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Most CHROs I speak with tell me the same thing: the hardest challenges they face aren’t being solved inside traditional HR forums.
That’s why I created Future of Work Leaders—a private, invite-only community for Chief Human Resources and Chief People Officers who want to think beyond policies and programs and focus on what’s actually shaping the future of work and employee experience. Members include CHROs and CPOs from companies like Tractor Supply, Novartis, LEGO, Norfolk Southern, Saks Global, PwC, Northrop Grumman, and more. We come together monthly in small virtual sessions and once a year in person to tackle the conversations most organizations aren’t having yet.
If you want to move beyond traditional HR to focus on the future of work, then apply to join the Future of Work Leaders Group.
As a leader, you’re navigating a landscape of unprecedented complexity. From fostering employee resilience and well-being to steering your organization through the AI revolution, the challenges are immense and the solutions are rarely simple. The constant flood of new frameworks and tech tools can feel overwhelming, often obscuring the foundational principles that truly matter.
But this special three-part episode cuts through the noise. All through 2025, we’ve distilled powerful, surprising, and deeply practical wisdom from diverse experts. Today, we’re going to look back at three of the best conversations so far, with an entrepreneur who built a multi-billion dollar firm from scratch, a scientist who studies the limits of human performance, and the chief security officer of one of the world’s largest companies.
Their insights revealed a common thread: building a future-ready team has less to do with the latest technology and more to do with intentionally cultivating the human element.
Listen to the episode here on Apple Podcast & leave a review!
The Entrepreneur’s Take: Your Team’s “Screen” Determines Their Reality
Organizational strength is not measured by resources, but by the accountability and grit of its people—a mentality that starts with rejecting the easy escape of victimhood.
Mark Matson, founder of Matson Money, an investment firm with over $12 billion in assets, argues that an individual’s success is determined by the mental “screen” through which they view the world. This screen, a combination of education, experience, and core beliefs, dictates their actions and ultimately their reality.
He illustrates this with the stark contrast between his entrepreneurial father and his resentful grandfather. His father saw the world through a screen of responsibility and opportunity, believing that creating value for others was the path to prosperity.
His grandfather, however, operated from a “victimhood” screen, a mindset so deeply ingrained that he told his grandchildren, “the only way… anyone ever gets money is to steal it from somebody else.” This worldview, Matson argues, traps people in a self-fulfilling prophecy of limitation.
For Matson, the American Dream isn’t about what many critics claim it is. “A lot of people think it is about greed and it is about materialism,” he clarifies, “and it’s not about that.” Instead, it’s the freedom for creativity, self-expression, and the fulfillment that comes from serving others.
This is a critical concept for CHROs shaping corporate culture. It forces us to ask a tough question: Are our well-being programs building resilient, responsible adults, or are we inadvertently coddling them?
Matson scoffs at companies that offer “wine dispensers,” “quiet pods,” and “ping pong tables,” arguing such perks risk fostering a culture of dependency that weakens the very people we aim to support.
If you think you’re a victim, and you think you’re entitled, and you think you can’t do it, and you think you know the man keeping you down. Guess what? That’s exactly what you’re going to end up with in life.
This tension between productive struggle and counterproductive ease is not limited to mindset; as scientist Alex Hutchinson reveals, it’s also at the heart of innovation itself.
The Scientist’s Take: Fight the Cult of Efficiency to Foster True Innovation
Journalist, Endurance Expert, and scientist Alex Hutchinson—a former long-distance runner for the Canadian national team with a PhD in physics—draws powerful parallels between elite athletic performance and sustainable knowledge work.
He argues that the modern workplace is a recipe for burnout not because of intense projects, but because of the relentless, low-grade grind. He makes a crucial distinction between acute and chronic stress. “The recovery from a hard thing… can be quite quick,” he explains. “The recovery from six months of grinding is going to be a lot more serious.”
Future-ready organizations must learn from athletes and build in “seasonality”—rhythms of intense focus followed by distinct periods of genuine recovery.
More surprisingly, Alex argues that our modern obsession with efficiency—perfectly optimized by tools like GPS and generative AI—is actively stifling innovation. By eliminating the possibility of getting lost, we eliminate the opportunity for unexpected discovery.
For innovation to flourish, leaders must create the space and psychological safety for their teams to wander and explore. This isn’t just a metaphor; it’s backed by data.
Alex points to a Harvard study of 1.6 million food delivery orders, which found that while exploring new restaurants often led to a lower-rated meal in the short term, it resulted in higher overall satisfaction in the long term as people discovered new favorites. Accepting the occasional bad meal is the necessary price for finding better ones—the same is true for discovering breakthrough ideas.
…if you never get lost, you never discover anything unexpected.
Just as Hutchinson warns against the false security of over-optimization, our final expert argues that in the AI era, our greatest vulnerability comes from an over-reliance on technical systems instead of human vigilance.
Listen to the episode here on Apple Podcast & leave a review!
The Security Chief’s Take: In the AI Era, Security is a Culture Problem, Not an IT Problem
According to Steve Schmidt, Chief Security Officer at Amazon, generative AI has fundamentally shifted the cybersecurity landscape. It is no longer just a technology problem to be solved by the IT department; it has become a critical people problem that falls squarely in the CHRO’s domain.
AI dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for malicious actors, allowing them to create highly sophisticated social engineering attacks—from phishing emails with perfect grammar to deep-fake audio—with minimal effort. This makes the individual employee the most vulnerable target.
As a result, the primary line of defense is not another piece of software, but a robust “culture of security.” This means moving beyond abstract warnings to build concrete verification habits. Schmidt offers a tactical example: train your team that “it is absolutely acceptable to hang up, look up my phone number on the internal system, make a phone call to me and say, Did you just ask me to do this?”
Schmidt reframes the security function not as a department that says “no,” but as one that enables the business to move forward safely. This cultural shift requires leaders to empower their people with the skepticism and critical thinking skills to navigate a world where it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish the real from the fake.
…a lot of people confuse security in the information age with technical security… when in reality, this is a people problem. It’s not just a technology problem.
The Human Element in a Tech-Driven World
The core message from the entrepreneur, the scientist, and the security chief is a powerful, unified theory for future-ready leadership: the greatest challenge we face is cultivating personal agency in an age of automation and dependency.
Matson’s “responsibility screen” is the foundational mindset of agency. Hutchinson’s call to “get lost” is about granting teams the agency to explore rather than just execute efficiently. And Schmidt’s “culture of security” is about building individual agency in verification rather than fostering blind reliance on a system.
As leaders, we must ask a more fundamental question: Are our systems and culture designed to build personal agency, or are we inadvertently engineering it away in the name of well-being and efficiency?
To hear the full conversations and dive deeper into these ideas, you can listen to the special 3-segment podcast episode embedded below.
