to fully absorb the alliance into the main corporate body.
If AstraZeneca thought in terms of fixed structures and rigid organizational boundaries, they would never have achieved their current strength in diabetes treatments. They saw the work of winning the diabetes game as being about moving pieces available somewhere in the world, not just moving the pieces available within the organization.
We are all familiar with outsourcing and the economic value it provides through specialization and its ability to mitigate the impact of product demand fluctuations. Alliances have similar advantages, but they introduce a much fuzzier set of relationships. The alliance between AstraZeneca and Bristol-Myers Squibb on diabetes treatment didn't just share employees, it also shared intellectual property. That fuzziness is important. It is both a challenge and an opportunity. When it comes to leading through the work, the traditional boxes we use to define what is inside and outside an organization are breaking down.
Earlier we showed how an organization called Topcoder was a source of freelance computer coders to solve Ion Torrent's compression problem. It illustrates how work is escaping the confines of regular full-time employment. Yet, Topcoder is much more than a source of free agents. It is an example of something called a talent platform that not only provides an alternative source of workers but offers insights about what it fundamentally means to lead through the work. We will deal with talent platforms in depth in Chapter 4. Here, we offer some highlights to show just how fundamentally they change how you think about leading through the work.
Upwork, the leading site for freelance work, was designed to be a marketplace that matches work to free agents. Need a logo? You can find a designer on Upwork. Need a part-time administrative assistant? Upwork can help you find one. Need a brand strategist? The talent you need, for as long as you need it, is a few clicks away. In many ways, Upwork is an Internet-based replacement for a temp agency – at least that is what it was when it started.
Think of it like the consumer buy-and-sell sites Craigslist and Kijiji, but instead of buyers and sellers of used household goods finding each other, work and talent find one another. A leader lists a task that needs to be done and free agents offer their services. Alternatively the leader can search the listings of free agents to see who is available. It is similar to job boards like Monster or CareerBuilder, except regular full-time employment isn't being offered or sought; and it offers services to help overcome barriers that get in the way of working with off-site free agents.
Upwork successfully competes against temp agencies partly because of the efficiencies of being automated, partly because it is useful even if you just have a small task rather than a whole job, and partly because it can tap affordable talent in the developing world. Upwork is important if you are a temp agency competing for market share or a leader looking for some extra help. If a talent platform was just the equivalent of a big room filled with tasks and free agents wandering around to find each other, then it would not be particularly exciting. And if Upwork was the only talent platform out there, it would be interesting, but hardly world-changing. However there is much more to talent platforms than this simple view.
Consider the talent platform Ion Torrent used: Topcoder. Whereas Upwork is usually seen as a way of getting work done more cheaply than using employees, Topcoder intends to tackle programming tasks so difficult that your employees cannot do them.
Topcoder challenges employment on two fronts. As a leader, when does it make sense to get work done with a fixed group of employees (assuming you have an employment brand to attract this highly desirable pool of talent, and they would pick you over Google) versus giving the work to more talented programmers on an as-needed basis? As a talented programmer, when does it make sense to tether yourself to a corporation when you could fly free as a Topcoder? The bigger question has to do with the scale of the change. Are we headed toward a world where most programming work is done via talent platforms?
What Topcoder is to programming, Tongal is to advertising. Tongal strives to be a better way for firms to get advertising videos made. It's a talent platform that enables crowdsourcing of ideas and the production of commercials. It attracts work from top brands like Lego, Anheuser-Busch, and Procter and Gamble. In the old, big-budget world of mass-market TV advertising, traditional advertising agencies may have an advantage, but among the fragmented audiences of the Internet and cable TV, those big budgets are unsustainable. For commercials, talent platforms like Tongal are a big part of the future.
A quite different kind of talent platform is Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Amazon's platform is named for the Mechanical Turk, one of the most notorious machines in the history of artificial intelligence. The Turk was an eighteenth-century chess-playing robot that astounded the intelligentsia of the time. No, your sense of the history of technology is not awry; the Mechanical Turk was a clever fraud. A man was hidden inside the robot and it was he who provided it with the intelligence to play chess.
Even in the modern world of computing there are some things humans do better than machines. Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) feels like a machine, but it cleverly takes little tasks and farms them out to anonymous human workers hidden behind the interface. Consider image recognition, such as being asked “Is this a picture of a kitchen or a bathroom?” This sort of task is easy for a human but hard for a machine. When leaders at Amazon confronted the problem of handling large numbers of microtasks a computer could not do, they created a talent platform to farm out these tasks to free agents around the world. A free agent working on Amazon's MTurk might only earn 10 cents for a task, but that's okay when a task only takes a few seconds. MTurk worked so well that Amazon turned it from an internal tool to a business.
There are a great many talent platforms. In the video business alone, there are numerous sites competing with Tongal, including MOFILM, UserFarm, Genero, Wooshi, and Vizy. Talent platforms extend to the world of on-premise work with the likes of Wonolo, TaskRabbit, and Gigwalk. These platforms connect managers to local free agents who can do everything from filling in for a cashier, to working on a construction site for the day, to helping your grandmother carry boxes upstairs.
Going down this line of inquiry leads us to ask whether the taxi-like service Uber should count as a talent platform. And if so, how do we classify Uber competitor Car2Go, which doesn't provide any talent at all, but is just a platform for finding the nearest “drive-it-yourself” car? And what about Wikipedia? It isn't really a talent platform, but it does source a vast array of talent on the web and is clever enough to enlist them as volunteers instead of paid free agents. Is Wikipedia part of this story, or something quite different? As is so often the case when the old ways are dissolving and the familiar boxes breaking down, there are more questions than answers.
If your employees are working for other firms as part of their development, if your programming is done by free agents, if your research is done by volunteers, or if a strategic part of your product line is being handled by an alliance, what does that mean to you as a leader?
You can act as if it is business as usual, and focus on leading your regular full-time employees. What's happening on the outside may not need to be a primary focus…not yet.
This “business as usual” approach, grounded in regular full-time employment, has lasted a long time even in the face of massive social and technological changes. The stresses on traditional employment structures were described in 1999 by Peter Cappelli in his book The New Deal at Work: Managing the Market-Driven Workforce.8 The rise of free agents was celebrated in 2001 by Dan Pink in his book Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself.9 A few years later, Ellen Ernst Kossek and Brenda Lautsch coined the term CEO of Me to capture the notion that everyone needed to be the CEO of his/her own life and career.10
We believe it is time to change your leadership paradigm, from managing your employees to leading through the work. Even if this paradigm shift suggests you will still get work done mostly with regular full-time employees, the very definition of employment has become so seriously eroded that even your regular employees really work for CEO of Me. They are speaking at conferences, maintaining their own