Idaho State University Featured In New Book, Jolted, By Anthony Klotz

Anthony Klotz had put forth a seemingly simple question to his audience on Idaho State University’s Pocatello campus.

The question was: If you won enough money that you could live comfortably without ever having to work again, would you keep working? It was one he’d posited before, and, just like before, hands went up around the room signaling they’d stay working. This time, though, Klotz got some unsolicited feedback from someone in the room: “You should ask the question again, but instead of asking how many of us would keep working, ask how many of us would keep working at our current jobs if we won the big one.” So, Klotz posed it again, adding the qualifier about staying at their current job. This time, only a few hands went up, surprising Klotz.

“I thought, ‘This is very important. This is one of the more insightful questions I've received in my career of teaching,’” said Klotz, a professor of organizational behavior at the University College London’s School of Management. “I’ve spoken to other audiences (since then) and kept asking the question. I wanted to make sure this wasn't just a Pocatello quirk, so I've asked that question to a room full of executives in Madrid, a classroom of students in London, and it shows up in more or less the same split I saw that day in Pocatello.”

Klotz had been giving his talk, “Leading Through Uncertainty and Shaping the Future of Work,” to about 40 students and local professionals. About two years prior, he’d coined the term “The Great Resignation” in 2021.

“This phrase went viral through no foresight of my own or anything like that,” Klotz said. 

Klotz is an expert on why people resign from their jobs, and “The Great Resignation" was the label he put on the wave of quitting he was predicting would happen–and the data later proved did happen–once the economic havoc of the COVID-19 pandemic subsided during an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. Klotz was invited to speak at Idaho State by his friend and colleague, Alex Bolinger, Idaho Central Credit Union Endowed Professor of Management, in ISU’s College of Business. 

“Anthony is incredibly talented, as I learned when I worked with him on a paper,” said Bolinger. 

The episode at ISU is now memorialized in the opening pages of Klotz’s newly released book, Jolted: Why We Quit, When to Stay, and Why it Matters. In the book, Klotz states, “most of us are one event away from leaving our job,” and defines jolts as the events that lead us to “stop and reflect on our relationship with work” and places the relationship “under the microscope.” 

“(The question in Pocatello) was just a light bulb moment for me,” Klotz said, “I had been writing the book and struggling with ‘is this about our relationships with work or relationships with our job,’ and sort of treating those two as the same. That question really zeroed in on (that) these are two completely different things: how people feel about work in general and how people feel about their current work situation.”

Over the course of Jolted, Klotz lays out the different jolts we experience in our professional and personal lives that lead us to question the place of work in our lives. From there, he outlines different responses we can use to deal with a jolt and, as the book wraps up, he looks at “how we can help others navigate the jolts in their lives.” 

“I hope people take away from the book a toolkit to deal with the jolts that they'll experience in their career, and then others will experience as well,” said Klotz. “Part of what I hope people get is a way to make other people's lives better through helping them recognize jolts and deal with them.”

“Obviously, the chance to bring Anthony, one of the top thought leaders in management today, to Pocatello, Idaho, was a very, very rare opportunity,” Bolinger said. “That is the kind of thing that students and community members would get at a school like Harvard, so it feels incredible to be able to give that same opportunity to our students here at ISU.”

“Anthony's talk was a masterclass in disseminating academic research experience and expertise into understandable and helpful information,” said Josh Luker, an ISU alum who's currently a doctoral student in organization studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  “He helped me realize how common it is for professionals to turnover voluntarily, and it helped me realize what kind of professional I needed to be in order to have the flexibility I would need for a future career.”

For more information on ISU’s College of Business, visit isu.edu/cob.

Prospective students can book a campus tour at isu.edu/visit.