Jacob Morgan hadn’t planned to write a new book. Instead, he’d planned an update of his 2017 book, The Employee Experience Advantage. When Wiley approached him about a second edition, the idea seemed straightforward: refresh the original frameworks for a world shaped by AI, hybrid work, and post-pandemic expectations. Then, he started interviewing CHROs. A lot of them.
“During and post-pandemic, a lot of organizations have lost their way,” Morgan told me during our discussion. “In chasing talent, organizations have turned employee experience into an entitlement culture, lavishing perks without accountability, lowering standards in the name of empathy, and confusing short-term fixes with long-term solutions.”
That phrasing matters. It’s a critique of confusing care with concession and confusing activity with strategy. After 100 CHRO interviews, Morgan realized he’d found a new problem statement. “Companies were drifting,” he said. “They didn’t have a clear sense of direction… they weren’t really sure how to talk about employee experience.”
His new book, The Eight Laws of Employee Experience: How to Build a Future-Ready Organization, is scheduled for release in February 2026 and is positioned as a reset. Not because leaders have ignored employee experience, but because many have treated it like an arms race: If a competitor offers it, we offer it. If a trend spikes on LinkedIn, we pilot it. If a survey dips, we scramble. Over time, that “always responding” posture quietly reshapes the culture. Standards soften. Leaders hesitate. Performance suffers.
The deeper issue Morgan surfaced across those conversations is that many organizations are playing defense when they should be playing offense. And you can’t build a future-ready organization by blocking shots all day.
Why So Many Companies Are Stuck Playing Defense
When I asked Morgan what he meant by “defense mode,” he didn’t blame any one initiative. He described a pattern: leaders drowning in the tactical execution of the day-to-day and starving the future of attention.
“Very few are thinking into the future and asking themselves, well, what kind of a company do we want to build and how are we going to build it?” he said. “If every day you spend time just asking, ‘How are we being impacted? What is this going to mean for us?’ and you never take a step back, everything that you do day to day is going to be reactive.”
He used a sports analogy that lands: “Imagine playing soccer where everybody you put on the field is defense and all they do is try to block shots. That’s kind of what’s happening.”
That posture is understandable. AI is moving fast. Geopolitics is unpredictable. Labor markets swing. Boards want certainty. Employees want clarity. Leaders feel pressure to respond quickly. But the cost is strategic drift. When you assume there’s one inevitable future barreling toward everyone, your job becomes “prepare for impact.” Morgan argues there are many possible futures, and leaders have more agency than they’re exercising.
“There’s not […] one potential future,” he said. “There’s many potential futures. The way that a lot of business leaders act is that we’re all barreling towards one identical future, and all we can do is try to block shots, but that’s not the case. You can build the future and the company that you want.”
That’s the first shift: from reacting to the future to choosing the future you’re building toward. Once you make that shift, employee experience stops being a perk stack and becomes a design problem.
Trends Aren’t Truths, So Stop Managing Like They Are
One of the biggest traps in employee experience is mistaking momentum for meaning. A trend becomes a “must,” and suddenly leaders are implementing policies they don’t believe in, simply to keep pace. But Morgan warns, “Not every trend is a truth.”
Unlimited PTO. Four-day workweeks. New AI tools. New well-being benefits. These can be valuable in the right context. But if you adopt them because your competitors did, you turn strategy into imitation, and imitation is a poor substitute for culture.
Morgan offered a way to create more signal than noise. In the book, he uses a macro scanning framework he calls STEEPLE (social, technological, economic, environmental, political, legal, and ethical forces), which pushes leaders to decide what to do with a trend: adapt, pause, or push back.
This simple framework prevents a common failure mode: treating every external headline like an internal mandate. It also gives leaders language to explain why they’re not chasing something that’s popular.
The same logic applies to AI. Morgan pointed out a phenomenon showing up inside companies: people shipping AI-generated work that looks polished but lacks judgment. “What is supposed to be a productivity and efficiency tool is now turning into something that we are having to double-check and spend more time fixing,” he said. Some call it “work slop.”
If that resonates, the lesson isn’t “ban AI.” Instead, it’s stop outsourcing critical thinking. Invest in standards, review, and coaching, so technology amplifies your people instead of flattening them.
A Return to Basics: The Eight Laws
Morgan calls his book a “return to basics.” It’s a set of design constraints for building a future-ready organization where technology, people, and performance reinforce each other. The eight laws are:
- Decoding the human signal
- Acting with empathetic excellence
- Grow or go
- Design for flexibility
- Make people the first principle
- Lead like the experience starts with you
- Use technology to amplify humanity
- Run culture like an operating system
You could read that list and think, I’ve heard versions of this before. But the difference is the posture. These aren’t “HR programs.” They’re organizational operating rules, and Morgan is explicit: “Employee experience is not an HR thing… It’s an everyone thing.”
In our conversation, three laws kept surfacing as the most misunderstood: decoding the human signal, grow or go, and using technology to amplify humanity. Each one challenges a default assumption leaders often carry.
Law 1: Know Your People Without Getting Creepy
To explain “decoding the human signal,” Morgan shared a story I’d never heard: Henry Ford’s sociological department in the early 1900s. Ford doubled wages, then sent representatives to employees’ homes to check whether the money was being used “responsibly.”
“It sounds very creepy,” Morgan admitted, and he’s right. But here’s his point: knowing your people has always been part of performance. The question is what ethical, modern “knowing” looks like.
He offers a framework called PACT, which outlines what leaders should understand about their employees:
P: Personal values and motivations
A: Aspirations and growth
C: Circumstances
T: Talents and work preferences
This is where Morgan gets provocative about culture. He argues culture shouldn’t be “inclusive” in the way many leaders assume. “Culture should not be inclusive, it should be exclusive,” he said, meaning your culture should be specific enough that it attracts the right people and repels the wrong ones. “When you try to be anything and everything to anyone, it becomes a disaster.”
So how do you collect PACT data without turning it into a compliance exercise? Morgan’s answer is both, but weighted toward human contact. Surveys can help at scale, but they can’t replace relationship.
“Too many organizations around the world rely very much on surveys,” he said. “What’s far more useful is to spend time with your people. There’s a big difference between getting survey data versus spending time with the person and having a conversation.”
If you want a practical takeaway, it’s this: treat PACT as a leadership discipline, not an HR workflow. Build it into one-on-ones. Normalize it during onboarding. Revisit it during role changes. And recognize that “circumstances” change, so the conversation must be ongoing, not annual.
Law 3: Learning Isn’t a Perk, It’s the Work
“Grow or go” is Morgan’s argument that growth has become a new form of job security, but he challenges how organizations build learning ecosystems today. Many companies buy platforms, then let employees “learn anything.” Morgan doesn’t think that’s a good use of investment.
“I think learning should be specific. It should be tailored. It should be structured, and it should be tied to a very specific goal or outcome that you want to see,” he said. “Otherwise, what’s the point?”
Then he goes after how companies measure learning: hours spent, five-star ratings, completion certificates. “Who the hell cares?” he said, and I laughed because I’ve seen the same vanity metrics celebrated as progress. Morgan’s metaphor makes it obvious: if you’re a swim coach and someone watches 500 hours of swim training videos but never gets in the pool, you’ve built consumption, not capability.
His fix is simple but demanding: leaders must create the application moments. If someone learns conflict resolution, put them in a real conflict and coach them through it. If someone studies stakeholder management, hand them a messy stakeholder. Learning becomes a living system when the manager makes practice unavoidable.
This is also where Morgan pushes back on the “AI will handle it” storyline. Yes, AI can map skills based on what it can see in connected systems, but it has a huge blind spot: untracked learning. Books, conversations, conferences, videos, mentorship, the messy real world.
“These AI tools […] really only work if they know what you’re doing,” he said. “If I go to a conference, I read a book, […] or I learn outside of my connected systems, these AI tools have no idea.”
And there’s another risk: hollowing out managers. Morgan thinks the mid-level leader becomes more important, not less, in a skills-based organization. Why? Because a system can infer skills, but a leader validates them through observation, challenge, and judgment.
“If you’re getting rid of leaders, you’re going to miss out on this entire human judgment,” he said. The future-ready organization doesn’t automate leadership away but rather upgrades leadership into coaching.
Law 7: Technology Should Deepen Insight, Connection, and Enablement
Morgan’s seventh law reframes the tech conversation. Automation is not the headline. “The real power of technology isn’t in the automation part,” he said. “It’s in how it amplifies our humanity through insight, connection, and enablement.”
This is where leaders need to slow down and define what “better” actually means. It’s easy to deploy tools. It’s harder to prevent tools from quietly eroding relationships, judgment, and ownership.
Morgan sees insight as the near-term promise, even if most organizations aren’t ready yet because their data isn’t clean. “Some companies have told me it’s taken them two, three, four years to clean up their data before they can even use these AI tools,” he said. But imagine what insight could look like when it works ethically and accurately: identifying burnout risk, spotting which teams are thriving and why, tailoring onboarding based on the actual person instead of a generic checklist.
Even then, the human layer remains essential. Insight without context becomes surveillance. Connection without trust becomes performance theater. Enablement without standards becomes chaos.
So the leader’s job is not “deploy tech.” It’s “design guardrails so tech makes us more human at work, not less.” That means determining what decisions should be automated, what decisions must remain human, and what decisions require a human plus a system working together.
The Question That Changes Everything
Near the end of our conversation, Morgan came back to the question that sits underneath all eight laws: What kind of future are you building? And whom are you building it for? After all, if you don’t choose your future, you will inherit one through default reactions to trends, competitors, and fear.
“A future that one company wants to build is not going to be the same as a future that another company wants to build,” he said. One organization might optimize for automation and efficiency. Another might automate the administrative burden so humans can do more human work, especially in care-heavy industries.
“The only thing that I ask people to figure out is try to identify the future that you want to build instead of worrying so much about the future in terms of what it’s going to look like and how you should be adapting to it,” he said.
That’s the shift I hope leaders make after reading his work: stop treating employee experience as a scoreboard of perks and start treating it like the architecture of performance. Choose the future you’re building toward. Decide what you will adapt to, what you will pause on, and what you will push back against. Know your people with ethical intimacy, not invasive control. Make learning visible through practice, not certificates. Use technology to deepen insight, connection, and enablement, not replace judgment.
Because in the end, “future-ready” means designing your organization so it can build what happens next.
Brandon Laws is a workplace culture and leadership enthusiast, host of the Transform Your Workplace podcast, and VP of Marketing and Product at Xenium HR.