I think that's the issue. Somehow, big companies
especially in the bureaucratic part of the organization.
It's not focused on outcomes. It's focused on
jobs and roles. What do I need? Oh
I need an Sv of Ai kinda putting
it off instead of saying, this is the
outcome, what tasks do I need, what skills
do I need? How do I match that?
Welcome to activation your host, Peter Hi. My
guest today is John Windsor. John is the
executive in residence at Harvard Business schools laboratory
for innovation science, which studies, artificial intelligence and
workforce transformation strategies. He's also founder and chief
executive officer of open assembly, a company that
provides content, community, and strategic advising to organizations,
people and platforms
to c create the future of work. John
is also an advisor to the digital initiative
at Harvard Business School. John Author of several
books, including beyond the brand, Spark, flipped, and
the best selling baked in. His most recent
book is Open talent, leveraging the global crowd
to solve your biggest challenges. And previously, John
was the chief innovation officer of the French
global media
agency, H, which fired his open advertising agency
Victories and spoils in 20 15. John welcome
to techno. It's great to speak with you
today. Thanks. Thanks for having me. That's a
great pleasure. Well, let's begin with the... I've
got a copy of your book here, open
talent.
Congratulations on on Thanks. Your latest work. Why
don't we begin? What what you mean by
open talent to find that for us if
you would. Yeah. I mean, I think, you
know, it it essentially, we tried to come
up with a a term that really
really took its seeds from open source software
that seemed to be, you know, a really
great place start and and, you know, hands
open talent. I mean, these strategies have been
going around for a long time, whether it
was freelancing
or it was crowds or the gig economy
1 of the things we've seen emerge is
we think, you know, language is really important
and trying to create a common language and
common process,
especially for enterprises to adopt. Right? And and
1 of the things when we looked around,
and we've studied this at Harbor for a
while. 1 of the things that's happened is
the gig economy really gotten coop opted by,
you know, B2c services where algorithms are really
controlling people when they work and how they
work. And so, you know, I'm a driver
for Uber. I'm told by an algorithm where
to go to do my work, and I'm
told who to work with, so who to
pick up. And so,
whereas you know, we look at open talent.
As really 3 prong. 1 is building an
external talent cloud, which includes freelancers,
and and that really, you know, freelancers are
really higher end, folks that are kind of
subject matter experts that can really launch in
and help companies.
And then building internal talent clouds which are
how do you kind of capture the cognitive
surplus of your of your employees and then
open innovation contests, which is something we've have
a lot of experience at the labs we
build all the stuff at Nasa.
Oh, well, I wanna get into each of
those and have you kind of provide an
overview of each. But before we I do,
I wanna just from a context setting perspective,
the whole notion of an open talent company
is something you have a lot of experience
with. You founded your first version of that,
I think dating back in the nineties. But
I should add, you know, wasn't, like, your
first company, you had worked in traditional settings
prior to that. So
at at at a point where the term
probably was not even coined. It was something
that occurred to you as a model to
employ, and I wanna understand what the inspiration
was for starting your your first open talent
company.
I come to the whole study of this
practice not as somebody trying to figure out
how to help companies use labor, but how
do I build an organization with a new
business model?
And and think about what does that mean?
So, you know, it was back when I
I... My wife was a professional triathlete in
bolder, and,
this magazine that Billie Jean King started in
in the seventies called women's sports and fitness
was on the market timing kit bought it,
and they were in the middle of bankrupt
and they had 40 editors and writers. They
just couldn't make it good economically. And so
I had the opportunity to buy that. And
all these... All my friends, the women athletes
in Boulder were pushing me to do I
flew to Nike and Mark Parker at the
time was a mid level guy and and
Tinker Hat field. And, you know, I... My
question was, like, hey. If I'm gonna do
this, I gotta put all my assets on
the line. Right? I got mortgage in my
house. I gotta do all this crazy stuff.
You think Wim do sports. This is back
in, like, 86, 87 and Parker was, like,
yeah. Women are definitely gonna do sports we'll
support you with a couple ads.
And so, you know, it's was a huge
risk for us. And so, you know, it's
as anybody, And and I always suggest innovation
always comes from when your back the. Right?
You have no other course. You've gotta figure
it out. And so it was obvious before
I met and, you know, purchase the magazine
that the paradigm in the publishing industry. There
were 2 big shifts. 1 was, you know,
how do I just reduce the number of
readers to just a core readers leadership. And
then the other thing was is, how do
I
flip the panel. I couldn't afford 40 people
editorial stuff. So I flipped the paradigm by
saying, you know, instead of the paradigm of
a writer from New York who may be
real in into Yoga, but it never rock
climb coming to boulder and interviewing Lynn Hill,
who is 1 of the most prominent, you
know, rock climber, female rock climber in the
world. And trying to go back to New
York and get the story straight. There's just
this
propensity to get the story wrong because they
don't know the Nuances is of what Lin
talking about. And sometimes Lynn you know, how
it is if you're subject matter x expert
you talk in a very ob 2 language
because you're used to your audience understanding a
lot of the new nuances. And so we
flipped the paradigm. I got rid of the
40 editors and writers, and I hired 2
former New York editors put them in boulder,
but I had Lynn write her own story
and that had editors edit it for the
audience. Well, that kinda shift from 40 to
02:38
people out of the out of the system
that that cost saved up money that we
were profitable right away. And so that was
kind of the first an inkling of that.
And then 1 of the things that I
found really interesting after the woman sports and
Fitness, I sold that to Condo. And so
I... But 1 of the things that was
frustrating when I was in the magazine publishing
businesses is that we worked with these early
adoptive consumers and is you know in your
work and innovation and and technology. They're are
always these kind of early adopters. You know,
there's
traditional... Diffusion curve Right? You've got these early
adoptive consumers that are doing really great stuff,
and they could really influence the rest of
the market. And so we put a group
the women in our readers leadership, not at
the bottom of the marketing funnel at top
and charge companies for strategy and product design.
Using these panels, we would call them, you
know, crowds or collect ti at the time.
It was kind of early days of market
research kind of doing crowds sourced market research.
And that worked really, really well. We worked
with Nike and h hp and Intel and,
you know, a slew of other companies. And
then I I merged that company with, agency
called Crisp Porter Bogus, which at the time
was about you know, there about 75 of
them, and there were about 14 of us,
and we merged companies, and we put... I've
written a few books by then, on c
creation. So
we put the idea of c creation. This
philosophy of, you know, how do we use
the power of people instead of us being
the Arrogant experts on creativity, you know, it's
the mom, you know, who knows how to
remove spots
from, you know, her kids outfits, you know,
that that is probably has a better voice
on it, What's really going on for hide,
you know, the laundry church, than we would
as a bunch of young creative.
And so we put that, you know, in
the center of what we did it worked
really well. We won 3000000000 dollars with the
business became creative global agency of the decade,
went from a hundred of us to 1200
of us in 2 years. And just a
crazy ride, you know, 1 all these big
clients Microsoft and Domino's and and Volkswagen. And
1 of the things It was stressful was
we couldn't find enough labor to do the
work. I couldn't find enough creative labor.
There's just too much, you know, too to
turn. But what 1 the things we were
trying to focus on as being innovative, So
we took on a new client an electric
motorcycle company called Bra
and literally frustrated because we can get any
creative to do the work inside
So we were... We did the audacious move
as the newly appointed, you know, newly awarded,
credit agency of the decade. We decided to
actually
crowds source to creative, which pissed off the
advertising world in a huge way. But 1
of the things that we noticed
is that holy crap. Like, the guy we
interviewed or the woman we entered... You know,
the guy we interviewed from when you Sydney
that couldn't come to boulder because of family
issues or the woman we interviewed, you know,
in London really wanted to work with us,
but she couldn't move either. And all of
a sudden, all these amazing people were doing
work for us. And it was like, they
were doing work during the hours that they
were supposed to be working for somebody else?
And I was like, this is cool. Like,
how can we capture the cognitive surplus of
this industry? Why do we need to move
people to boulder all the while we know
that they're gonna leave pretty soon as older
wasn't a creative hub.
And it Dawned on us that this whole
industry is gonna just imp because, you don't
need, you don't need to have,
kind of physical
migration to a place like boulder, you can
digitally migrate, you know, from my anywhere in
the world. And so I took that and
and launched my own company called Victor and
spoils.
And
Became... It was an agency based on crowds
sourcing principles. It became pretty
iconic for a couple things. 1 is that
it was a big challenge to the current
paradigm.
But there were really 2 things that shifted
the industry, and that was, you know, Stuart
Elliott who wrote for the new york times
offered as this great opportunity to write an
article about us. And so he wrote an
article, but he said that stipulation was we
couldn't launch the company until the article is
written. And so in in October of 20...
The I guess it was 2009,
we were in my, you know, my garage,
3 of us who started the company.
And a little freaked out running out of
money saying, wow, It thinks is gonna work
and in that morning,
the article appeared in the New York times.
And by that night, 3000 people globally signed
up to work for us. And Dish Network
gave us their hundred and 10000000 dollar advertising
account. So we'd went from 0 to 15000000
dollars in in net revenue in, in about,
12 hours. And so that kind of put
things on app. Right? And and and from
our perspective, you know, it was really exciting.
Got to work. A couple years later, with
a lot of momentum and a lot of
notoriety, We noticed that Harley Day and was
up for review. And we you know, like
anybody else. We wanted to work for Harley,
but we knew by asking for permission to
be in the pitch.
That it wasn't gonna be able to... We
we would never get in there because it,
you know, those pitches are half million dollar
fares and they're it's all about dinners and,
you know, golf games and all these lavish
lunches.
And so my credit director evan fry, you
know, we were at the coffee when we'd
heard the news, and he was like, you
know, instead of asking for permission, Let's ask
for forgiveness. And
ran back to the office and literally in
20 minutes, we, you know, made a video
to our crowd and launched it. And just
said, hey, we're working for harley Davidson and
I'm putting 10000 dollars of my own money
up. Let's do some kick ass work and
see if we can get a meeting to
show up, you know, that this new model
works. And I wrote a blog post to
to Marco Rick a letter to Mark on
my blog. I never met before and just
saying, hey Mark, You know, I enjoy the
dinners and lunches. Super nice people, really creative,
really fun. As you're doing that, I got
10000 people working on your business. Give a
shot if you wanna see something.
And that hit Twitter, And literally, 20 minutes
later, Mark hans wrote me back, saying I'd
love to see the work tired of traditional
agencies.
And 2 weeks later, we went to Milwaukee
and won the glow billion dollar Harley Davidson
work, which blew up the industry. And so
because of that, in the notoriety,
David Jones from Boss, I saw him a
tad, and he said, he came... He approached
me and said, you know, you're you're great
at being controversial and throwing rocks at the
glass houses of the companies why don't you
come in here and help me fix 1.
And so III
decided to sell Victor Spoils to H boss
and become chief Innovation officer out of Paris.
And it was a shit show. You know,
was, like, these guys, you know, they did
not want that French did not wanna let
go of the, you know, the importance of
these amazing creative in Paris. They could not
see some, you know,
home in in in cl Cleveland doing creative
work. It was there you know, is there
identity. Right? And so
although the project didn't go well and David
lost a job that did the the Ceo
and I excited to leave. It was super
interesting and the thing I made it so
interesting was that the 3 guys,
Mike Tu,
Cream Lac connie and and and brought and
on.
Started doing a much case studies on us.
Wrote 1 on pictures and spoils and what
wrote a really big 1, which is still
1 of the best selling case studies at
Harvard 10 years later on on a boss
change faster on. The ability for organizations to
adopt to new business models.
We just, in fact, went back a few
months ago, and they're gonna create a Hp
o, Harvard business school online class on the
Os case study. We did this tenth anniversary
kinda, you know, update of it. But it's
been really interesting to see, you know, how
it's great as an entrepreneur because you're like,
this is awesome. I can, you know, reduce
my cost phenomenally. Can do great work. I
can use these business models.
Yet. It's just so hard for large organizations
to adopt. So that's the stuff we've been
trying to study, and and I went went
to Harvard after the case studies and
started working with the Cream Lac county at
the laboratory for innovation Sciences.
And 1 of the things that they had
done is back in 2007,
Nasa, Jeff Davis, who was the the head
of Health human services the chief medical officer
for Nasa. Had a real problem. He had
a budget cut of 80 percent
for that... The Health and human Services division,
which meant. He only had 20 percent of
the budget to keep astronauts alive in space.
And so he went to cream
that, you know, cream had studied under von
Hip, and then that was the democrat of
innovation, which was really 1 of the foundations
of this whole body of work.
And all of a sudden, we started doing
projects together with Jeff and things accelerated. We
were getting
phenomenal results from people around the world that
wanted to do work for Nasa.
So next year, the center of excellence for
collaborative innovation, which be we bill at Nasa,
we'll have a budget of a billion dollars.
And I think there's something really instructive here
is, like, 1 of the things I point
out in the book is you can have
a mindset. Like, we can look at Nasa.
Right? And we could say, wow, innovative organization
seventeenth thousand full time employees, some of the
most innovative people in the world. Right? That
would be a traditional way of looking at
it. The way Nasa looks at the organization
is they think of themselves a network organization
working with a workforce ecosystem. So because of
C, they have
17000 full time employees, we created some software
called Nasa work that allows them to connect
to their 30000
contractors.
And then C,
the center actually uses 40 other platforms that
tap into a hundred and 10000000 people globally
that are willing to do work for Nasa.
So a network
organization an abundant mindset would be, Nasa has
the ability to work with a hundred 10047000
people to do hard work for them. And
that mindset shift in Inside Nasa's been really
explosive and and and game changing.
But I find it so ironic. Right? I
mean, I think I was on the on
a thread this morning and somebody kind of
included me something on Linkedin, and mister Guy
Ireland trying to protect,
you know, trying to say, freelancing is bad.
You know, why should individuals have the rights
to do work that our great agencies do?
And he's a guy that runs an agency.
The way I responded was, you know, I'm
sure in 2006
and 7, maybe 2008,
there were a bunch of, you know, executives
that published these things called phone books. And
they probably rail against this thing called Google
saying, oh, Google's wrong. It's not right. We
spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars
reading these phone books, and that's the most
authentic way to get the information to define,
say, a,
I don't know, like, a dry cleaners. Right?
Publish once a year. I I found it
interesting when I did some research. Do you
know how much it cost to produce the
2007
yellow pages in Boston?
Hundred million dollars. Mike goodness this. Well, a
hundred million dollars for you and I to
find a dry cleaner. And now now that's
free. Right? That's free on Google.
And and somebody's putting up, you know,
recommendations. You get the latest information. And so
my sense is is every part of every
industry has been
digitally transformed and talent is a place that's
gonna... It's that it's inevitable. Same thing's gonna
happen. You mentioned earlier in your response you
talked about challenges that large organizations have with
with this sort of a model for obvious
reasons. There's already kind of a mode of
work. There's kind of a
a means of continuing to justify the organization
that's already there as opposed to a startup
for instance, that's a couple of people in
a and looking for easy ways to find
creative people on the cheap, for example, if
I may. Overly of.
Push sure describing. You so you but you
talked about it work for Nasa because they
were a network organization. Is that is that
a
necessary ingredient for large organizations to be able
to make work or are there other
versions of large companies or other characteristics that
are put of large companies that would allow
them to do this?
I mean, I think there's a couple things.
1 is
that I think we have to always
ensure
that we have a any organization, has a
customer centric
strategic
mindset. And what I mean by that, and
I look back to my own to my
own history. Right?
Back in the day,
I was just so curious,
like, publishing companies
weren't in the business of providing information to
the audience. It wasn't, like, let's say, fast
company wasn't in the business of providing
the latest
business information.
To their audience. Essentially what transpired was the
editor,
his vision was that. But, you know, soon,
what happens and I think this happens in
every company. The biggest expenses
in this case, putting ink on paper and
distributing
magazines,
those are the things that either make you
or break you profitability from a magazine company.
And so the executives that start running the
company are focused on putting ink on paper
and distributing the magazine.
Nothing to do with satisfying the needs of
the reader that of the editors and the
founders get kinda pushed off to the side.
And I think every
organization gets stuck in that. Right? As time
goes on, there are new ways to do
the same thing.
It's unfortunate. Right? I think when the internet
started, I guess because I was a magazine
publisher and a little bit Tech savvy,
I somehow just assumed that V Magazine was
gonna be innovative and own fashion online.
Yet,
Ko, all they cared about was making an
efficient way of putting ink on paper and
and distributing a fashion magazine.
Instead of being in the information
industry
supplying,
you know, the greatest fashion
information to their customers
However, they decide to buy it or have
the consume it, they were only in the
Magazine business, and they got wiped out by
social media, by,
online things. And I think that's the threat
for every company that you get siloed
into
not trying to deliver, like agencies. Right?
Agencies,
at least what I see now and in
this article this morning with this this this
opinion piece this morning was spot on in
this thinking is that... He's not thinking about
like, how do I best...
Let's forget about the business model. How do
I best deliver
advertising
for the the consumer for my clients
versus
I'm gonna protect my my business model. I've
got this moat and protect this antiquated business
model. It's really hard for organizations to change
that. Very interesting, John. Had classic innovators dilemma
scenario that you're describing there. For sure. And
I wonder how do you think about the
balance between,
internal resources, employees, when to bring on people
full time versus external talents such as the
high end freelancers you were describing, earlier,
how do you think about the balance between
those? What sorts of rules are, you know,
best equipped to have as as permanent employees
versus those that are not?
Yeah.
That's a great question. So III would suggest
that, you know, every... Not just every a
company as was described
you know, becomes protective of their bureaucracy and
their way of doing things, but so did
divisions inside companies. Right? So let's lay out
a scenario
Let's just say, Peter, you were disappointed, you
know, Ceo of a Fortune 500 company. And
it's a technology company, and the board told
you first thing you need to do as
an Ai strategy.
So, you know, there 2 ways to get
that done. Right? The first way, which is
the traditional ways is to say, go to
your C,
and say, I need Of of Ai. Well,
how long do you think it's gonna take
to hire an Sv of Ai today? It's
gonna take 6 to 8 months. Right? A
good 1.
And then you hire her, and she's gonna
take 3 to 4 months to hire her
team, and then it's gonna take 2 to
3 months to set up the processes to
get the strategy done. Then you're talking about
18 months. Now the alternative, if you have
an open talent mindset, you would say,
this... My my my outcome, I need to
have a strategy. Right? And I don't have
the talent house.
So
1 strategy
could be to go to platforms and say,
who are the 10 best people in my
field that our freelance that are around the
world, that I could invite in for the
weekend experts
and sit with my team when we can
do a 2 day strategy and define what
are the a hundred tasks in order to
accomplish that strategy, like that outcome. And in
a weekend, we could say, you know, hey,
Joe manufacturing doesn't know anything about Ai, but
he knows a lot about manufacturing. So I'm
gonna pair him with somebody. And we're gonna
put together and those hundred tasks are to
be assigned.
And within a month, you can create a
pretty good strategy. Right? With that that team.
You know, it's not a great strategy, but
18 months and a great strategy
is gonna be
nonexistent today. Right? And so I I think
that's the issue is that somehow,
big companies
especially have forgotten
But you see the C suite understands it,
but below that, in the bureaucratic part of
their parts of the organization,
it's not focused on outcomes. It's not focused
on outcomes.
It's it's focused on jobs and roles. Like,
what do I need? Oh, I need a
you know, an Sv of of Ai,
let them decide what the role what the
what the what the tasks are, let them
decide what the skills are. Kinda putting it
off instead of saying,
this is the outcome, what tasks do I
need,
what skills do I need? How do I
match that?
The reality,
according to Corn Ferry is that 8... There
85000000
tech jobs that will go filled by 20
30. It's gonna cost companies 8500000000000.0
dollars.
That's gonna get it reduced a lot with
Ai, You know, the speed of which Ai
is growing, but it's still gonna have, you
know, no matter who you are. You can't
hire the best talent.
Just don't wanna work for you, you know,
they have this ability to go do things
that they where they wanna do. So in
that case, if there's this
power
between demand setting the terms to supply the
best supply setting the terms.
In my mind, if you're focused on task
and outcomes, it doesn't matter. If somebody works
for full time or part time, you want
the best talent to get the best outcomes,
and like that's gotta be the focus. Yeah.
Really interesting. I I was
I'm particularly intrigued with your chapter on how
culture matters in an open talent world. I
could say like, a fascinating topic because I
think to the uni unemployed, 1 of the
first things they might think about is what
what John's talking about here is a disaster
from a culture perspective because you know, how
do you even form a culture when you
don't have people that are,
kind of bought in enough to be a
permanent employees of of of a institution? Talk
a bit about your thoughts about culture and
and why it does indeed matter in a
in a in a scenario like what you're
describing?
Yeah. So I I would say anybody that
thinks that there is a... If if you
have more than 1 office,
the thinks that you have a specific culture,
you're being naive. Like, the idea that, you
know, you have 10 offs around the world,
you have 10 different cultures. You know, where
the people are, you know, there there's lots
of different reasons for that. Right? There's in
office culture, there's cultures that people have, you
know, and where they live and what they
do and how they interpret things.
I I believe that the best
work is always an ecosystem. I mean, you
you you represent that. Right? You work on...
You help companies solve their big, you know,
strategy problems with technology and their culture problems.
You're not unemployed full time. They hire you
because you have a unique perspective because you've
had experiences out side of that. But you
are a part of this network. Credit? You're
part of what makes organizations really great.
For me,
I'm a, you know, climber and and surfer,
and I've spent a lifetime doing that. And
so I've worked a lot over the years
with Pat. And I was on the Board
of Directors of black diamond equipment, and
all of those organizations are network organizations and
network cultures. And 1 of the things we
used to do Black Diamond,
Peter Met, the Ceo,
you know, implemented the system that we would
build equipment all week Monday to Friday, and
on Friday and I would have a pizza
party,
and we'd take that all the equipment the
prototypes and we handed it out not just
employees but talk Anybody would show up in
the in Salt lake
to go test equipment, and that weekend can
everybody go out and they would break the
equipment, they would try it. And then Sunday
we'd have a beer party and everybody come
back together and mention like things. So it
was building a community that was much bigger
than call culture. I I think this idea
of there's an internal culture is just wrong.
Like, the the great cultures in the world
are ones that their customers are involved in
the culture, and their are suppliers and there's
this
ecosystem of culture. So for me, and we
call it the book, the network... A network
culture, But I think that's super important to
rethink
what your culture is and bring in outsiders
not just
great freelance talent or
using open innovation tools like contests, but also,
you know, how do we dis fill it
down so that other people can buy in
I mean, Nasa is a great example. Right?
Like, every...
I'm sure you see it too. Every 5
years you're walking through
some fashion, you know, district and some brand
has started to produce Nasa t shirts. And
you're like, wow, the stickiness of the Nasa
logo, the stickiness of the culture like, everybody
wants to be part of that? And and
I would encourage
brands and companies, no matter if they're ABB
or B company. Like, how do you do
that? How do you get customers
to tattoo themselves with your brand, not just
the giveaway away polo shirt. Right? But but
actually say, I love this brand. This represents
me to me, that's a strong culture.
And you've noted the
necessity to focus on outcomes, which I think
again is not the turkey For sure. It
it makes so much sense, of course. But
it it isn't the way the traditional work
is done. I mean, we, we you know,
most people think about you arrive at the
office at a certain time. I would granted
the pandemic has changed a lot of this.
For sure. So the world is actually many
ways moving towards the insights you've you've been
familiar with decades now. But talk a bit
about, you know, the necessary ingredients to be
able to be outcome oriented and and some
of the frankly, cultural shifts that are necessary
in order to to foster that.
Yeah. I I think it starts... You know,
there's a balance. Right? There's a balance between...
First of all,
it... It's a it's a bottom up and
a top down solution. Right? So the first
thing is, and and you you've probably seen
this and I... I'm sure that we're aligned
on this. It's like the current, you know,
argument about Ai. Like, you know, like, yeah.
Ceos can say, no Ai can be used
in the company. But that just isn't reality.
Right? Like, in in a open talent, 1
of the things that we studied at Harvard,
which I thought was super interesting is that
the free freelancer dot com, which is a
platform.
Has only a couple dozen Fortune 500 clients,
yet 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies
have an active corporate email that works weekly
on freelancer dot com. And so, you know,
you can put your head and sand as
a leader and say, you know, these are
my day mandates. This is not gonna happen
all the while. The reality is is your
workers are gonna try to find really good
and efficient ways to make their their jobs
easier.
And so, first of all, it's admitting that.
Right? It's admitting that this is gonna happen.
Like, these innovations happen whether we like it
or not. And we have to be a
part of it. So how are we gonna
adapt to that? And and I I think
that's the the first recognition. The second recognition
is just to start experimenting
I never would recommend whether it's ai or
or it's, you know, open talent to bet
the farm on, you know, let's you know,
let's get rid of everybody and use Ai
tools or let's, you know, get rid of
everybody and use freelancers.
But trying to find small
experiments that are non
risky that are that are kinda not threatening
to get work done. 1 of 1 of
our clients,
Us
who worked with for a long time, You
know, But not Cars got really interested in
the space and was really stoked. And he
found this really interesting place where, you know,
his Hr team
was supposed to put all us data into
the Oracle system.
But over a a couple of years, they've
been just using an excel
spreadsheet. And so there all this data that
was outside their system.
Well, they're trying to figure out what to
do. First of all, you know, V not
kinda mandated that the Hr department do it,
but they're so busy doing their day to
day job that they couldn't get to it.
So Hr department recommended that they use a
consulting firm, and v not got a bid
from the consulting firm for 3 months and
250000
dollars. You know, the reality I I've ever
written a couple states case studies on deloitte
and deloitte, you know, is super upfront. They
charge 5 times their employees salary, and that
pays for the Deloitte brand and the deloitte
offices, and all those things, it's not about
the work. It's about the deloitte brand. Right?
So now there are new matching ways. So
But not went out to great platforms like
graphite,
found 4 people to do the work bid
that out to those 4 people, and they
they put together a bid for 25000 dollars
and 5 days to do the work. So
So you're seeing this, like, can't get it
done with the team,
the the external use of external tools is
it's really expensive and slow.
And you can do it much faster using
freelancers. Now there's a responsibility for fin not.
Right? You can't just hand it over to...
You hand it over to deloitte. You know
that it's gonna get done that they have
your systems, but the not now has a
responsibility to understand what needs to be done,
to understand and, you know, the outcomes to
to own those outcomes. You can't blame, you
know, deloitte
the nets and that's 1 of the things
I think stopped this innovation. Right? A lot
of people wanna a neck to choke to
say, oh, Mckinsey, Those numbers might have been
right, But, you know, I wasn't successful because
they gave us a bad strategy.
Right. Yeah. Very interesting. Very interesting. I wanna
get into you You've mentioned a few different
recommendations you have in your book open talents.
First among them was was building an ink
external talent cloud. Can you just describe what
do you mean by that and the steps
to do so? Yeah. So we start with
the idea of building
building a a center of excellence. And that
could be 1 person that's passionate about it.
That understands the platforms. And I think sorting
out
what platforms
can help you do a great job, you
know, of of solving a problem. A couple
of really interesting places that I'm intrigued with
right now is in a couple platforms.
You know, 1 1 platform that's really interesting
to me is, you know, everybody's looking for
New talent. So that that
everybody's building
their own offices and call center, not call
centers, but but, you know,
workflow centers.
Latin America because there's a lot of good
tech talent down there. Right? And so a
lot of platforms are building, you know, big
big crowds from Latin America, and it's been
really, really successful. But 1 of the companies
that we work with called Mandela, you know,
started. Actually, it's such an interesting story. They
started,
They noticed that there was a a propensity
for African talent to be over indexing on
the ability to learn
computer science skills, software engineering skills. So pre
pandemic, they worked with Soft bank and a
few other large investors and built place based
education center, and they've trained a third of
the African tech talent.
Now coming out of the out of the
pandemic,
they have, you know,
really unique things to to really unique people
to be involved with your business. And have
really become a an open talent platform with
a hundred and 30
countries, but really created a great process. So
when you're looking for talent and not everybody
else is used or, you know, in, you
know, interesting points of view. They're really interesting.
Another probably
more interesting case study right now is there's
a platform called invisible. And invisible launched
a bit ago, maybe 7 years ago, but
in 20 20. They had an interesting insight.
They said, you know, What what would happen
if we aggregated
all the freelance talent for Ai software engineers.
Put together a crowd of 2500 software engineers
that had Ai specific, you know, experience
and sure enough in 20 21, Open, I
called them and then Meta and then and
then Google and then, you know, and then
ant all of the guys,
and it's scaled radically.
They're just growing, you know, doubling every every
couple months. But 1 of the things that's
happened is that invisible has been in building
those Ll m's
and they know that stuff. So they've decided
to create a, a new
process called the process orchestration platform.
And what they'll do, they they work with
large enterprises to go in and to say,
here the task need to be done, let's
atom those tasks. And decide which tests are
best for humans and which tasks are are
best for Ai
to really make you efficient. They've increased the
the, you know, the launch of chat Gp
by 6 months. So they're really into this.
But that's not stuff that any company can
get experience at. Just like, you know, no
company, we just had this Ai conference at
Harvard at d cubed
our big... You know, at the business school,
but our our big initiative called digital design
and data.
And the this president of Wealth Management for
Jpmorgan, you know, she said, hey, we've got
75000
data scientists.
We can't compete with Ll. We're not even
gonna try to do like that. What we're
gonna do is match each 1 of our
data scientists with a with the senior executive
or an executive,
and every executive will sit with a Ai
software engineer all day long, and Ai engineers
is only there to help make them more
efficient. And so, you know, Jamie Diamonds is
not gonna be Jamie Dim anymore. Is gonna
be super Jamie Dim with all these Ai
tools that are gonna be connected.
But I think those are areas
that no matter who we are as a
company, we can't
be fast enough in this area. We can't
get the knowledge. We can't get the people.
We have to use outside resources.
People that have done this a lot. And
so, you know, freelance is certainly a really
important thing. So building an external tale cloud
would start with connecting with a few really
good platform right? Either invisible or in other
cases, Mandela
and being able to tap into kind of
this higher end, you know, subject matter expert
to really accelerate things.
Recently,
a couple weeks ago Ron stat bought torque,
and 1 of the things they've noticed, so
to a a technical,
you know, crowd,
freelance platform.
And the president of of Ron was really
clear the Us president of Ron set. He
said, you know, the reason we're doing it
is that our margins and staffing industry really
shitty and we expect we're gonna put everybody.
We're gonna change radically change our organization and
put everybody in Ron digital
onto the torque platform.
And currently,
when we have a client call, it takes
60 days
to go through the process
and to be able to deploy talent to
somebody with all the analog process. You have,
you know,
Here's the brief. It goes out to a
hundred recruiters, A hundred recruiters compete against each
other to find the right talents.
It takes a while.
Torque can do that same work in 2
hours because they have this crowd of people
ready to go ready to work, digitally defined
ability to interview. And so those are the
kind of the radical shifts that you need
to do. But you can't get from here
to there
without employing either acquiring those companies or crime
acquiring those kind of relationships. Yeah. Super interesting.
And,
a complement to that, which you alluded to
is, building an internal talent marketplace.
To talk talk a bit about how those
work together.
I think that's really critical. Right? In our
in our work with Nasa, 1 of my
favorite
examples
in our Nasa work platform was that A
guy had just gotten commissioned or AAAA
budget for 5000000 dollars, 1 of the engineers
inside Nasa,
And the project that he got the budget
on was to figure out how do
detect
dehydration inside a space suit So it's gotta
be... You know, you got somebody out outside
of the space station, they, you know, whatever
they they they they pee in their system.
But is he dehydrated easy he not. Nobody
ever knew. Right? Nobody could could analyze that.
And so that was the project he was
working on. The idea of how do we
digitally separate these kinds of 2 different liquids.
He put that question up after he got
the budget, he put that question up on
the internal talent marketplace.
And loan behold, somebody else in Nasa had
been doing a project for a few years
of separating digitally separating 2 different kinds of
liquids and analyzing their content.
And using those principles, he was able to
accelerate 3 or 4 years worth of research
and 5000000 dollars of budget. He didn't need
to use a budget budget. He could solve
that problem.
I would suggest that this points to the
fact that most large organizations have probably somewhere
in your organization have probably figured out a
problem or a solution to the problem you're
working on. Yet because of bad communications of
relying on email or even Slack,
it's really hard to get that. And so
The question is, how do we capture the
cognitive surplus
of an organization? I would say, let's forget
about the external tale clouds for now. Right?
Like, where are the people in there that
maybe, you know, maybe he's a marketing guy
or she's a marketing person?
And and at night, she's gotten certified on
Google Ai training, and she's gotten, you know,
she's had 2 or 3 months of that.
Yet, there's no opportunity inside the organization for
most organizations to actually cross poll.
Gl a great example of a platform that
allows, you know, that not only ups skill
to be able to get new skills, but
also that idea that, you know,
you, Peter could say, I wanna, you know,
be in the Ai space. That's what I
wanna do with my career. Oh, look, there's
are some projects with my marketing experience that
I can kinda help out.
On my off hours to be able to
do that. I think that's a huge
acceleration.
Really great overview of that as well. And
then you, finally noted open innovation contests as
an important ingredient as well. Again, talk about
those if you would. I mean, I think
for a lot of companies that's terrifying. Right?
The idea that we built our identity on
the quality of our work or expertise and
my career built on it.
I mean, 1 of the more fascinating things
that happened at at Lyft
was that the Harvard Medical school called us,
and they had been doing a thing with
Broad Institute,
to think about new ways to sequence
some Dna.
And a abroad had spent a couple decades,
over a hundred million dollars to get this
kind of you know, ability to sequence this
Dna in 5 and a half minutes. Huge
success. Right? The guys who did it are
world famous
amazing. And so
came to us and we just... We're curious
We were say, wow. What happens if we
just did an open contest
in 1 month. Right? Put the prize money
at 35000
dollars. Let's do it in a collaborative way
where we invite people in, they get into
the contest by actually
proposing an algorithm
that tested to a certain level
And then once they're in, a certain level
compared to the standard.
Once they're in, then then everybody gets to
see the algorithms and it's a collaborative
project with 80 people across the globe to
see how fast they can build on each
other. Right? Well, the guys have probe were,
like, theirs is no way, and we spent
a hundred million dollars and 3 decades doing
where the smartest guys in There's no way
this will lower happen. Well, you know, their
standard was... Not only does it have to
beat the benchmark of their algorithm it had
to be 10 percent better to get in
the contest.
How long do you think it took for
somebody outside to beat their algorithm? Very rapidly.
24 hours. 24 hours. Yeah. But the crazy
thing was is the 80 folks that that
they gone in the contest
by iterating and and and being, you know,
psyche to do it And what we find
in the Nasa work. Right? There's 3 reasons
that people play open innovation platforms. 1 is
for the for the money. Right? But also
for the glory, like, I solved an algorithm
for broad.
And also for the for the guts, like
can I compete
with this?
And so over the next 3 weeks, this
crowd did the did the work guess how
fast the the the sequencing happened by a
guy out of Poland. Minutes
14 seconds. From 5 and a half minutes
14 seconds and the top 25 algorithms were
all under 30 seconds. My goodness. And so
if you're looking to solve really hard problems,
Unfortunately,
what I've seen And III bet you've seen
the same thing, it is that when companies
run into really hard problems,
they tend to start putting them on the
back burner. Oh, spent tens of millions of
dollars on that. We can't figure it out.
We've got more pressing things. That's not a
big deal.
Our suggestion always is to let... Let's pull
those out of the warehouse or out of
the closet and start giving those over to
contest to see if people can't kinda push
them along. And what we find is it's
it's not the fact that there are smarter
people outside your company. It's the fact that
a lot of those folks have adjacent knowledge
that your experts didn't even know existed because
it's not what they do.
The guy that solved the Rodents institute problem.
He is
he is a mathematician. He solved a lot
of problems for us.
Made a lot of money. But he's never
done a Dna sequencing or any biological
problem at all. It's just they had such
a different perspective on how to look at
the problem. He's able to solve it, and
I would suggest that every company has
intra problems that they cannot solve and they
need that adjacent knowledge and open innovation capabilities
allow you to think about things in a
in a new way.
Or are there, like, platforms that you would
recommend using or what? Yeah. Yeah. So W
is a really amazing platform. They focus on
the
innovation space.
So do innovation consulting, but they bought a
platform called innocent, which is 1 of the
grand daddy's of the space, and they... It's...
And it's in incentives done more work than
new anybody. A few others, but those guys
are, you know, the best. The problem with
these open innovation platforms that we've seen are
great platforms come along like C,
and then C gets bought by Google and
Google takes up a hundred percent of their
capacity. So C still round,
they still do amazing work. They have an
amazing community that does that work. It's just
a hundred percent of their capacity taken up
by Google. That makes sense. So we've talked
about Ai in for variety of different ways.
I I wanna kind of more squarely talk
about artificial intelligence and the role, you see
it playing. It sounds as though you're you're
largely an opt optimistic relative to the to
the the topic. You certainly see the necessity
for companies to delve into it. Rather than
to,
stick their heads in the sand as you
noted. Talk about how your own experience with
it has informed what you think the future
of these these work models are with, enhanced
with artificial intelligence.
It's interesting. Right? I I so I played
just like you, you know, played a lot
with it. I'm, 1 the things that I
I found pretty profound was that I took
all my my manuscript, all my writing
and put into its own Gp.
And then when somebody asks me a question
of, like, what are the 3 ways to
build an external tale cloud, I just go
to my tool and it builds that for
me. And so, and, it's based on my
information. And I can do that. I I've
actually written a few articles
or B not telling Hp that I've used
the Ai to build it and it's slid
right through and they're like. This is amazing.
What a great article.
And so I think that that's just the
reality. Like, it it to me,
you know, I I love this image that
you probably saw on the book. There's in
in 1900,
there was a picture of, you know, fifth
Avenue
across way, on Fifth Avenue. An intersection, and
there were all horses, you know, just jammed
packed with horses in 1 car.
And literally, 13 years later, that same intersection
was packed with cars and 1 horse.
And I think that's what we're talking about
here. Right? If you were a buggy with
manufacturer,
you could rail all day long off on
the fact that, you know, cars are unsafe.
They're dangerous. They're horrible. In fact, if you
look back in history, 1 the things that
I find super interesting.
Is theirs
there were some laws in Massachusetts that I
found, you know, crazy. 1 was if you
owned an automobile, and you came to an
intersection. You had to get out of the
car as a driver with flags,
get all of the animals to stop, and
then you could proceed through. That was the
first 1. The crazier 1 was if you
see an animal, and you're driving on the
road, you have to stop and dis assemble
your automobile hide it behind a tree. And
then when the coat is clear, you could
come back on the road and re assemble
it. I think that's a little bit what's
happening. Right? Is I think that there's a
lot of Ais in reality. It's gonna happen.
Either we engage with it and decide what's
good and bad. How do we put some
guard rails on it, or we can stand
on the sidelines and complain about it, but
that's not gonna get us anywhere. And I
think it's gonna be an incredibly powerful tool.
Who knows what the outcome gonna be. I
think we have to figure out
who should we follow and 1 of the
people I follow a lot is Ethan Male,
who's, you know, wrote a book on c
intelligence and, you know is right at the
top of the game. And it's it's super
fascinating name space. I think it's gonna be
profound Right? And I think that it's gonna
cause a lot of big cultural shifts.
My sense is is that even the sense
of what work is and our identities as
do... You know, our our work identities are
gonna be radically shifted and probably ding to
buy a lot of this stuff. Right? How
how soon, you know, it's gonna be my
age... My Ai agent talking to your Ai
agent coming up with some copy for an
article
that we can approve. Right? That's the way
it's gonna work.
So who knows know if that's good answer
or not, but
it's it's up in the air. Yeah. Sure...
I... John, Here at the close of the
conversation. I I'd love to have you diagnose
what the secrets to your success have been?
You've had such an interesting and varied career?
You've been able to draw
insights and inspiration from across very different experiences.
You seem to maintain great curiosity,
as your as your career in life has
unfolded.
What what do you attribute some of the
routes to your success. What are some of
the ingredients to that?
I mean, yeah, that's a great question. I
I would say
my success
has
been
built on my failures. You know, I'm not
a detailed guy. I can't
you know, Like, I can't plan out things
a long time in advance. I've tried to,
you know, I've I have been a ceo
6 times and and successfully, but
I'm just super curious. Right? I'm not
I'm not a guy. I'm I've did a
great example.
You know, my my buddy, Jim call so
I climbed with a bunch. He's a here
and boulder.
When he was riding before he wrote, you
know, built the last. He he had this
rock climb project and Aldo that's right down
the road from us.
He spent
3 years working on a rock climb that
was about a hundred feet long. Like, he
documented every
move. He
analyzed that he figured it out. And he
was super successful at it. I I can't
do that. I... I'm more interested in, like,
you know, asking why not kind of, you
know, exploring around the corner, you know, over
the horizon.
I think that's some of it. I think
that, you know, It's not... It it it's
some of its curiosity, but some of its
resilience. I've had a, a few tragedies have
happened in my my life, and it's,
you know, You just have to keep moving
forward. Right? Yeah. 1 step at a time
and and figure out what's next. I I
think we're in for a real
difficult time, especially for large companies, and especially
for Ge rh age
that have been running those companies. Their identities
tied up in, you know, having
big company and having
a bunch of employees. And I think those
days are gonna be gone. Right? I... Unfortunately,
the unit of
organization is gonna be much smaller. And with
the Sam Alt question of, like, you know,
it's gonna be in within the year, there's
gonna be a billion dollar public company with
the 1 employee.
I think that's gonna be true. Right? These
tools are super powerful, but it's not just
the radical shifts of organization. It's the radical
shifts for the identity of who people are.
Like, what does that mean? Right? If I
don't have my office to go to and
don't have my employees to report to and
So we've gotta rethink that. I think that's
the coming crisis. How do we deal with
that?
Well John, thank you so much for an
interesting conversation, and and
Congratulations again on your book. Is open talent,
leveraging the global crowd to solve your biggest
challenges. Thank you for sharing your insights through
this conversation. I really enjoyed it.
Thanks so much. I really appreciate it. It's
really great to get to know you and
like to learn more about your work.