chief Information Officer for the city and county of San Francisco. He was on a little break after starting a couple of tech companies in his hometown in Texas when he was approached by the city manager. Even though it was not an intentional career path, Miguel was convinced to do his civic duty by helping to reshape the technical organization for that city government. He stayed for over two years before being recruited by San Francisco. As the CIO of what is thought to be the center of the tech universe, there are major expectations for Miguel but he believes it is a good challenge.  Miguel was appointed by the mayor to lead the tech strategy for the city and county. He is responsible for leveraging technology to improve the government and how it delivers services, and then advising the mayor and other departments. Miguel is also the department head of San Francisco's central IT department so he really gets to roll up his slee

Dr. Christine Geith is the CEO at eXtension, which is part of the Cooperative Extension System. She has worked in higher education at two universities, including Michigan State most recently. Her specialty is online learning. About three years ago, Christine got involved in refreshing the conversation about the Cooperative Extension System's digital strategy and knowledge dissemination to the public,. Her goal is to help the system's professionals increase their measurable local impact.   The Cooperative Extension System was founded 100 years ago and includes 120 institutions that have different types of funding from the federal government. It is basically a network of people in every county across the United States that is responsible for spreading research based science and innovation to families, communities, and farmers. They share information about food systems, production, family nutrition, solutions for obesity and chronic disease, community prosperity, starting small businesses, protecting and managin

Matt Perez has been in the technology industry for a very long time, working in both small and large companies.  Almost 10 years ago he co-founded Nearsoft with partner Roberto Martinez. Nearsoft helps their software development company clients grow development teams with engineers in Mexico. Clients can then reap the benefits of a team that speaks the same language and works in the same time zone. Currently, Nearsoft has around 200 employees and 3 offices in Mexico. Even more unique than their strong presence in Mexico is the fact that there are no managers or titles at Nearsoft… it is completely self-managed! According to Matt when people start working at Nearsoft it takes them a while to really believe that they don’t have a boss. They have an onboarding process that is currently being expanded from 2 to 6 weeks to help deal with that. The process highlights how to work with clients and communicate within the organization. New hires are assigned a mentor for any questions they may have. Everything, such as

Lindsay McGregor is the co-founder and CEO at Vega Factor, a company that helps organizations build high-performing, adaptive cultures. She is also the co-author of a New York Times Best Seller, Primed to Perform: How to Build the Highest Performing Cultures Through the Science of Total Motivation. Lindsay received her B.A. from Princeton University and an MBA from Harvard, and has worked with Fortune 500 companies, nonprofits, and universities. She started her career working in strategy and found that one question often popped up.. "Do we have the culture to pull off the strategy?" Many companies would chose small, incremental improvements in their culture. She found that it was difficult to convince companies that big culture changes could really impact their performance and bottom line. Lindsay teamed up with Neel Doshi to research what is a great culture. They tested dozens of theories through research around the world, from 50 major companies and 20,000 people. They found that one truly predicted perfor

The way that cities evolve impacts our lives, personally and professionally. Jonathan Reichental works as the Chief Information Officer for the city of Palo Alto, reinventing sectors of the government that are struggling. Cities need a CIO because technology is the center of operations and almost all projects have a technical aspect. Not every city currently has a CIO but we are seeing the shift and demand to take IT to the center of delivering better services to citizens.   Jonathan's office is in the city hall of Palo Alto. They built a civic tech center that looks like a start up, offering on-site training and team building. His team consists of 32 full time staff, plus temporary staff related to different companies like contractors and employees from vendors. Relative to cities of its size, Palo Alto has a large IT group. The city delivers all of its own utilities which generates half of its revenue. The population of less than 100,000 people doubles during the day with workers and students commuting in.

Mark Curtis started his career in the marketing and digital field, and is now the co-founder and Chief Client Officer at Fjord. Fjord is the design and innovation part of Accenture Interactive that employs 750 people in 18 cities... mainly designers spread across the world! The company is growing rapidly due to the increasing demand for service design and the delivery of end design digital products. Mark and his team are responsible for inventing services and laying out the design.   Fjord's recent report, The Era of Living Services, describes how data analytics will be combined with the Internet of Things to create services that come to life! It is based on the thought that we are currently experiencing the third era of digital that adds complexity on top of the previous eras - desktop web and smart phones. These services are described as living because they will change in real time, be all around us, and effect our lives in really profound ways. The Era of Living Services will be very impactful at work, at