Future Of Work Podcast

About This Episode   Office owners and employers have spent heavily to turn the beige office into something closer to a five-star hotel. Paul Fairhead, CEO of Infuse Hospitality and former CEO of Guckenheimer, argues that the design work is largely done and the hospitality work is not. In this episode of the Future of Work podcast, host Frank Cottle asks Paul what landlords, employers and flexible workspace operators get right and wrong about food, and why so many corporate cafeterias still sit empty.  Paul, a chef by training with more than 25 years in hotels, restaurants and corporate dining across Europe, Latin America and the U.S., lays out what he calls the food truck approach: small menus, executed well, available only here and only today. He explains why variety now matters more than consistency, how a coworking center with 20 members can borrow the same playbook as a 3,000-person building, and why direct relationships with neighborhood restaurants can beat delivery apps. The two also dig into the harder business questions, including how landlords price amenities into rent, why employees often don't see what their employer spends on a $1 cup of coffee, and how property owners can keep food programs flexible as tenant mixes change. Paul closes with the simplest place to start: coffee. 

About This Episode   Frank Cottle sits down with Dave Wright, Chief Innovation Officer at ServiceNow and co-author of Infinite: How Visionary Leaders Transform Today's Businesses into AI-Forward Companies, to dig into why so many companies are pouring money into AI and getting almost nothing back. Dave's argument: most companies aren't failing at AI because of the technology — they're failing because they're using it to automate the same broken workflows they already had, instead of rethinking the workflow itself. Frank pushes back with his own company's playbook: rewriting 130 job descriptions from scratch, doubling productivity with the same headcount, and giving guardrails to the people instead of the AI. The two also get into revenue-per-employee at AI-native companies, Ford's very public AI-quality-control stumble, why five generations of workers are adopting AI so differently, and whether "human-in-the-loop" is already outdated thinking.   

About This Episode  In this episode, Frank Cottle talks with Charlene Li — one of the most established voices in business transformation and disruptive leadership. A New York Times bestselling author of seven books, Li founded the disruptive analyst firm Altimeter Group, served as Chief Research Officer at PA Consulting, and now runs her own firm, Quantum Networks Group. She has advised 49 of the Fortune 100, spoken at the World Economic Forum, TED, and SXSW, and was named one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company. Her latest book, Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success, co-authored with Dr. Katia Walsh, is — in her words — not a technology book, but a leadership and strategy book.    The conversation starts where most AI conversations refuse to: identity. If the machine can do it, who are we? From there, Li dismantles the "AI-first" label, names the scarcity trap behind headcount-cutting AI strategies, and lays out the unglamorous groundwork — mindset, skill set, toolset, decision set — that lets companies move fast because they can move safely.   

About This Episode In this episode, Frank Cottle sits down with David Grossman — one of America's foremost authorities on leadership and change communication inside organizations. Grossman is founder and CEO of The Grossman Group, a trusted executive coach to the C-suite, and a six-time author whose award-winning Heart First series is applauded by leaders worldwide. His latest book, The Heart Work of Modern Leadership: 6 Differentiators of Exceptional Leaders (Amplify Publishing Group, 2026), is an Amazon Best Seller across four business categories. His commentary has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, Fast Company, Newsweek, the World Economic Forum — and Allwork.Space.   The conversation moves from The Grossman Group's research with The Harris Poll — which found AI to be the single biggest change-management issue in business today — into the surprising heart of his new book: it's not the bad leaders organizations should worry about. It's the good ones.

About This Episode In this episode, host Frank Cottle sits down with Jessica Knapp, VP of Growth at WorkSpace Geek and one of the flexible workspace industry's most data-informed voices. Knapp brings a rare dual perspective — she has worked on both the operator and software sides of coworking, including as employee number one at OfficeRnD and across multiple CEO roles in SaaS, with experience spanning New Zealand to the United States. She spoke at GCUC 2025 on AI and coworking.  The conversation ranges across why institutional customers are moving into flex, the "amenities gone wild" trap, the lost service era of the industry, the untapped network effect of coworking, secondary-market growth, what AI frees operators to do, and her Monday-morning advice for every operator: look at your data, and amplify what's working.