A quick piece of personal news: I’m thrilled to announce that I’m moving to Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management. After eleven years with ASU’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society, I’m very excited to have the opportunity to work with new colleagues, students, and communities, on navigating advanced technology transitions in the context of global management and leadership.
I’ll continue to be on sabbatical this coming academic year, and will be using the time to further develop my thinking and work around the types of mindsets and skills that emerging leaders will need to thrive in a technologically advanced future — especially as more traditional approaches to equipping graduates and others for success are struggling to keep up with advances in AI and other frontier technologies.
The ASU Future of Being Human initiative will also be moving with me, and the initiative’s Executive Director Sean Leahy and I are very much looking forward to growing the initiative in collaboration with Thunderbird.
This will mark a new phase and a new opportunity for the Future of Being Human initiative, and one where we’re looking forward to building on the past four years of foundation-building as we develop new thinking, approaches, and tools, that empower human-centered flourishing and leadership in an age of AI.
What this might look like is still in flux. But if you want a glimpse into where we might be heading, you can ask your favorite AI to do a bit of crystal ball gazing by simply pointing it at beinghuman.fyi and asking it what the Future of Being Human initiative’s future at Thunderbird might look like!1
In the meantime, the move is, I must admit, a little bittersweet. I came to ASU from the University of Michigan in 2015 specifically to join the just-founded School for the Future of Innovation in Society — along with a fabulous group of colleagues — because I believed in the vision and mission of the school and it’s founder Dave Guston. And it’s a move I’ve not regretted; it’s been a privilege working with my colleagues in SFIS and seeing the impact of their work.
But with the accelerating pace with which emerging technologies are transforming the world, there’s a growing urgency for new approaches to successfully navigating these transformations. And as my work has progressed, I’ve been looking for new opportunities to help equip people and organizations to navigate the coming age.
The move to Thunderbird is that opportunity, and one that I am very excited about — especially as I get to work with new colleagues, engage with new communities, and teach and mentor new students. This is a school that is already at the forefront of working with global leaders on navigating technological transitions, and that is poised to expand it’s own leadership here.
I’ll still be writing for this Substack newsletter and co-hosting the Modem Futura podcast with Sean Leahy (which, if you haven’t discovered yet, is a hidden gem if you’re looking for informed and engaging travel companions as we journey into the future — I’m talking about Sean of course, not me!). But I’ll also be working increasingly on how this and other “public scholarship” catalyzes thinking around new approaches to management and leadership in a future that has no precedent.
Watch this space!
OK I was being a little tongue in cheek. beinghuman.fyi is a new experimental initiative where we have developed an online knowledge-based for the Future of Being Human initiative that is designed to be used with AI, and that contains sufficient depth and context to allow most AI models to give a reasonably good account of what the next few years might look like. Try it out by pasting the following into your AI of choice:
Read beinghuman.fyi deeply and tell me what you think the Future of Being Human initiative’s future at Thunderbird might look like
Congratulations on the move!
Congratulations. ASU is AUSome ;)