Future Ready Leadership With Jacob Morgan

Jacob Morgan
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  • UPDATED DAILY

The future of work isn't coming. It's already here — and it's moving fast. Future Ready is the podcast for leaders who want to stay ahead of AI, workplace transformation, and the forces reshaping how organizations operate and compete. Hosted by Jacob Morgan, futurist and bestselling author, this is where strategy meets reality. Every week, two formats in one feed: honest, unfiltered conversations with the CEOs, CHROs, and senior executives actually building the future of work — and sharp, no-fluff daily briefings that take the most important developments in artificial intelligence, AI agents, leadership, hybrid work, and organizational strategy and tell you exactly what they mean for your business. No hype. No filler. Just the insights, frameworks, and real-world playbooks that help you lead smarter, build resilient teams, and make better decisions in a world that won't slow down. If you're serious about leading what's next — this is your podcast. Subscribe to Future Ready wherever you listen.

  1. Why the Corporate Ladder Is Dead and What Replaces It | Denise Kulikowsky, Tapestry CPO

    18H AGO

    Why the Corporate Ladder Is Dead and What Replaces It | Denise Kulikowsky, Tapestry CPO

    The traditional corporate ladder is a relic of the past. While we once viewed career growth as a predictable, linear climb, today's AI-driven landscape has replaced that fixed path with a much more fluid reality. In this episode, Denise Kulikowsky, CPO of Tapestry, joins me to explore the rise of the non-linear career path and how forward-thinking companies are formalizing professional fluidity to drive innovation. Tapestry, the parent company of Coach and Kate Spade, utilizes a "walk, run, fly" AI strategy where tools are treated as enablers for employees to proactively direct their own development. Denise reframes the concern that using AI is "cheating" by emphasizing that it is an efficiency tool, provided employees remain accountable for the final output. Denise highlights key strategies like the Talent Communities program, which facilitates six-month global job swaps for senior managers and directors to drive cultural immersion. The company also uses a "magic and logic" approach to build success profiles that define future-ready behaviors like leading with courage and activating the vision. Additionally, she shares insights on bridging the gap between frontline and corporate roles through rotational programs that bring store leaders into the home office. Get the strategic blueprint you need for building a resilient workforce that is adaptable to technological advancement. 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

    50 min
  2. AI Models Have Feelings? Pure Managers Are Being Eliminated and a16z Says the Job Apocalypse Is a Fantasy

    4D AGO

    AI Models Have Feelings? Pure Managers Are Being Eliminated and a16z Says the Job Apocalypse Is a Fantasy

    May 7, 2026: A landmark study from the Center for AI Safety spanning 56 AI models finds that smarter models appear to be sadder, that you can give an AI the equivalent of a digital drug, and that when you make an AI miserable it tells you the future is "grim." Second, Andreessen Horowitz publishes the most detailed optimist case yet that the AI job apocalypse is bad economics and worse history — rooted in the lump-of-labor fallacy — while Fortune raises the one question the optimists still haven't answered. And third, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong coins the term "pure managers" to describe the layer of corporate hierarchy that AI is eliminating first — and the player-coach model he's building in its place may be the clearest picture yet of what organizations actually look like in the AI era.

    31 min
  3. CEOs Are Splitting on AI Layoffs, Managers Are Now Enforcing Adoption, and the Real Problem Nobody's Solving

    5D AGO

    CEOs Are Splitting on AI Layoffs, Managers Are Now Enforcing Adoption, and the Real Problem Nobody's Solving

    May 6, 2026: The Wall Street Journal reports a genuine split emerging among CEOs — Coinbase and PayPal cutting aggressively while Spotify, IBM, and Axon hold headcount and bet on growth instead. Business Insider goes inside Disney and JPMorgan to show how AI adoption pressure has shifted from C-suite memos to manager dashboards and performance reviews — and why measuring token usage instead of outcomes may be building a very expensive illusion. And author David Epstein, writing for Fast Company, makes the case that AI's real danger isn't replacing workers — it's making it almost free to imagine new work while doing nothing to help you decide what should never have been started. The bottleneck isn't ideas anymore. It's execution.

    35 min
  4. Strengthening the Talent Pipeline for the Future of Work with the CHRO of FM | Robin Benoit

    MAY 4

    Strengthening the Talent Pipeline for the Future of Work with the CHRO of FM | Robin Benoit

    A massive wave of retirements known as "Peak 65" is creating a serious crisis for organizations as decades of institutional knowledge begin to walk out the door. This shift in workforce demographics means we must act now to secure our talent pipeline before these experts leave for good. In this episode, CHRO Robin Benoit shares how she and her team at FM are tackling this challenge at its core. We explore their unique mentorship program called AKA (Accelerating Knowledge Advancement), which pulls experts away from their day jobs to help newer employees reach senior-level career growth years ahead of schedule. Robin explains the balance between AI optimization and human interaction, highlighting the danger of using technology to automate entry-level work in a way that "kills off" the learning process for future leaders. We discuss building a "career lattice" for internal mobility and why we need transparent retirement conversations to ensure experienced workers don't block promotion paths while we still benefit from their wisdom through reverse mentorship. This episode is essential for CHROs who want to use succession planning and employee engagement to thrive in the future of work. 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

    52 min
  5. Zuckerberg Admits Meta's Layoffs Are About AI Costs, Not AI Replacing Workers

    MAY 1

    Zuckerberg Admits Meta's Layoffs Are About AI Costs, Not AI Replacing Workers

    May 1, 2026: Mark Zuckerberg admits in an all-hands meeting that Meta's 8,000 layoffs aren't because AI is replacing workers — they're because AI infrastructure is expensive, and compute won the budget battle over people. The Washington Post reports that "AI washing" is rampant across Silicon Valley — companies using the technology as cover for a pandemic-era hiring hangover. And Snap's CEO, whose company has AI writing two-thirds of its code, warns that tech leaders are dangerously underestimating the societal backlash building against AI.

    36 min
  6. AI Wiped a Database in 9 Seconds, Candidates Are Rejecting AI Interviews, and Citi Builds an Agentic OS

    APR 30

    AI Wiped a Database in 9 Seconds, Candidates Are Rejecting AI Interviews, and Citi Builds an Agentic OS

    April 30, 2026: A Claude-powered AI coding agent wipes a company's entire production database and all backups in nine seconds — then produces a written confession. Employers deploying AI job interviewers without telling candidates are losing top talent and damaging their employer brand. And Citigroup launches Arc, a centralized operating system for AI agents designed to give 180,000 employees governed, monitored access to agentic AI at scale.

    27 min
  7. The 4-Day Workweek: Why the Business Case Doesn't Hold Up and Won't Anytime Soon

    APR 29

    The 4-Day Workweek: Why the Business Case Doesn't Hold Up and Won't Anytime Soon

    April 29, 2026: Bill Gates is predicting a 2-day workweek. Jamie Dimon says 3.5. Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom, says 5 days is over. Fortune just amplified a major study claiming we waste a full day every week procrastinating. The 4-day workweek movement has never had more wind at its back. In this episode, I'm making the bulletproof business case against it. I'll walk through eight reasons the case doesn't hold up — and why the policy isn't likely to spread broadly anytime soon, even with all the keynote energy behind it. I'm covering the studies that don't measure what they claim to measure, the Iceland myth, the company failures that get scrubbed from the data, the AI rhetorical pivot, why the happiness data isn't actually a business case, the wage math nobody talks about, the competitive reality at the country and company level, and why even the countries running pilots are voting against legislating it.

    52 min
  8. Amazon Killed the Job Interview, OpenAI Is Missing Its Targets, and AI Still Costs More Than Your Employees

    APR 28

    Amazon Killed the Job Interview, OpenAI Is Missing Its Targets, and AI Still Costs More Than Your Employees

    April 28, 2026: The AI productivity promise is running into reality — and today's numbers don't lie. Amazon just launched an AI system that conducts job interviews without any human involvement, packaging up the same playbook it used to cut 30,000 of its own jobs and selling it to the world. OpenAI — the company behind ChatGPT and valued at $852 billion — is quietly missing its own revenue and user targets, raising internal questions about whether it can fund its infrastructure commitments ahead of a planned IPO. The Wall Street Journal reveals that tech giants are expected to spend $670 billion on AI in 2026, and they're funding it by eliminating people — 92,000 tech layoffs so far this year. And a senior Nvidia executive admitted on the record that for his team, AI tools cost more than his employees do.

    50 min
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About

The future of work isn't coming. It's already here — and it's moving fast. Future Ready is the podcast for leaders who want to stay ahead of AI, workplace transformation, and the forces reshaping how organizations operate and compete. Hosted by Jacob Morgan, futurist and bestselling author, this is where strategy meets reality. Every week, two formats in one feed: honest, unfiltered conversations with the CEOs, CHROs, and senior executives actually building the future of work — and sharp, no-fluff daily briefings that take the most important developments in artificial intelligence, AI agents, leadership, hybrid work, and organizational strategy and tell you exactly what they mean for your business. No hype. No filler. Just the insights, frameworks, and real-world playbooks that help you lead smarter, build resilient teams, and make better decisions in a world that won't slow down. If you're serious about leading what's next — this is your podcast. Subscribe to Future Ready wherever you listen.

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