Future Ready Leadership With Jacob Morgan

Feb 3, 2026: We start with the rise of "résumé Botox," where experienced professionals are removing years of experience just to get past hiring filters. Then we look at new data showing how Americans are rethinking what "safe jobs" look like in an AI-driven economy, with growing confidence in hands-on and blue-collar work.
From there, we explore the next phase of automation as AI moves beyond screens and into the physical world — with robots learning to operate in messy, real-world environments. We also go inside Google's Project EAT to understand how one of the world's largest companies is turning AI from a personal productivity tool into a standardized operating model. Finally, we examine why the construction labor gap is shrinking — and why that may say more about slowing demand and capital cycles than a true solution to labor shortages. Each story stands on its own, but together they point to a bigger shift in how experience, skills, and job security are being redefined.

What happens when activist investors call your multi-billion dollar acquisition the "single worst deal of the decade"? Most leadership teams would panic, but NRG Energy did the opposite: they doubled down on their people. While most large-scale acquisitions look great on a spreadsheet, they often fail because leadership loses sight of the human energy behind the numbers. In this episode, Peter Johnson, SVP and Head of Talent and Culture at NRG, reveals how his team navigated the acquisition of Vivint—a deal that tripled their workforce to 16,000 employees and was publicly condemned by activist investors as the "single worst deal" in the sector. While the announcement triggered a 25% stock crash, their leadership's commitment to a strategic "North Star" and a "don't crush the butterfly" cultural philosophy eventually drove a staggering 420% stock recovery. Peter explores the raw challenges of an 18-month integration, from the technical hurdles of migrating 16,000 employees between competing HR systems to the deeply emotional task of harmonizing job titles across disparate industries. By prioritizing the "why" behind the change and fostering a unified "One NRG" identity, the company successfully blended traditional corporate discipline with tech-forward innovation, nearly doubling employee engagement and proving that human-centric leadership is a massive financial win. If you're a CHRO, this episode shows what real value creation looks like when people come first.
 
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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—preorder a copy here: 8EXlaws.com

January 30, 2026: The future of work is accelerating—and for many leaders, it feels overwhelming.
Political shifts, new laws, rapid advances in AI, rising ethical expectations, and changing employee demands are all converging at once. The volume of change can make it feel like you're stuck on a treadmill that keeps getting faster.
But here's the reality: not every trend deserves your attention.
In this episode, I walk through how external forces—political, legal, and ethical—are reshaping the employee experience, from pay transparency and AI governance to data privacy, workplace monitoring, and evolving expectations of leadership. I also explain why compliance is no longer just an HR or legal responsibility—it's becoming a shared leadership mandate.
More importantly, I share why trends aren't truths.
Just because something is happening doesn't mean you should chase it.

January 29, 2026: Today a series of stories made it impossible to ignore how fast work is changing. Meta says AI now allows one employee to do the work of entire teams. Engineers at Anthropic and OpenAI say AI writes nearly 100% of their code. Amazon and Dow announced thousands of job cuts as they restructure for efficiency. And at the same time, companies are hiring storytellers to help cut through the growing flood of AI-generated content.
In this episode of Future Ready Today, I connect the dots across these developments and explain what they reveal about shrinking teams, disappearing roles, changing career paths, and the rising importance of human skills in an AI-driven world. These aren't isolated headlines — they're signals of a deeper shift in how companies are redesigning work right now.
I break down what's actually happening inside organizations, share the data behind these changes, and offer a futurist lens on what this all means for leaders, employees, and anyone trying to stay future ready.

January 28, 2026: In today's episode, I zoom out to help you see what's really shaping the future of work.
Before we talk about AI, leadership, or organizational strategy, we need to understand the forces happening outside our companies. Because work doesn't evolve in isolation—it's shaped by powerful external trends in technology, society, economics, and more.
That's why I walk through the STEEPLE framework: a futurist tool designed to help leaders move from reacting to predicting—and from predicting to designing.
STEEPLE stands for Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political, Legal, and Ethical forces. Together, these seven domains explain how work is changing and what leaders need to prepare for over the next five-plus years, especially in an AI-driven world.
We explore how AI is becoming the central nervous system of organizations, why skills are replacing job titles, how identity and purpose are reshaping careers, and why the economic contract between employers and employees is being rewritten in real time. I also share why the future of work isn't something organizations "deliver" to employees—it's something that's co-created, requiring accountability on both sides.
If you're trying to make sense of rapid technological change, shifting employee expectations, and what leadership really means in the age of AI, this episode gives you a practical framework to understand what's coming—and how to design for it.