Future Ready Leadership With Jacob Morgan

If your organization isn't obsessed with how fast your people can learn, you're already falling behind in the race to "out-learn" the competition. In this episode, I'm joined by Susan LaMonica, the Chief Human Resource Officer at Citizens Financial Group—a super-regional bank with $226 billion in assets and 18,000 employees. 
We explore how they are driving a massive workforce transformation to build a team that is ready for the future of work. We dive deep into their journey of becoming a skills-based organization and how they use a "skills taxonomy" and an internal talent marketplace to support mobility and career development.
Susan also explains their "measured approach" to AI governance within a heavily regulated industry, including the role of their Generative AI Council. We unpack their "Reimagine the Bank" initiative, where they are rethinking 47 different business processes to drive value and effectiveness. From launching internal "gigs" to tracking productivity metrics like customer NPS and employee sentiment, this conversation is a strategic guide for any leader looking to blend high-tech tools with a human-centered culture.

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: https://bit.ly/8exlaws

May 15, 2026: The Guardian documents the tech industry's accelerating purge of middle managers — and history says companies have tried this exact bet before with Jack Welch and the Reengineering movement, with disastrous long-term results. The Wall Street Journal reports companies are drowning in ungoverned AI agents, raising a critical question: is agentic AI actually different from the RPA sprawl crisis of a decade ago, and is the difference showing up in real outcomes? And Yale's Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and NYU's Gary Marcus argue in Fortune that America's 1,200 AI bills have no shared test for what makes good policy — and the regulatory patchwork hardening in place rhymes uncomfortably with the conditions that produced the 2008 financial crisis.

May 14, 2026: Tucker Carlson and Kevin O'Leary debated AI, energy, and jobs yesterday — and O'Leary had the right argument but made the wrong one. Today we break down what he should have said, including the real jobs data, what Jensen Huang is saying about hiring, and why the self-driving truck doesn't eliminate the driver — it transforms the job. Then we look inside Meta, where 8,000 layoffs are coming next week during the most profitable quarter in company history, employees are being surveilled to train their replacements, and some workers are openly hoping to get cut. And we close with a Fast Company piece that reframes the entire talent shortage conversation — the problem doesn't start in HR, it starts in kindergarten, and corporate America is pouring billions into the wrong end of the pipeline.

May 13, 2026: Goldman Sachs President and COO John Waldron went on CNBC and publicly described his entire workforce as a "human assembly line," announcing that digital AI agents will be the firm's robots. Amazon employees are gaming internal AI usage leaderboards by burning meaningless tokens through a tool called MeshClaw — because the pressure to show AI adoption has become greater than the pressure to do actual work. And Princeton University voted to end 133 years of unproctored exams, because AI has made cheating behaviorally invisible and the peer accountability system that underpinned one of the most respected honor codes in American higher education has structurally collapsed.

Most companies think they have an AI strategy. New data from Gartner says they're wrong — and it's costing them. In today's episode, Jacob Morgan breaks down three stories that cut through the hype and tell the real story of where AI and business stand right now.
May 12, 2026: First, a landmark Gartner study of 350 global executives reveals that 80% of companies that cut headcount in the name of AI are seeing little to no return — and the ones getting real results are doing the opposite of what most CEOs are doing. Second: a provocative new framework from Fortune identifies the five AI postures most organizations have already drifted into without realizing it — and explains why the most dangerous one is the one that feels the most comfortable. Third: CNBC reports on how AI is creating a new C-suite power struggle, with the Chief AI Officer emerging just as every other executive function is being told it's their moment to lead.