167 | The Future of Work with Jacob Morgan
Our guest today on the pod is Jacob Morgan. Jacob is a trained futurist and one of the world's leading authorities on leadership, the future of work and employee experience. He speaks in front of tens of thousands of people each year and his content is seen over a million times per year. He also is the host of the popular The Future of Work podcast.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
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Jacob Morgan Awarepreneurs Interview
SPEAKERS: Paul Zelizer, Jacob Morgan
Paul Zelizer 00:01
Hi, this is Paul Zelizer, and welcome to another episode of The Awarepreneurs podcast. This podcast is all about the intersection of three things, conscious business, social impact, and awareness practices. Each episode, I do a deep dive interview with a thought leader in this intersection. Someone who has market test that experience that is already transforming many lives. Before I introduce today's guests, and our topic today, I have one request, if you could go over to iTunes, or whatever app you're listening to the show on and do, hit the subscribe button do a review, it really helps. Thanks for considering. Today, I'm thrilled to be introducing Jacob Morgan. And our topic is the future of work. Jacob is a trained futurist, and one of the world's leading authorities on leadership, the future of work, employee experience, and leadership. He speaks in front of 10s of thousands of people each year, and his content is seen by over a million folks each year. He's also the host of the future of work podcast, and I just found out he has a new podcast with his wife that we're going to hear about you, Jacob, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Before I ask you the question that we always start off with, I just want to tell a little story about why I invited Jacob to the show, partially because you're doing awesome stuff. But the particular thing that I think is illustrated by this story, is how the change and the workplace is affecting us as social entrepreneurs. So my daughter is now a junior the recording of this episode, and she is in this fabulous program. I'm really jealous. I wish they had something like this. When I went to college. It's called the university Scholars Program at George Mason in Virginia. And it's this interdisciplinary, like, how do we work together on hard problems as humans kind of a program? And the question that they screened people in and out was the question was this question. They said, with artificial intelligence, and robotics, the world of work is going to change and current on our current production, millions and millions and millions of people are going to lose their jobs, what should we do? And they had this, you know, very interesting interdisciplinary conversation. And that's how they screened who got in or not. That's the conversation I want to have to take up. So before we get to it, though, just to get to know you, one of the things that we do is we ask people about a wellness are an awareness practice that you personally use to help you bring your best most resilient self to your work?
Jacob Morgan 02:33
Well, there are probably a few things that I do. Um, one of them is to not check email or social media until four o'clock, so I only check it once each day at four o'clock. I don't do meetings on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I try not to I mean, we don't have a TV in the bedroom. So just kind of, for me, most of the the wellness techniques that I do, it's not so much about meditation. It's more about having control over how I use technology and what I do with my time. And the reason why I did this is because, like you, as I'm sure you know, of several months ago, actually, a couple years ago, I would have lots of meetings back to back. I mean, when you're an entrepreneur, people want your time all the time, you know, schedules can be very hectic and chaotic. And I would find that when I would have days where my I have back to back meetings, and they don't have to do that the next day in the next day, I would get very stressed out and burned out and exhausted. And so as a pilot, I said, Okay, I'm not going to do meetings on Wednesdays, and I'm going to see how I feel on Wednesday, and actually started really looking forward to my Wednesdays, because I could do whatever I want. And so I instituted that now three days a week, and it's probably probably been one of the best things that I've ever done. And maybe one other little practice that I do. My form of meditation is with chess. So I do chess puzzles, I study chess like that, that, for me, is my escapism when I feel like I need to take some time for myself or get away from work. So those have been very helpful for me. Boundaries. I'm such a huge fan of boundaries.
Paul Zelizer 04:14
Got to have them especially as an entrepreneur, right? Yeah, exactly. So before we get into the work that you do now ... there in your bio, there is this cup of coffee. That was very, it was a very poignant moment, this coffee thing happened, what, what was what were you doing professionally and with your life before that cup of coffee and what happened with that? Ask about a cup of coffee. It's actually funny how something so small, like a cup of coffee can change your life, right? Change Your Life and change the trajectory of where you're going. And so to give people a little bit of context, I was not a very good student in high school or community college. My GPA was like a 2.7 mine 2.8 I mean, you know,
Jacob Morgan 05:00
Very, very average even a little bit below average. And when I got to the University of California, Santa Cruz, which is where I got my, my dual ba degrees, I realized that this was the last opportunity that I had. And if I didn't do well, in college, nobody's gonna hire me, I'm not going to get a job. And I became very, very, like scared about my future. And so I worked really, really hard. I double majored in economics and psychology, graduated with honors. And my first job out of college was in Southern California, and I joined a technology company. And when I interviewed there, I was told I'd be doing all these really cool and amazing things. traveling the country meeting with entrepreneurs, you know, they really built it up and told me this very compelling story. And so I became very, very excited about this job. And I had a three hour daily commute to the office and from the office, and I thought, you know what, it's worth it because this is going to be a great opportunity for me. And a few months into my job, I find that I'm just doing data entry and cold calling and PowerPoint presentations. I didn't need any kind of a degree to do any of the stuff that I was doing. It was very disengaging, and demoralizing. And the kind of nail in the coffin for me was a couple months in, I hear one of the business leaders, CEOs scream from across the office, he's like, Jacob, I got a really, really important project for you. And I got very excited I've had Okay, this is it, I paid my dues. I did what I needed to do. And here comes the excitement. So I run over to the CEO, and I say, Yeah, what is it, and he says, I'm late for a meeting, I need you to go run to Starbucks and get me a cup of coffee. And you can get yourself a latte as well. And that was one of the last full time jobs I ever had working for anybody else that was around 15 years ago. And it sent me on my current path, because I always thought I was gonna get a normal job, go get my MBA and climb the proverbial corporate corporate ladder for whatever company I was a part of. And that cup of coffee really spun me around in the other direction. So you left that corporate setting, and you got interested in entrepreneurship and futurism and leadership and how things work in organizations like, it was a Yeah, what was the trajectory from Okay, no, screw this, I'm out of here. This is not my thing. My initial reaction wasn't anything. And the word entrepreneur didn't even pop into my mind, it was like, Okay, this sucks, there's got to be a way I can make money on my own. Like That was my thought. There has to be a way in the world of the internet, and the kind of this new world that we're part of that there's got to be a way for me to make money on my own. And so I just started Googling and researching and I play around, I played around with all sorts of stuff. I tried affiliate marketing, search engine optimization stuff, this was all, you know, way back in the day. And at the time, some of these social platforms started to emerge. So I evolved a little bit from search engine optimization, to social media marketing, to consulting for how to use social media inside of a company to get employees to work together, to the future of work and leadership and employee experience. So there was a natural evolution and progression. But it has been 15 years. And it was 15 years ago that I first started thinking about, how do we think differently about leadership? And what is the future of work gonna look like? And how do we create experiences for people who don't have to go through the same things that I went through? And I know, there are lots of people who went through far worse things than that. And, you know, obviously, it's not a competition. But the point is that nobody should show up to work, feeling disengaged, and deflated and demoralized. And like the, you know, the the leaders there don't appreciate you evaluate, value you. And that's, that's what put me on my current path.
Paul Zelizer 08:50
When people ask me why I do what I do, I said, Well, here's the deal. If we go to work every day, and what we're spending, the majority, like spiritual teachers tell us the single most precious resource we have is our attention. And if we're spending the majority of our waking hours doing something that's not aligned with our values, and what we're on the planet to do that has profound ripple effects. And if we find a way to spend the majority of our waking hours, because in a modern economy, most humans work more than anything else we do while we're awake in any given day, or at least in a given week. That has profound ripple effects. I want to do more of the latter. If more people were spending, the majority of the world would be a better place. And we wouldn't be experiencing quite as many or a lot less of the problems that we're experiencing. Now. That makes sense. So anyway, I hear you saying something like that. Yeah, for sure. So talk to us about a trained futurist our audience is going to be we've had lots of folks that really intentional and did deep dives on leadership, thinking about businesses and organizations but like a futurist, I don't think we've ever had a futurist on our show. What does that mean? And What are some of the forces or vectors that a futurists are tracking and that are contributing to the kinds of it's like a perfect storm of things are happening right now. And work is really changing, what are some of the factors that are contributing to those changes? A lot of people think that a futurist is someone who predicts the future. And a lot of people also they get a crystal ball and new guy question. Yeah, I wish I had a crystal ball.
Jacob Morgan 10:30
But the other thing people assume is that, or they, a lot of people don't realize is that foresight is actually something that you can study. So I went back to the University of Houston, and I received my professional certification in the field of foresight. And it's one of those things where a lot of people can call themselves a futurist, you know, they just kind of like slap it on their LinkedIn titles, or they put on their business cards. But there's a difference between calling yourself that versus actually getting training on it. In futures when when you study foresight, and you can get a master's degree in this too, by the way, you go through a series of training programs where you are taught to think in terms of scenarios, you are taught to try to anticipate what might happen. And there's a series of tools and frameworks and methodologies that futurists use, that helps them think a little bit more creatively and abstractly, to help them come up with what scenarios and possibilities might be. So the way that I like to describe what a futurist is, or what a future is does, is not so much predicting the future, but helping make sure that we are not surprised by what the future might bring. And I always draw the analogy between this and the game of chess. So obviously, when you play a game of chess, and again, I play it obsessively. When you play a game of chess, you are not predicting your opponent's move, if you could predict your opponent's move, every time you'd be, you know, the computer, you'd be the world's top chess player. But instead, the way the chess players think is in terms of scenarios, they think in terms of like, Okay, well, I could move my Bishop, my opponent might move this rook here, they might move their Bishop there. And if they do that, then this is how I'm going to respond. And so you think in terms of these different scenarios and possibilities, the goal for top grandmasters is you never want your opponent to make a move on the board where you're like, oh, my goodness, I didn't see that coming. Like I totally missed that. So that's the analogy between chess and futures futures, want to make sure that we're not predicting what's going to happen. But we can give you a sense of what some of the options might be. So that when it does happen, you're not going to sit there and go, Oh, my goodness, I never thought that was coming. Instead, we want you to be like, Oh, yeah, well, that was one of the options like we're not, you know, not crazy surprised by that. And you're in conversation with some pretty large organizations about what are some of the forces? What are some of the likely scenarios as it relates to work? You know, I won't mention any names, but go look at the podcast. And you can see, oh, you can mention whatever you want. Yeah, you know, these organizations have hundreds of thousands of employees, and you're talking to CEOs and other leadership. And that's who hires you at least some of the time, right? So what let's just start at that, like, very large business. And then I want to go next, what does that mean for us, as you know, micro businesses and smaller medium sized companies. So when you're mature, I'm in you know, you're a Honeywell, you interviewed somebody and an executive from Honeywell? What, when you're a company of that size? What are you thinking? Or what are some of the scenarios, you're saying to a leader at a very large company, here's what's happening in the economy. And here's the scenarios that you need to pay attention to, when you're one of these really large organizations with hundreds of thousands of employees. Well, scenarios, first of all, I have to be a little bit more concrete. So typically, a scenario is built around something more, more specific. An example might be a scenarios, specifically looking at jobs, and technology and automation and what the future of that might be. So typically, when I'm speaking with CEOs, or business leaders, or working or advising them, the the conversations are around specific things. It might be around talent, it might be around technology, but it's never just the general Hey, what's going on in the world, you know, give me scenarios for the world. Because that is very, very broad and very, very abstract. And so that's obviously one of the things that I encourage business leaders to think of is let's talk about scenarios, but let's make them a little bit more, more specific and more concrete. Again, to use an analogy between chess or you know, any any board game for example. You know, when you think of a scenario, you think of a scenario that is specific to the game that you're playing. We're not going to be playing chess. And I'm going to say, Hey, you know, why don't you give me a scenario for for the game of Go, or for Candyland. Like you, you focus on one specific thing, the thing that's in front of you the moves that are being played. So that's, that's kind of the first piece is, when thinking of scenarios, you want to have something a little bit more concrete in, in place. So I guess that kind of makes it hard to answer the second part of the question. I mean, there are certainly trends that we speak about, you know, broader trends that are happening in the world of work, of course, things like COVID, has been a big one. Of course, things like Black Lives Matter, social injustice, all of that has certainly been a part of it. But then we see other things like globalization, a big shift towards purpose, and meaning that employees care about leaders having to be more authentic and transparent inside of their organizations, the overall just changing nature of talent that we're starting to see. So there are a lot of kind of trends that are out there.
Paul Zelizer 16:10
Mobility is a big trend. So lots of big macro trends out there, which are forcing us to think differently about work. So yeah, let's dial in on our audience take up and say, okay, so some of those contributing or Yeah, factors, vectors, COVID, the Black Lives Matter movement in social injustice, looking at what's happening in the environment, you live in the Bay Area. And as we're recording this, like, you're just getting back to like, breathable air there, because there's been so many fires there, right? Yeah. So these are some of the big purpose and meaning a lot of our listeners have seen that and get hired for those kinds of conversations. So these are some of the things that you're at least creating scenarios around. What would you be encouraged if you were a social entrepreneur who wanted to be paying attention? Like, let me just wind back for a second say, it feels to me like, I am seeing some very large enterprise level businesses doing this kind of scenario, you know, building or game theory around scenarios. And it's much less common in the social enterprise world, which is why I wanted to have you on the show. I'm a smaller business, let's say, you know, I'm not in survival mode, I've got enough clients, or I'm selling enough product, I'm like paying the bills, but even then our kinds of businesses tend to be pretty like, you know, nose to the grindstone, put on your blinders, you know, sell the next season or product or get the next enrollment in your course. And these kinds of issues, you know, what does it mean that purpose and meaning is like a big uptick in that in the workplace and what people are wanting and expecting, you know, like, that may not be that general trend on very many people's radar, what are some of the scenarios you would be encouraging our audience to be tracking and thinking about and feeling into and looking into in terms of scenarios that are likely to affect the space, I'd say probably,
Jacob Morgan 18:19
the x, since scenarios are meant to be a little bit more specific to to a situation, it sounds like what probably would be more more relevant is paying attention to trends. And we'll certainly give you kind of two parts of this. First is, if you want to start to think a little bit more like a futurist, there's a pretty handy tool. I didn't create it, but I made a nice little visual, and anybody can Google it, it's called the cone of possibilities. And if you google cone of possibilities, Jacob Morgan, you'll see kind of a nifty little image that I put together. And a very simple way that you can start to think and apply this framework. And you can apply this to anything, anytime you need to make a decision, pivot, invest in something, just think big picture, you can just ask yourself a series of four questions. The first question that you want to ask yourself, is why might this happen or not happen? So that's the scenario that you're thinking of. So why might something happen or not happen? If we were to think just the very big picture, we could look at jobs and automation? So why might technology replace millions of jobs around the world? Or why might it not happen? So that's kind of your scenario that you start with? The second question is what else might happen? So in the case of you mentioned, your your daughter, she was asked in her school, millions of jobs are going to be replaced around the world? Well, my first argument would be how do you know? That is one scenario, that is one possibility that might happen, but at the same time, that's also a scenario and a possibility that people have talked about for many, many decades, and we have not seen that happened in the past? And there's no guarantee that that will happen in the future. So again, certainly a possibility. But do we need to make concrete business decisions because that is the only future that's going to exist? No. The second thing in that context, and I guess I'm going a little bit on a tangent. The second thing in that context is that replacing a job is not the same thing as replacing a person. person does many different types of jobs. And just because one of the many jobs that you do gets automated or replaced, doesn't mean that you as a human being get replaced. And there are lots of examples. If you want, I can go into these, you can just tell me tell me later. But there are lots of lots of stories and examples of companies who automated lots of jobs, but didn't lose any people. So again, going back to the four questions, why might this happen or not happen? So why might technology automate and replace millions of people around the world? Second question, you want to ask yourself, what else might happen? Well, let's say technology doesn't replace millions of people around the world. What's another like a potential scenario that might happen? Well, maybe technology will indeed have a dramatic impact, it will replace a lot of jobs, it will replace a lot of people. But maybe another scenario is that we will come up with plenty of new jobs for these people to do. Maybe another scenario is that we're going to unlock more human creativity and possibility and we're actually going to be living in a world of abundance and more utopia as opposed to dystopia. A third question that you can start to ask yourself is, what do you want to happen? And how can you make it happen? So for your business, for your life, your career, what is it that you want to see happen? In my case, you know, I have a team of 10 people that I work with, I would love to see technology being used more inside of my business specifically, so that the people I work with can focus more on creativity, more on strategic problem solving, instead of on routine work. And we've already started to see this happen. For example, I used to have somebody on my team who did podcast transcriptions that is now being done by a technology. I used to have somebody who would create thumbnails, or to create captions for me in videos. That's all done by technology, the person still works on my team. But now she helps me come up with strategic ideas and what we could be doing better with marketing. So that's what I want to happen. Technology, take away the mundane stuff. And humans focus more on the things that they're meant to do. And the for the question that you want to ask yourself is what factors are going to influence why this will or will not happen? So again, getting back to the very first question, which is where the very first scenario, I should say, is, millions of people, not jobs, millions of people around the world are going to get replaced by technology, and they're going to be out of work. So what might influence why that would happen? Well, there are a couple of things that I can think of. First, if government takes no action, and we just kind of ignore the problem, that's certainly something that could contribute to making that a realistic scenario. And number two, if we as human beings, and as individuals don't take it seriously, and we don't focus on teaching ourselves new things, and we just kind of assume that what we've learned in life is gonna carry with us for the rest of our lives. That is certainly what could contribute to it. If organizations don't invest more in rescaling and upskilling their employees, that can be a huge contributor to it. If there is some crazy technological discovery, where, you know, tomorrow, we get the birth of true artificial intelligence that can do everything that humans can do. You know, that might be a contributing factor to that, too. So that is really how a futurist will think. And then, when you think about these scenarios and possibilities, when you start to make a decision, you could say, Well, wait a minute, it's not quite as easy as it sounds. It's not quite that simple to replace millions of people around the world, because there are a lot of things that actually need to happen. And you look at those sort of criteria, and you start to see, well, wait a minute, we are investing a lot in retraining and upskilling. The government is taking this seriously. A lot of individuals are upskilling and retraining themselves and taking courses. And when you start to look at it from that perspective, you say, Well, you know, maybe that there, there are some other potentials that might happen. Maybe we won't live in this kind of dystopian world that some people say we will be a part of. So I know that was kind of a long way to think about it. But those are basically the four questions that I encourage anybody to think about when they're making a strategic decision for their business.
Paul Zelizer 24:46
really helpful take up and I'll put a link in the show notes to the cone of possibility. So thanks for sharing that with us. Sure, a little more personal question. So as you're sitting with people, these are big questions, you know, and that scenario if it goes right or it goes left, you know, some of the people you work with, we're talking billions of dollars, right? You're, you know, but even to me, my personal economy, you know, like I already had an online business and COVID came along, and somebody who is equally as talented me, but had a more bricks and mortar business, maybe they owned a studio of, you know, a movement practice, and COVID comes and wipes it out, and I'm doing fine. But it could have easily gone maybe there was some hacker that totally wiped out the internet and the person who had the studio degree, and Paul's like, business goes up in smoke, right? These are major major. There's a lot of emotions and a lot of human suffering that comes with these. And the leaders that you're sitting with, they know there's a lot at stake both financially and personally and spiritually and emotionally. How do you personally navigate you're interacting with decision makers, and they gotta imagine that there's a lot going on in their nervous systems. And they're looking to you as a guide, this guy, Jacob, he's a futurist, he has these conversation, like Jacob, you know what I mean? Like you're on the receiving end of a lot of human anxi and energy. How do you navigate that, given the just what's at stake here? Well, a part of it is that's just kind of how life is in general, we all have to make those types of decisions all the time, whether we're moving, whether we're buying a house, whether we want to propose to somebody, whether we're making the look of whether we're looking to make a career change, we always are faced with these tough decisions and tough choices that we have to make. For Business leaders, the first important thing is that I never make a decision for them. I'm never going to tell a CEO or business leader, this is what you should do.
Jacob Morgan 26:47
That is, you know, my job is to help them think through these things. But they know their business, they know their financials, they know their risk tolerance, they know the market, they know all that sort of stuff Far, far better than I do. My job is just to help them think a little bit differently. And the other thing that a lot of these business leaders do, I think a very good job of is they rarely just pick one path and go down it, they make several investments in different areas, with the understanding that not all of them will work. And that's okay. And that I think is the right approach that we need to have. I mean, you look at a company like Amazon, for example, have the you know, they they made a one of their biggest failures was the Kindle phone. I don't know of a billion dollars, if not more was wasted on that. But Jeff Bezos didn't say, hey, Amazon, we're gonna put every everything that we have in this phone. And if it doesn't go, well, we're going to be bankrupt. No, I mean, Amazon is investing in how many different aspects of their business, I mean, they're in grocery, they're in logistics, they're in delivery, they're in technology, they're in home automation. They're in so so many, they're in space travel, there in so many different factors, so many different facets of business in life, that if one of those things do not do well, it's not something that's necessarily going to crush the business. And I think the same is true for entrepreneurs. In my case, for example, usually, my wife and I, we're both professional speakers, and we usually give anywhere between, you know, 4050 talks a year are constantly on the road, and COVID came along, and all of that got cancelled. I mean, I can't, I don't think I've done maybe earlier this year, I did one or two in person speeches. But I say it's been at least six months since I've done any kind of speaking engagement in person. And so one of the things that we had to do is obviously stiff shift towards virtual. So now we focus more on virtual engagements. We focus on things like getting content sponsorships, for our shows, we focus more on things like creating courses. So we have to as entrepreneurs pivot and focus on different and multiple areas that our income and revenue streams as opposed to just one. So the same thing is true, whether you are a multi billion dollar company or whether you're an entrepreneur, best piece of advice is you need to have multiple, multiple angles, different ways that you're thinking about your business, and not just one thing. I mean, in our case, if all we did is we assumed that we can only speak in person in front of audiences. I don't know what would have happened. Yeah. You know, you have to pivot. Yeah, I was talking to a client yesterday and in the past, I haven't done one this year, but in the past I do high end retreats for people love to come to New Mexico. It's a beautiful place. flying in New Mexico, like you know, we could do a six month coaching program or we could like spend for intensive days and get a lot of that work done in four days. Right. Come on in and along the way. We'll show you some beautiful places.
Paul Zelizer 30:00
Eat some incredible food and kind of partake of all the richness that is New Mexico haven't done one in 2020, right? For the similar kind of people aren't getting on planes and flying to places that are far away. So yeah, I totally hear you there. So multiple streams of income listeners, you know that I have my spiritual highlighter, I'm on a circle that multiple revenue paths and like getting locked into one day can't agree more. So let's do this I want to take a quick break here word from our sponsor, and we come back I want to hear about your streams of revenue and how this all works as a business and how you work with clients. Before we do that, we're printers isn't like most podcasts, we don't have like a meal plan delivery service or a you know, a website service. We are a community sponsored podcast and you were printers community is about if you have a business that is looking to make a positive impact in a really deep and significant way. And you're looking to figure out how to make a good living doing it. You're not necessarily trying to figure out how to get a private jet plane but you want to live well. You want people to help you grow your business and be support both on the external things this morning, we did a master class on launching your own podcast we have LinkedIn pottery of two groups of 12 to 15 people that help each other get their LinkedIn profiles and learn how to use them. You have an Instagram pod where people learn how to use Instagram. We have guests come in and a guest earlier this year me Hawk came in and talked about how he's what he learned as a very intentional podcast guest strategy. He did over 100 Guest interviews in the first six months of 2020 and told us and increased his revenue between three and $400,000. They were still figuring out a couple of the last who signed on and who didn't write very sick, very concrete, insignificant things like that. You could use more support like that. Go check out the aware printers. community at aware printers.com forward slash community and thank you aware printers for sponsoring this podcast. So let's get into the mindset Jacob, I like to joke let's put our entrepreneur glasses on right how the work that you do. And I also want to bring in your wife tell it tell us about your wife, because you mentioned her she's also an entrepreneur, you have your own businesses separately, but then you also do some stuff together.
Jacob Morgan 32:22
Yeah, so she does what I do, but she focuses more on the customer experience side of things. So I focus more on what's going on, you know, on the inside of the company, employees leaders, Blake does a little bit of that. But she focuses very much on customer experience and how that whole world is changing. So she has her own business, I have my own business. And we recently launched what we call the be your own boss podcast, which people are interested they can check it out. It's BYOB podcast calm. And basically we are we've made a lot of mistakes during our entrepreneurial endeavors. You know, of course, we've made a lot of good things happen to we've had a lot of wins, we had a lot of great successes, but plenty of failures, plenty of mistakes, plenty of things that we wish we would have known before we started. And we created the podcast and the YouTube channel as a way to help people become their own boss to learn from our mistakes, learn from our failures, learn from what works, and copy and paste it into what you're doing. So that's that's been a fun new project for us. Nice. So that's a new podcast. And you also have one, this little podcast I'm joking, called the future of work very well known in the space. Tell us about that podcast. Yeah, so that one is at future of work, podcast calm and that one, as, as the name suggests, it's more focused on how the world of work is changing. And so I interview some of the world's top business leaders to get their thoughts and perspectives, ideas, insights on what they're doing, what they're thinking about how they see the world changing. And really, the goal is to provide insight and guidance to the listeners on what they should be doing in their lives and in their careers. So that's one of the significant ways that people find you, that's how I found you. I was like, check out this podcast, and we could really use somebody to help us have this conversation. And, you know, it was really interesting what you're doing there. So would you say that's one of the significant ways that people become aware of you? Is that fair to say? Yeah, the podcast certainly is one. You know, there's books, there's stuff on social media. Yeah, my my goal is to basically be everywhere. So nice. It and then you just mentioned the books. You have three best selling books. Tell us about your book. Yep. So the most recent one is called the future leader, which is based on 140 CEO interviews that I did, and survey of nearly 14,000 employees then with LinkedIn, and that one looks at the skills and mindsets that you need to have if you want to become a leader and then you world of work. The book right before that was
Paul Zelizer 35:00
called the employee experience advantage, which is how to create an organization where people genuinely want to show up the book before that was called the future of work, which again, looks at how the world of work is changing. And then there was actually a fourth book before that called the collaborative organization, which looked at how do we use technology to get employees to work more effectively together? Well, I mean, I didn't know about that last one. can check it out? So I'll put links to all these. So you mentioned the books you already mentioned speaking, which in the past is very significant part of your business? And thank you COVID is now non existent for at least right now are very not in a way was. Are you doing any speaking online? Or not? Some lots of virtual stuff? Yeah, for sure. So virtual speaking, and then you do the very thoughtful courses, talk to us about your online course part of your business. Yeah, my wife has a couple of those as well. And people who are interested can go to future work, university comm there's a couple courses, one on leadership, one on customer experience, one called the future of work, fast track. And basically they teach all the things that we've learned all their research that we've done from our books from our advisory, and they're broken down by specific topics, and we try to create new courses on a regular basis. And then you also mentioned people here know, I'm a huge fan of podcasting, you talked about getting people to sponsor some of your content, how does that work? And how, like, on the scale of things, like where does that fit? Is that a very large percentage of your income? Very small, somewhere in the middle?
36:35
Um, I'd say,
Jacob Morgan 36:38
maybe a little bit on the smaller side. But I mean, a lot of, you know, there are a fair amount of listeners, and it's not so much just that podcast sponsorship, I do it more as like a content sponsorship. So I have a big network online newsletter, LinkedIn newsletter. And so one of the things that brands are always very interested in is, how do we sponsor the podcast, and also a lot of the content that I create online, so I give the opportunity to brands to sponsor the podcast and some of the newsletters that I have. So that's it's been, it's been fun. It's certainly been a big help. But I don't it's by no means like the majority of the income or revenue from your the business. If there's a listener who wanted to get into, you know, sponsored content, what would be your first suggestion, your first 123 suggestions of, you know, making that a viable possibility for them? Well, first, you need to have something worth sponsoring. So you need to have an audience, that's going to be the number one thing that people care about. So before you even think about any kind of revenue generation, the first question you need to ask yourself is, do I have an audience? Do I have a large enough audience where people are going to sponsor and you don't need to have hundreds of thousands of people, you can start small, but then have the sponsorship be small, have it be $100, a month, $200 a month, I mean, whatever is reflective of the size of audience that you have. But as long as you can get into the habit of starting to generate some sort of revenue, that even if it's a small amount, it's recurring, hopefully, and it gives you a little bit more confidence, because you can see that coming in. The second thing, I think that's also really crucial, is who you're going to get to sponsor. So you need to understand your niche, you need to understand the market that you're in the business. And then find the relevant people who are going to go out there and sponsor your show, whether they are vendors, whether they are individuals, I mean, whoever it is,
Paul Zelizer 38:35
but have some people that you can reach out to and try to get them to sponsor your content. One of the things that has been effective, you put together a media kit or a sponsorship kit, so that people can see exactly what they're getting, how many views, how many downloads, what's included as a part of the sponsorship, all that sort of stuff, I think is very, very helpful. So those are probably the first places that I would start. And then the third thing that you need to obviously keep thinking about is how do you grow the audience? Not just how do you have an audience, but how do you make sure that the audience keeps growing? So I'd say those are probably the three most important things. When I launched the were printers podcast, we had, you know, somewhat developed community and people knew the brand and knew me, and yeah, I had two sponsors $250 each and so I was making 500 a month at least it was like more than paying for itself right from day one. That was that was kind of cool, right? And it wasn't some giant brand. It was other entrepreneurs. One was a website designer and the other was somebody who did a certain kind of business development business coaching and and like so I could launch and the expenses were more than covered and I like to joke I could take my family out to eat twice a month and the podcast covered it from day one. That was kind of cool, right? Yeah, exactly. As long as you get something in there. That's a great place to start. Yeah. When You're looking as an entrepreneur, your business in these times, you know, you've seen some disruption, we talked about the speaking part of things. We've talked about how you've made some shifts, but you already had some good things in place. Like what are you thinking about as a future for a futurist for your own business take up about, like, what's coming in these times? And or at least in your scenario, you know, that you're running? How are you making some changes? Or what are you tracking for your business right now? Well, the biggest one is, of course, this, this shift towards virtual. So it's thinking of how to do a better job of leveraging virtual content and virtual speaking to to drive revenue and make sure the business keeps thriving. So that's been a very big focus, thinking of what those products are going to be different types of products, how they're going to launch, so that that whole virtual concept has been has been a very, very big focus for, for me, for the time being. A lot of our audience is really passionate about purpose and meaning. And you talked about that being one of the trends, what do you again, is in your personal business, and in the conversations you're having, whatever scale organization, but the more impact oriented, you know, call it ESG, or somebody who would need know what the UN sustainability goals like somebody is on that end of the spectrum, and they know that their employees are thinking about purpose, they're thinking about meaning their clients are likely thinking about that even more than they were two years ago or five years ago? Is that something you're tracking? And if so, what are you doing about that? And what are the conversations about purpose and meaning among your entrepreneur and fellow business owners? What are y'all talking about not real?
Jacob Morgan 42:00
Well, the first important thing for people to realize is that purpose and meaning are not the same thing. And it's oftentimes used interchangeably, but they're very, very different things. So I have sort of a framework that I like to use to help kind of guide people through this. And it's job purpose, impact, meaning, your job is what you do. Everybody knows what your job is, it's kind of what it says on your job description. Your job is to get on the phone and to talk to customers, your job is to sell things, your job is to write code, whatever it is, people usually have a good sense of what their job is. The second piece of this is purpose, purpose is the intention of your job. Why are you doing your job? So for example, in the case of sales, well, my job is to sell things. My purpose, the reason why I'm selling things is because I want to generate revenue for the business, I want to help the organization grow. The reason why I code is because I want to create great products and services for for customers, I want to create a better user experience. So that's your purpose. It's very much tied to the work aspect. The impact is the outcome. So your purpose is your intention. Your purpose is what is your goal? Well, my purpose is to make sure that I solve customer issues that I help make their day better, and that I get them to come back to the company want to transact with us. Your impact is the outcome. In other words, is that what you're actually doing? Maybe your purpose is to solve customer problems. But the actual impact is that you're making things worse, maybe you're not able to solve customer problems making maybe you're making your customers more frustrated, more upset. So the tie here is that you want your impact to be at least equal to your purpose. But ideally, your impact is greater than your purpose, meaning you're overachieving you're going beyond. In other words, my job is to help customers and brighten their day, but I go even beyond that. They say that they get the best customer experience with me that they've ever had in their life. I mean, they love it so much like it's beyond even what I set out to do. Meaning is the different aspect of it. This the meaning aspect is why you personally do it, what you actually get out of it. For the developer, the coder, their meaning might be really likened to work on complex challenges, difficult problems, trying to do things that nobody else is able to figure out. For the sales professional or the customer service professional. The meaning that they might get out of it is building connections and relationships with others, they might get meaning out of out of helping others. So your meaning is very, very subjective to you. And that's kind of the framework that I like to use. So purpose and meaning are very Very different, they're related, but they're not the same thing. And what I oftentimes find is that everybody knows their job. A lot of leaders know their job, and their purpose and their impact, because they have more insight into the company. And they're more seniors, they can see how the work they're doing is making an impact. A lot of entry level employees only know their job, but they don't know their purpose, their impact. And everybody struggles with the meaning. What are they personally getting out of it? I don't think that's something that we ask enough. And is that written up somewhere on one of your books? Or is there a place? Yeah, it's in the book. If you Google probably, let's see if you google Jacob Morgan? Job purpose impact, meaning you'll probably find that out there. Yeah, I think so. You also talked about what's happening, Black Lives Matter and very robust conversations in our networks, the listeners of this show about inequality. And disparities, health wise, this is like an incredibly poignant moment for people that care about those issues. Or, again, what are you tracking? what we, what do you personally doing in your business? And what would you recommend as a futurist, that social entrepreneurs who care about those issues to be working on as they're thinking about being a leader in their own business? So specifically looking about looking at like the social injustice, social injustice, and how much attention and just how many businesses have gotten caught really flat footed? You know, really? Yeah. Yeah, that's been a tremendous shame. The one of the most important things and this is true, whether you are a big company or a small company, whether you are a leader in any capacity is that there used to be a time where you could play in the gray area, as a leader, as a business where you didn't have to take a stance, you didn't want to upset anybody, and you just kind of like, you know, people didn't really know what you stood for you, you were just neutral on everything. And that has been very much the approach that most organizations have taken that most leaders have taken. And they've always taken that approach, because their mentality is, well, we don't want people to disagree with us. We don't want to take a stance and have people disagree with our stance, but the far bigger fear that we should have. Now, it's not that people are going to disagree with us, but it's that people don't know what we stand for to begin with. So regardless of how big or small your company is, regardless of how many people you're leading, I think one of the most important things that you need to do is to take a stance, let people know what you care about what you're fighting for, where you are on these different issues, and be open and transparent with it. I mean, if you are standing up for these causes, let people know about it. There's no, you cannot be in the gray area anymore. That's not how business gets done. So I think that's probably the best, the best piece of advice I can give anybody. What's the future of the future of work guy? Like? Like, what are some things you're working on that? Aren't it by go to your website? You know, I can't see them or new partnerships are like what, but what's on the leading edge of your business that you're excited about? Hmm, um, I'd say the next kind of few things that we're working on are our courses, virtual programs, making some updates to things there. And thinking of some new fun courses to create, you know, my wife and I are thinking of doing like a speaking course, because a lot of people keep asking us about that, or how to build a personal brand. So we get lots and lots of questions about these types of things. And that is definitely something that we are are considering. So it's think it's really about the future of work University and what we want to do with that. Not so to be your own boss component. And how do we want that to grow? What do we want that to become? Right now it's a podcast, we want that to become its own business, its own entity, something more than what it is. So those are a lot of things that we're exploring. Take, there was something that you were hoping we were going to talk about on this topic, and we haven't covered it or there's something a thought or two you wanted to leave our listeners with as we say goodbye. What would that be? Probably the most important thought is if you don't think about the future of work, you're not going to have a future. So everyone listening needs to think about and plan for their future. Don't have your head in the sand. Don't assume that everything you learned in school or that everything that your company teaches you is what you need to be successful personally and professionally. You need to be a perpetual learner and teach yourself the things that you need to be successful. I mean, it's something that I try to work on constantly. For the business, at least, I try to do one thing every year that I didn't do a year before. And on a regular basis, I'm trying to figure things out and learn new technologies or new platforms or how to do this or how to do that. And I think that's a very, very critical component that people cannot cannot sleep on.
Paul Zelizer 50:18
Take up, thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate it. My pleasure. It was a lot of fun. So thanks for listening. Before we go, I just want to remind you, we do an episode twice a week now every Tuesday and every Thursday. So if you've got an idea, and we love listener, suggested guests or topic, just go to the website, go to the contact page and tell us your idea. For now, I just want to say thank you so much for listening. Please take really good care in these points in times. Thank you for all the positive impact that you're having.