Directionally Correct, A People Analytics Podcast

Check out this episode of the #1 people analytics podcast with special guest, Dr. Paula Caligiuri, Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University, Co-Founder of Skiilify, Best-Selling Author, Podcast Host of “International Business Today”!

In this wide-ranging and deeply insightful conversation, host Cole Napper sits down with one of the world’s leading scholars on global talent, cultural agility, and international business to explore how work, careers, and human capability are evolving in a time of rapid technological and geopolitical disruption. The discussion begins with Paula’s decades of research on global mobility and expatriate success, where she studied how individuals adapt when working across cultures and unfamiliar environments. Drawing on her early work examining personality predictors of expatriate success, Paula explains why traits such as openness to experience and extraversion often predict who thrives in new and complex contexts. While traditional expatriate assignments have declined, the underlying challenge—humans operating outside familiar environments—has only intensified. Today, novelty comes to us rather than us traveling to it, as employees increasingly work across global teams, industries, generations, and rapidly changing technologies.

From there, the conversation shifts toward cultural agility, a concept Paula has championed throughout her career. Rather than simply adapting to new situations, cultural agility involves knowing when to adapt, when to maintain your own standards, and when to help create new norms. In a world where AI, automation, and shifting labor markets are transforming jobs at unprecedented speed, these capabilities are becoming essential. Paula argues that while technology continues to reshape work, the human skills that help people navigate complexity—curiosity, humility, resilience, perspective taking, and relationship orientation—are becoming more important, not less.

Cole and Paula also explore the growing conversation around skills-based organizations and the changing nature of talent management. As technical skills evolve rapidly and often have a shorter half-life than ever before, organizations must think carefully about how they build durable human capabilities that allow workers to move fluidly between roles, industries, and challenges. Paula shares insights from both academic research and real-world experimentation through her company Skillify, which helps individuals develop these capabilities through tools designed to build cultural agility across different stages of life and career.

The conversation also explores Paula’s professional journey—balancing roles as a professor, entrepreneur, author, and podcast host. She reflects on the importance of translating academic insights into ideas practitioners can apply. Along the way, Paula offers practical advice for professionals seeking to build meaningful careers and strong personal brands, emphasizing the importance of understanding what you want your reputation to represent and consistently aligning your work with that purpose.

Throughout the episode, Cole and Paula connect the dots between global labor dynamics, AI disruption, workforce transformation, and the future of human capability—offering a thought-provoking discussion about what it means to succeed in an era defined by uncertainty and constant change.

If you like this episode, you’d also love exploring prior episodes—visit colenapper.com for the full archive and show links.

Check out this episode of the #1 people analytics podcast with special guest, Dr. Gary Russo, Executive Director of Workforce Intelligence at Providence Health!

In this wide-ranging and deeply human conversation, Cole sits down with Gary to explore what it really means to build and sustain a people analytics function for more than a decade inside one of the largest not-for-profit health systems in the United States.

Gary reflects on hitting his ten-year mark at Providence Health & Services and what it takes to move beyond the AI hype cycle that has dominated so many analytics conversations. Rather than chasing headlines, he shares how real progress often happens in small, unglamorous steps: defining terms, building trust, clarifying governance, and laying foundations so better decisions can take root years later. From early debates about what “analytics” even meant to establishing strategic HR data governance across dozens of executives, Gary explains why perseverance and continuity of vision matter more than any single dashboard or model.

The discussion dives into how healthcare fundamentally differs from other industries. In a world where leaders can honestly say they skipped your email because they were saving lives, prioritization hits differently. Gary unpacks the unique reimbursement model of healthcare, where organizations are rewarded when patients get well and do not return—creating an industry that is, in many ways, funded to keep itself out of business. He also explores the looming workforce crisis driven by aging populations, chronic disease, and nurse shortages, and why creative, nontraditional pathways into care delivery may be essential to sustaining the system.

AI gets a reality check as Gary distinguishes between generative buzzwords and the quieter power of automation, robotics, and computer vision already transforming surgery and diagnostics. He emphasizes that governance—clear definitions, aligned metrics, and shared language—is the prerequisite not only for AI, but for productive conversations between HR, finance, and operations. Sometimes progress begins with something simple, like distinguishing between “position FTE” and “worked FTE” so debates end and better questions can begin.

Throughout the episode, Gary blends neuroscience, therapy insights, improv training, and even fire performance into his leadership philosophy. He shares how relationship counseling principles apply to employer-employee dynamics, why listening goes far beyond surveys, and how understanding human uncertainty is central to responsible analytics. The conversation also tackles burnout, pessimism, social isolation, hybrid work, and the growing gap between strategy and so-called “data fluency” problems—challenging the assumption that unused dashboards signal a skills issue rather than a clarity issue.

At its core, this episode is about using analytics in service of something bigger: putting more caregivers at the bedside, strengthening communities, and making decisions that ripple far beyond a spreadsheet. If you care about the intersection of AI, workforce planning, healthcare, and long-term culture change, this is one you won’t want to miss.

If you like this episode, you’d also love exploring prior episodes—visit colenapper.com for the full archive and show links.

Check out this episode of the #1 people analytics podcast with special guest, Buddy Benge, Head of Workforce Strategy and Resource Management at Edward Jones!

In this wide-ranging, unfiltered, and deeply thought-provoking conversation, Buddy joins host Cole Napper to explore the real future of work—beyond the buzzwords, vendor hype, and recycled HR talking points.

Buddy shares his unconventional journey from coding AOL text-based games at 18 to earning a master’s degree from Cornell and building early dashboards at Raytheon, where he helped shape strategic workforce planning. He later stood up people analytics functions at Monsanto and Bayer and led Human Capital Insights at Edward Jones before stepping into his current role defining workforce strategy and resource management for a 55,000+ associate financial services firm.

Together, Cole and Buddy unpack what workforce strategy actually means inside a large, complex organization. They explore how AI, automation, sourcing strategy, process excellence, job architecture, FP&A, and upskilling converge in a modern future-of-work function. Buddy explains why the conversation must shift from static “roles” to the “work to be done,” and how organizations need to deconstruct tasks, redesign jobs, and rethink capability building to remain competitive in an AI-accelerated world.

The episode doesn’t shy away from controversy. Buddy challenges assumptions about AI agents, probabilistic versus deterministic systems, and unrealistic expectations placed on emerging technologies. He breaks down the math behind multi-step automation error rates and why leaders must understand acceptable risk, system maturity, and economic tradeoffs before turning decision-making over to machines.

From there, the conversation expands into bold critiques of HR itself. Buddy questions why HR technology is often misconfigured and underleveraged, why performance management frequently destroys more value than it creates, and why common talent acquisition metrics like quality of hire may be fundamentally flawed. He pushes listeners to rethink how value is defined in white-collar work, how compensation systems attempt to price roles without understanding task-level impact, and why we may lack a shared language for articulating real contribution.

They also explore leadership development, coaching, employee listening, benefits strategy, retirement risk, relocation in a return-to-office era, and the evolution of HR job titles. Buddy argues that leadership development may be the single most important function inside an organization—and that its future could be significantly reshaped by AI-driven tools.

Throughout the episode, two seasoned practitioners wrestle with the tension between legacy HR structures and the urgent need to evolve. This is not a surface-level trends conversation. It is a candid, systems-level discussion about analytics maturity, data life cycles, organizational design, and the practical realities of driving change inside complex institutions.

If you care about workforce intelligence, analytics, AI disruption, and the structural future of HR, this episode delivers sharp, experience-driven insight from someone who has built and reinvented people analytics functions across global organizations.

If you like this episode, you’d also love exploring prior episodes—visit colenapper.com for the full archive and show links.

Check out this episode of the #1 people analytics podcast with special guest, Rob Dees, Senior Director of People Analytics & Insights at Target!

In this wide-ranging and deeply thoughtful conversation, Rob joins the show to explore what it truly means to bring decision science into people analytics, how a product-based operating model can transform HR, and why employee listening should be treated as an intelligence function—not just a sentiment survey.

Drawing on more than 20 years of military leadership experience and his academic background in decision science, Rob unpacks his “three-legged stool” framework for decision quality: alternatives, information, and preferences. He explains why organizations often over-invest in data while underinvesting in clarifying objectives, and how value-focused thinking can elevate workforce decisions from reactive to strategic. Whether discussing optimization models, AI-enabled decision support, or human capital investment, Rob consistently returns to one central principle: leaders must own the objective function.

The conversation dives into what it’s like to lead a 60-person people analytics team inside a complex enterprise. Rob shares how adopting a product operating model—with short sprints, user personas, rapid prototyping, and disciplined routines—helps teams move from slide decks to shipped insights. He outlines how a comprehensive and continuous listening strategy acts like a network of sensors on the battlefield, creating a common operating picture of the employee experience. By combining employee sentiment with operational human capital metrics, organizations move beyond awareness to real understanding.

One of the most compelling segments revisits Rob’s early work measuring the “whole soldier” at West Point, where he helped build a data-driven model around heart, body, and mind. That experience shaped his philosophy that performance models must integrate values, trade-offs, and measurable objectives. He connects those lessons to modern employee value propositions, showing how leaders can think in terms of optimization: if you had finite resources to invest in pay, flexibility, development, or belonging, where would you allocate them for maximum impact?

The episode also explores the intersection of AI and decision science. Rob explains how machines excel at processing information and generating alternatives, but humans must define preferences and constraints. In an era of generative AI and prompt engineering, the discipline of structuring objectives becomes more—not less—important. Without clarity on what you are optimizing for, even the most advanced models will miss the mark.

Finally, Rob reflects on leadership under pressure, including the powerful question: do your soldiers know your voice in the dark? From quarterly feedback rhythms in the military to continuous feedback cultures in business, he argues that clarity, proximity, and disciplined listening are foundational to performance.

If you care about the future of workforce intelligence, employee listening, AI-enabled decision-making, or building a high-impact people analytics function, this episode will challenge and sharpen your thinking.

If you like this episode, you’d also love exploring prior episodes—visit colenapper.com for the full archive and show links.

Check out this episode of the #1 people analytics podcast with special guest, Tyler Weeks, Managing VP of People Technology, Research, and Analytics at Marriott!

In this wide-ranging and intellectually electric conversation, host Cole Napper sits down with one of the most original thinkers in the people analytics and HR technology space to explore where the function is really headed—and what most organizations are still missing. Tyler brings a rare blend of deep technical R&D experience, systems thinking, and practical leadership insight from operating at scale inside one of the world’s largest and most complex hospitality organizations.

The discussion starts at the macro level, tackling the future of people analytics and why the field risks becoming overly focused on dashboards, reporting, and polished narratives rather than real impact. Tyler argues that people analytics teams should think less like traditional insights groups and more like true R&D organizations—designed to rapidly test ideas, discard what doesn’t work, and scale what does. Using vivid metaphors and analogies, from ESPN tickers to Moneyball, he reframes success as a series of small, compounding wins rather than grand, one-time “transformations.”

From there, the conversation moves into how credibility is actually built with executives. Tyler shares how his team at Marriott deliberately avoided big promises, instead focusing on solving obvious, painful problems and shortening the distance between insight and action. Rather than building static dashboards, they focused on lightweight applications that allowed HR partners to do something with the data, fundamentally changing how work got done across the organization.

AI features heavily in the second half of the episode, but not in the way you typically hear it discussed. Tyler is candid about his concern that many teams are simply “slapping AI” onto existing processes and calling it innovation. He explores why documentation is becoming executable code, why HR may soon be managing something closer to an open-source software problem than a policy library, and how people analytics can help organizations navigate this shift responsibly. The conversation also dives into uncomfortable but necessary territory around surveillance, performance measurement, and the ethical boundaries of increasingly granular data—drawing on Cole’s “The Camera” thought experiment and Tyler’s concept of “terraforming the future” of work so that it remains human-centered.

Along the way, Tyler connects ideas from physics, entropy, collective intelligence, and social science to explain why work is fundamentally a team sport, why focusing solely on individual brilliance is misleading, and why social cohesion remains one of the most underestimated drivers of organizational performance. He also offers refreshingly blunt advice on preparing for an AI-driven future: stop theorizing, start using the tools, and cultivate a “hold my beer” mindset across your team.

This episode is packed with sharp insights, provocative takes, and practical lessons for anyone serious about building people analytics, HR technology, or AI capabilities that actually matter. It’s a conversation that challenges comforting narratives, replaces buzzwords with first principles, and leaves you rethinking what progress in this field should really look like.

If you like this episode, you’d also love exploring prior episodes—visit colenapper.com for the full archive and show links.