Future Ready Leadership With Jacob Morgan

April 22, 2026: What does it actually take to build an organization where people perform at their best? In this episode, I'm breaking down what I call Empathetic Excellence — and it comes down to three things: competence, merit, and empathy. Not one of them. All three. I share two stories that have stayed with me — one about my daughter Naomi on the tennis court, and one about my father's first job in America — that I think capture this better than any research study could. I also get into why calling meritocracy a myth is a trap, what two dystopian novels from the 1950s and 60s can teach us about the workplace today, and why the diversity conversation inside organizations needs to shift from what people look like to how they think. If you lead people — or want to — this episode is for you.

April 21, 2026: Amazon commits $33 billion total to Anthropic in a landmark deal securing 5 gigawatts of compute — the equivalent of five nuclear power plants — while Anthropic's revenue triples from $9 billion to $30 billion run-rate in months, signaling we are past the pilot phase. Meta installs tracking software on employee computers to capture every keystroke and mouse movement as training data for AI agents — examined here against the full context of $73 billion in Reality Labs losses, an AI model that trails its competitors on agentic benchmarks, and a photorealistic AI clone of Zuckerberg designed to replace human management conversations. And the Wall Street Journal goes inside BlackRock's AI transformation, where the world's largest investment firm is rolling out firm-wide agentic platforms and human "squads" to oversee AI — with its own head of AI admitting no one has fully cracked the nut yet.

Technology is moving faster than ever, and many of us feel the pressure to keep up without losing our human touch. We need a clear path to help our teams embrace change while building a culture of trust and growth.
In this episode, Lisa Coulson, SVP and Chief Human Resource Officer at Principal Financial Group, joins me to talk about what it means to build an AI-literate workforce at its core within financial services. We explore how their data literacy and employee training program reached 90% of workers and how internal AI tools helped with their AI adoption.
Lisa shares their step-by-step "funnel" approach to reskilling and upskilling, the impact of AI in leadership development, and how to build an internal talent marketplace to match employee skills with new roles.
We also tackle the necessity of governance in a regulated industry and the ongoing challenge of measuring AI's ROI and productivity gains during a workforce transformation. This episode is every CHRO's clear guide for leading a digital shift while keeping the employee experience strong.
Watch the full video on YouTube
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Start your day with the world's top leaders by joining thousands of others at Great Leadership on Substack. Just enter your email: ⁠⁠https://greatleadership.substack.com/
Quick heads-up: my new book, The 8 Laws of Employee Experience, is a practical playbook for building an environment where people do their best work—order a copy here: 8EXlaws.com

April 17, 2026: Employer power has officially returned and workers are accepting things they never would have a year ago — but is that actually a bad thing? Then, teen boys are dating their AI chatbots and experts are warning about what that means for the future workforce. And finally, Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report reveals that global employee engagement has hit a five-year low — and what employees say they actually want from their leaders might surprise you.
Watch the full episode on YouTube.
 
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Start your day with the world's top leaders by joining thousands of others at Great Leadership on Substack. Just enter your email: ⁠⁠https://greatleadership.substack.com/
If you lead people, you design experiences—do it on purpose with The 8 Laws of Employee Experience. Order now: 8EXlaws.com

April 16, 2026: Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.7 this morning — a significant upgrade focused on complex coding and self-verification that changes what human oversight of AI actually needs to look like. Bank of America posted near-record earnings and credited AI, spotlighting a new tool for its 18,000 financial advisors that raises important questions about what happens when information advantage disappears from knowledge work. A major new global survey from WalkMe finds 80 percent of enterprise workers are actively avoiding AI tools, and new Gallup data shows Gen Z's enthusiasm for AI is collapsing fastest among daily users — pointing to a crisis of institutional trust that no training program can fix. And the CEO of Indeed argues the entire AI-and-jobs debate is focused on the wrong threat: demographic contraction, not AI displacement, will define the next 50 years of work — and almost nobody is preparing for it.