The future of work is changing, and we can't afford to have our leaders evolve backward by sticking to outdated leadership styles.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 Thompson, world’s #1 CEO coach and author of CEO Ready, who shares what it really takes to step into the top seat: mastering leadership languages, building trust with your boss, and aligning ambition with the real demands of executive life. Then we dive into the age of AI with Dr. Michael Chui, Senior Fellow at McKinsey and QuantumBlack AI, who explains how agentic AI is reshaping leadership itself—from decision-making and team structure to the rising need for leaders who can manage machines as skillfully as people. Finally, we turn to the workplace of the future with Stanford Professor Dr. Nicholas Bloom, the world’s top expert on remote work, who debunks common myths, lays out why hybrid work is the sweet spot, and reveals how AI might accelerate the decline of fully remote roles.

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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/

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 work: new behaviors, technology, the rise of millennials, mobility, and globalization. These fundamental shifts are already changing how we attract talent, design jobs, and build cultures. If you're still leading with a 20th-century playbook in a 21st-century world, it’s time to upgrade. Explore the trends, the real stories behind them, and what you need to do right now to stay ahead in this episode.

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This episode is sponsored by Workhuman:

AI without purpose doesn’t serve people. It’s why many companies have tried, and few have succeeded.

Workhuman is one of them. With the groundbreaking release of Human Intelligence, Workhuman combines AI with real recognition data to help leaders do right by their people, and their organization.

It’s how you spot burnout before it leads to turnover. Or discover hidden strengths before they’re overlooked. It’s how you build a culture that’s not only productive—but sustainable. That’s what future-ready leadership looks like.

Learn more at Workhuman.com and see how Human Intelligence is helping the most forward-thinking companies lead with insight, empathy, and impact.

________________

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/

We’ve built a world where products appear with a click and groceries restock like clockwork...until they don’t. When the pandemic hit, it wasn’t just shelves that went empty, it was our illusions of a stable, efficient global supply chain that collapsed. And it wasn’t a freak accident, it was decades in the making. In this episode, we sit down with Peter Goodman, Global Economic Correspondent for The New York Times and bestselling author of How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain. Peter brings a deep, behind-the-scenes look at how global trade works, and what happens when it doesn’t. We unpack the hidden risks and questionable logic behind decades of offshoring, our blind devotion to just-in-time inventory, and a relentless pursuit of shareholder maximization at the expense of resilience.

Peter covers the untold story behind what went wrong during the pandemic and why it could happen again, why we became too dependent on China, and how consulting firms and shareholder obsession made things worse. We also dive into how AI could help (or hurt) global logistics, why nationalistic trade policies could hurt your business more than you think, and what the future of trade and sourcing looks like in a more unstable world.

________________

This episode is sponsored by Workhuman:

AI without purpose doesn’t serve people. It’s why many companies have tried, and few have succeeded.

Workhuman is one of them. With the groundbreaking release of Human Intelligence, Workhuman combines AI with real recognition data to help leaders do right by their people, and their organization.

It’s how you spot burnout before it leads to turnover. Or discover hidden strengths before they’re overlooked. It’s how you build a culture that’s not only productive—but sustainable. That’s what future-ready leadership looks like.

Learn more at Workhuman.com and see how Human Intelligence is helping the most forward-thinking companies lead with insight, empathy, and impact.

________________

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/