Jacob Morgan is one of the most forward-thinking voices on leadership, employee experience, and the future of work. He is the bestselling author of six books, including Leading With Vulnerability and his latest, The 8 Laws of Employee Experience, released in February 2026. He is a TED Speaker, the host of the podcast Future Ready Leadership with Jacob Morgan, and the founder of the Future of Work Leaders community, a network of CHROs from organizations like Johnson & Johnson, Dow, LEGO, and Northrop Grumman.
Jacob returned to the Elevate Podcast to talk to Robert Glazer about the future of leadership, people-first cultures, balancing high support with high standards, and much more.
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Jacob Morgan On Building A People-First Culture
Our quote for this episode is from Peter Drucker, “The greatest danger in terms of turbulence is not the turbulence, it’s to act with yesterday’s logic.” Our guest, Jacob Morgan, is one of the most forward-thinking voices on leadership, employee experience, and the future of work. He is the best-selling Author of six books, including Leading with Vulnerability and his latest, The 8 Laws of Employee Experience, released in February 2026.
He’s a TED Speaker, the Host of the podcast, Future-Ready Leadership with Jacob Morgan, and the Founder of the Future of Work Leaders community, a network of CHROs from organizations like Johnson & Johnson, Dow, Lego, and Northrop Grumman. Jacob, welcome back to the show for round three. You’re joining a rarefied club.
Thank you for having me. When was the first one? I am curious what year that was.
I’d have to check the dates. Anything that gets around COVID gets very blurry for me, it’s whether it was before or after COVID.
Yeah, it gets blurry for everybody.
A Futurist’s Insights About AI, Blockchain, And Modern Tech
As I said, you’ve been on a few times. We’ve had quite a few new listeners since then. Can you give us just a quick reprimer on your background and your work as a futurist in business?
Sure. This was not an intended career path for me. As many people thought, I would join the corporate world after college. I graduated with a dual BA in Economics and Psychology. Thought I would get an MBA and thought I would one day become the CMO of a company like Coca-Cola or IBM. Had a bunch of terrible jobs working in the corporate world and went off on my own.
Ever since then, I’ve been focusing on the future of work and leadership and employee experience. The topics have changed and evolved over time. There was this theme of Enterprise 2.0 and there was this concept of social business which was around probably around a decade ago. Some of the terms have changed here and there, but the concepts have not. I went back to school at the University of Houston to get a professional certification in foresight.
A lot of people when they hear the title futurist, they just slap it on their linkedin profile because it sounds cool. People don’t realize it’s actually an area of study. You can get a Master’s degree in it. You can get a certification, which is what I did. Over the past several years, I’ve been writing books, speaking, running the CHRO group, which has been a lot of fun, and really just enjoying talking about the future of work and how things are changing.
You’re just thinking ahead. Constantly trying to look at the patterns and where things are going. Where’s Bitcoin going to be in a year from now? Can you stock trade?
I’m actually pretty bullish on cryptocurrencies. I don’t know what the amounts will be, but to me, and this is like a whole we can have a whole separate side episode on crypto and finance, but I’m bullish on the crypto space, I’m bullish on the US economy, I’m bullish on AI. I’m pretty optimistic.
It’s good to be bullish because if you’re a futurist who’s not bullish, then you’re just a doomsayer.
There are a lot of people who say that, “This is going to crash, that’s going to be terrible, no one’s going to have a job, AI is taking it.” there are a lot of people out there who say that stuff. I’m definitely not.
Including the people selling AI, which is probably why AI has such a 20% approval rating. I was reading an article that said nowhere in the history of similar things did people encourage people to adopt it and tell them that it would ruin their lives at the same time. They’re like, “It’s a really weird strategy.”
They have a vested interest in this because all of these companies are raising enormous amounts of capital. They’re all trying to go public.
They’re bleeding enormous amounts of capital too, yeah.
They’re raising tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars at ridiculous valuations. You see Claude comes out and they say, “We have this crazy new model called Mythos,” then what does openai do the following day? “We also have this crazy cool AI model. We’re also going to just release it to a small group because of cybersecurity concerns.” it’s a narrative that they’ve been playing.
It’s been a good marketing campaign. They’ve been doing this for years. I don’t know if people remember several years ago, I think it was either ChatGPT or Claude, they also came out and they said, “We threatened we were going to shut down the model and it ended up blackmailing our users and this and that.” this has been an ongoing narrative with these AI companies for a long time.
What’s interesting is I don’t know generally the truth is somewhere in between. I actually saw that there’s been an uptick in software development jobs. Apparently, when you can develop tons of software and it’s cheaper, you might you can get more leverage off the engineer.
Yes, but it’s categorized differently. There are software engineers, there’s software developers. More on the senior level side, there’s been a massive uptick in that area. More on the entry level side, there’s been a reduction. I think it’s 15%, maybe 20% on the entry level side, but more on the mid and higher level side, it’s been a massive uptick. The AI space has been fascinating. I don’t even know if you saw the news. There’s a company called Allbirds, which used to make, I believe, shoes. Did you see that news?
I did, and I saw it, the stock’s up 700% and it reminds someone showed it to me and I said, “This reminds me of Long Island Blockchain when the Long Island Iced Tea company renamed their name into Long Island and they were bankrupt within like a year.” it feels like if you’re going after a gimmick.
For people not familiar with what we’re talking about, Allbirds was a clothing brand. They made shoes.
The shoe company that has great shoes, I love the shoes, but they just over-diversified and grew way too fast in the ZIRP era.
For people not familiar with the story, the price per share of Allbirds was around $2 to $3 per share. They came out and said, “We’re now going to become an AI company. We’re going to invest in gpus, we’re going to sell AI products and services,” the stock is now from $2.50 to over $18.
Is their new owner own them yet? I can’t tell whether they own them or not yet with this news or else that deal probably just got a little in jeopardy given that it was for $30 million.
I don’t know the details of who’s owning it now, but it’s one of the most bizarre pivots that I think I’ve seen.
As a futurist, I’m sure you’ve seen everything before. Go look up Long Island Long Island Blockchain. Remember blockchain? Everyone was blockchain. Same thing.
Every company said that they had an AI model and every company was investing in AI. I empathize with a lot of the leaders out there who are trying to figure out what is actually BS that’s floating around and what is stuff that they should be paying attention to because they just get smacked over the head dozens of times a day by the next greatest thing.
My answer is you should be in it and you should be playing with it and you should understand it. You may not want to bet your whole business on it. I also don’t think you can afford to not use it or understand it now because it’s like these other things. Again, you have a horse and buggy delivery service and people have these thing called a car. Soon it’s going to make your horse and buggy delivery service.
I used Claude for Excel and worked on this big project with all my financial stuff that I was trying to fix over the years for tax time. That was like having a genie inside Excel. I was like giddy laughing. You can’t compete against someone who doesn’t use that. Now you have to have a baseline understanding of Excel to but I don’t know how much you’ve used it. Powerpoint, actually the plugin, not so helpful, but the Excel one was crazy.
I use Claude, it’s my preferred tool now. I use Claude and chatgpt, I have them play off of each other sometimes, but I find the analysis from Claude just to be much better. It’s funny, as we’re talking, I was just looking at the Allbirds website. You can still buy shoes.
AI shoes. It leads just to see what happens. Feels like a SEC investigation. Feels like a pump and dump.
Yeah, very bizarre. Somebody’s making away with something over there.
Launching A CHRO Community
Alright, so since you’ve been on last, you’ve launched a brand-new book on employee experience, we’ll talk about it. You launched your CHRO community, RO community, and we just started talking about the business world’s been shaped by AI. What’s been the biggest shift in your thinking over the last two years?
I’m curious, these CHROs, what is the tone between scared, overwhelmed, excited? This is a long question. One thing that I think is interesting is as we really leave this ZIRP, zero percent interest rate world where companies could just grow and burn money and then figure out the people out afterwards, it seems decidedly that that playbook is not going to work going forward and so people are going to need a different way.
The era of virtual free money was pretty nice.
Actual free money too, yeah.
Yeah, actual free money, exactly. Those were good times for a lot of people out there. I think for a lot of just CHROs and business leaders in general, they feel very overwhelmed and unprepared. Speaking for CHROs specifically, and we have almost 40 CHROs in the group, which is called Future of Work Leaders, FutureOfWorkLeaders.com for people who are curious.
The big conversation for CHROs now is around, “Do we own AI or does the CTO own AI?” who should be owning AI inside the company? What impact is it going to be having and how should we be thinking about what this means for the future of work at our company? I think the struggle for a lot of organizations out there is they are trying to get as many people to use these AI tools as possible without thinking of the potential consequences or repercussions of doing so or without doing it in a responsible way. If you have this powerful tool, let’s say you have a company with 50,000 employees and all of a sudden, one day everyone shows up to work and you say, “You have this new AI tool now, go use it.”
“Go use it or we’re out of business.”
Exactly. They’re outsourcing their critical thinking, they’re outsourcing their judgment, and there’s just a lot of potential negative consequences and repercussions that we have not thought through beyond just looking at, “It might save us money or it might let us let go of some people.” there’s not a lot of thought. I think there was a study that came out that said 80% of employees are still willing to trust AI even if it gives them the wrong answer.
Some companies have been explicit, and leaders like, “You own the outcome. You own the report,” right? There are some guidelines you need along with it.
There’s a lot of challenges happening with this AI space. Just trying to grapple with AI and what this means for the future of work is a big topic. I always tell CHROs, “You are now the Chief Future of Work Officer.” Specifically from that perspective, I think there’s a lot there that companies are trying to grapple with. Just rapid change across the board.
The Right Way To Leverage AI Tools
I could make really compelling arguments on both sides of this case. Particularly when you’re talking about with HR. How do you get to the point where you’re encouraging people to play and do stuff and break some eggs and figure it out and figure stuff out? At the same time, I can imagine HR could cripple this in terms of, “We can’t do anything, you can’t do this, there’s state laws.”Some companies are getting private sandboxes to mitigate this problem. I could make a compelling argument that letting people go rogue with AI and then it’s going to create all these lawsuits and also not letting people play around and try.
We’re getting to the point where some people have fully automated their jobs. There was some story about this years ago and Verizon fired the guy. I would have been like, “Let’s bring you in and figure out how you did that.” There’s people like if you didn’t notice that they had fully automated some task, clearly it was working and but slapping them on the wrist? I could argue with myself on this.
That’s why you have these AI tools, you can argue with them as well. I think there are two things here that don’t mesh well together. One is speed and one is governance. Two things there, which I’ll unpack in a minute, but it’s not just the companies, but if you remember in educational institutions, in college, in high school, if you were using AI, you were reprimanded as it being bad. Colleges were telling you, “Don’t use AI for anything. It’s bad, it’s terrible.” A lot of people graduated from these four-year universities being told that they shouldn’t use AI and that it’s bad.
They’re expecting the 22-year-olds to tell them how to automate all this stuff. This is what I say to my kids in college. I’m like, “People are going to hire you expecting you to know how to do this and tell them how to do it.”
We completely we stigmatized something that we should have really put more of a spotlight on, similar to your story, like Verizon got rid of the employee instead they should have said, “How did you do this? What can we learn from this?” This happens in a lot of areas. We tend to be wrong. We thought blue-collar work was going to get automated and white-collar work was going to be safe. Now what do we see? White-collar work is getting automated and if you’re in the trades, that’s where we see the biggest gaps and the highest growth and the biggest opportunity.
Everyone thought blue-collar work will get automated. However, it is white-collar work that is being automated.
We were wrong in a lot of different areas here. Getting back to your original question, speed and governance don’t go hand in hand. I think the big challenge for a lot of companies now is they’re trying to figure out, “Do we go fast or do we go ahead in a more safe way?” If you look at countries like China, they’re surpassing the United States in a lot of the agentic and AI stuff because they don’t have copyright laws, they don’t have the same rules and restrictions. They just say, “Go, go, go.”
In an organization, you have a choice. If you want to be able to put in as many guardrails and safety nets and as much security as possible, you’re going to be limited by the models that you’re using, by the quality of outputs that you’re going to be able to get, by the things that you’re able to do. Similarly, if you are willing to unleash and unlock everything, you have to deal with the potential consequences that there might be mistakes, there might be repercussions, and you’re going to have to go back and make adjustments.
One company, and I won’t mention them, they told me that they unlocked their AI tools for their whole organization. One employee at the company built their own like AI tool for employees to use. It got a lot of widespread adoption in the company, and then the company realized, “Wait a minute, we’re spending a ton of money on tokens for these employees to use this,” they had to throttle it back. Again, they learned from it, they saw the mistake, and then they brought it in. I think that’s a tough choice for organizations right now.
The Biggest Thing Companies Get Wrong About Employee Experience
The new book, The 8 Laws of Employee Experience. We can get into we can get into a few of those eight. What’s the single biggest thing companies are getting wrong about employee experience now?
I think there are a few things. It’s not that dissimilar than one of the things that I talked about in my original book that came out in 2017. I think during and post-pandemic, a lot of organizations really lost their way. The big callout for the book is that it’s time to get back to basics. During and post-pandemic, companies tried to be anything and everything to anybody. As a result, they became nothing to everybody.
Right, even doing remote work or in-work well is different playbooks.
Yeah. We became so desperate to keep talent, we lowered standards, we created ridiculous perks and benefits, we gave people bonuses. We did everything we could because we were scared to lose people and we wanted to get people. I think that’s one of the reasons why now you actually see so many layoffs that are happening. We’re using AI as a scapegoat to justify it.
If you’re a public company and you do layoffs, you say AI. You get a stock push, not which is the truth, and then someone will flash like with what’s Jack Dorsey’s company Block. They’ll flash something showing that since COVID, they had hired 500% more people. Yeah, coming out of the ZIRP era, every problem was solved by adding people, it just seemed for years in companies.
Again, if you as a publicly traded company say that you’re letting go of people as a result of AI, you get viewed as being forward-thinking and cutting edge. If you tell people you’re letting go because of bad numbers or bad strategic decisions or hiring mistakes, you get viewed as being a poorly run company. One will give you a higher stock price performance and one will give you a lower one. Regardless of what the truth is, you’re going to say AI because the market’s going to respond to it as we saw with the announcements from these companies. Their stock price went up after they made these statements.
I think that’s one of the big things that organizations are trying to figure out. How do we get back to the basics of what matters at work? This is why companies are saying get back to the office. This is why they’re saying, “We’re removing some perks and benefits.” This is why organizations like Amazon and Meta are asking their leaders, “What did you work on last week or last year? What are some of the things that you accomplished?” It’s back to accountability, back to responsibility, removing performative work that now AI can take over, and much more ownership and getting back to how work should be.
Balancing The Power Between Employer And Employees
There’s so something in that I think you’re saying but not saying that I’d love to dive into. Obviously, it became a little accommodative. It actually reminds me of the problem that universities have gotten into where now they’re charging so much that they have a hard time holding the line because the people see themselves as a customer paying $90,000 a year and they’re making all these ridiculous demands. I think employee perks and things that started to not be about the work, companies getting involved in social initiatives and things that were not about the work, people thinking that that stuff was more important than what the company delivered.
It does seem that companies who really waded into that without being authentic. My example is always like if you’re REI, like you expect them to talk about climate issues and environmental issues and it’s very aligned to their business. I think it created a little bit of an obfuscation of like, “Your job isn’t to provide all of my needs in life and meet my things that I’m interested in.”
There’s a job to do that this company has a product or a service and we need people to do good work and deliver good work. Clearly, there were a lot of people I would say with a lot of these layoffs. The truth is I’ve heard leaders say, “We did these cutting costs and our revenue started growing.” It’s not like the people weren’t working, it’s just whatever that group was doing didn’t really matter.
No, I agree. So the subtle thing that you think I’m saying but not saying.
No, the subtle thing in that was a lot of the stuff outside of the company. I think a lot of things became around politics and social justice and opinions and benefits and my flexibility. I’m not saying that employers have a little more power, but I don’t think that they should be abusing that. Obviously, this is a balance beam that goes unfortunately back and forth.
Yes. During and post-pandemic, I would say employees had around 80% of the power. Now I would say it swung back and employers have around 80% of the power. To be honest, that’s how it should be. I always use this fun analogy. I have two kids. If my kids say that they want to have ice cream and cookies for dinner, it’s not a 50-50 decision-making. I’ll listen I’m not going to like throw my kids across the room. “You want to tell me? I’ll hear what you say.” I’m going to respond and say, “Great, I’m glad that’s what you want, that’s not happening in this house.” I appreciate you wanting cookies and ice cream.
During and post-pandemic, employees had around 80% of the power. Now, it has swung back to the employers.
Same thing for organizations. The organization is paying you your salary, they’re giving you your equity, they’re giving you your bonus, they’re giving you your retirement plan, they’re paying for your tools, your resources, the space in which you work, food if you have it, whatever other benefits they might offer. Yes, they are taking on the risk, they are making the investment.
It’s not an entitlement.
They shouldn’t treat you poorly, they should still treat you respectfully.
It’s like ghosting. Candidates shouldn’t ghost and employers shouldn’t ghost. It’s not it’s not a good behavior.
I think that organizations having more of the power is a good thing and that’s how it should be. Again, with the caveat, they should give you learning and growth and development opportunities, leaders should have your back, you should feel like you can speak up and share your ideas, it shouldn’t be a toxic environment. You as an employee, if you’re under the assumption that you can take a job for a company and then somehow say, “I don’t want to come to the office,” or somehow think that you’re going to be dictating terms, that to me is a very unrealistic view of the world and of how the corporate world works. I think there are a lot of reasons why that’s the case, but that’s not reality.
I was on a panel right after COVID, maybe 2021, ‘22, and they said, “What do you think everyone’s going to be looking for next year?” I don’t remember what my answer was. It was a HR-oriented crowd and someone said, “I think people are going to be looking to work on what they want to work, where they want to work, and how they want to do it.” I just couldn’t leave that alone. After she said that, I went back and I was like, “I got to say, that’s a problem.”
Did you say that during the panel? You called her out?
I did in a much more diplomatic way than this. Remember, this was the 1099 peak in era too. I was like, “That feels like a contractor, like an Uber, like I want to set my lifestyle thing. If you’re part of a team, you can’t say those things. That’s not being part of a team.”
“I want to work when I want, how I want, on my terms, on my this, on my that.”
She said it in a nicer way, but people are going to be looking to work how they want to work on the projects that excite them and the something else.” I was like, “That’s all great but that is rogue individualism.” We haven’t talked about this yet, but being on a team has inherent sacrifices. This is the same problem with people who have utopian versions of how societies can work. Being part of a community that works means that you can’t optimize for yourself all of the time. That’s one of the definitions of that.
Yeah, you can’t be on “Team You.” I completely agree. I think we’re very much aligned on some of the things that we saw during and post-pandemic and so I wrote even on my Substack the beginning of the year, I think I said, “2026 is the year of accountability and responsibility,” where these things are now becoming front and center.
Again, I want to preface because sometimes I say these things and people will send me angry comments. We’re both prefacing by saying the company should treat you well, not create a toxic environment, give you opportunities, growth, mentor, like all that stuff, I agree. It’s not about the company being a jerk and like holding it over you and like forcing you to work 90 hours a week. Again, it’s the company that should have more of the control. I think that, like I said, that’s a good thing.
What An Ideal Company Culture Looks Like
Even more simply, let’s imagine the product that you’re working on is you have those things and it’s shrinking and it’s losing more money every year. You shouldn’t expect that there isn’t a conversation coming about that. What are we going to do about that.
We’re seeing now so much of the pushback, whether it’s return to office. I know several companies during and post-pandemic where they would give employees, for example, free food or free massages or therapists, where now I talk to employees at those companies and they say, “It’s not free anymore, it’s subsidized.” We can get these things a little bit of a discount, but now we have to pay for them.
It’s really hard to take back entitlement, but it’s also right, entitlements are called entitlements for reason. K, to the office thing, let’s use that as an example. I think saying like, “Come back to the office because I said so,” and throwing a tantrum and making it a power thing is not what you want to do. Saying like, “Look, the function of our business and how we want to meet requires this in-person and if that’s not what you want, we’re happy to figure that out with you, but for how we want to run our business and the culture we want to develop, this is really important.”
That’s what Jamie Dimon said.
I wasn’t Jamie Dimon the first part a little bit or no?
He was one of the first people who came out and said, “Look, I’m noticing an erosion in our culture, I’m noticing that people are not paying attention in virtual.” he went specific. He said, “I want people back to the office.” If you look at the growth of jpmorgan compared to every other bank during financial crises, during times of turbulence, they have grown, they have weathered every storm. They are arguably the most successful bank on planet Earth. I don’t think that’s by accident. I think Jamie Dimon is very intentional about the culture and the business that he wants to create.
I think intentionality is key. Look at spacex, look at any of Elon Musk’s companies. Nobody is under the assumption that you’re going to go work at a company like that and work 32 hours a week or 40 hours a week. You know you’ll go there, you’re going to get paid very well, but you’re going to work 50, 60, 70, 80 hours a week with some of the smartest people on planet Earth trying to tackle some of the world’s biggest challenges.
They’re clear about that. If that’s what you want, come here. If you want work-life balance, don’t come here. Uber recently went on the Diary of a CEO podcast and he called out specifically, “If you work at this company, you’re working hard. If I send you an email, I want you to respond back on the weekend, I don’t care what time it is,” like he was very clear.
Right, and people should be able to self-select into that. If they’re being honest about that, then you shouldn’t go there and say you don’t like it. You could have chosen. I appreciate the companies who try not to be anything to any everyone and they say, “This is who we are and these are the right people that that would be here.” the problem is a lot of them don’t say what the actual culture is, but yeah, in those cases, it shouldn’t be a surprise.
I had a conversation with Patrick Lencioni and we were talking about the difference between inclusivity and exclusivity. We were talking about this idea that a lot of organizations try to be too inclusive, meaning they try to say, “We don’t care what your values are, how hard you work, what your beliefs are, what your goals are, everybody just come here.” That’s not what culture is. Culture is meant to be an exclusive set of people who are aligned with the values and the direction and the culture of the business. It’s not meant for everybody.
Culture is meant to be an exclusive set of people who are aligned with the values and the direction of the business. It is not meant for everybody.
Before anyone writes any hate mail, because I know you and I agree on that, that you share some unmovable values. That doesn’t mean that people are the same, that doesn’t mean they’re carbon copies, but you have to have some consistent values of why you come to work together. In fact, I have found that the companies who claim to be most inclusive and the perceptions are almost exclusive because I saw a survey that said that Gen Z wants, 80% of the people want to work at a company that shares their values or shares their opinions on something like that.
I was thinking like, “Everyone can’t have the same opinion, so you only want to work with people that agree with you?” People who fight against that then make illogical arguments like that and I’ve talked to Patrick about this topic and you find again even higher ed institutions of education, they preach inclusivity and all they try to do every year is make their numbers look like it’s harder to get into. It’s a funny game.
The Slippery Slope Of The Cult Of Purpose
I have a name for this. In the book I have these five potential futures that I talk about for employee experience, and one of them is called the cult of purpose. That is exactly what I think we saw in a lot of organizations. The idea here is when you create it’s almost a company that is too pure and too aligned on something where the values are filters through which every single decision gets made. What ends up happening is you create an environment where everybody believes the same thing, everybody is so aligned, and there’s no dissent. There’s no like, “Wait a minute, I don’t know about that.” It’s like, “No, you can’t speak up against the cult of purpose.”
That’s what a lot of universities have become.
Yeah, it’s a little bit like the Borg. At first glance you look at that and you say, “Well, that would be nice because it creates such deep engagement, people join the organization because they so much believe in the work,” but eventually the values then shift from purely being values to being dogma. You create a culture where dissent feels dangerous and where you might get ostracized or potentially lose your job.
Although Patrick thinks companies have been hypocritical. He actually thinks if you’re going to do that, then just tell everyone that that’s what it is. He thinks companies recruited people under one premise and then they came in and they got this story afterwards rather than like, “Look, don’t come here if you’re not this faith or this belief or this whatever because you’re really not going to like it.”
Being honest up front is correct. No company, I would think, would come out there and say, “We don’t value dissent, we don’t want you to speak up and share your opinion.” maybe there are some out there. The “cult of purpose” is when it when you have potentially good intentions but you almost want to become so pure and so noble that anything that goes against is shunned and people start to leave and it creates a weird environment.
Alright, so give me the 8 laws for everyone reading and then I’m going to ask you to pick maybe dive in your 2 favorite children there.
The two favorite laws. Do you want me to give you like a quick sentence for each?
Yeah, just give me a flyover on all of them so everyone can get a sense of what they are.
Okay, and I jotted them down here because it’s hard to remember.
This was a test. If you have notes, that’s all good. You have too many rubrics. People ask you stuff and you’re like, “I don’t remember exactly what that was.”
Law number one is Decode the Human Signal. That really just means know your people, but know your people on a human level and a tech level. Law number two is Act with Empathetic Excellence, which I suspect just based of our conversation you’re going to want to talk more about.
Yeah, I was starring that one.
This was in relation to a lot of the DEI backlash that we saw and I think this is at least a new useful framework that that I’ve used with several organizations. Law number three is Grow or Go, which basically means that learning is becoming a new form of job security inside of a company where if you give people the opportunity to learn and grow, they can move around instead of just having to leave. Four is Design for Flexibility, flexibility not just in terms of where you work, but flexibility in terms of being able to potentially shape your career path inside the organization. This is a future state. Again, all of the things I talk about in the book I’m looking out maybe 5, 10 years.
Law number five is Make People the First Principle. This is not just values on the wall, but how do you actually make people the first principle? Six is for all the leaders out there, and it’s Lead Like the Experience Starts with You. It’s not an HR thing, it’s not a somebody else thing, it’s a you thing. Seven is Use Technology to Amplify Humanity. The last law is Run Culture Like an Operating System, the same way that you have on your phone or on your computer.
Why You Should Put People First
I’ll pick two. Let’s start with putting people first. Often a phrase. I think some people might say, “But some of the stuff you were talking about was really about putting the company first or the company’s needs or the company power.” What I actually had an experience at a company a week ago that I felt like was really living this.
A Southern company and they had their annual meeting, it was a safety meeting.They paid for all their physicals, gave them bonuses if they got their blood drawn, they gave all these awards for people who found safety holes in the business and you got the understanding that they were really incentivizing people taking care of themselves. What’s your framework on that and how does that work with a like employers have 80% of the power?
It goes back to the idea and I’m sure you’ve seen this a lot as well, there have always been companies that they have the values that they hang on the wall, they have the, “This is our culture, this and that,” but they don’t really mean it. When I say, “Make people the first principle,” I have this framework in the book that talks about four dimensions of value at work, of what it means to make people the first principle.
The first one is Social Value. These are things that the organization should try to create for their people. Social value is thing like team connection, collaboration, shared purpose, you you get the social element from there. Second one is Moral Value. For example, how does the company respond during tough times? Do you feel that you’re working for a moral organization that is actually doing the right things that it says it’s going to do?
Professional Value. This is where you get things more like compensation the traditional elements there. Emotional Value. That’s things like recognition, do you feel like you have psychological safety, etc. Make people the first principle means that you try to create these four types of value at work for them. If employees have those four types of value, they feel like they want to be a part of the company.
Now make people the first principle doesn’t mean that they have more say than the organization. It means part of what we talked about. The organization has the power, but you do the things for the people that that are required to make them want to be a part of an organization and do a great job. I have a framework that I like to use for companies and that is. Do you understand what makes a great day, a week, month, quarter, and a year for your people?
Most organizations have no idea. Frequently what I’ll do is we do these exercises with CHROs and I’ll ask them what is a great day and all that stuff for their employees. That’s what making people the first principle means. It means do you are you giving them those four types of value that they need at work? If you are, I would say you’re doing a very good job.
Is that an inward-looking morality? We were talking about before, I think that gets complicated if you start weighing in on all sorts of external things.
Moral value is things like, “Do I trust my leaders?”
How they make decisions at work, how they behave, not what my company takes stands on or opinions on or anything like that.
If the company’s going through a tough time, what is it going to do? Is it going to try to figure out how to take care of employees or is it going to cut us right away? The company’s investing in AI. Is it going to just get rid of us or is it going to try to figure out how to upscale and reskill us so that we can still stay employed with the organization? It’s more strategic business decisions and how employees are treated. It’s not looking at social justice or DEI or any of those types of things. It’s specifically looking at the work and the people there from that.
Do you have data? Is there some data on particularly the social justice element? Has this been a net benefit for companies in terms of with their employees or has it caused more consternation? Again, I thought this premise was pretty interesting. I really want companies that agree with my positions or whatever. I like how most of the times, a lot of us, even if we agree on the problem, we don’t agree on the solution. I understand some consumer brands have to do this or to but I actually also not sure that companies should have opinions. I think that’s inherently polarizing.
I can’t speak to the broader social justice topic because that’s a very broad topic. Specifically to the DEI element, I highlighted a couple surveys in my in my book of where researchers, they took people who looked physically different but thought the same. They took other people who looked the same but thought different. They had them do various experiments, solving puzzles and this and that.
Consistently across the board, all the researchers found that what matters most isn’t how you look, it is how you think. The big argument that I make in the book is cognitive diversity is ultimately what matters most inside of an organization. That’s what I tried to show in the book when we think about those things. A lot of the research that I have found specifically finds that it’s not the physical diversity that we should be caring about inside of organizations, it is the cognitive diversity, how we solve problems how we think through things. Again, to your point, we’re in a team dynamic, we’re solving problems, we’re trying to accomplish a goal, and so from that regard it makes sense why you want people who can approach that problem with different viewpoints and perspectives regardless of how they look.
We need to disagree, but whatever those 2, 3 , 4 cultural principle red lines are, we have to agree that those are the non-negotiables or else, we’re just a bunch of individuals. We’re not coming together for any purpose.
I had Frank Dobbin on my podcast. We did a conversation, it was called The Flaws and Failures of DEI Programs. Frank is sociology department chair at Harvard, he is one of the, I think, the leading experts in this whole diversity space. He’s published numerous papers in academic studies which have found that a lot of the DEI programs inside of companies actually did far more harm than good.
Just in terms of morale, in terms of how they were deployed what they did to people, how they made people feel guilty, the resentment that it like, they just in general created far more harm than good. You can make the argument that maybe it’s just the programs should be done differently, which is again, people have made that argument. At least what I have seen, again, the cognitive diversity piece should matter more for any type of team dynamics.
How To Seek Out Cognitive Diversity
Obviously, people know how to seek out surface-level diversity. How should they seek out cognitive diversity?
You ask questions. “How would you solve a problem? How would you approach this?” Case studies. I don’t know if you ever had this experience, but when I graduated college, I remember I was trying to interview for various organizations and they would always ask these really strange questions and I couldn’t figure out, “Why are you asking me these questions?” years later I finally figured it out. One of the questions I went into, they said, “How many skis are sold in the United States every year?”
Yeah, the consulting questions.
I was like, “What?”
Manhole covers in New York.
Yeah. “If you had your same mass but you were the size of a of a nickel and you were trapped in a blender, how would you get out?” I remember I would hear these questions, I’d be like, “What?” They would say, “We just want to hear how you think. We want to hear how you would solve the problem.” I would go through and I would say, “Okay, well I’m going to guess that this is the number of people who ski, these are how many skis.”
They buy it every five years.
I went through that process and they wanted to hear how I think. Am I analytical? Am I able to process information? Am I just going to guess? Am I going to use something from my life experience or from my schooling or am I a skier? They wanted to see how you would think to solve a problem. Now, you can make the argument whether those questions are valid or not, that’s beside the point, but those questions help you process information. I have two kids, and so if they ever have challenges at school, I always ask them questions to see how they process information.
I can see the way that they process information versus their friends, for example, is different. My daughter plays competitive chess. She has friends who are in acting or in gymnastics. If you ask all of them a question whether it’s about, I don’t know, philosophy or religion or, “What do you think of does God exist?” or “How would you solve this problem?” they all have a very different way that they would solve the problem. My daughter has a more analytical, strategic problem-solving mind. Somebody else might have more of a creative approach to solving it. You can ask questions and get a sense of how a person will approach a problem and that to me is the most, I think, useful useful skill and criteria that we should be looking at when it comes to building and creating cohesive teams.
Understanding Contradictions In Emphatic Excellence
We may we may have touched on it a little bit, but what was number two again on the list?
Number two, Empathetic Excellence?
Yeah, Empathetic Excellence. There’s contradictions built into that. How do we how do we manage that?
Empathetic Excellence is really about three elements. Competence, merit, and empathy. Competence is obviously can you do the job? Skills, knowledge, capabilities, etc. Merit is how the organization rewards you for your competence. Your compensation, benefits, etc. Empathy is, I think, what binds everything together. It’s being able to see the full person. Challenges that they had to overcome, obstacles, aspirations, fears, etc. I use the story of my dad in the book.
Empathy is what binds everything together. It is being able to see the full person and the challenges they had to overcome.
My dad was born in the Republic of Georgia. When he came to the United States, he didn’t speak any English. He was an engineer in the Republic of Georgia, so he was an engineer by trade. He would go to a lot of job interviews in the United States and he would get turned down nonstop, left and right. He would have to fly across the country, save up money, sometimes people wouldn’t even show up for the job interview. Finally, he goes to a job interview to become an engineer and the person’s interviewing him, and after the interview the guy says, “Okay, we’ll get back to you.”
At that point my dad had had it, he’d been jerked around nonstop by so many different companies, he said in his broken English, “You know, just tell me right now. Tell me now if I got the job or not. You interviewed me, you interviewed everybody else, just tell me if I got it.” It turns out the person interviewing my dad was the president of the company and he reached his hand across the table and said, “Congratulations, you have the job.” Now, in that case, you make the argument. Was my dad the most qualified engineer for that position?
Now, he could obviously do the job and do a great job, but maybe there was a phd who was being interviewed there. Maybe there was somebody with a Master’s degree or somebody who was more perhaps technically capable above and beyond my dad. Why did my dad get the job? At least what I believe and what my dad has shared with me is because the person saw what my dad had to overcome to get that job. He saw how hard my dad had to work, he saw the initiative that my dad took to want that job. He saw him not just purely from your capabilities, but who you are.
Isn’t that though character? Your capabilities without character doesn’t perform very well in the workplace.
Yeah. Exactly. I’m sure there were lots of phds and fancy people who would just go into the job, “Thank you so much,” then leave. My dad was like, “I want this job. I want it! Just please tell me if I got it.” My dad shared with him how hard, he had to come thousands of miles from the Republic of Georgia, how he had to learn how to speak English by watching the Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin shows for eight hours a day with an English-to-Russian translation dictionary. He shared how he’d have to sit in front of a mirror for hours a day trying to mouth out English words. The guy who’s hiring my dad is like, “Wow, you clearly are willing to do whatever it takes to be successful. Right? You’re willing to do whatever.”
How long did he have that job for?
I don’t know. I think it was a few years.
That was his big break.
Yeah, that was, I think, one of the first jobs he had in the United States. He was living in low-income housing in in New Jersey with a bunch of other immigrants and foreigners. That to me is the empathy piece. When somebody can look at all of that and say, “Not only do you have the qualifications, but I also see what you’ve had to do to get here.”
Now, it’s important to stress that Empathetic Excellence doesn’t mean lowering standards. It’s not about saying, “Well, you’re not really that qualified, but I’m going to give you a chance because you did all these things.” It’s about saying, “You clearly have the requirements. I know that you can do the job. I like your character. I’m going to give you an opportunity to go above and beyond and to rise to meet the expectations that we have at the organization.” It’s not about bringing things down to you.
There’s a mantra I I’ve been using a lot, leadership. “High support, high standards.” Happy to support you, believe that you can make that extra leap, but the bar doesn’t get lowered because we made that choice for you.
Yes, 100%. That is how I look at Empathetic Excellence. I think you need all three of those things. In the book I have a Venn diagram of how those three overlap. I’ll give you just a couple examples. If you only have competence and merit and you don’t have that empathy piece, you get what I think exists in a lot of organizations and that’s the performance treadmill. Where you’re running on the treadmill and it’s just, “Okay, work harder, we’ll pay you more, work harder, we’re going to pay you more,” you’re just dangling the and that’s it. There’s no human there.
If you only have competence and empathy, you get a stalemate. It’s a feel-good culture and, “I want you to feel good here and I know you’re really good at your job, but I’m not sure if I’m going to reward you,” it’s like, “What’s happening?” If you have merit and empathy but no competence, you get the coddled mediocrity trap.
That’s the worst in my book.
That’s the worst thing that you can have. You need all of these things to come together.
Why Every Company Should Differentiate Themselves
There were a few things I was going to ask you about. They come together in my mind. We talked about this return to office and where we’re going to be moving out of last time we talked about, what did you call it Pinocchio’s Island for employees? The free food and therapists and accountability. It was a great it was a great name. I think the quote was, I had a note that you had talked about some CHRO who described her company’s culture as a culture for children. We’re correcting on this stuff.
I think coming out of COVID, what it was, like everyone sounded the same. We touched this a little bit more on with Uber. In terms of culture expectations, in-office, out-of-office, how important is it is it more important that companies differentiate now and that people line up to that? I feel like, as you said, everyone was saying the same thing before and just trying to keep up with the Joneses. It feels like that’s the totally wrong approach.
Yeah, of course every company should differentiate. Just like every family should differentiate, every person should try to differentiate, every business should try to differentiate. It’s interesting because whenever I talk to companies and sometimes they’ll share these crazy perks or benefits that they’re offering and I would say, “Well, why are you doing these things?” they always say, “Because our competitors are doing them.”
They never say because we believe in them deeply or our employees.
“We believe in it deeply, we’re trying to stand out, we’re trying to do something different that nobody else is doing,” it’s always because, “Well, our competitors are doing it and if they’re doing it we want to compete for talent, we got to do it too.” So at a certain point, when does that stop? If a company’s going to start giving a horse to every employee, are you going to do that too?
You just made me laugh. It was years ago and I was getting a tour of Google’s first office in New York. It was like a hotel concierge staff and they were showing us around and I had a visceral reaction to sound like what we’re talking about. They were telling us there’s a kitchen and whatever, but the developers, they all have mini-refrigerators in their offices so they don’t have to go get the stuff out of the kitchen. They were selling this as a benefit and I was like, “This is the worst possible message that you could send.”
Making your company unique. Say what you will about Elon Musk and spacex and Tesla, those companies are differentiated, they’re unique. Jamie Dimon’s company is unique. There are a few organizations out there where you know. REI’s unique, Patagonia is unique. I think it’s important for companies to be unique because you want to attract people who are aligned with that uniqueness.
It’s like dating. When you are looking for your spouse, your significant other, if you try to be just like everybody else, you’re going to be single for the rest of your life. Ultimately, you want to find a partner who falls in love with you for you. Whatever your unique quirks and characteristics and flaws and whatever might be, this person is going to accept them, they’re going to maybe find some of them charming and funny and humorous and love you for you. The same thing is true for an organization.
If you try to be like Google, then the company’s going to say, “I could just go work for Google.” why would somebody want to work for you over somebody else? This gets back to the theme of being very exclusive instead of being so inclusive. Again, we’re purely talking about alignment with values, with character, with vision, with goals and aspirations. I think that’s been one of the big challenges. This is why I say companies have lost their way and they need to get back to basics because they’re trying to be anything and everything to anybody and it’s not good.
What Leadership Now Looks Like In The Age Of AI
I know you weren’t high on leadership coming out of COVID. I actually think one of the challenges has been that we had a lot of leaders who grew up in this zero-interest-rate environment and just not so easy to flip a switch from being a growth-at-all-cost leader to a profitability and value-oriented leader. Where is leadership now and particularly with AI, what is the DNA of a future successful leader and maybe just over the next five years going to look like?
Yeah, I think there are a few things. I can maybe touch on one thing, I don’t need to go into all five. In the book I have a concept called The Five Archetypes of Future-Ready Leadership. I think one of the most important things, and I wrote about this, for a lot of leaders is the idea of human prompting. Human prompting, if you think about it, we’ve been very obsessed over the past 1, 2 , 3 years of trying to figure out, “How do we put the perfect prompt into AI to get the most accurate and the best result possible?”
The unintended consequence, again, when everybody’s using AI. If we’re in the same team and you deliver some piece of work to me and I know that you’re using Claude, my job now as a leader is to pull Robert out of Claude. I have to human prompt you to get your personality, your discernment, your judgment, your critical thinking because I know that you used Claude. I might ask you questions like, “Is there anything that you think Claude missed? Did you disagree with anything that Claude said? If you had to expand on something here, what would you expand upon? Did you disagree with again.” I’m trying to pull your critical thinking out of it.
If you didn’t have any, then that’s a whole different discussion.
Yeah. The reason why this is a new skill because in the past, you didn’t have these AI tools so it was very safe to assume that the work that you were submitting, I would see you and we would be able to talk about it. Now, everybody’s just simply regurgitating what AI tells them to say, as a leader, I have to now pull the humanness from all of my employees who I now are using these AI tools. A lot of leaders are not used to that, they don’t know how to do that, they don’t know what questions to ask. They don’t understand. What are the unique human capacities that you have that AI doesn’t? I think there’s a lot there for leaders and they’re just not prepared. Things like pattern recognition, intuition. I have to be able to pull that out from you instead of just assuming.
All this human stuff is more important in the world of AI. I keep saying to people, if they use AI too much to the point where it degrades their capabilities that allow them to compete against AI, they’ve sped up their own demise in some ways.
Disagreement is one example. AI’s not going to disagree with you. It’s only going to agree with you and it becomes this this sycophant and there were some studies that were done on this too. Even if you’re wrong, it’s just going to further your wrongness and make you think more highly of yourself even though you’re wrong. Disagreeing is a very human thing that AI will never do.
AI will not disagree with you. It becomes this sycophant that will make you think highly of yourself, even though you are wrong.
Having skin in the game. AI makes decisions and it’ll tell you things but it doesn’t have a vested interest in any in any outcome. It’s not an owner, it’s not being paid. It doesn’t care. You, your team, your customer, you all have a vested interest in decisions that are made. These are unique things I have to pull this out of you and understand the context of the things that you’re doing. Again, this is all stuff leaders are just they’re not prepared to do. They don’t know how to human prompt.
Get In Touch With Jacob
Jacob, where can people learn more about you, your work, the book, the forum? Where do they go?
Yes, there are a few places. My newsletter is Future of Work Newsletter. The group is called Future of Work Leaders for CHROs. My email, in case people want to send me angry comments, is Jacob@TheFutureOrganization.com.
They can copy me if there’s anything I said, yeah.
Send all the angry comments to Robert, guys. He really made me say all these things. My website is TheFutureOrganization.com if anybody wants to reach out.
Very tight branding. Thank you for coming back for round three and you pump these books out so I’m sure we’ll be having a round four in a few years. There’s always a future, although I heard like they don’t even write sci-fi books anymore because they become true like within a couple of years.
All the best ones have already been written.
Alright, to our readers, thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d appreciate if you could leave us a review or just share the episode with your friend as that is what helps new users discover the show. Thank you for your support and until next time, keep elevating.
