What is our social contract & how do we prepare?

Editor’s note, September 2026: This piece was first published on LinkedIn on February 21, 2021, when I was Dean of the School of Business at Medgar Evers College, CUNY. It has been checked against primary sources for republication here. One correction was made in the body and is described below; everything else stands as written.

Three short video interviews carried the argument in the original, and Medium’s importer does not carry LinkedIn video. They can still be watched on the LinkedIn original, which is linked at the foot of this piece. The importer also dropped a paragraph and the summary list; both have been restored here from that original. One inconsistency is the author’s own: the text asks what we learned from “these two brief segments,” and there were three.

The correction: Dr. Harpreet Singh is co-founder and co-CEO of Experfy, sharing the role with Sarabjot Kaur, not its sole CEO. Experfy, incubated at the Harvard Innovation Lab, is still operating in 2026. An update rather than a correction: Thomas Kochan held the George Maverick Bunker Professorship of Management at MIT Sloan when this was recorded and is now that chair’s emeritus holder. And the question put to him here had already been answered in print three months earlier, in Thomas Kochan and Lee Dyer, Shaping the Future of Work: A Handbook for Action and a New…