Future Ready Leadership With Jacob Morgan

March 20, 2026: 
The White House dropped its national AI legislative framework today — I go through the whole thing, because there's a provision about preempting state AI laws that is one of the most consequential things to happen in AI policy in years.
A columnist at The Sunday Times made an argument that stopped me: the real AI risk isn't losing your job — it's what happens to your retirement if AI disrupts your career at 50 instead of 30. Most people aren't thinking about it this way. They should be.
Jensen Huang proposed paying engineers in AI tokens worth half their salary, on top of cash. I explain what tokens are, why elite engineers are leaving high-paying jobs over GPU access, and what it means that the unit of value in the AI economy is shifting from time to compute. The New York Times is calling it tokenmaxxing.
And JPMorgan deployed AI to monitor junior bankers' hours — not because they're over-reporting, but because they're deliberately hiding how much they're actually working.

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/
Stop patching problems and start designing an intentional workplace. The 8 Laws of Employee Experience gives you the how. Order a copy here: 8EXlaws.com

March 19, 2026: Jensen Huang had one of the biggest weeks in tech at Nvidia's GTC — but his sharpest line wasn't about chips. When asked why companies are laying off workers, he said simply: because they're out of imagination. We unpack what that means, plus his surprise take on compensation from the All-In podcast.
Then Cognizant drops a bombshell update to its 2023 workforce study: 93% of jobs impacted by AI, $4.5 trillion in labor shifting to machines, six years ahead of schedule. Their own words: "We underestimated the technology."
But two CEOs are pushing back on the doom narrative — Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick says humans will be "super fine" until AGI arrives, and Tech Mahindra CEO Mohit Joshi argues the demand for human labor isn't going anywhere, and has the data to back it up.
We close with JPMorgan Chase's 2026 tech trends report and the concept quietly reshaping what leaders actually do: context engineering.

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/
Stop patching problems and start designing an intentional workplace. The 8 Laws of Employee Experience gives you the how. Order your copy: 8EXlaws.com

March 18, 2026: Two-thirds of CEOs are freezing hiring while betting billions on AI — and a gender economist argues they're cutting the very people needed to make those bets pay off. A 7,000-word Substack essay imagined a "Ghost GDP" collapse by 2028, moved the Dow 800 points, and sparked a Wall Street war between Citrini Research and Citadel Securities over whether AI job fears are real or overblown. Management consulting was supposed to be dead by now — Capgemini's strategy chief explains why it's not, and why the shift to outcome-based billing may be the more disruptive story. And Microsoft's chief scientist says the degree with the worst starting salaries may be the most future-ready credential in the age of AI. Sources: Fortune, Bloomberg, Fortune Eye on AI.
Watch full video here: https://youtu.be/Tk_asOKvJkI?si=8ke31xXp_Yk8UZlb
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Looking for what actually moves the needle on performance and retention? It's in The 8 Laws of Employee Experience. Order here: 8EXlaws.com

March 17, 2026: Five major AI models shipped in a single week in February. Your company's training budget grew 5%. Cathie Wood told Bloomberg this morning that AI is already pushing productivity above trend and projects it hits 6% annually — Goldman Sachs says there's no macro evidence of it yet. Both can be right, and today we explain why. Plus: FedEx's blueprint for an AI agent workforce across 50% of its operations, the real argument against traditional corporate training programs, and the full financial math on Meta's reported 15,000-person layoff — including whether the company leaked it on purpose to let Wall Street price in $160 billion in market cap before a single cut is confirmed.

Many managers today spend more time on paperwork and individual tasks than actually coaching their teams. This lack of true leadership hurts the employee experience and stops a business strategy from succeeding. In this episode, Emily Field and I talk about her strategic transition from a McKinsey partner to becoming a first-time Chief People Officer at LPL Financial. She shares her initial 30-day "learning tour" where she focused on listening to employees to understand the company's unique culture before building her people strategy. We also unpacked her "People Leader Operating System" and a "talent flywheel" designed to improve the talent lifecycle from hire to retire. We explore the 50/50 performance management split to measure both business outcomes and human values, as well as using AI as a "superpower" to assist work while keeping human judgment as the main partner. Emily also explains the "people P&L" dashboard to track leadership data, the "align-empower-reinforce" model for training 1,300 leaders, and the importance of rewiring business processes to remove friction for employees. For CHROs, this is your guide to scaling a people-first culture and building a future-proof organization.
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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/
Future-ready organizations are built, not hoped for. My latest book, -The 8 Laws of Employee Experience shows how. Order here: 8exlaws.com