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

Michael Arena, PhD is the Chief Talent Officer at General Motors. He is responsible for enterprise talent management, strategic workforce analytics, talent acquisition, executive development and global learning. GM employs 200,000 people across the globe. Major markets include North America, China and South America.   Prior to joining GM, Dr. Arena served as Senior Vice President of Leadership Development for Bank of America's Global Consumer and Small Business Banking group and spent two years as a visiting scientist within the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, where he studied the intersection of human behavior, innovation and social connectivity. He is also currently a Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania.  He is the author of a new book coming out in June, 2018 called Adaptive Space: How GM and other Companies are Disrupting Themselves and Transforming into Agile Organizations. One area that General Motors has looked at is Social Network Analysis, also called ONA – Organizational Netw

In the past we have always depended on humans and their ideas, intuitions, and feelings to figure out certain issues in our companies such as how to build teams, work on projects and carry out performance evaluations. Now, we have an increase in devices and ways to collect data in the workplace so we are able to track anything and everything. With this move towards data collection and technology we have a new field emerging, people analytics. With this new field we are able to add in data and science alongside of our intuitions to help our companies function as successfully as possible. Data can help us figure out things such as, what the most successful leaders in organizations do, what the key qualities are that make up an amazing team or how the best customer service professionals talk to their customers (and for how long). I don’t think that we will ever completely remove the human aspect, but I believe that by combining data with human ideas, intuition and feelings companies will be able to make better,

Teresa Roche, Ph.D is the Chief Human Resources Officer for the City of Fort Collins, Colorado. Sixty miles north of Denver, Fort Collins is home to Colorado State University, with 32,000 students, several large high tech employers, and leading businesses in the brewing industry. There are 2400 employees at the city, with 28 that are in the HR department. There are similarities and differences in private and public sectors. One difference is found in various types of departments that this public sector has - such as a wellness team and a volunteer program manager. In the public sector, there is a requirement to serve all people’s needs. That is quite different as compared to private companies that may focus on one group – the customers.  In addition, there is an emphasis on transparency in public forum. The city of Fort Collins’ finances are available online for anyone to view. Budgeting is BFO – budgeting for outcomes. They have a triple bottom line – social, environmental and economic. Some trends that Tere

A lot of times managers and executives tell their employees how they should act and behave. They explain what their expectations are for the employees and they lay out ground rules for working for the company. But a lot of times those same leaders are not exhibiting those behaviors themselves. There is a fascinating story about Gandhi that can really teach us something about leadership. The story is about a woman whose son was addicted to sugar. No matter what she did she could not fix this addiction in her son. Doctors, friends and relatives all told the young boy to stop eating sugar because it is not good for him, but he wouldn’t listen. Finally the mother decided to take her son to see Gandhi to see if the son would listen to this well respected, wise and pious man. The waited in line to meet Gandhi for a very long time and when they finally got to him the mother explained that her son was addicted to sugar. She told Gandhi her son would not listen to anyone telling him not to eat sugar, but surely he wil

Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates). O’Reilly Media delivers online learning, publishes books, runs conferences, urges companies to create more value than they capture, and tries to change the world by spreading and amplifying the knowledge of innovators. He is also the author of the new book, WTF?: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us When asked about changes in business since the 80’s and 90’s, O’Reilly said it appears that businesses are focused are on the future and their ability to sell rather than building a real business. Another fundamental change is that most of the work is done by a program, the managers of the bots that are doing the work.  There is also a group of workers that are managed by the bots – like Uber. One of the trends O’Reilly is currently paying attention to is AI and automation. Do we use machines to replace people or use them to augment people? O’Reilly believes the future of AI is up to us. They can run us over. Or we put t

There is one thing we as humans possess that technology will never have and if we can hone in on it, we can overcome the technology takeover. The topic of automation and AI in the workplace keeps coming up. A lot of people are worried about job loss and technology take over. One major thing that comes up when thinking about our move to automation is what is going to be the role of humans? What will be our purpose in this new automated world of the future? After traveling all over the country and meeting a ton of people from all sorts of industries and backgrounds I am convinced that our main role as humans is to be human. There are no machines or robots that have our ability to connect, empathize, communicate, and sympathize. We also have the ability to be vulnerable. Technology just cannot replace us in these aspects. So we need to keep learning how to be more human and we have to keep connecting and building relationships. Those of us who are good at being human will grow, expand and continue to be successf

Jeremy Welland, PhD is the Global Head of People Analytics at PayPal Holdings, Inc.  PayPal is an American company with 18,000 employees, operating a worldwide online payments system that supports online money transfers and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods like checks and money orders. PayPal is one of the world's largest Internet payment companies.   He also serves as a faculty member in the School of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of the Pacific.  Prior to PayPal, Welland was the Director of People Analytics at Pandora Media, Inc. He earned his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Michigan. One of the ‘hot topics’ they’ve been working on at PayPal is the subject of diversity and inclusion. One area in particular was focusing on pay parity for women. They have been successful in this and will work to maintain it. To find the truth of what drives people, why people leave, etc., they often will start with asking managers what they believe. The

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