This is the published version of Forbes’ Future of Work newsletter, which offers the latest news for chief human resources officers and other talent managers on disruptive technologies, managing the workforce and trends in the remote work debate.
If you’re based in the U.S., you’ve probably spent the past several days feasting on turkey, sitting in front of the TV watching football, scouring Black Friday sales—and reading countless online posts about what people are grateful for. I’m sorry to say you’re going to have to read one more.
Over the last three years, I’ve had the enormous privilege of writing about the future of work—covering where this thing we all spend so much of our time doing might head next, writing about who’s disrupting the status quo, and reporting on which leaders are trying to make work just a little bit better.
It’s been a wild ride, and one that I’m incredibly grateful for: I got to write about the seismic changes happening to where work takes place, how companies think about hiring based on skills rather than degrees, and the impact of generative artificial intelligence on jobs and careers. I launched a brand new summit for Forbes focused on people shaping the future of work—the CEOs, people leaders, founders and thinkers whose ideas are defining our new normal. And I created this Forbes newsletter from scratch—one that hopefully, dear reader, has provided at least a few new ideas or good reads as you start your Monday mornings. I’m incredibly thankful for the opportunity to try.
For nearly two decades, I’ve written about the workplace, managing people and the shifting role work is playing in people’s lives. That shift has sped up exponentially in the last few years, as people prioritize their mental health, grapple with burnout and focus on other parts of their lives over an uninterrupted linear climb to the top. I’m grateful for the chance to take a short break before moving on to my next chapter—today’s newsletter will be my last for Forbes—as well as for our fantastic newsletter editors, Sarah Whitmire and Chris Dobstaff, who will be showing up in your inbox over the next few weeks.
As we face even more change in the coming months—especially with an incoming administration in Washington, but also with the escalating impact of AI—I keep thinking about the conversation that closed our most recent summit. LinkedIn’s Chief Economic Opportunity Officer Aneesh Raman, who spoke on the panel I moderated with IBM’s Nickle LaMoreaux and Deloitte’s Anthony Stephan, said something that stuck with me: AI could help usher in a new “relationship economy, where social ability is at the center of work,” he said, but it will be a huge challenge given we’ve always lived “in a broken world of work that never really asked much of humans.” In the future, he thinks “human ideas are the new code, human energy is the new data center, and a new world of work anchored on the human brain is about to emerge.” I can only hope he’s right.
DIVERSITY + INCLUSION
Walmart confirmed to several outlets that it will roll back some of its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives—including no longer giving priority treatment to suppliers based on race and gender, ending racial equity training for staffers and exiting from the LGBTQ rights group Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index. The company also told AP that it plans to review grants for Pride events to ensure it was not “financially supporting sexualized content that may be unsuitable for kids.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Rather than generative AI platforms like Github or Codeium that make code suggestions for developers, AI startup Cognition has $200 million in funding to build an AI tool that can program entirely on its own, like an “army of junior engineers.” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in October that more than a quarter of new code at the tech giant is written by AI, and AI coding is the most-funded use case in generative AI according to Pitchbook figures, with startups focused on it raising over $1 billion in the first half of 2024 alone. And as Forbes’ Rashi Shrivastava and Richard Nieva write, the funding rush may not be great news for the 5 million Americans who work as programmers, earning a median salary of $130,000—much less the 13 million coders in India and China. But Cognition cofounder and CEO Scott Wu insists that massive job losses are not imminent and that the field has been “capped by supply.”
POLICY + PRACTICE
Billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy—co-heads of the Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency—say they want to slash federal spending by $2 trillion. DOGE could take aim at a number of federal agencies, writes Forbes’ Lindsey Choo, including the Department of Education, the Pentagon and the IRS. Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece that they planned to embed DOGE appointees in government agencies, “aided by advanced technology,” and identify “the minimum number of employees” necessary for the agency to perform its core functions.
WHAT’S NEXT: MEDLEY COFOUNDER EDITH COOPER
Edith Cooper cofounded Medley, a group coaching platform, with her daughter in 2018 at age 59 after a 30-year career on Wall Street. The former head of human capital management at Goldman Sachs, Cooper recently spoke with Forbes about what HR leaders bring to startups, why coaching in a group is beneficial, and her views on AI coaching. Excerpts from the conversation below have been edited for length and clarity.
You and your daughter, Jordan Taylor, launched a startup after you’d spent 30 years on Wall Street. How did that happen?
I left Goldman seven years ago for a variety of reasons. It was sort of that moment where I heard myself giving [other] people advice around getting comfortable and being uncomfortable. Goldman is an amazing institution, of course, mostly because of the extraordinary people that it attracts. As I looked at what the next steps could be there, I thought: What am I going to be really uncomfortable with?
I decided to step out. To be honest, I thought my path would be another C-suite kind of job at another company. I had no idea what that was going to be. I thought I’d give myself a little bit of a break. I’m really super fortunate. I developed a relationship with Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Slack. He had asked if I was ever able to serve on a board. Joining the board of Slack really did take me into new territory of thinking and opportunity and growth. At the same time, my daughter, Jordan Taylor, was at business school and she was incubating an idea on the power of teams and groups. She thought about her experiences in her life and realized how important teams and connecting with groups mattered.
So she’s working on this idea, and she calls it Medley. As I listen to her describe the ultimate objective of giving people opportunities to show up as individuals, but to learn and leverage the experience of others, I asked her if I could do it with her. I was totally enthralled with the concept. I thought and believed that I would have benefited, my organization would have benefited. I didn’t really think through a startup.
What does it offer in terms of coaching that’s not already out there?
Medley is a group coaching platform for leadership development. It is an opportunity for people to operate within a curated group of six to eight people. We have senior executives who are part of the program, and we have those we are calling rising leaders. The key component, though, is that you’re managing [people]. You’re responsible for leading. We feel like it’s really very impactful when you’re a rising leader. … You’ve been really good at your job. Now you’re a manager. People are looking at you to deliver on the goal. People are looking up at you to set the stage for them to be successful. But who’s focused on you?
It’s [been] an interesting evolution of the business. When we launched … we were really focused on individuals who had agency around their professional and personal growth. Covid hits. We continue to work on that model and we got [questions] from companies that wanted to learn about whether we could offer the model within their organization. … We’ve really evolved toward an enterprise model that focuses on individuals within companies.
How does an executive role in HR prepare you to be a founder?
I did a number of different jobs when I worked at Goldman Sachs. I have to tell you that [HR] was the most challenging and impactful role I think I had in the 20-plus years I worked at Goldman. And that’s because in order to be an effective CHRO, you have to understand the drivers of all the different businesses. You really do have to have an analytical and business bent to really understand what is going to make the business successful. And the most complicated thing in an organization are people.
If you’re a CHRO, you’ve got to really be versatile and entrepreneurial in the way that you think about all of these different components of running the talent agenda. … You have to be able to think and to be versatile and make adjustments as you’re building a business. You have to really understand the various stakeholders who are going to determine whether you’re going to be successful or not.
We’re hearing a lot about AI coaching being a tool that companies are deploying. People like the idea of being able to anonymously say “help me with this issue” without their manager or mentor knowing what they struggle with. What’s your view on AI coaching?
We are a human-first organization. We think it actually matters more now to be human-centered versus completely technologically driven. Having said that, we do pay attention to what’s going on with respect to AI-enabled training. … I don’t think we really are at a place in the development of these tools to be able to definitively say “yes, this is where we’re going or no, it doesn’t matter.” So therefore, our thinking is to pay attention, to see what they’re offering and to double down on what we know, which is that human interactions really matter.
FACTS + COMMENT
With DEI cutbacks and employers urging workers to leave their politics at home, charitable giving in the workplace is emerging as a way for employees to express their values, according to Forbes’ Maria Gracia Santillana Linares.
$3.2 billion: Amount of donations processed in 2023 by Benevity, the dominant player in the giving platform space, from workers at companies like Microsoft, Cisco and Visa
14%: The 2023 increase in total giving on the platform over the previous year—and Benevity is once again on track for double-digit growth in 2024
‘I gave at the office’: The cliche references a long tradition of workplace giving, going back to World War II when charity by way of paycheck deduction first began
STRATEGIES + ADVICE
Put these skills on your resume when applying to remote jobs in 2025
Why kindness in the workplace is more important than ever
How a proudest moments list could help in your next performance review
QUIZ
Just days before the Thanksgiving holiday, which company’s suite of workplace apps suffered a widespread outage?
A. Google
B. Microsoft
C. Slack
Zoom
Check if you got it right here.