Depending on your job, this episode is going to be a relief or a cause for concern. The good news is that automation is not going to get rid of the need for human work. In fact, technology is creating new categories of jobs that are abundant in the workforce. However, some jobs that were once seen as the holy grail of job security, coding in particular, are the easiest to be automated away. Alexandra Levit, author of the new book Humanity Works: Merging Technologies and People for the Workforce of the Future, joins us to explain the types of jobs that will be left to the machines and what will be left behind.

Alexandra Levit is an internationally recognized thought leader, futurist and consultant. She conducts primary workplace research on behalf of Fortune 500 companies including American Express, Deloitte, PepsiCo, Whirlpool and, previously, the Obama administration. A columnist for the New York Times and Forbes, she also has been named ‘Top Entrepreneur to Follow on Twitter’ by Forbes, ‘Top Career Expert to Follow on Twitter’ by Mashable and ‘Top Business Expert to Follow on Twitter’ by CEOWorld.

In the ten years since Distracted was first published and while a lot has changed a lost has stayed the same. Maggie Jackson is back with a new edition of her book, with new data and looking at our new relationship to the machines that surround our life. While there are more distractions than ever the good news is we’re more aware of it as a culture and that’s the first step in winning some of our attention back.

Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist who writes the popular “Balancing Acts” column in the Boston Globe. Her work also has appeared in the New York Times and on National Public Radio, among other national publications. Her acclaimed first book, What’s Happening to Home? Balancing Work, Life and Refuge in the Information Age, examined the loss of home as a refuge.

Women have been told to lean in but, more often than not, what women want is to “lean in-between.” Kathryn Sollmann, author of the new book Ambition Redefined, is here to advocate for those women, the ones who want to work but have no interest in climbing the corporate ladder. There are lots of options out there to grow wealth that don’t involve heading to the C-suite.

Kathryn Sollmann is a recognized leader in helping women navigate the many stages of work and life. Through her blog and coaching firm, 9 Lives for Women, she is one of few voices strongly encouraging women to always work-at every age and life stage-to achieve long-term financial security. Her emphasis on women’s financial independence has generated event-sponsorship funding from corporate wealth-management giants, including AXA Advisors, Fidelity, Raymond James, Cigna and Wells Fargo. With good humor, no-nonsense delivery and the ability to educate and motivate, Kathryn is a frequent speaker, and an inspirational voice for women in college to retirement years. A frequent media resource, her expertise has been called upon by The Today Show, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Money magazine, CNBC & more.

Cisco is hardly a startup anymore but they’re in the business of bringing startups into the fold. The trick to that, according to John Chambers, is to have a culture that accepts outside people and ideas. It’s a healthy mindset that extends beyond mergers and acquisitions and is one of the many things he talks about on the podcast today and in his new book Connecting the Dots.

John Chambers, chairman emeritus at Cisco, served as the company’s CEO for more than two decades. He has worked closely with government leaders from around the world, serving on committees for two U.S. presidents and earning the first-ever Clinton Global Citizen Award as well as the Woodrow Wilson Award for Corporate Citizenship. He is also the founder and CEO of JC2 Ventures, where he helps disruptive startups to scale and lead market transitions.

After decades of working Chip Conley started all over again. Hired as an advisor at Airbnb he eventually became something of an intern to the young CEO. He’s written a new book Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder which reframes how to approach work for older workers, both as a keeper of wisdom and as a digital immigrant.

Bestselling author and hospitality entrepreneur Chip Conley is Strategic Advisor at Airbnb. At age 26, he founded Joie de Vivre Hospitality and turned it into the second largest boutique hotel brand in the world. After selling his company in 2010, he joined Airbnb, and as head of Global Hospitality and Strategy, helped turn it into the world’s largest hospitality brand. Conley has received hospitality’s highest honor, the Pioneer Award. He serves on the boards of the Burning Man Project and the Esalen Institute and is the author of Peak and the New York Times bestseller Emotional Equations. He holds a BA and MBA from Stanford University.

Mark Johnson has updated his classic book Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal with a new chapter taking into account our relationship with digital technology. He joins us to talk about disrupting new markets and how to couple digital with business models.

Mark W. Johnson cofounded the strategy and innovation management consultancy Innosight with Clayton M. Christensen in 2000 (it was acquired by the Huron Consulting Group in 2017). A coauthor of Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today’s Business While Creating the Future (2017), he has written and cowritten numerous articles, including the McKinsey Award–winning “Reinventing Your Business Model” in Harvard Business Review.

If you’ve ever taken an Uber you know that you give your driver a rating at the end of your journey. You probably know that their job depends on how good their average score is. But do you know how high that score has to be before they are essentially fired? And did you know the drivers can rate you too? Alex Rosenblat, author of the new book Uberland: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Rules of Work, joins us to go behind the scenes on what your drivers are dealing with and the difficult choices they often have to make.

Alex Rosenblat is a technology ethnographer and the author of Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work, forthcoming with the University of California Press in October 2018. A researcher at the Data & Society Research Institute, she holds a master’s degree in sociology from Queen’s University and a bachelor of arts degree in history from McGill University. Alex’s writing has appeared in media outlets such as the New York Times, the Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, Slate, and Fast Company. Her research has received attention worldwide, and has been covered in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, MIT Technology Review, WIRED, New Scientist, and the Guardian. Among the scholarly and professional publications in which her prize-winning work has been published are the International Journal of Communication and the Columbia Law Review.

The story of Apple’s success with the iPhone is that they didn’t make a product people wanted, they made a product people didn’t even know they needed yet but very soon had to have it. Today we’re talking to Ken Kocienda, the creator of auto-correct on your iPhone, about what it was about Apple that put them so far ahead of the competition.

 

Ken Kocienda was a software engineer and designer at Apple for over fifteen years. After graduating from Yale with a degree in history, he fixed motorcycles in Arizona, worked in the editorial library of a newspaper in New York, taught English in Japan, and made fine art photographs in all those places. Eventually, he discovered the internet, taught himself computer programming, and made his way through a succession of dot-com-era startups, before landing at Apple in 2001, where he worked on the software teams that created the Safari web browser, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. Ken is the author of Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs.

AMA Faculty member and author Ash Seddeek joins us to review some of FranklinCovey’s 7 Habits and share some of the things he’s learned from his years as an executive coach and trainer.

Ash Seddeek is a business success and leadership coach, speaker and author. Ash has worked for fortune 500 companies such as Deloitte Consulting, Kaiser Permanente, Oracle, BroadVision, and Cisco Systems on leadership development, strategic account manager sales training and strategic content for large scale corporate communications experiences such as Cisco Global Sales Experience and the Partner Summit with combined 25000 annual attendees.

We’re all born with inherent dignity. However, according to Dr. Donna Hicks, author of the new book Leading with Dignity, many of us have to be trained to learn how to recognize when we’re being treated with dignity and when we are not. She joins us to talk about ways we as leaders can extend not just respect but dignity to those around us.

Donna Hicks is an associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. As a conflict resolution specialist, she has facilitated diplomatic efforts in the Middle East and other high-conflict regions and conducted numerous training seminars worldwide. She lives in Watertown, MA.