Futuro del lavoro speakers
Voci che plasmano come le organizzazioni si adattano all’automazione, ai modelli ibridi e alle mutevoli aspettative lavorative
Speakers Associates represents 224 speakers on Futuro del lavoro, including Zavier Coyne, Thimon de Jong, Rahaf Harfoush, Nilofer Merchant, Russell Beck, Jeremy Blain, Katja Schipperheijn, Graeme Codrington, Lauren Ducrey, e Kayleigh Fazan.
Leaders are asked to rebuild office culture, hybrid patterns and employee belonging at the same time, often without a template that fits their company. The result is real-estate bills that no one defends, engagement scores that keep sliding, and a generation of talent that treats the workplace as optional. The question is no longer whether to bring people together, but what the gathering is actually for.
Most strategy processes are built for a stable horizon. They forecast from the recent past and break down when the underlying drivers, AI capability, energy systems, demographics, shift faster than the cycle they were designed to track. Leaders need a way to think rigorously about what is actually changing, ten and twenty years out, without sliding into either denial or hype.
Executive teams know the rules of the game have changed and still default to the playbook that built the last decade. Automation is eating predictable work, and the human capabilities that matter most, empathy, judgement, persuasion, are the ones leadership pipelines were never designed to develop. The question is no longer whether to adapt, it is which parts of the business to rebuild first and how to develop the people who will lead that rebuild.
Hiring at scale rewards the wrong things. Resumes, polished interviews, and pedigree filter for people who look the part, not for people who hold up under stress, ambiguity, and team load. The cost shows up later, in failed executives, hollow benches, and teams that cannot absorb the next shock.
Most leaders now agree that AI will reshape their workforce. Fewer can say what that looks like on a Monday morning for a marketing coordinator, a finance analyst or a field engineer. The distance between boardroom AI strategy and the person being asked to use the tools is where adoption stalls, budgets leak and cultural resistance hardens.
Senior leaders are expected to be authentic and adaptable at the same time. Their people are loyal to a craft, not a company, and trust in institutions has thinned. The question for the executive team is what holds a leader together when the organisation around them keeps changing shape.
Most early-career attrition is not a pay problem or a purpose problem. It is a translation problem. New hires, managers of new hires, and first-generation professionals all operate inside a set of unwritten rules that nobody is taught and few are willing to spell out, and the cost of that gap shows up in engagement scores, ERG complaints, manager escalations, and lost talent before the second promotion.
Most senior teams now accept that AI will reshape how their organisation works. The harder question is what their people should be doing more of, not less, as the technology takes on more of the cognitive load. Without an answer, transformation programmes default to tooling and miss the human capability shift the strategy actually depends on.
Five generations now share the same office, the same Slack channel and the same expectations of their employer, and almost none of those expectations agree. Engagement scores are sliding, managers feel outnumbered by their direct reports’ demands, and the post-pandemic settlement on hybrid work has hardened into resentment on both sides. The work is no longer to defend a culture. It is to rebuild the social contract between the organisation and the people who turn up to it.
Most leadership pipelines still produce a narrow band of talent that looks and thinks alike, and the boards that authorise the spend cannot explain why the numbers have not moved. The gap is rarely intent. It sits in how succession, promotion, and capital are actually allocated, and in whether senior leaders are equipped to govern those decisions with conviction.
Institutional authority is eroding faster than most leadership teams can adapt. Customers, employees and stakeholders expect to participate in decisions that were once made behind closed doors, and refuse to grant legitimacy by title alone. The tension: how to retain the discipline of a serious institution while building the participatory muscle that now determines influence, loyalty and trust.