Future Ready Leadership With Jacob Morgan

June 9, 2026: Meta is investing $115 million into America's Workforce Academy to train electricians, welders, plumbers, fiber technicians, and other skilled tradespeople for the AI infrastructure boom. This isn't charity, it's a talent pipeline for the data centers, wiring, fiber, and physical systems AI depends on. Then I get into Anthropic's release of Claude Fable 5, its most powerful publicly available AI model yet, and what it means for trust, accuracy, pricing, and accountability as AI moves deeper into business operations.

We have all worked at a place where we felt like just another number in a spreadsheet. It is incredibly frustrating when you offer feedback that seems to vanish into a black hole of corporate bureaucracy. But what if your company actually treated your voice like a strategic roadmap for the future?

In this episode, DJ Casto, the EVP and Chief Human Resources Officer at Synchrony, joins us to explore how his team transformed their culture to become the number one best place to work in 2026. DJ shares the secrets behind their decade-long journey of separation from GE Capital and how they climbed the rankings by anchoring their identity in the concept of trust.

We dive deep into their philosophy of co-creation, where active listening through quarterly pulse surveys and roundtables allows employees to directly design the culture they want to inhabit. Discover how Synchrony applies agile software principles to HR by launching minimal viable products for benefits like personalized wellness coaches and on-site therapists to see what truly resonates with the workforce.

We also tackle the modern challenge of AI, moving past the doom and gloom to discuss how technology can actually unlock human creativity and fulfill more enriched roles. You'll learn how to foster employee accountability through a focus on critical experiences rather than rigid job paths. This episode unpacks how you can build a high-trust organization where continuous improvement is a lifestyle rather than a one-time goal.

Watch the full video on YouTube

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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/

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

June 5, 2026: Two stories today. First: hybrid work's approval ratings are climbing — but new research finds half of its believers quietly defected over three years. There's a name for what's breaking it, and most organizations haven't seen it yet. Second: Anthropic dropped internal data showing AI is writing 80 percent of its own code and outperforming human researchers on their own turf. The numbers are real — but so is the question of who's really behind the warning. One week after closing a $965 billion valuation and four days after filing for an IPO, Anthropic is calling for AI governance and oversight. That might be genuine concern. It might also be regulatory capture — the oldest playbook in business, where the most powerful incumbent shapes the rules in ways that lock out everyone coming up behind them.

June 4, 2026: Microsoft unveiled a wearable AI badge at Build 2026 that can see, hear, and act on your behalf. I break down the real productivity upside, and the chilling effect on human communication that the tech press isn't talking about. Then I take a critical look at Monterey Park's landmark vote to permanently ban data centers — 86% to 14%, the first in America. I understand why communities push back. I also think this particular decision is a mistake, and I'll tell you exactly why.Finally: Uber just cut 23% of its entire HR and recruiting function at record revenue, with 95% AI adoption across engineering — then said AI had nothing to do with it.

June 3, 2026: Most people use a data center dozens of times a day and have no idea what it is. Today I'm changing that. I break down exactly what data centers are, what "compute" actually means, why every new AI model needs exponentially more of it, and how short we currently are as a country — using real numbers from Goldman Sachs, FERC, RAND, and others. Then I take on the five biggest myths driving the backlash: that new data centers waste water, that they're an energy disaster, that they kill jobs, that taxpayers are funding Big Tech, and that they destroy communities. I debunk every single one with sourced data — because the misinformation around data centers is doing real damage to America's AI future. These buildings currently account for 80% of US economic growth according to S&P Global, they're funding the nuclear renaissance, and they're the front line in a race with China that we cannot afford to lose. This is the episode I'd send to anyone who thinks data centers are the enemy.

June 2, 2026: Senator Bernie Sanders wants the federal government to own half of OpenAI, Anthropic, and every major AI company in America — and he's framing it as reclaiming stolen public knowledge. We break down exactly how his American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act would work, why the Norway comparison falls apart, and what would actually happen to valuations, talent, and American competitiveness if it ever got close to passing. Then: Apollo Global Management's chief economist says there is zero evidence AI is killing jobs — and the data may actually back him up. We look at Jevons paradox, the AI washing phenomenon, and why the aggregate labor market story is more encouraging than the doom headlines suggest. And finally: new Federal Reserve research reveals that 64% of the rise in young worker unemployment since the pandemic traces back to remote work, not AI — and why being willing to go to the office five days a week may be the single best career move a worker in their twenties can make right now.

Have you ever walked into a meeting and felt like everyone was just wearing a mask of professional perfection while their true selves stayed hidden in the parking lot? It is easy to get lost in the data and the dashboards of modern work, but we often forget that the people behind those numbers are what actually drive the results.

We all want to be part of a team where we are seen for who we really are rather than just what we can produce. In this episode, I sit down with Veronique Subileau, the Senior Vice President of HR at UGI Corporation, to explore the invisible roots of corporate culture that turn a 140-year-old energy company into a breakthrough environment. Veronique shares her unique philosophy on why leaders must touch the heart before speaking about results, offering practical tools like her four core questions regarding fun and purpose to foster deep human connection.

You'll learn how to navigate the tension between high-performance standards and radical authenticity through the company's poetic values framework while discovering why the shadow you cast as a leader determines the energy of your entire team. We also dive into the future of work as Veronique explains how to invest in humans as much as technology by using AI to unleash time so employees can shift from being human doings to true human beings.

This episode redefines the role of the leader as a human prompt engineer who knows how to pull unique creativity and heart out of a workforce in an increasingly automated world.

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

May 29, 2026: Costco's CEO Ron Vachris said it plainly this week: "I don't see AI making choices for Costco" — and with $440 billion in market cap and 17% stock gains this year, the companies doubling down on human judgment are quietly outperforming the ones cutting workers for AI. On today's episode, Jacob Morgan breaks down three stories that together reveal the gap between what companies say about AI and what they're actually doing: why Costco, IBM, and Delta are winning by betting on humans; why corporate America is getting the bill for "tokenmaxxing" — the practice of deploying AI everywhere without measuring whether it works — and what disciplined AI investment actually looks like; and what OpenAI's newly published Frontier Governance Framework, which formally maps its own risk categories including "loss of control," means for every business leader who needs an enterprise AI governance strategy before the regulations have teeth.

May 28, 2026: Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.8, sharper reasoning, better agentic coding, and a fast mode that runs 2.5x faster at a third the cost, with Mythos-class models coming in weeks. A new EY-Parthenon survey of 1,200 CEOs shows 99% expect AI to reshape their workforce strategy but only 42% are doing anything about it and why the 57-point gap between awareness and action is the real story. And a deep look at grade inflation in American colleges: the average GPA is now above 3.5, yet 43% of students meet none of ACT's college readiness benchmarks, 12th-grade math and reading scores are at all-time lows, and recent college graduate unemployment sits at 5.7% with a job-finding rate now matching high school graduates. What's behind it, what it costs, and what it means for the future workforce.

May 27, 2026: The two CEOs most responsible for the AI jobs apocalypse narrative are walking it back — and the timing couldn't be more revealing. Sam Altman says he's "delighted to be wrong." Dario Amodei is softening. Both are heading toward trillion-dollar IPOs. In this episode, Jacob Morgan breaks down the financial logic behind the narrative shift, what a chart from Bianco Research reveals about software development jobs that contradicts the doom story, and why Uber just burned its entire 2026 AI budget in four months with nothing to show for it — and why 80% of enterprises are facing the exact same problem.