Today I discuss the leadership theme of Arrogance vs. Humility. It’s a big topic and covers many parts of a company’s cycle of growth and variations in styles of leadership. Without judgement, I wanted to discuss the topic in this era of massive AI investment, huge bets on the future, and many ongoing layoffs. There are good reasons for arrogance and it also has its problems, so I decided to share my thoughts.

I also discuss our upcoming 2026 Imperatives research coming in January and give you some insights on the new features in Galileo to help transform the way we assess, coach, and develop our leaders. (And we’re all leaders now.)

Additional Information

Palantir CEO Alex Karp Interview w/NYT Andrew Sorkin

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Interview w/NYT Andrew Sorkin

Gavin Newsom California Governor Interview w/NYT Andrew Sorkin

In this podcast I describe our newest CHRO Insights research, based on 25,000 CHRO profiles and detailed analysis of their job history by Findem. What you see is that CHRO tenure has dropped by 20% in the last five years, the role is still primarily held by women, and the pay levels of CHROs have not kept pace with the pay of other C-level officers.

Despite these challenges, the scope, role, and importance of the CHRO has rapidly increased, leaving many CHROs to take on roles a Chief Transformation Officers, Chief Strategy Officers, and even Chief AI Enablement Officers. And the career path to CHRO and from CHRO is changing.

Listen here to understand more. You can download the overview here.

You can get access to the detailed research by licensing Galileo, the essential AI Agent for HR, or by joining our corporate membership.

Like this podcast? Rate us on Spotify or Apple or YouTube.

Additional Information

Josh Bersin Company Launches Research and Advisory Service for CHROs, a Role Under Increasing Pressure

Understanding the Path to CHRO (research report)

The Pivotal Role Of Chief HR Officer in AI Transformation

This podcast is one I’ve been working on for months. Jane Hoskisson, Director of Talent, Learning, and Diversity for IATA (the world’s advocacy, support, and training provider for 300+ airlines). Jane is joined by Alina Aronberga, HR Aviation Leader (former SVP of HR for Air Baltic), who partnered with IATA and others in GAAST, The Global Aviation and Aerospace Skills Taskforce. (You will hear Jane and Alina discuss GAAST in the podcast.)

Jane and Alina discuss many things, including the rapid growth in airlines, the critical need for talent, skills, and diversity, and their comprehensive Future of Work Aerospace Industry Skills Matrix.

This industry skills model, which defines skills at four competency levels, details the industry-wide skills for the major job roles in an airline. It also describes the way these skills will change with AI. And this entire model, which integrates detailed product and operation plans from Boeing, Airbus, and many airlines and service providers, was developed with Galileo®

As Jane explains in the discussion, Galileo was the thought partner, AI consultant, and analyst that directly helped IATA develop this model.

This means that any airline, airline provider, or aerospace manufacturer, can get the model from IATA and GAAST, and use Galileo to understand how these new roles and skills impact their operations, product plans, services, and internal talent strategies. Galileo, loaded with this data, is now available for thousands of aviation HR professionals to help with recruiting, job design, pay and benefits analysis, and training.

And there’s more. Through Jane and Alina’s relationships with airlines and other sources of business and economic data, the model describes how aviation talent needs vary by geography.

Aviation skills in demand in the US, for example, are tilted toward space travel and aeronautics. In the middle east, where airlines are doubling in size in 4-5 years, the critical skills are in pilots, crew, and front-office staff.

You can download the latest version of the skills matrix here, and there’s lots to learn by simply reading it. You can see how this authoritative, highly researched model can be used for training, hiring, succession, pay, and all the critical decisions airlines must face in this unprecedented period of growth.

In addition to these resource and the podcast, Jane and Alina will be joining us at our annual conference Irresistible 2026, on June 8-10 at USC in Los Angeles. They will be talking about their work, showing more on how Galileo was used, and also join a panel with airline industry CHROs from around the world. If you work in the airline or aerospace industry, you should join us – this will be a key industry topic at the conference.

For those of you who are in other industries, let me assure you that airlines have precisely the same talent, hiring, leadership, and training problems you have – but with a safety and regulatory-driven urgency not seen in any other industry. So these are complex, highly skilled HR teams and we can all learn a lot from their experiences and stories.

I want to thank Jane, Alina, and all our airline clients and partners for supporting this work. We have much more to talk about in...