December 23, 2025:

AI is moving from experiment to expectation at record speed, but employees say leadership hasn't built the systems needed to support it. Remote work is quietly becoming a privilege instead of a right. And a growing number of professionals are reclaiming Sundays as deep-work days because weekdays have become fragmented and unproductive.

In this episode, we examine four stories that reveal a powerful shift underway: the future of work is no longer about where or when people work — it's about who has leverage, who controls their time, and which organizations can redesign work fast enough to keep up. If you want to understand what's really changing beneath the headlines, this episode connects the dots.

For many leaders, "transformation at scale" feels like an impossible task—especially when employees are overwhelmed, technology is accelerating, and expectations about the future of work keep shifting. But Norfolk Southern has done this successfully in one of the toughest environments imaginable: a 200-year-old freight railroad with a safety-sensitive, unionized workforce. And in this episode, you'll hear how. Annie Adams, CHRO and former Chief Transformation Officer, shows what operational excellence powered by AI really looks like in practice. You'll learn how she led a headquarters relocation to Atlanta, built a future-ready corporate headquarters around employee experience, and used guiding principles like clear communication, leader toolkits, and discretionary effort to manage transformation fatigue. Annie dives into how Norfolk Southern "puts the AI in railroad" through innovations like digital train inspection portals, machine vision, on-edge computing, and 75+ algorithms that turn "finders into fixers." She also breaks down how their data science team uses predictive maintenance to model track wear, how giving frontline employees mobile tools has improved the way work gets done, and how Copilot is helping leaders make sense of 26,000+ employee survey comments. She shares cultural anchors like their SPIRIT values and the iconic Lake Pontchartrain recovery story that reveals the company's deep commitment to innovation and purpose.

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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

December 19, 2025:

Workers are hesitating before changing jobs. Parents are questioning whether college is still worth the cost. Talent shortages persist even as hiring slows. And U.S. regulators are signaling a major shift in how companies approach DEI.

In this episode, we explore six key future-of-work stories shaping how people think about careers, education, productivity, and fairness at work. From new data on job mobility and workforce policy to early recession signals and changing attitudes toward vocational paths, these stories reveal a workforce moving from confidence to caution—and from slogans to systems.

December 18, 2025:

Is artificial intelligence already replacing jobs—or is that narrative getting ahead of the data?

This episode examines new research from Vanguard's 2026 Economic and Market Outlook, which analyzes U.S. employment and wage data to understand how AI exposure is actually affecting work today. Contrary to widespread fears, the findings show that jobs most exposed to AI—including analysts, accountants, HR professionals, and other knowledge workers—are not disappearing. They are growing. And real wages in those roles are rising faster than in jobs with lower AI exposure.

The episode explores why AI is currently acting as a productivity amplifier rather than a job killer, how this phase mirrors earlier waves of technological change, and where the real risks are beginning to emerge. It also looks ahead to the implications for workforce design, skill development, and career pathways—especially as AI reshapes entry-level work and raises performance expectations across organizations.

For leaders, executives, and professionals trying to separate AI hype from reality, this episode offers a grounded, data-driven view of what's happening now—and what signals to watch next in the future of work.

December 17, 2025: Gartner's 2026 HR trends reveal how AI adoption is outpacing people systems and managerial readiness; Ford scales back parts of its electric vehicle strategy as regulatory pressure, legacy infrastructure, and workforce realities collide; white-collar job markets tighten while demand grows for skilled, non-automatable work; rising job anxiety spreads across professional roles as career certainty erodes; companies accelerate skills-based hiring as college degrees lose signaling power; and the UK passes a major Employment Rights Bill aimed at reducing job precarity by expanding worker protections and limiting unstable work arrangements.

AI is failing most companies, trapping employees in digital exhaustion. The real problem isn't the technology, but the organization itself. Forget fixing your models—the path to true transformation is redesigning your workflows, structure, and human collaboration to finally work with AI. In this episode, Rebecca Hinds, Head of the Work AI Institute at Glean, unpacks insights from the Work Transformation 100 study, revealing what 100+ leaders, technologists, and researchers are doing differently to make AI actually work. You'll learn how AI needs to be embedded in the flow of work, why organizational structure eats AI for breakfast, how centralization and decentralization must coexist, and how leaders can avoid automating the soul of work by preserving ownership, creativity, and accountability. Rebecca breaks down the emerging collaboration between HR and IT, the rise of agentic workflows, the role of telemetry data in measuring AI adoption, and why flattening org charts for the sake of AI often backfires. She also shares real examples of bottom-up and top-down AI change, the impact of digital exhaustion, and the critical importance of redesigning processes and incentives before redesigning technology. This episode is every CHRO's playbook to lead AI transformation with human insight, organizational clarity, and people-first strategy, not hype.

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This Episode is sponsored by Glean:

The AI Transformation 100 is here — Glean's Work AI Institute reveals what's really working with AI at work

The AI Transformation 100, authored by Dr. Rebecca Hinds, Head of the Work AI Institute at Glean and Stanford's Bob Sutton surfaces 100 hard-won lessons from leaders actually deploying AI at scale. It's not about what AI could do — it's about what works, what fails, and what companies have to get right to make AI real. One takeaway: AI doesn't fix broken systems. It amplifies them.

________________

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

December 12, 2025: Recent data shows unemployment for new college graduates is now higher than the overall workforce — an unusual and troubling signal that entry-level work is breaking down. At the same time, OpenAI's GPT-5.2 marks a shift from AI as a helper to AI as a task owner, reshaping how professional work gets done and raising hard questions about jobs, accountability, and career paths.

We also explore why AI is dramatically expanding the role of the CHRO, turning HR leaders into architects of human-AI collaboration, and how "ghostworking" is emerging as outdated productivity metrics collide with modern knowledge work. Finally, a Microsoft executive draws a rare line in the sand, saying AI development should stop if it threatens humanity — highlighting the growing leadership challenge of governance, judgment, and restraint.

December 11, 2025: In today's episode, I break down five major stories reshaping the future of work and leadership. I start with the growing crisis of trust as employees hesitate to adopt new AI tools, then dive into the global debate around "neurorights" and the push to protect cognitive privacy in an era of emerging neurotechnology. I unpack AT&T's candid admission that cultural fixes came far too late, explore how AI managers are beginning to automate managerial busywork and influence organizational design, and examine Disney's landmark partnership with OpenAI and what it signals for the future of creativity and intelligent content creation. Each story includes a futurist lens that connects today's headlines to the deeper shifts every leader must understand to build a truly future-ready organization.