2023 John Hope Bryant (3)

‘If we aren’t careful, we could be setting ourselves up for a new type of caste system’

Reflections on The Future of Work 2023 from WorkingNation Advisory Board member John Hope Bryant
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We asked our WorkingNation Advisory Board to share their thoughts on the most important issues and challenges facing the workforce and the labor market in the coming year.

John Hope Bryant, the founder, chairman, and CEO of Operation Hope, is a prominent thought leader on economic empowerment and financial dignity.

Here are his thoughts on The Future of Work 2023.

“There’s been a tremendous gap in the skills that today’s workers have and what employers need. We are rapidly becoming a high-tech, high-touch society in which the American worker needs a new set of technical skills that up until now was optional.

As we continue to reset the economy, we simply need more training programs for workers looking to enter the workforce and retraining programs for existing workers so they can keep their jobs going forward.

If we aren’t careful, we could be setting ourselves up for a new type of caste system where those who are trained, prepared, and familiar with the technology are the most valuable and highly compensated whereas the others are left at the bottom.

Those who are currently at an economic disadvantage are already behind for the world to come. Without high-speed internet and time to invest in education, gains in tech preparation are simply an ideal.

We must make the appropriate investments in our future workforce today or risk widening the divide tomorrow.”

You can read all The Future of Work 2023 articles from our WorkingNation Advisory Board here.

Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.