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The way people work was changing long before the COVID-19 pandemic. But, the pandemic accelerated many changes including the employees wanting more flexibility and variety in their work. We continue our episode series on the labor and employment crisis with a conversation with John Winsor (MBA 1986). Winsor is the CEO of Open Assembly and an executive-in-resident at Harvard Business School’s Laboratory for Innovation Science. He is working on a new book about the future of work. Winsor believes open talent is the way of the future.
The VOE Podcast is an extension of Voices of Experience, the signature speaker series at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business. Keep tuning in each month for more business insights from Daniels’ alumni voices of experience.
Transcript
Kristal Griffith:
Hello, and welcome to the VOE podcast.
Jake Jensen:
An extension of Voices of Experience.
Amber D’Angelo:
The Signature Speaker Series at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business.
Kristal Griffith:
We are your hosts.
Amber D’Angelo:
Amber D’Angelo.
Jake Jensen:
Jake Jensen.
Kristal Griffith:
And I’m Kristal Griffith from the Daniels Office of Communications and Marketing. We’ll be unpacking topics at the intersection of business and the public good with CEOs and other business leaders from the Daniels community. Let’s dive in.
Joining me today is John Winsor, CEO of Open Assembly and an executive in residence at Harvard Business School’s Laboratory for Innovation Science. While we’ll ask John about both of those titles, we are eager to hear about his thoughts on the future of work, since he’s writing a book on the topic right now. John is a 1986 graduate of the Daniels College of Business receiving his MBA. John, welcome to the VOE podcast.
John Winsor:
Super excited to be here. Love to you. It was definitely formative in my years, especially as an entrepreneur.
Kristal Griffith:
John, let’s start with your background. You have more than 30 years of experience in entrepreneurship and leadership. You’ve been in charge of innovation strategy, marketing, advertising in the fitness space. Your background is very intriguing and very diverse. So talk a little bit about your journey becoming CEO of Open Assembly and what Open Assembly is.
John Winsor:
Open Assembly is essentially the commercial side of the laboratory. Based on the work, the lab’s previous name was the NASA tournament lab. So we were focused on solving hard problems for NASA using open talent as a solution. And then I’m writing a new book with the guys at the lab. I’m not sure of the title. I think we’re going to call it Open, Agile and Network, kind of the idea of open talent, agile process, and a networked organizations.
Kristal Griffith:
Let’s talk a little bit about this current labor and employment crisis as you know, right?
John Winsor:
Right.
Kristal Griffith:
It’s, people cannot find workers, but then workers also seem like they can’t find jobs. So it’s like a unique situation I feel in time. So talk about I guess, what’s going on. What do you see happening in the world? And then it sounds like you and Harvard has some interesting ideas about solving it.
John Winsor:
Maybe, we’ll see. We’ll see if they’re relevant. I mean, the world is changing so fast
I think we have to think about how we build organizations, right? And so when you think about the movement from agricultural age to industrial age, it was for a while, it was very much apparent that there were new things that needed to be built, let’s just say cars, right? But yet the way work got done, the organizational structure was very firmly rooted in kind of a communal agricultural point of view. And so when the first thing Henry Ford did was created the model N and the model N, it was a big advancement. It took a couple of months to, oh, sorry, a couple of weeks to build a car.
He actually changed things around the model N. He laid the plans out on the floor, and then he laid all the parts on top of the plans and then people came together and built the car, and it went from two weeks to two days. It was really an advancement, it was amazing.
But then when he decided to do the model T, he actually changed it around. He just said, “Instead of everybody working together, why don’t we create an assembly line where we have one person in charge of one thing, we’ll create an 84 step the assembly line. And by people getting focused on that one thing, then we’ll create some more momentum. Well, all of a sudden Model Ts could be built in two hours.” So big advances by changing organizational structures to match the needs in the marketplace of these new things being invented. And so how do organizations really work in this new world of work, where things are faster, and then on top, you throw in the pandemic where everything’s remote, we don’t really know who’s an employee, and who’s not, who’s on the call. We just know who’s doing great work and who’s not.
Kristal Griffith:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Winsor:
And so what kinds of new structures do we need to build to allow for these kind of open talent marketplaces to exist? So what we’re trying to figure out is what are the steps that organizations need to do to evolve to that. How do they do that? How do they look at the world in a platform marketplace kind of way without destroying themselves?
Kristal Griffith:
Sure.
John Winsor:
Because you can see a lot of firms and Facebook is a great example that just, and social media, it’s just kind of completely destroyed the publishing industry because they have a new way of communicating news or communicating people’s ideas, right? It’s not, it’s just, it’s a distribution tactic more than it is a strategy. So anyway, that’s kind of what we’ve been working on.
And I think specific to your question, one of the things we’re seeing is that coming out of COVID, there’s an incredible acceleration of need, right? So if we look at specifically the tech talent marketplace, right now, there’s a 40 million talent deficit. There are 40 million more jobs available globally than there are talent to fill those jobs. And that’s going to expand to 150,000,000 by 2025. So there’s no way that a company can use to tried and true methodology of, “Hey, let’s have the HR department hire some folks. That’ll take three months to interview them, three months to hire them. We’ll get there. And then they need to hire staff, they’ll take six months. And then we might have a strategy on how to approach something like AI a year and a half from now,” versus “Let’s get together this week with the 10 best thinkers on AI, let’s do a four day jam session. Let’s figure out what the tasks needed to be done, who are the best people in the world to do each of these tasks. And in three weeks we have a strategy ready to go.”
So anyway, that’s kind of the stuff that we’re working on. And I think there’s significant implications. I think you’re seeing because of that tech talent deficit, that all of a sudden everything’s flipped to the workers are in charge, right? The workers know that in these specific areas, that they’re kind of, there’s more demand than there is supply. And so instead of before, HR departments are built in a place where there’s a lot of supply for talent and not a much enough demand. So by flipping that paradigm, you’re seeing really crazy things like the great resignation, like the resume tsunami, where just everybody’s looking for something new to do.
Microsoft recently reported that they think that globally 40% of the workforce is going to look for another job in the next two years. So I think you’re seeing this kind of incredible upheaval in the marketplace and the control of who has the power now, and the worker company perspective. Now workers have the power and they’re going to demand more. They’re going to demand higher pay, they’re going to demand different working conditions, working from home, remote working, working from Bali, wherever it is, they’re going to want to work two or three jobs. They want to work when they want to work, how they want to work. And that’s what we’re seeing. These open platforms really provide people.
Kristal Griffith:
Yeah, we’re seeing, right? People, employees who are in demand, of course-
John Winsor:
Yep.
Kristal Griffith:
Not everybody, but employees who are in demand saying, “Well, it’s really expensive to live in San Francisco or Seattle.”
John Winsor:
Exactly.
Kristal Griffith:
So why don’t I move to North Dakota and keep my amazing pay. And there, I think a lot of companies are trying to figure out how to deal with that when there might be some backlash initially.
John Winsor:
Yeah, but I think the reality is, is like, that’s going to be the thing that the guys that, so Paul Hlivko, who’s a CTO and CXO at Wellmark Healthcare. They’re a Blue Cross Blue Shield provider in the Midwest. And he describes it really, really well. He says, “Hey, I was going to go hire a woman, really excited about hiring her. And she lives in Des Moines and we have a new kind of hybrid workforce policy that says you only have to work in office one day a week.” And so historically he’s been the best employer in the Des Moines, Iowa, Metro area, kind of could get any employee wanted, paid at the height of that, that the scale. So he kind of had his choice and there was a bit of expectation there.
And so he called this woman and gave her a job offer for $90,000 and said, “Oh, you only have to come into the office one day a week. You can do your thing.” And she called back and she said, “No, that’s really awesome. I appreciate that. A Silicon valley tech firm that’s really highly rated offered me a completely remote job for $140,000.” And so his point to me was it used to be that I had this pool that was pretty ring-fenced of 1.2 million employees in the Des Moines area that I competed with for that I competed for. And now I’m competing with tech firms from Silicon valley that have 40%, they’re willing to pay 40% more Silicon valley rates, but they have a job pool or a talent pool, a 150 million people. They can choose anybody they want.
And so his point was, his prediction was, is every company will have to go a hundred percent remote. That’s going to, if you want the talent, you’re going to have to deliver what the talent wants. And so that’s what I think is going to happen is that yeah, then there’s Joe’s jobs you have to be there for. But it’s a talent war and you’re not going to win without the best talent. And the best talent now has the choice, they get to choose when they want to work, where they want to work and how they want to work.
Kristal Griffith:
Fascinating, I mean, to me, that brings up kind of two, maybe questions, problems. One is, it makes me think that the employers who are more antiquated, not wanting flexibility may end up with a less quality.
John Winsor:
For sure.
Kristal Griffith:
And then do small businesses suffer in some ways if they can’t compete on the same level?
John Winsor:
I mean, I don’t know. I mean, I think that, that’s why open talent exists, right? That people are going to go to the open talent platforms. You see this in tech all the time and the best data scientists don’t want to work for any one company. They want to do the most interesting projects that they can learn the fastest and have the best skills. So they’re going to work on a project basis. And so if I was starting a company today, I would do it. I wouldn’t have any employees. I would have all project-based and get the best talent in the world and have them work on specific projects, tasks if that might work.
Kristal Griffith:
I’m so intrigued by this idea. So let’s say you’re a student at DU, for example.
John Winsor:
Yeah.
Kristal Griffith:
Whether you’re an undergrad or grad and, but you don’t have really a body of work yet. So do you feel like that kind of potential employee is still really marketable in open talent? Or do you advise they actually get a job somewhere to develop that and then start building up a portfolio and get a website and showcase their work? How does this work for the worker?
John Winsor:
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s really simple. I think that I would at least my experience in bigger companies is internships are akin to slavery, right? They’re akin to like get coffee and make copies and maybe sit in on a meeting or two, and you just don’t get anything out of it. But if I was doing an internship, now I would join. And even during class, I would join three or four different platforms and start playing. One of the great examples at NASA, we love to talk about is that the Homeland security came to NASA and said, this is 10 years ago and said, “We need to improve the algorithm that controls the x-ray machines at airport.” The big ones with the one that sweeps around and at the time, the accuracy of the, of those were, was about 70%.
And they’d had the best data scientists at HSA and the best data scientists from the company that built those, we have making nice progress, 10% a year, 5% a year, really good stuff. And so they went to NASA. NASA has a thing called Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation. And NASA went to a platform called Kaggle. Kaggle, decided to put up a contest together and over a three-week period in that contest, it was a global contest to improve this algorithm. And so what was interesting is the top 20 entries, these are the best people in the world over 10 years, $30 million estimated that it have gotten it to 70% accuracy, right? In two weeks, a bunch of entrepreneurs or software engineers from around the world, the top 25 were better than 95% accurate.
So quantum leap in, in progression all for $25,000 for the winner, that’s super interesting, that happens all the time and open talent especially in the tech world. But what I thought was super interesting was the person who got the fourth highest result from the algorithm was a freshman at Berkeley, who was learning how to build games at Berkeley as a software engineer or just a game developer and decided it looked at that problem and said, this isn’t an AI problem or an algorithm problem. This is a gaming problem. So what he did is he built little figures for his game, digital figures and put weapons on those figures and then ran a really, really fast simulation on a software gaming simulation. And through that simulation, the software created an algorithm that could detect those weapons.
And so he won a bunch of money and he also solved this big problem for HSA. And he got a big job offer from HSA as a data scientist.
Kristal Griffith:
I bet so.
John Winsor:
Right? And so, that to me, I think it’s awesome. All of a sudden a kid who’s a freshman at Berkeley gets to play with the very best people in the world to solve problems. And what we find in these platforms is that it gives you the freedom to not just play on things, to do things, but also to learn a lot of people are going to platform say, “Huh, I’ve never gone and then worked on anything on quantum, in quantum computing. Oh, look, there’s a contest in quantum computing. I’m not going to do very good in it, but I’m going to play on it and I can watch everybody else. I’m going to learn a lot from it.” So this idea that upskilling is a really important part of the open talent ecosystem is a really important reason for students to get involved.
Kristal Griffith:
Absolutely, and I just resonates with me so well because we do this all the time here at Daniels, right? You’ve got a case competition. You’re working with a real world.
John Winsor:
Yeah, that’s awesome.
Kristal Griffith:
Real world data set. We do race in case we do inclusive excellence case competition, right? So our students are getting hands on experience with these situations and to your point, right? That is part of their portfolio then. I’m really curious a little bit about this, your lens through entrepreneurship. I mean, that is a big program here, as you know, at Daniels and Joshua Ross recently launched entrepreneurship at DU. So we’re kind of the hub of entrepreneurship for the entire university. In that space, to me, it just seems like you were one of these people that, “Oh, let’s run with this for a while,” but then you would see this other need and say, “No, there’s something there.” What is that, what’s going, how do you know?
John Winsor:
Oh, that’s a great question. First of all I was in the very first entrepreneurial class at DU and I think Ron ran it back then. And so I think it was 80′, it was 1986.
Kristal Griffith:
Okay.
John Winsor:
So it’s nice to see it develop so much. I would just say fail often, fail fast. And you know, I think that’s the key, right? And always ask why not, instead of why. I think we get stuck in a while and it takes us down a wormhole, why didn’t that work and how do we make it work? And instead of looking at the world and say, “Well, why not? Why not do that?” Be a little bit contrarian and look at, look at the world in a new way, there’s all this I can see it right in large steady organizations. You don’t want to be the speed boat that moves around because that hurts your ability to produce earnings for your shareholders.
But in the context of being successful today, it’s really speedboat, right? And you can’t think about like hitting home runs, you got to hit singles and doubles and strike out a few times. And you’ve got to really just have experiences because what I’ve found now in my career, it’s like, I don’t, it’s the craziest thing I keep telling my sons actually just find one thing. And it seems so odd for me to say it because I’m definitely not, I’m definitely a Jack of all trades, but I just say, find one thing and just become the very best in the world at it. And just like the most micro thing in the world, just try, try to be the best, something you’re super passionate about. And I found that and I give that advice a lot.
It’s like, instead of do all this extraneous stuff of like, “Oh, I want to build a company because I want to make a lot of money or that’s kind of interesting, but I got all these other interests I’m doing this because I really want to do that.” Do that, right? Do the thing that you really love. Because the greatest thing about the internet is no matter what happens, you have a mark, there’s somebody else out there that can help you do your thing.
One of my favorite experiences in the last couple of years, I went to a retreat with a bunch of entrepreneurs and this guy stood up and told me this great story. And he said he’s like, “Yeah, I’m a successful entrepreneur from LA and we’ve raised a 100 million bucks and my company’s a unicorn and it’s worth a billion bucks. And so I’m pretty proud of myself and I’m doing my thing and we don’t make money yet, right? So we’re still like pre pre-revenue. And so I go to my sister’s house for a wedding in New Hampshire and they live on a farm and I’m on my phone all the time and they’re really relaxed and chill and just doing their thing. And my brother-in-law has his big beard and big overalls.” And I’m kind of laughing at him saying if he really knew how the world works, I’m a unicorn and I’m doing all this great stuff, not making any money, but you know, we’ll make money sometime. And the brother-in-law drifts out to the garage and you know, this friend who was telling me this story said he heard a chainsaw go off.
And he was like, “Oh they’re doing some little workout in the garage. I’m going to go check on how my brother-in-law’s doing, that poor guy. He’s got to use his chainsaw. I’m looking at my shareholder agreement for next quarter and got it, got it all dialed.” And so he goes out and this guy’s with the chainsaw making signs, right? Cutting signs out of wood. And finally gets his notice and in his brother-in-law looks and says, “It’s the craziest thing. I make these signs. And I put them on this platform called Etsy and I’m making $4 million a year off the site.”
Kristal Griffith:
No way.
John Winsor:
Yeah. He’s like, “It’s crazy, this people love these signs. I can’t make enough. My chainsaw runs out of oil and air. It’s never sharp. And I just said, I can’t keep up, but that $4 million just keeps coming in.” And so my buddy is like, “I walked back to the house. I actually have a losing money, that’s losing money in LA and I’m stressed out a hundred percent of the time and beholden to all these other people. And here my brother-in-law is he drinks coffee when he wants to, he hangs out whenever hangs out with his wife, my sister, and he uses his chainsaw all day long and he’s doing a hundred times better than I.” And so I think that’s the reality, right? He’s like, “Find that passion and just do it really, really well.”
Kristal Griffith:
I love it, I love it. So as you know, Daniels is known for teaching ethical leadership and dedication to the public good. So talk a little bit about how those values factor into your role as a leader and entrepreneur.
John Winsor:
Oh, that’s a great question. You know, I think that’s awesome that Daniels is doing that because I, one of the things that we’re really working at the set of the transmission of work is trying to figure out those ways to create the right social construct, to make all this stuff happen. Because obviously people stick with jobs because of the benefits and things like that. And then they, in fact, a lot of people stick with bad jobs for a long time because of that. So my sense is, is that there’s lots and lots of good work to be done in those things. And the reality is it’s not just ethical business practices isn’t just a nice to have anymore. It’s a must-have because the world’s just really transparent place. And if you have bad behavior, Glassdoor or a tweet or a video on Instagram can really ruin everything.
Kristal Griffith:
Anything else you want to share that I haven’t asked that we should ask you about?
John Winsor:
No, I just, I love DU and the more, the longer, the further I get away from it, the more I appreciate it. It’s just got so much great momentum and it’s just a, it’s an honor to be an alumni.
Kristal Griffith:
Love it. Thank you so much. This has been the VOE podcast.
Jake Jensen:
Produced by the Daniels College of Business and sponsored by US Bank.
Amber D’Angelo:
Music by Joshua Muetzel, music composition graduate student at the Lamont School of Music.
Kristal Griffith:
Join us next time for more business insights from our community.
Jake Jensen:
In the meantime, visit daniels.du.edu/voe-podcast.
Amber D’Angelo:
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