POCATELLO — Anthony Klotz posed a simple question to a room of about 40 students and local professionals at Idaho State University: If you won enough money to live comfortably without ever working again, would you keep working?

Just as he had seen in other audiences, hands went up around the room. Then someone offered a follow-up: "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 asked again, this time adding that qualifier. Only a few hands went up.

"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 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."

That moment at ISU is now immortalized in the opening pages of Klotz's newly released book, "Jolted: Why We Quit, When to Stay, and Why It Matters."

Klotz is best known for coining the term "The Great Resignation" in 2021 during an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek — a label he put on the wave of voluntary job departures he predicted would follow the economic disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. The data later proved him right.

In "Jolted," Klotz argues that most people are one event away from leaving their job. He defines jolts as the events that cause people to stop and reflect on their relationship with work and place that relationship "under the microscope."

The Pocatello classroom moment helped sharpen his thinking while writing the book.

"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," Klotz said. "That question really zeroed in on these being two completely different things: how people feel about work in general and how people feel about their current work situation."

The book walks readers through the different jolts people experience in their professional and personal lives that lead them to question the place of work in their lives. Klotz then outlines responses for dealing with a jolt before closing with a look at how to help others navigate their own.

"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," Klotz said. "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."

Klotz was invited to speak at ISU by Alex Bolinger, Idaho Central Credit Union Endowed Professor of Management in ISU's College of Business, who had previously collaborated with Klotz on a research paper.

"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."

Josh Luker, an ISU alumnus and doctoral student in organization studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said the talk reframed how he thinks about his own career.

"Anthony's talk was a masterclass in disseminating academic research experience and expertise into understandable and helpful information," Luker said. "He helped me realize how common it is for professionals to turn over 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."

"Jolted" is available now. For more information on ISU's College of Business, visit isu.edu/cob.