Future Ready Leadership With Jacob Morgan

We often talk about employee engagement, but before that comes something deeper: experience itself. Just like we invest our own time and money into personal experiences that create lasting memories, employees evaluate their organizations through the experiences they have at work. The problem? For over a century, companies have designed work as if humans were robots—linear, rigid, process-driven, and void of humanity. From definitio...

AI is shaping the future of work, no doubt, but are organizations truly ready to harness its full potential? Beyond the hype, leaders are grappling with challenges around AI adoption, cultural resistance, and the fear of losing human judgment in the process. What do leaders need to know about balancing AI’s promise with its pitfalls? In this episode, Peter Mahoney, Chief Commercial Officer at GoTo (formerl...

What if your leadership skills were truly borderless? Could you step into any culture, any team, anywhere in the world—and still thrive? That’s the challenge and opportunity of developing a Global Citizen mindset, one of the most crucial traits for leaders today. In today’s Leadership Spark, I share why the Global Citizen mindset is a non-negotiable skill for modern leaders. I tell the story of a remarkable CEO who defied cultural ...

In business and in life, the most dangerous risk you can take is avoiding risk altogether. Whether it’s leading a team, making strategic investments, or navigating unpredictable markets, risk is always present, yet most leaders misunderstand how to harness it. In this episode, Jim McCormick, best-selling author (The First Time Manager, The Power of Risk) and founder of the Research Institute of Risk Intelligence, shares lessons fro...

The way we manage people today is built on ideas from over 100 years ago—ideas designed for factory floors, not modern workplaces. Management was originally created to enforce control, standardize behavior, and ensure compliance. Engagement, empowerment, and innovation? None of those were part of the equation. And yet, many organizations still operate with that outdated playbook, whether they admit it or not. In today’s Leadership ...

Why do we struggle with conflict even when we know it's important? In today’s polarized and high-stakes workplace, leaders are more afraid than ever to say the wrong thing or engage in tough conversations. But avoiding conflict doesn’t protect relationships, it slowly breaks them. In this episode, Bob Bordone, Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School, shares why conflict isn’t something to fear, but something to practice and turn into a...

If aliens landed on Earth and observed how we work, they’d probably be baffled. We spend most of our lives doing this thing called “work,” yet so many people feel unfulfilled, undervalued, and stuck in roles that don’t inspire them. It’s even baked into our language. Look up synonyms for “employee,” “manager,” or “work” and you’ll find words like cog, zookeeper, and drudgery. Something’s clearly broken. But the good news? It’s star...

Why are so many employees entering the workforce unsure of themselves, lacking confidence, and not quite ready to thrive? And with AI automating more tasks by the day, what should leaders actually be focusing on to future-proof their people? The world is flooded with information at the speed of light, yet starved of real connection and human skills. So how do we bridge the growing gap between soft skills and hard results? In this e...

What if your employee perks are actually backfiring… making people disengage faster, not stay longer? The way we attract and retain talent is overdue for a serious reset. In today's Leadership Spark, we dive into why the traditional employer-employee relationship is broken and what leaders must change to stay relevant. You’ll learn how outdated recruitment practices no longer work in a world where candidates interview you just as m...

So much of what holds leaders back isn’t strategy or skill. It’s the invisible mindset traps we don’t even realize we’re stuck in. Most leadership challenges are created by unconscious patterns running the show beneath the surface. In this episode, we dig into what it really takes to break those patterns with Diana Chapman, executive coach and co-author of The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. We explore how leaders unknowing...

What if your office is making people miserable… and you don’t even see it? We now live in a world of hybrid work. The spaces we work in, the technology we use, and the culture we experience shape us more than we realize. If you’re still only focusing on tasks and performance while ignoring the environments that make or break engagement, you’re already falling behind. In today’s Leadership Spark, we uncover the three hidden forces d...

AI is moving faster than any of us can keep up. Every week brings a new tool, every month a new disruption, and leaders everywhere are left scrambling to understand what this means for their people, their culture, and their future. In this episode, I sit down with Charlotte Eaton, Chief People Officer at Arm—the company powering almost every smartphone on the planet—to explore how AI is fundamentally transforming the workplace. We ...

The world of work is changing faster than ever! Globalization, mobility, millennials, technology, and new behaviors are transforming how we lead. In today's Leadership Spark episode, I break down these five trends reshaping work and reveal why they’re forcing every manager to become a better leader. I explore how these shifts are making traditional management obsolete, why people no longer need to work for your company, and what it...

Most leaders avoid tough conversations out of fear—of seeming harsh, being misunderstood, or facing backlash. But the conversations we dodge are often the key to growth, accountability, and psychological safety. In this episode, Paul Falcone, bestselling author & former CHRO of Nickelodeon Animation, breaks down how leaders can approach tough conversations with clarity, confidence, and compassion. Paul introduces powerful framework...

What can a world chess champion teach us about the future of work? More than you think. Just like Magnus Carlsen challenged convention to become the greatest player in history, leaders today need to rethink everything about how we work, lead, and build organizations. This episode explores why challenging convention is no longer optional. We unpack the five trends reshaping work—new employee behaviors, exponential technology growth,...

Great ideas often die, not because they’re wrong, but because no one knows how to influence others to act on them. In leading today’s complex organizations, it’s not enough to be right. The real challenge for leaders is getting people to change behavior, and stay changed. In this episode, we sit down with Joseph Grenny, co-author of Crucial Conversations and one of the world’s leading experts on influence and behavior change, to un...

Most leaders manage culture with dashboards that measure what's easy, not what's true. In this episode of Leadership Spark, KeyAnna Schmiedl, Chief Human Experience Officer at Workhuman, challenges leaders to stop relying on outdated engagement scores and start looking at what really drives culture: recognition. She explains why traditional HR data misses the lived employee experience and how recognition moments reveal the hidden i...

The future of work is changing, and we can't afford to have our leaders evolve backward by sticking to outdated leadership styles. It's high time for a major upgrade because this new era of work won't wait for you to catch up. In this three-part episode, we explore what it takes to thrive at the highest levels of leadership across three urgent dimensions: executive readiness, AI fluency, and hybrid work strategy. We begin with Mark...

The real game of the future of work is how to unstuck yourself from the past. As the workplace keeps changing, new expectations are reshaping what it means to work, manage, and lead. But instead of preparing, many organizations are just reacting to challenges, caught off guard by the shifts they should've seen coming. So what’s behind this disruption? In today's Leadership Spark, we break down the five trends driving the future of ...