A few years ago, sometime in the middle of the night, I was driving from New York City to Washington, D.C. because CrowdStrike had taken down systems around the world. Flights were canceled, airports were chaos, and I was supposed to get from Sacramento to Washington to interview Johnny C. Taylor Jr., the president and CEO of SHRM.
The sensible thing would have been to reschedule. Instead, I drove to San Francisco, found a flight to New York, rented a car and drove through the night to Washington. It was my own version of Planes, Trains and Automobiles, minus the trains. I really wanted the conversation.
What I did not know at the time was that the trip would become one more dot in a career story that only makes sense looking backward.
About ten years earlier, my relationship with SHRM had started in a much less dramatic way. I keynoted the Tennessee SHRM conference. At that point in my career, I was simply excited to be there. I met Jack Phillips, who became a mentor. I spoke. I went home. There was no grand strategy behind it and certainly no ten-year plan for where the relationship might eventually lead.
Years later, SHRM made a controversial decision about how it talked about DEI, and I wrote about it in This Week in Culture. Their CMO read the piece, which gave me an opening to ask for something I actually wanted: a conversation with Johnny about what was happening underneath the decision.
He agreed, and then CrowdStrike happened. I could have rescheduled, but instead I decided to make the logistics future Jessica’s problem and kept going. The interview was good. More importantly, it was not the end of anything. It became another beginning.
SHRM invited me to host an event. We kept talking. People inside the organization kept reading this newsletter. The conversations continued until, eventually, the question changed from What do you think? to What could we build together?
Tomorrow, we launch the answer. It is called The Work Signal.
Every other week, I’ll take one force reshaping work and pressure-test it against SHRM research, peer-reviewed studies and conversations with executives who are actually making decisions inside organizations. We’ll look at AI, labor markets, productivity, leadership, culture and the changing nature of work itself.
There is already more information about these things than any reasonable person can absorb. Every day brings another headline telling us AI is replacing jobs, AI is creating jobs, nobody wants to return to the office, everybody secretly wants to return to the office, productivity is up, productivity is down, and the labor market is somehow simultaneously strong, weak, resilient and collapsing.
Information is not scarce. Interpretation is.
The question behind The Work Signal is not simply, What happened? It is: What does this signal, and what should leaders do differently because of it?
That is what excites me about the partnership. SHRM brings research, data and a massive community of people dealing with these questions inside organizations every day. I spend my time talking with executives, studying the choices they make and trying to understand what those choices reveal about culture, leadership and results. Putting those perspectives together gives us a chance to get beyond whatever happens to be dominating the news cycle and ask a more useful question: what does any of this actually mean for someone trying to lead?
But what I keep thinking about this week is not really the newsletter. It is the path that led to it.
If you had told me ten years ago, standing at that SHRM conference in Tennessee, that I would eventually launch a newsletter with SHRM, I would have had no reason to believe you. There was no ten-year plan. There was a conference, a mentor, years of speaking and writing, a piece I happened to write about a decision SHRM had made, someone inside the organization who happened to read it, an email I decided to send, a CEO willing to have a conversation, a global technology failure and a ridiculous drive through the night.
Then there was another conversation, and another after that.
We love to tell career stories backward because backward makes everything look strategic. Once something works, we connect the dots and tell ourselves a very flattering story about how intentionally we built the whole thing. Living forward feels nothing like that.
Living forward is deciding whether to go to the conference when you have no idea whether it matters. It is writing something before you know who will read it. It is sending the email when you are not sure anyone will answer. It is following up with someone because the conversation was interesting, not because you have already calculated the commercial outcome. It is recognizing that an opening has appeared and deciding whether you are willing to walk through it.
You cannot know which conversation will matter ten years later or which person you meet will become a mentor, a client, a collaborator or simply someone who changes the way you think. You definitely cannot engineer the exact sequence of events that eventually becomes a meaningful opportunity.
What you can do is create more dots. Do work worth noticing. Develop a point of view and publish it. Stay close to people doing interesting things. Ask for conversations. Follow the curiosity. When an opportunity appears, take it seriously enough to act.
Tomorrow, one of those openings becomes The Work Signal. Looking backward, the path feels almost obvious.
It absolutely did not feel that way while I was driving through the night.
Subscribe to The Work Signal: https://lp.shrm.org/The-Work-Signal-Subscribe.html
Elsewhere in Culture
If AI Does the Junior Work, How Does Anyone Become Senior? | With Co-Host John Frehse
John came in worried about what happens to the leadership pipeline if AI eliminates the junior work people traditionally use to learn, but I think there’s another way to look at it. If AI means we need fewer people overall, we may also need fewer senior leaders. And learning to lead was never confined to entry-level work anyway. I’m 42 and still having moments where I realize I’m learning how to be a better executive. The career ladder may change dramatically, but curiosity, judgment and the ability to keep learning will still separate the people who grow from everyone else. Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ceo-daily-brief-with-dr-jessica-kriegel/id1725350421?i=1000789533639 Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/episode/7xhIwoJ4MXULrjk86CXOT1?si=be52abba46bb4340
The Bad First Draft That Moves Billions | With Co-Host John Frehse
The monthly jobs report moves markets, shapes headlines and influences how leaders understand the economy, despite being essentially a first draft built from imperfect data that can be revised significantly months later. John thinks unemployment could actually be meaningfully higher than the headline number suggests, which led us to alternative signals like job postings. Those have problems too, including ghost jobs. The bigger point is that leaders are desperate for certainty in an environment where some of our most trusted signals are increasingly noisy, so understanding the limitations of the data matters as much as understanding the number itself. Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ceo-daily-brief-with-dr-jessica-kriegel/id1725350421?i=1000789761375 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3Az3C2znTnGiU8cVpT53Sd?si=18fe7c7809ba4c2e
Introducing The Work Signal, My New Partnership With SHRM
This Thursday, I’m launching The Work Signal in partnership with SHRM. Every two weeks, I’ll take one force reshaping work and look at it through SHRM research, what we’re seeing inside organizations and the conversations I’m having with CEOs and other leaders. I’ve found that the real signal usually lives somewhere between what the research says could happen, what leaders are trying to make happen and what actually happens inside organizations. That’s what this partnership is about: finding those signals and translating them into decisions leaders can actually use. Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/announcing-the-work-signal/id1725350421?i=1000790004333 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3PF3MEHNuGfFUFBRnBY5ck?si=affed383da294ef3
And coming later this week…
AI Is Creating Capacity. Will Leaders Cut Costs or Build a Growth Engine?
The first edition of The Work Signal asks a question I think most organizations have skipped: capacity to do what? Everyone talks about using AI to increase productivity, but productivity creates capacity, and capacity alone is not a business result. A study of 7,000 knowledge workers found that AI saved individuals meaningful time without automatically transforming organizational workflows. Leaders now have to decide where that time goes. More customers? Better products? New services? Fewer employees? AI can create capacity, but leadership and culture determine whether that capacity actually turns into growth.
There Is No Such Thing as “The Labor Market” | With Raúl Valentín
Raúl Valentín, CHRO of ABM Industries, oversees a workforce that includes more than 100,000 hourly employees, and at that scale he says there really is no single labor market. Hiring happens locally, which means understanding individual communities rather than relying solely on national trends. We also talked about how ABM is using AI across HR, from translation and training to compliance and a new coaching tool designed to give frontline managers access to support when HR may not be available. For a massive workforce operating across multiple languages and shifts, AI could make expertise available exactly when people need it.