Transcript

Bennie F Johnson

Hello, and thank you for joining us for this episode of AMA’s Marketing And. I’m your host, Bennie F. Johnson, AMA CEO. In our episodes, we explore life through a marketing lens, delving into conversations with individuals that flourish at this intersection of marketing and the unexpected. We’ll introduce you to visionaries whose stories you might not yet have heard of, but are exactly the ones you need to know. Through our thought -provoking conversations, we’ll unravel the challenges, triumphs, and pivotal moments that have been shaped by marketing. Today’s guest is my dear friend Jason Wingard. Jason is a globally renowned executive with deep expertise in both corporate and nonprofit sectors, specializing in the future of learning and work. He’s currently serving as the distinguished visiting professor at Harvard University and executive chairman of the Education Board, Inc.

Prior to that, he recently served as the 12th president of Temple University and professor of management, policy and organizational and leadership studies. A thoughtful, thorough leader, Dr. Wingard has published widely on the topics of strategy, learning and leadership. His most recent books include, The College Devaluation Crisis, Market Disruption, Diminishing ROI, and Alternative Future of Learning, the great skills gap, learning for life, how continuous education will keep us competitive in a global knowledge economy, and learning to succeed. He is a senior contributor to Forbes and writes about leadership and strategy. I love to welcome to our podcast today, Jason Wingard.

Dr. Jason Wingard

Bennie, thank you very much. It’s great to be here. I appreciate it. And I love the work that you and the AMA are doing. You are driving change. You are innovating. You are disrupting. You are contributing to the thought leadership landscape. And I’m just so proud of the work.

Bennie 

Oh my goodness. Thank you. And likewise, you know, one of the questions that we’ve been posing and has been driving us for the last year has been this simple equation. If the future of business is changing and the future of work is changing, how must the future of the profession and the professional change? And we’ve been using that as a guide in our conversations. And as we were talking about it, I was like, I have to talk to Jason and hear your commentary and your thoughts, because you had a chance to work both in higher education, in corporate learning, and in professional spaces at that nexus of learning in the future. Talk to me a bit about what shaped your work. What led you to that nexus?

Jason 

Yeah, that’s a good question. I am a bit of a unicorn, Bennie, as you know, in that I have worked as an executive and a senior administrator in the corporate setting, in the nonprofit setting, and in the higher education setting, as you said. And in each of the roles that I’ve had across those sectors, I focused on talent and adult development. And so…

Bennie 

Right. Right. Right.

Jason 

You know, what has led me to that is that I grew up as the son of an educator. My dad was a principal, a high school principal and then a superintendent. So I really learned from going to school board meetings and going to football games and going to debates in the auditoriums. I learned all about K -12 education, the curriculum, the teaching, the learning and everything that goes in between. My mother, on the other hand, was an executive in human resources. So she worked for the Insurance Association.

Bennie 

Right? Right. Mm. Mm -hmm.

Jason 

And was the head of HR there. So I learned about managing people and managing talent and most importantly how you develop that talent. So when you put those two things together, education and professional development and human resources, human capital management, you get what I have emerged in my own career, which is one where I am focused on how people develop in each one of those sectors. So at Goldman Sachs in the corporate setting, I was responsible for Goldman Sachs University and the leadership development.

Bennie 

Mm -hmm. Right?

Jason 

Partners at the Aspen Institute, I was focused on the development of teachers in urban settings. Then working at Columbia University where I met you as a Dean of the School of Professional Studies. Each one of these experiences was different and results and the targets were different, but the core goal was the same thing. How do you help people be their best selves so that they can manage at work and they can manage at home and they can get and achieve the kinds of results that they’re looking for? So,

Bennie 

Mm -hmm.

Jason 

My experience and my background led me to that and my diversity of experiences across sectors allowed me to gain experiences. And then I took that and I contributed to the thought leadership landscape I write the four books that you just mentioned.

Bennie 

Right.

Right. You know, one of the things that I see that’s really powerful in hearing your journey, your background kind of reinforce, kind of continuing to reinforce that space is that it prepared you perfectly for the last few years of utter disruption, right? We think about some of the things that we knew as classic human resources approaches to work or classic ways in which we thought about talent and learning have really been turned on their heads the last few years. Talk a bit about…some of the most disruptive changes you’ve seen in kind of the space of professional learning.

Jason 

Yes. So I met with a group of students this morning here at Harvard University. And we went all the way back and talked about the history of work. And so when you look at work from a historical standpoint, you say, what is the objective here? You have an offering, whether it’s a product or a service. And for that offering, you are trying to beat the competition. You want advantage over your peers who produce the same product or service. And the way that you win, that competition is by gaining more market share measured by revenue and ultimately measured by profit. You know this, all of your listeners know this. The differentiator in that equation and back to your question of what’s happening in the last couple of years to disrupt, the differentiator in that equation has been the quality of that product and service. That’s how you won for decades and decades and decades. And that goes without question. But increasingly in the last couple of years, that

Bennie 

Mm -hmm. Right.

Jason 

Quality of best in class product and service required best in class talent in order to be able to achieve it. Why? Because the globalization that has occurred in the global marketplace has made it so it’s harder to beat the competition with the quality of your product or service. Automation has amplified how quickly things change, right? And so the differentiator becomes, do you have the best people with the best skills to be able to help you?

Develop that product or service faster than the competition with higher quality than the competition and can you retain that talent so you can keep doing it quarter after quarter year after year and so when I consult to and advise lots of CEOs in the boardroom of fortune 100 companies the number one agenda item that they have right now for the last couple years has been talent. How do we get the best talent? How do we keep the best talent? How do we develop the best talent and

Bennie 

Mm -hmm.

Jason 

That is what is key to those organizations in allowing them to be more competitive and to have the advantage against their peers. So when you’re looking at the AMA and when you’re looking at other associations across lots of different industries or wherever it is that you work, you look core to what is the talent that we have and are they better than the talent of our competitors? And what does better mean? It means, are they equipped with the skills?

Bennie 

Right?

Jason 

That will allow you to do today’s job, but also be prepared to do tomorrow’s job. Are you skilled now? And will you be up skilled for tomorrow? And if a company doesn’t have a strategy around that, if you as an employee don’t have a strategy for yourself, then you’re gonna get left behind.

Bennie 

Right. It’s so true. I mean, one of the areas that we in particular, AMA, we see as a part of our pushing our essential community for professionals is being that guide and support and the ladder of skills available to our members. We know that marketing is a space that rapidly expanding, rapidly evolving, right? Technology forward and skill dependent. So it’s all of those kind of critical points. And we look at, we see, people coming in to, can I learn what’s next? Can I develop for my skill? What we found is interesting is kind of having that relationship. I love how you’ve talked about it. It’s not just talent for the organization. It’s also you looking at yourself as an active agent in your own talent and development and seeing where those opportunities lie, right?

Jason 

Yeah, you know, one of the questions that people ask me very often is, is college enough? Right? And I’ve written a lot about this and it is a very contentious topic, particularly when you’re working in higher education as I do. But I also have worked on the corporate side where we are recruiting from universities. And so the question then becomes, if you get a credential from an established higher education institution, is that enough?

Bennie 

Right. Right. Right.

Jason 

For 50, 60 even years, it was enough. And that’s what my, the college devaluation crisis says. For those decades, going to college was the panacea. It was the ultimate solution for you being able to get a job and being able to do well in that job over the course of your career. Now, the future of work says you getting a credential while it’s good, while it prepares you to have good critical thinking skills, analysis.

All of the soft and hard skills that you may need for today, it’s not going to prepare you necessarily for everything you need for tomorrow. So you have to emerge into this continuous learning ecosystem where you are getting more and more skills on a regular basis from a variety of different sources. And so talent alone is not enough. You know, you and I, Benny, can have all the talent in the world and then we can have the credential from the best place in the world.

Bennie

Right. Right.

Jason 

That’s not enough either. We have to also continuously upskill ourselves. Whose responsibility is that? And I think we’re going to talk a little bit about that in a few minutes, but whose responsibility is it? Is it the university’s responsibility to give you what you need for a lifetime of career readiness? Is it the employer’s responsibility to give you that as they hire you? Is it your responsibility as the employee to do that? Those are the questions that we are all grappling with in this talent on demand.

Bennie 

Right.

Jason 

Future of work and future of learning environment.

Bennie 

It’s so true. One of the things I remember you first working on and was such an innovative model when you started at Columbia to actually go on a global road show. Right. I remember you having the conversations with talking to top employers now and having those candid conversations are what are the skills that you’re going to need in the future and bringing that content back to your institution of higher education.

And designing programs that created a virtual loop with, are we teaching? Because that’s always the question, right? Are we teaching the right things now? In the past association, I remember I would have conversations with educators and they were really committed to their plan and curriculum that they had built over 20, 30 years. But what we were hearing every day from the employers of record and brands of note was that what you’re preparing the students with is not what we need.

And while they’ll come out and we appreciate them, they’re going to go on another two year learning journey with us internally. Best case scenario. But then we weren’t getting it.

Jason 

What you just said is so important. So I think I’ll try to recap what you just said, because I want your listeners to be able to hear it. What we need right now, whether you are in a university environment or whether you’re getting professional development on the job or whether you’re going somewhere else in the gig economy to get trained, whatever the source, you need to have curriculum that is constantly evolving and meeting the needs of what the labor market is looking for.

You cannot have a curriculum in a box that was good for yesterday, that you are taught, that you are evaluated against, and then you pat yourself on the back and say, I just went through this course. I am now certified. I just went through this training program. I now know all I need to know. That curriculum has to continuously evolve. And what you mentioned was what I did when I was at Columbia, which was to say, let’s disrupt higher education. Instead of having a curriculum that we’ve been using for five, 10, 15 years even, let’s go to the employers in the corporate landscape, nonprofit and other employers around the world and let’s ask them what skills did they need their employees to have. We will take all of that data, we will bring it back to our faculty, we will bake that into our curriculum on a semester by semester basis so that our students can feel confident that when they go to class, they actually are learning what Amazon needs right now in the space of marketing. And they can go get a job at Amazon or one of those peer companies right away and know that they are fully trained. But what we in higher education had been doing for many decades, and in some cases still are doing, is dusting off the curriculum that we’ve used and we’re recycling it. And we’re teaching it over and over again. And that doesn’t do our students the service that the global marketplace is.

Bennie

It really doesn’t. And we were seeing that students are coming down a course with high expectations and aspirations that you have when you enter a profession, being hit with this reality wall that what they’ve learned and spent the last four years isn’t enough to move them in and forward. And that was also an incredible barrier for underrepresented groups as well, who would spend time into the path. And this was a path forward and being met with that.

Jason 

Yes, absolutely.

Bennie

So I’m going to ask a little different. I’m going to ask us to open up the aperture a bit, because we just started talking about it, and we tend to think about this talent conversation as a domestic continuous 48 conversation. But let’s expand that before, when we talk about these roles and opportunities, that we’re really looking at a global economy and a global dynamic space for talent. What are some of the things that our listeners want? Whether they’re individual practitioners or running teams or organizations, should be considering in this next wave a future of work in a kind of open border global talent pool.

Jason 

Yeah, I think that the thing that your listeners and all of us need to understand is that the products and services that are being developed that have been in past decades were very regionally dependent, right? So if you’re making glass, you make glass in one of the contiguous 48 states, let’s call it, you know, somewhere near Indianapolis and Indiana, you are going to build a product, you are going to get source materials from that region, and you’re going to probably buy and large sell to them.

But now with globalization and automation and all the technological advances that we have, now when you are making glass, you are probably sourcing your core materials from all over the world and you are distributing your end product all over the world. And so the contracts you have, the relationships you have, the languages that you need to know and understand, the cultural sensitivities you need to have all open up and make you a global player and a global business.

And so when you are an employee who is seeking to work for a global organization, you need all of those skills. You need people skills with global and cultural sensitivity. You need to understand how markets work in different economies, different currency, different laws and policies about how you move product and materials across boundaries, et cetera. And so.

Bennie 

Mm -hmm.

Jason 

You just need to be much more aware about how the world operates, what the policies are, what the politics are, what the language, the currencies, the core and raw materials. You can’t just understand what’s happening in your small region of the world because that’s not how business is played anymore.

Bennie 

It really isn’t. We see it every day. Everything is global. You know, you look at small startups who are in Detroit, who supply chain operations, they’re still in Detroit taking advantage of the old infrastructure, selling product all across the globe. Right. And spending the space in there. So I’m going to ask a little more philosophical question. And we’re both parents of kids who are thinking about college and in college and every space else. What does college mean today? You know, what does it mean for for not to have you speak on behalf of your kids, but what does it mean for our students today?

Jason 

Yeah, I think that and I just wrote an article. So this is a good play. I wrote an article in Forbes that came out a couple days ago, which talks about how companies are hiring fewer college graduates than ever before. And so what is the purpose of going to school? That was that was the article that I wrote. If the data show this is not Jason’s opinion, but if the data shows that companies around the world are hiring fewer college graduates for the first time.

Bennie 

Right.

Jason

in about 60, 70 years, then is it still good to be able to go to college? Is it gonna be valuable for the time and the investment that you’re gonna allay, right? Financial. And I think that it is, but you have to be discerning as a high school student going to college or as a college student who’s already in school, because what you want is both and. You want liberal arts education, the core learning about a wide set of readings,

Bennie

Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Right.

Jason 

And language and cultural understanding, all the things we just talked about with respect to how the global business world is changing, your core education at a university will prepare you for that global marketplace. But you also need to be able to apply real skills that the marketplace needs right now. And so that may be logistics management, that may be computer science and programming, that may be language translation embedded in you know, customer service analytics. It could be anything, but you need to have some skills and those skills need to continuously evolve as the job and the marketplace evolves. So what is it, where is, where can you go to school where you can get that core liberal arts education? You could also get the soft and hard skills that you need and you can also apply and work out those skills that you are learning about while you are still in school, right?

So some schools, some universities, colleges and universities are better at that. They teach you the liberal arts. They teach you soft and hard skills, and they also have partnerships out in the workforce so that you can be getting experience practicing what you need to learn so that when you graduate, you are ready to hit the ground running. But some schools, some colleges and universities are resistant to that and they teach you the core liberal arts. And that is very valuable, as I said earlier, for gaining critical insights on how to have discourse and how to have a more global knowledge about authorship and other history about how the world has operated. But if they refuse to also give you pathways to practicing those skills, then you’re going to have to get those skills somewhere else, right? And the argument, Benny, that comes is, is it the college’s responsibility to fill that bridge for you to be able to apply your learning in the workplace?

Bennie 

Right. Yeah, it’s so true.

Jason 

Some would say, no, it’s not. You know, colleges and universities, their objective is to prepare people for society. And then if you want to learn specific trade skills to be able to do a job well, well, let the company teach you that. Or you go find that from another source. That’s the college and university’s responsibility. But then we get back to enrollment is down across the board in many of our colleges and universities around the world, right? And companies aren’t hiring from them as much. So if it’s not as valuable.

Many of those colleges and universities are saying to themselves, well, we want to be more valuable. So we’re not going to replace what we have been doing because it is so valuable to us and to society, but we’re going to add on those partnerships so that our graduates will get those pathways to practicing their skills in the workplace so they can get a gainful employed job. And they still also have that core curriculum that we’re so proud of for many decades.

Bennie

You know, it’s interesting as I listen to you talk through it, it really establishes a classic brand challenge, right? In which the offering explains, because yes, you cannot do those things, but you’re also showing your core customer out of the door, right? As opposed to me think about it in a university context, you are the customer as the student, you are the customer as the recent alum, you are the customer as the established alum, and you want a loop in which you’re continuing to support. If you don’t see value with the product, then you shift to another product right in that space. And, you know, I think it’s interesting. There is a one of our journal editors was telling about a program they offer classic for their liberal arts students. They can do a two summer boot camp in business. So you can be a literature major and do a two summer boot camp. And it was designed for reluctant students from moving from the liberal arts space to have a transition bridge. But it’s that to that conversation. It’s the core liberal arts education. This hyper focused business boot camp that that sets you up for internships, jobs, or provides another set of skills in an on -ramp to get there.

Jason

That’s exactly right. And so you’re seeing some higher education is being disrupted. And so you can either be disrupted right out of business or you can try to adapt in a way that you still satisfy your own core product and service. You don’t want to abandon that. But you do have to look at the data. When you’re in business and college universities are in business and people are not buying your product as much as they used to, you have to decide.

Bennie 

Right?

Jason 

What is it that I can do or should do to make them do it? And so you see some universities doing what’s called a four plus one, right? So you get your four year degree and then you get a one year graduate degree in a much more narrowly defined master’s degree. So maybe you get a bachelor’s degree in history and then you get a narrow master’s degree for that one year, four plus one in something that’s more specialized in the skill basis, let’s call it technology management. And then,

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Jason 

That the real world experience where you’re applying that knowledge out in the field. And then that satisfies everybody. The employer’s happy, the student’s happy for that investment, and the university is still doing what they see as core, but they’ve adapted and they’ve created a product, whether it’s a boot camp or a plus one year or some other kind of training that allows everybody to be happy.

Bennie 

Right.

And they’re a part of the success narrative, right? They’re a part of your success narrative where as you move on in your career, you’re always harkening back and recognizing back that this was instrumental in moving me forward. Which is it.

Jason 

That’s exactly right. And this is not a Q and A session. I know this is the podcast. So we’re, we’re having this discussion and sharing information, but if we were having a lot of Q and A session, I bet you people would be raising their hands and calling it and asking, well, you know, I would be to some the pariah. How dare you talk about colleges and universities not being good enough, you know, you as a professor or president, you know, not being able to say that the college and the university.

Bennie

Right.

Jason 

Is what society needs and we are doing a really good job of adapting our curriculum, that should be enough. It is really good. But then others would say, yeah, I understand what he’s saying because we are going to career fairs on campuses and we are hiring these students. And while they are great and while they have done well and gotten all the grades, they don’t really have the skills that we need to hit the ground running and help our workforce be competitive right now. So it’s this conundrum where both are right.

Colleges and universities are doing a really wonderful job. Employers are looking for skills that they’re not finding. So there’s a gap in between. And then my question to your listeners is whose responsibility is it then? It is either the college and university’s responsibility to adapt and change and offer more, or it is the corporation’s responsibility to assume all of this talent out there and then train them themselves. Or it’s the person’s responsibility, the employee to go out and find the ed tech industry and sector in venture capital is really growing right now. All these education companies that provide skillable training, you know, alternative degrees and digital badges, things like that, that certify you with skills are available right now. And venture capital was really hot on investing in those companies because individuals in the gig economy are investing in trying to get caught up with those skills. I’ll give you a quick case study, right? So Amazon, as I mentioned earlier, they have made news because they are spending $1 billion on re -skilling and up -skilling their existing workforce. So the people who already work for Amazon, they’re going to spend a billion dollars to make sure not only they can be trained to do their existing job well, but they’re going to future -proof those employees to make sure that they’re up -skilled to do whatever the next job is going to come down the pike. That’s Amazon’s investment. Google is doing something completely different. They are actually…

Bennie 

Mm -hmm. Right. Right, right.

Jason 

Getting rid of, they are laying off their full -time employees by the tens of thousands and they’re saying we’re going to invest in hiring from the gig economy. We’re not going to spend a lot of money training employees themselves. We’re going to have a smaller workforce and we’re not going to hire as much from colleges and universities. We’re going to go out to the gig economy and we’re going to hire people who have the exact skills we need at this moment to be competitive and win and when that skill is no longer needed.

then we will move on to the next contractor in the gig economy who can help us. And by doing that, we will always be fresh. We will always be ready to win the game of talent, right? And so I always ask people when I give talks, who do you think is gonna win? Do you think the Amazon strategy is gonna win or do you think the Google strategy is going to win? But the key question embedded in all that is where’s higher education?

Bennie

Right, right. And the question is, as you look at it, you know, the question of who’s going to win is often from the standpoint of being a spectator. And it takes out some of the agency. But the reality is, if you’re a worker or a professional, if those are the only two paths, where do you find your agency? Right? Because in the Google path, you’re there until your skill runs out. In the other staff, you’re there until you stop learning the new items in there. How do you create that?

Jason

Yes.

Bennie 

That path that makes sense for you, right?

Jason 

That’s exactly right. So you’re getting it and I hope that the listeners are getting it too. No matter which path you go down, there is a different responsibility that employees will have in the future of work, which is you’re responsible for continuously learning, upskilling and re -skilling to future -proof yourself and to make yourself valuable in today and tomorrow’s economy. And your question for yourself is, where am I going to get?

that future proofing skill and re -skill? Am I gonna keep going back and getting more degrees? Am I gonna go to some of these EdTech organizations and getting certified with skillable badges? Am I gonna go work in an employer that’s gonna train and retrain and up train me? But where am I gonna get that? Because if I don’t have it, then I render myself obsolete and then I’m not gonna have a job. See, everybody’s worried when we talk about the future of work, about technology. Automation is gonna take my job.

Bennie 

Right.

Jason 

That is not true. Automation is taking over many of the rote jobs that are needed for efficiency and higher levels of productivity. But there are still more jobs that require innovation, disruption, communication, coordination. That’s always going to be human beings. But those skills and how you do that and how you work with the technology is up to people. And people are going to need those skills. And where you get those skills is what we’re talking about now. But…the ultimate responsibility is up to the person.

Bennie 

It’s really interesting. And it’s a change in what had been the historic American social contract, right? You went in and you worked in proximity. You went in and worked in the industry that was there. You worked in the space. You stayed at an employer for a prolonged period of time. You know, I think about, you know, you take a look at like the fortune five and look over the course of 20, 30, 50, a hundred years back and you start to see less and less players who were there back then. Right? Right. If you, if you go and you look back,

Jason 

Mm -hmm.

Bennie 

You know, 50, 60 years ago, you can probably name everybody. It’s Coca -Cola and Parker and Gamble, right? To kind of move forward in that space in there. And at a time, I think about, you know, just when we were coming out of college, you know, what would have been our parents’ advice for how to navigate a career and how much that advice would change to data we give our own students, our own children.

Jason 

At IBM, right. Well, you know, there weren’t as many global players. So it would have been advisable to take the local regional powerhouse and get got a job there at that place. And then, and then, you know, getting advice and sponsorship and mentorship to be able to stay at that organization for a long time. You know, people used to get out gold watches if you stayed at IBM for 25 years, if you stayed at your local organization for a long time. And so our generation, Generation X was the first,

Bennie 

Right?

Jason 

To not stay in jobs for a long time. Start a job in two years here, three years there, if even. And so then your parents, then they give you that feedback. Well, what is your resume gonna look like if you’re changing jobs quickly? What is your resume gonna look like if not only are you changing companies, but you’re changing areas of focus, disciplines, functional responsibility. You’re going from marketing to accounting.

Bennie 

Yeah. And industry. Right.

Jason 

To consulting, you can’t do that. You’ve got to specialize. You got to stay focused on doing one thing. I was an accountant, I was a CPA, and I did that at Ford Motor Company for 42 years. Well, that’s not the case anymore because people are being required to change areas of focus and specialization. And how they get trained to do that is changing constantly. And where you are doing that is going from company to company to company. And in many cases, you’re not working anywhere. You’re working for yourself.

Bennie 

Right, right, right.

Which is so true that you say that because one of our fastest growing areas of people getting professional resource and insight for us as the American Marketing Association isn’t just in learning what’s next in marketing. It’s learning how to run and manage your marketing business. Right? Because you may have spent time in -house, you may have been a consultant in this space in there, and now you’re tasked with how do I take this core skill that I have, the incredible superpowers that I have of being in marketing, and then turn that into…you know, handling someone else’s marketing is not the same as running your own agency or running our space in there. And we see that, you know, even if we have members of our community who are not thinking about being entrepreneurs over the course of a career, they will have a moment in which they’re entrepreneurs. And so we try to make sure we have the resources and skills for that upskilling as well.

Jason 

That’s right. Yeah, and see that is, you know, fought for an association to have that kind of skill that you offer to your members. That skill building opportunity is tremendous because it clicks eventually, right? Sooner or later, you as an employee, when you’re navigating the work landscape, sooner or later, you realize that things are moving faster and it’s more competitive and the talent game, the talent war is much more cutthroat. And so you have to do more to make yourself readily.

Bennie

Yes.

Jason 

Available and valuable and where are you going to go to get those resources and when you can go to a place like AMA, I’m giving you the plug now, you can go to AMA and you can network with a group of people who are engaged in that talent warfare and who have access to resources that the AMA is offering that all of a sudden you’re making yourself more competitive. The problem is, is that it just gets tiring and I think people need to hear from people like you and me that says yes, that is the new world order, that is the new competitive landscape. You have to

Bennie

Oh, thank you sir. Right, right.

Jason 

To keep training and developing yourself and re -skilling and that’s never gonna go away. That is just how things are gonna be moving forward. So the question isn’t when is it gonna be over? The question is who is the best resource for you to be able to develop yourself on a continuous basis?

Bennie 

It’s so true. So I’m going to ask this question as we’ve talked about these kind of paradigm shifts and world shaking moments in there. What are you most excited about when you think about the future of work? But what gets you what gives you optimistic hope and energy?

Jason

I think that we are developing in the corporate landscape, in the nonprofit, in higher ed, you know, new products and services are being developed all the time. And when we, when we do our best to utilize technology, global understandings of best practices, when we skill ourselves, when we are disruptive, when we innovate, when we collaborate, when we blend our heart and our soft skills, we are solving really big problems in the world with respect to climate change, with respect to reproductive health and other health issues, with respect to challenges in people getting along, peace and negotiation from country to country, things that we have been plagued with for decades and for centuries. We are at a point in time right now where what we know, the future of work and the future of learning, aligning the way it is right now.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Jason 

Is poised to help us to solve some really big problems that we haven’t been able to do before. And so I’m excited about that. When we think about cancer coming to an end, when we think about specialized diseases like sickle cell anemia, when we think about climate change and the polar ice cap melting and us being able to figure out how to reverse that, you know, even with our crazy habits of how we live, that is what is going to happen as we, you know, look.

We talked earlier about companies that are trying to make the best widget and provide the best service, and they’re trying to charge the most for that and make the most money for their shareholders. And that’s all important. But we also are living in a planet and in society where our best outcomes for the work we do are poised to help people and are poised to help our communities and are poised to make us a better country, a better universe. And so I know that sounds a little bit hokey, but…we are doing a lot of research now in universities that is seeing how the benefit of all of this coming together and working hard and training ourselves. We are really accelerating what we are, our knowledge, and we are accelerating our practice at the same time. And we’re seeing some real benefits and I’m excited about that.

Bennie 

You know, that’s actually a perfect way to close our conversation and what you’re excited about that the nexus of all of these things we looked at, the future of learning, the future of work, the future of opportunity and the future of reaching our full potential. I think that comes together. Thank you, my friend. This has been a brilliant journey through thinking about this and helping us navigate this change of the future of work and learning. I thank you for being here with me.

Jason 

Well, thank you, Bennie, again for having me. And as I just said, I am optimistic about the future of work. I’m optimistic about all of us as professionals and what we can achieve at work and in society. And I’m proud, once again, of what the AMA is doing to help people be their best selves, help organizations be their best version of themselves and what you are doing as a leader. So thank you very much for this invitation.

Bennie 

Thank you. And thank you all for joining us. This has been an episode of AMAs Marketing And. I’m your host, Bennie Johnson. Thank you for joining us with Jason Wingard and exploring the future of work, the future of opportunity, and the future of hope. Thank you all.