Joseph Fuller is Professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School, where he oversees the Managing the Future of Work Project and focuses his research on the changing nature of work and the evolution of the C-suite. He was the founder and longtime CEO of The Monitor Group, the global strategy consulting firm, now Monitor Deloitte. In this episode, MBO Partners speaks with Professor Fuller about what, in this time of rapid change, the term “the future of work” actually means and how we can apply his learnings to workforce design and transformation.

Professor Fuller also talks about what he sees as the biggest challenges facing today’s CEO and organizational management and how many of those top requirements for organizational success involve changes to aspects of talent development and sourcing, including contingent work; digitalization and decentralization; diversity and inclusion; globalization and the labor supply chain. He discusses a recent BCG and HBS Future of Work study on the topic of contingent work and discuss how, in the future, more and more organizations will have needs for high-skill contingent talent for business-critical assignments – and how this is shifting the power equation in favor of the supply side of the talent equation.

He also provides a look at the higher education sector and discuss the role of credentialization in talent acquisition. Citing his soon-to-be-published research, Professor Fuller talks about the ways AI is poised to improve and expand talent profile of companies in the future – a profile that will begin to also include the contingent worker to a greater degree.

About This Episode’s Guest

Joseph Fuller is Professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School, where he focuses his research on the changing nature of work and the evolution of the C-suite. He was the founder and longtime CEO of The Monitor Group, the global strategy consulting firm, now Monitor Deloitte. At HBS, he oversees with Professor Bill Kerr, the Managing the Future of Work project; the pair co-hosts a podcast of the same name.

Research Mentioned in This Episode

Fuller, Joseph B., Manjari Raman, Allison Bailey, and Nithya Vaduganathan. "Building the On-Demand Workforce." (pdf) White Paper, Harvard Business School and Boston Consulting Group (BCG), November 2020.

Fuller, Joseph B., and Manjari Raman. "Dismissed by Degrees: How Degree Inflation Is Undermining U.S. Competitiveness and H...