Future Ready Leadership With Jacob Morgan

Preparing a global team for a world that changes by the minute can feel like a race against time, especially when 80% of jobs face major shifts by 2030. In this episode, we tackle the challenge of turning that fear into a high-performance culture that stays ahead of the technology curve.
Tracy Platt, CHRO of Newell Brands, joins us to explore top strategies for AI adoption, focusing on the move toward "agentic commerce" and the urgent need for AI literacy across the whole company. We also unpack simple ways to put AI into daily work, like cutting performance management review times from two hours down to 30 minutes.
Our discussion highlights the shift from tracking vanity metrics to measuring real business results and why human judgment is the ultimate guardrail for AI-driven work. Tracy shares how managing ambiguity has become the most valuable currency for modern leaders in this brave new world.
For CHROs, this episode is your clear roadmap for leading your talent strategy and workforce planning through the rapid evolution of the future of work.


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 3, 2026: Two major academic papers dropped today alongside fresh labor market data, and together they paint the clearest picture yet of what AI will actually do to the economy and to work. Stanford economists show that 87% of U.S. productivity growth since 1950 came from automation — and explain why AI's impact will be real but slower than the hype due to "weak links" in production. A Chicago Fed forecasting paper reveals that even expert economists admit the range of outcomes is genuinely wide. On top of that: AI is now the #1 cited reason for tech layoffs, a new Forrester study finds most workers still don't know how to use the AI tools their companies deployed, Jack Dorsey argues AI should replace middle management entirely, a startup built an AI coworker that monitors your work and reports to your boss, and OpenAI just bought a media company to control the narrative. Seven stories, one through line: the disruption is real, the timeline is uncertain, and the window to prepare is open right now.
Watch 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/
Future-ready organizations are built, not hoped for. My latest book, -The 8 Laws of Employee Experience shows how. Preorder here: 8EXlaws.com

April 2, 2026: A landmark MIT study out today challenges the AI job apocalypse — and the data lands somewhere more optimistic than the headlines suggest. Then: the "AI washing" debate exposes a harder truth — with Gallup data showing only 21% of employees are engaged globally and $438 billion in annual productivity losses, most large companies were already carrying 10 to 20% more workforce than they needed long before AI arrived. The Wall Street Journal profiles the real people filling 640,000 new AI-created jobs — from a 25-year-old Head of Human AI Solutions to a pathologist earning $75K on the side training medical AI. And CHRO pay at S&P 500 companies just surged 30% — what boards are really pricing in when they write those checks.
Watch 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

The first quarter of 2026 was not just a collection of headlines. It was a definitive "hard reset" for the global workforce, marking the moment where the gap between legacy systems and the new AI-driven reality finally collapsed.
In this episode of Future Ready Leadership, we're revisiting the top stories that made it to our Best of the First Quarter edition. We start with the trillion-dollar software sell-off, where the market's reaction to AI-driven workflows signaled a massive shift from humans performing manual tasks to supervising automated systems.
This move toward radical accountability is further exemplified by Citigroup's declaration of the end of the "effort era," as CEO Jane Fraser mandated that employees be judged solely on measurable results rather than visible busy work. We then examine Amazon's internal talent mobility strategy, which reframes automation-related job changes as an opportunity for redeployment by giving staff 90 days to find new internal roles.
This leads into a discussion on the reset of the HR technology operating model, as boards begin to question the value of traditional seat-based licensing now that AI is becoming the primary interface for data. Finally, we analyze Accenture's decision to tie promotions to AI usage, highlighting the need for a "human judgment receipt" to ensure leaders are rewarding actual performance improvement rather than mere "corporate theater".


Watch the full video on YouTube
----------
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

March 27, 2026: Anthropic accidentally leaked Claude Mythos — its most powerful model ever — and the implications for cybersecurity and enterprise AI go far beyond a product announcement. America's top HR leaders gathered at the WSJ CPO Summit and delivered a blunt message: most companies are building AI agents completely wrong, and IBM learned that the hard way. JPMorgan has made AI adoption a formal, trackable performance requirement for 65,000 engineers — and it's a preview of what's coming to every large organization. And a new KPMG survey finds Gen Z wants the C-suite and a 5 o'clock logout — so we have an honest conversation about whether that's actually possible.