David Lee has achieved fame for a TED Talk titled: "Why jobs of the future won't feel like work."

His talk describes how robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are rapidly reshaping companies and eliminating work that people are employed to do.

Americans have been through something like this before. Once upon a time, most Americans lived and worked on family farms. Then, technology and mechanization replaced manual labor, forcing millions of Americans off the farm. The shift took place over a century. Even when the disruption was painful, people generally had time to adjust, to learn how to work in factories or offices or in new livelihoods created by machines.

The difference now is that technology is moving fast, once again ending millions of jobs, but with little time to adjust. Lee, vice president of innovation at UPS, works to design new kinds of jobs that will be relevant in an age of intelligent machines.

Lee will elaborate on his ideas April 19 in Syracuse where he'll give the keynote address at CenterState CEO's annual meeting at the SRC Arena.

Tell me about your work at UPS.

My job is to act as a catalyst and the lead strategist to help the company be more innovative globally.

How do we apply new technologies to the operations that we're working on?

How do we build new products?

Even larger, how do we build new businesses, things that UPS should be doing that we are not doing today?

Then, how do we take pieces of cultures that we admire from our partners, from our customers, that we see in the marketplace and bring in those pieces to modernize the culture of UPS?

We're a 110-year-old company with a great track record of growth and reinvention. But we need to start moving faster. I'm trying to bring in new language and philosophies that allow us to move at a pace to keep us relevant and strong over the next 10 to 15 years.

In my TED Talk, I made a point that we had a century to adjust to leave the farm. We had time to leave the factory. But we won't, frankly, have a lot of time to deal with this coming change of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics. Part of what I do in the TED Talk is to get people thinking about how fast this is going to occur.

We as leaders have a responsibility to start redesigning what we ask people to do when they come to work.

It's incumbent on smart people and thoughtful leaders to make decisions on what's important and what's not. They shouldn't take for granted that the opinions of those who came before them or are above them are necessarily better opinions.

Certainly, there's risk to that. But part of being a good innovator is you have to have courage to say: That process is broken. Or that decision-making is broken. And either I'm going to try and fix it, or, at a minimum, I'm not going to let it get in the way of things that are important.

How did you come to this belief?

Prior to UPS, I spent about five years building and running an innovation program at SunTrust Bank. It's about the ninth largest bank in the United States.

At SunTrust, we started a series of programs. We had a sort of hack-a-thon for grownups. We had a new business plan competition. We designed workshops to allow people to come together and talk about how to fix something.

We discovered the real secret to innovation in these large organizations was related to empowering people. Find five to 10 people who think a certain problem is important. They naturally bring different perspectives, different skills, different areas of influence, different areas of expertise. We gave them the chance to collaborate and gave them permission to solve it.

Amazing things started happening.

People made working prototypes in three weeks. They created new businesses. They solved problems that had been outstanding for a decade. The framework allowed people to find like-minded people and gave them permission to solve something.

Seeing them build new products and create economic value was incredible.

What was really interesting was the tremendous human impact. People said: Your contest gave me purpose about why I was here and what I was supposed to be doing.

The framework in most companies is limiting. They invite people to come to work and just do your job. You're given two or three words on your business card and you're asked to be that.

We have the capability to be much more than that.

The programs that we designed and deployed unlocked this hidden potential. I was thrilled with the technical and economic output. But I was also thrilled that it was rapidly and dramatically improving the quality of work life for people.

That led to conversations and ultimately an invitation to work at UPS. These are things that worked in the financial services industry at a scale of 25,000 people. Will they work in a completely different industry at a scale of 400,000?

What advice do you have for effective leadership, especially for a new leader?

Don't go into any situation with too many pre-suppositions about what works, what doesn't work, what's broken, and what matters to people.

The number 1 thing that a new leader has to be good at is listening. Listen with an open mind. Approach every situation with a beginner's mind.

Spend time talking to people at every single level. Don't just talk to executives. Don't just talk to your peers. Talk to people who are front line. Talk to people who have been there for 30 years. Talk to people who have been there for six months.

Get them one-on-one in a private environment, where they are willing to tell you what they think needs to change, what works, and what doesn't work.

One of the problems with large organizations is that bad news doesn't escalate. If you ask someone at the bottom what's broken, they'll tell you a completely different set of things than if you ask someone in the C-suite.

So, as a new leader, make sure you're getting a wide and diverse perspective as you figure out the situation with the team you inherited or that you're building.

Understand the strengths of your team, both as individuals and collectively.

Figure out what people on your team are naturally good at. What parts of the work do they really enjoy? Allow them to focus on those things.

There's virtue in constantly trying to get people to get better at the things that they're not good at. But it's exhausting.

If people get to come to work and do the things that they love doing, get consistently better, so it becomes a core part of their professional being, they're going to love coming to work. Right?

All of these jokes: Hey, happy Friday, or thank goodness it's Friday. That to me is actually a sad statement. What it tells me is that all these people are looking forward to who they get to be on Saturday and Sunday. And they do not look forward to who they get to be on Monday and Tuesday.

New leaders today need to think about: How do you create environments where people look forward to the work that they get to do, to the thinking that they get to do, and to the challenges? The environment that you create is important.

What are the qualities of good leadership or leaders you admire?

Number 1 is integrity. You have to be someone that is trustworthy - trustworthy to your customers, trustworthy to your partners, trustworthy to your team members, and trustworthy to your supervisors.

The second one is: Good leaders inspire.

Good leaders will encourage people. They'll set a vision. And help everybody who is involved in a project understand why they are working and give them a sense of the purpose and long-term impact of the time that they are spending every day.

Third, good leaders help the people in their organizations develop as people and as professionals.

I spend time on my teams talking about mastery goals. Everybody should be thinking about words and phrases that are not on their resume now, that they really want to be on their resume a year from now.

It's incumbent on me to find projects and learning opportunities so that what they want to be as a human being and as a professional a year from now happen because of the work that we bring to them.

I'm inspired by the research of Daniel Pink. He wrote a book called "Drive," which is all about intrinsic motivation.

Let me flip the question: What attributes do you see in poor leadership?

I was thinking: Let me answer quickly with some of the people I admire.

Sure.

I admire different people for different things.

I admire Nelson Mandela very much, first, because of his persistence, and his willingness to lead from behind - frankly, leading from a jail cell.

The movie and the write-up about him showed him spending time in prison learning about rugby. That was the cultural piece important to F.W. de Klerk and the South African government at the time.

Nelson Mandela wants to be someone who can sit down, speak their language, care about the things that they care about, and not be seen as the antithesis to that.

In a difficult environment, being able to empathize with the people you are trying to change makes a big difference.

Empathy is humongous. Any good leader has to be able to empathize with both the constituents and the forces that they are dealing with.

Steve Jobs was a tyrant in many ways, impatient, and hard to deal with in ways that I don't admire. But I think the thing about Steve Jobs that I really admire is that he had this sort of relentless pursuit of excellence. The standard by which something was good enough was: Is it good enough for Steve?

Having leaders who help make it very clear how good your work needs to be is an important part of what leads to fantastic outcomes.

Steve Jobs' most important role probably was that of chief tastemaker. Where he could say this is good enough and that's not good enough. His level of expectations led to a decade of incredible groundbreaking products at Apple.

Of course, you have to build a team that can execute on that.

What themes will be in your Syracuse talk?

I'm certainly going to talk about some of the things that are in the TED Talk. I want to help people understand the coming impact of artificial intelligence and machine learning. They are not years away. We are all using them on a daily basis. I want people to understand how as a leader today, you should be thinking about it.

Apple has something like 400 job openings in machine learning. Amazon has over a thousand. Google has probably over a thousand as well.

So the world's technology firms are building up armies of people capable of creating machine learning and artificial intelligence software. You can't just sit around and wait. You have to develop a strategy by which you're going to apply these technologies.

I firmly, firmly believe there will be this huge separation between companies that know how to apply machine learning and AI and those that do not over the next five years. It will be a question of survival.

That said, as a society we have to figure out what we're going to do when we're talking about tens of millions of jobs being outsourced to robots and software.

My challenge to the audience will be: How do we start designing human-centered work?

If you do just one thing, that one thing will be replaced by a machine. If you do seven different things, 10 different things, then you have human-centered work that allows people to be dynamic human beings while they're at work.

That work won't be replaced by software soon. It might be in 30 years, but it won't be in the next five to ten years.

Several hundred people, all leaders in their companies, will be in your audience. What's your advice to them for leading their organization through this kind of change?

The advice actually is simple. In some ways it's repetitive to what I've already said. I'll case it this way:

Most things that companies need to change to be a better place to work and a better service for customers probably already exist inside your organization.

Somebody inside your company has said: I wish we did this differently.

There's no shortage of ideas.

The shortage is in creating space and permission for people to actually, one, figure out whether their ideas are good or bad, and then, two, start to organize themselves in a way that allows your organization to start doing something with the ideas.

An idea comes up, and it's easy for the loudmouths in a meeting to say: Well, that'll never work. Or: We can't do that. Or: We tried that once. Leadership has to change cultures that protect the status quo. How do they go about doing that?

I don't know if this is an exact answer, but the concept that I think a lot about in that space is risk appetite and sponsorship. So, say you hear an idea. You run a small team, and somebody from your department goes: Hey, we should go do this instead.

Maybe that person's put 10 hours of thought into it.

You have to decide whether you think this idea is good or bad. It's like a 50-50 coin toss, because some ideas are good and some are bad.

So, it's a 50 percent chance that you kill it and say it's not a good idea. Don't bother.

Fifty percent of the time somebody goes: Oh, yeah! That's a cool idea. Let me learn more about it and work with you to take it to the next level.

In a large organization, you might need to do that coin flip six or seven times.

Something that starts off as a 50-50 possibility looks like a 6 percent possibility by the time it moves a few layers up.

When something looks like 13 percent or 6 percent, somebody's going to say no to it almost all the time.

Layers create a cascade of risk intolerance.

We can't rely on the courage of middle management to take up great ideas and carry them all the way to the C-suite. We need to hotwire that process.

I don't know how you'd write this up, but, don't let the middle management hem and haw and decide whether it's worth the career risk to promote an idea.

What stands in the way of change, the thing that helps status quo, is you've got more people taking calculated risks as opposed to inspired risk.

The weekly "CNY Conversation" features Q&A interviews about leadership, success, and innovation. The conversations are condensed and edited. To suggest a leader for a Conversation, contact Stan Linhorst at StanLinhorst@gmail.com. Last week featured William (Bill) F. Smullen, former right-hand man to Gen. Colin Powell and now director of the National Security Studies Program. Smullen advised: Gather around you the smartest people you possibly can.