Episode 196: Addressing the Global Skills Shortage with Open Talent Strategies (Interview with John Winsor)
In a world where traditional approaches to talent management are falling short, it's time to rethink how we leverage skills to address the global workforce crisis.
This episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast we explore exactly that as David Green sits down with John Winsor, the author of "Open Talent: Leveraging the Global Workforce to Solve Your Biggest Challenges," to discuss the transformative potential of leveraging "Open Talent" through John's three-legged model.
Join us as we uncover:
Why skills-based organisations are crucial to save the future of businesses.
An inside look at the three-legged stool framework: internal talent marketplaces, external talent clouds, and open innovation.
Real-world tips for overcoming the challenges of shifting to a skills-focused approach.
How embracing open talent can positively impact your company culture and the importance of a digital transformation mindset.
Inspiring examples and case studies that highlight the benefits of adopting open talent strategies.
If you're an HR leader looking to innovate and bridge the skills gap, this episode is a must-listen.
Support from this podcast comes from HiBob, who brings us Bob, the most usable enterprise HCM according to Nucleus Research. Bob, is rated the most useable HCM solution in Nucleus Research's 2024 Enterprise HCM Value Matrix.
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Links to Resources:
John Winsor on LinkedIn: John Winsor
Open Assembly: Open Assembly
HiBob Platform: HiBob
MyHRFuture Academy: MyHRFuture
[0:00:00] David Green: John, welcome to the show. Could you start by sharing the journey that kind of got you to where you are today?
[0:01:56] John Winsor: So, I started my career, I was a rock climber and surfer and I worked for a publisher for one year out of college and I got this crazy idea that back in the day, back in the 1980s, there weren't any hotels with fitness facilities in them. So, I took this crazy flyer, quit my job because I'd put on, I don't know, 20 pounds or so, and decided to write a book called Fitness on the Road. And I got super-lucky. United Airlines and Four Seasons Hotel picked me up as sponsors, and I kind of just was the dirtbag bike racer for the summer and travelled around courtesy of United and Four Seasons and got in really good shape. And then a publisher picked up the book and that was kind of crazy. So, but yeah, he said he had a bunch of time before we were going to publish it. So, I enrolled in business school with the idea of starting a regional sports magazine, you know, kind of modelled after a magazine in California.
I had the opportunity to buy a magazine called Women's Sports and Fitness out of bankruptcy, but that got me to kind of the alternative talent stuff that I still work on today. And the challenge of Women's Sports and Fitness is that Billie Jean King had started in the 1970s and then it had kind of gone out of business, been resurrected by Time Inc, Sports Illustrated's publisher. And they had 40 editors and writers in New York. And so, the typical way the magazine, in the heydays of magazines, you'd have these big staff of editors and writers, and you'd fly a writer out to meet a subject, let's just say a rock climber in Boulder, Colorado. And oftentimes, they'd send a writer who didn't really understand the specifics of the sport, so the magazine wasn't really authentic. And so, in order for me to afford to buy the magazine, I actually flew out to Nike. There were three of us in my company, but I flew out to Nike because I knew those guys just from my athletics. And Mark Parker and Tinker Hatfield, Mark became the CEO eventually, but he was kind of a mid-level guy, and I said, "Hey, I'm going to put all my assets on the line. My wife's a professional ultra-athlete", who Tinker and Mark knew pretty well, "and what do you think? You think women's sports will be big?" And they're like, "Yeah, go for it. This is going to be a great thing, women's sports are going to be huge. We'll run ads in the magazine". So, I risked everything. I put my house on the line and did it all, and bought Women's Sports and Fitness out of bankruptcy.
But the big thing that happened was that in order for me to do that, I kind of offloaded all the editors and writers. And then I hired two editors that were very athletic, but were good, national magazine writers. And then I had the readers, the rock climber and boulder, write their own stories, and then the editors, would edit the stuff. And it was such a crazy idea back then. I don't know why, it seems kind of normal now, but the idea that everybody has the opportunity to have a voice. But it worked really, really well. It worked well financially, it worked well from an authenticity standpoint, and we went on quite a run. We grew the company from 2 magazines to 12 magazines, and sold it to Condé Nast, and rode the wave of women's sports. And that got me interested in this idea of using, what I called it back then was co-creation. Like, how do we use early adoptive consumers to create marketing strategies for companies, whether it's for the subject of magazines, or we started working for Nike and Levi's and HP and Intel, a bunch of other companies. And I wrote a few books, three books on co-creation and trying to figure that. In fact, I think, when Beyond the Brand in 2002, I kind of coined the phrase for marketing co-creation. So, really fascinating journey.
That kind of led me into the advertising business writ large with an agency called Crispin Porter Bogusky. And Crispin was this magical place that was super creative. There were only like 75 of them, and there were 25 of us at Radar. We merged the companies. We put co-creation at the core of our practice, and lo and behold, it just was accelerant. Went from 100 of us to 1,200 of us in two years, won $3 billion worth of work, became the creative agency of the decade. And then the thing that really put us on the map was, we won the billion dollar Harley-Davidson account. And that led me to sell the company to Havas and became Chief Innovation Officer of Havas. And that was a horrible failure. The idea that a small kind of anarchy-based, new model trying to go into a staid French company and recreate the business model was a horrible, horrible miscalculation by David Jones and by me. But what it did do is it actually captured the attention of Harvard Business School and they wrote a couple of case studies on us. And the Havas case study, the Change Faster case study, is still the number one selling case study for the executive ed program and we just did -- David and I went back for the 10th anniversary of talking about, how do companies accept these new kinds of models?
So, that led me to the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard and we're building all kinds of stuff at Harvard and I just wrote this book called Open Talent, the base on the journey we've done. But then the lab at Harvard actually started interestingly, they got a call from Steve, not from Steve, but from Jeff Davis at NASA in 2007, and Jeff had added a budget cut of 80% in his Health and Human Services but still had to keep astronauts alive in space. So, how do you keep astronauts alive in space for 20% of the budget? He went to Kareem, Kareem suggested crowdsourcing projects. That was a wild success. And now for 2025, the Centre of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation that we built from the lab, in partnership with NASA, now has $1 billion for 2025. So, they're going to use $1 billion of crowdsourcing and freelance and really to solve their hardest problems.
[0:08:06] David Green: You seem to be quite good at landing on stuff that's going to get big, whether that's women's sport --
[0:08:10] John Winsor: I know, it's crazy, right? Yeah.
[0:08:11] David Green: -- creation, which is certainly something we're seeing more of now even in big companies, they're looking at co-creating stuff for their employees. So, maybe in a nutshell for those of our listeners that maybe haven't heard of the book, maybe you haven't read the book yet, what's the overall synopsis?
[0:08:26] John Winsor: So, our premise is that the world of talent's changing, right? Just like you said, if you look at the tech talent world, Korn Ferry says that 85 million tech jobs will go unfilled by 2030, costing companies $8.5 trillion. And so, there's got to be a new solution, right? And I think that there's been this balkanisation inside most companies, where HR's handling the internal talent and procurement's handling staffing and outsourcing. And so, one of the things that we started doing with our company, Open Assembly, during COVID is just having this open conversation about not just external talent clouds or freelancing, but also the technology to build internal talent marketplaces, and then using our background with open innovation capabilities, and kind of stitched this together into a three-legged stool called Open Talent.
One of the things that we ran up against early on when we were talking about it is that, isn't this just another way of saying the gig economy? And when we did the analysis at Harvard, we realised gig economy companies tell a worker where to go, you know, at the airport, and what to do and get paid for that. Whereas, what we're looking at is kind of a new agency for people, whether it's somebody internally using an internal talent marketplace to say, "Yeah, I'm an accountant, but man, I'd love to do some creative work. Oh, there's some upskilling in using Gloat", because my company uses Gloat, "maybe it's Unilever, and I can do these projects, or I can go jump in and be a part of a meeting and learn those skills", so kind of a better retention model. Likewise, with the lack of tech talent, as you know, all these platforms have moved upstream pretty quickly. There's 1,000 platforms and so many different kinds of platforms now. We're seeing a real accelerant to the external talent clouds. And I'm finding it really interesting in that there's still a lot of headwinds for the industry.
Even though we would say our premise is that open talent is the digital transformation of talent writ large, with external, internal and these kinds of innovation capabilities, thinking about workforces and ecosystem, like Jeff Schwartz and those guys wrote that really great book from Deloitte, right, it's really amazing, the HR world, or maybe larger than that, the talent world is really balkanised, right? You've got HR doing a wonderful job with internal teams and trying really hard to get it to upstream, to be more aligned with C-level to look at outcomes and tasks and skills; yet, there's a procurement function over here that has a lot of power too and they have staffing and outsourcing and are buying things like they would buy bolts in a lot of cases. And so, buying by bulk, buying by price, is that the really the best way to get the best talent involved with a company's strategy?
[0:11:20] David Green: There's a couple of phrases that you use quite a lot in the book and it might be helpful to get everyone on the same page maybe who's listening. So, what's your definition of open talent; and then, another phrase that you use at work is, what's your definition of networked organisation, because I think these are two terms that flow through the book?
[0:13:13] John Winsor: Yeah, I mean what we tried to think about was, we tried to think about what could be a possible vision for the future, and we really took inspiration for the open-source community. When you think about how software is written these days, predominantly it's open-source code, right? Like there's a repository of code that people dip into to use, and instead of reinventing the wheel and redoing something, there's lots of ways to build that. I just think that's the way talent's going to be. It's beneficial for the company, finding the right talent at the right time to get the right job done, but likewise, for the person. And I think when you look at some of the bigger trends, I had a really interesting conversation with an HR professional in the Netherlands and she really led me on some research, forgetting that we're all big, kind of developed nations now, facing this reduction of birth rates, the reduction of people entering the workforce, and massive increase in retirement, and this gap of people working. Now, the best skilled people leaving and then the newest people coming in, not only has that implications for our society and how do we pay for the retirees, but it also has big capabilities for companies, like the best expertise with the longest longevity is leaving and all these new folks are coming in that need to be trained. And so, what we see over and over again in the clients that we use is that's a really big issue and it's only going to exacerbate.
So, this idea of open talent leads to things like digital migration. So, many of the Western nations are locking down and not allowing free flow of immigration. We've got to solve this for companies, right? So, the only alternative is to be able to use freelance systems and be able to work on a strategic level, not just outsourcing a segment of the company, but more on a strategic level. I think this is really prevalent when you think about what's happened with generative AI. If you look at the AI companies, they've really been built with freelance talent. OpenAI could not have gone as fast as they have gone without the help of companies like Invisible and Turing, two platforms that really specialise in that space. So, I think what you're seeing is you're seeing those companies that are new, that have a ton of momentum, that are digitally native, are already there. They're thinking about what's the outcome I need, what kind of tasks that need to be done; and now, in the case of generative AI, what tasks need to be atomised that either can be done by human or done by machines? And then on the human side, what skills do we need, how do we match? And so, I think it gets away from the jobs and roles and longevity, and all those kinds of things; much more performance-oriented.
So, I think that to me, what we tried to do is capture the essence of that, this movement that's been going on a long time. But it's really difficult inside large organisations, because HR departments unfortunately have become bureaucratic and really risk-management organisations, instead of aligned with the C-level to say, "No, it's about taking the best talent to get the outcomes we can as fast as we can". So, I think that's where it starts, this mindset shift. And when you think about mindset shift, it's really thinking about the company not in the old way of like, this is the company, it exists out here by itself in culture, or in in the marketplace. It's really a networked company, a network organisation that you need to figure out how to work in a new way, and we're seeing that emerge.
We have a new case study that's really on this. One of the companies that we really love, and I've worked with for a long time, is SEI. SEI is a big wealth management software company, and they tried to use some external talent clouds, some platforms, it didn't work, it was a horrible failure. And so, Sanjay Sharma and Ryan Hicke did something super-simple. They had this issue, right? They had 5,000 people creating a software package, but they had all these clients who needed all this extra work done that wasn't getting done and there was this tension that clients weren't happy. And so, Sanjay just reached out to clients and listed the top 100 projects that needed to be done, the tasks that needed to be done, and went to his workforce and said, "Hey, I'll pay you guys more. Here's the bounty on this Excel spreadsheet. Work on weekends and nights, and in fact use the money, the $1,800 a year we give you for training, come together as groups. And if some kind of new software, like Snowflake, gets certified as a team and then do those projects". Well, those 100 projects got done in a month and a half.
Interestingly, the next step was that they actually went to their, I guess it's NTT and Cognizant and rewrote those contracts to allow for people that are full-time employees for Cognizant and NTT to make extra money playing on the open-talent platform inside SEI. But the real innovation I think is coming and they're just starting to experiment. It's the thing we're writing a case study on, Chris Denton and I are, is that they're actually allowing now their customers to put up projects and determine their own bounty onto the platform, and so I think that's a really interesting thing. I think in order to do that, you've got to develop a thing that we call network culture. Like, how do we do that? I mean, sometimes you can do it yourself, like in SEI's case; other times, it takes you implementing software like Gloat to be able to accelerate that kind of stuff.
[0:18:38] David Green: This is a very innovative way of thinking about talent and as you rightly said, most big organisations aren't there yet. So, even if they've implemented like an internal talent marketplace like Gloat or Eightfold, or many of the others that are out there, they've probably got that, as you said, that's probably run by someone in HR. Then if they're thinking about contractors, they might be using an Upwork or a Fiverr, or another platform, but maybe that's not being run through HR, maybe that's being run either directly through people in the line or maybe via procurement, because traditionally procurement tends to manage contractors.
[0:19:17] John Winsor: Exactly.
[0:19:18] David Green: The two ends probably don't really talk to each other. From what you're saying, John, to actually make this work really effectively, you need to bring these two together. So, you get the request, either it's an internal request, a piece of work that we need to complete, or it comes directly from a customer …
[0:19:32] John Winsor: Probably.
[0:19:32] David Green: … "We've got talent internally that can potentially do this, but we also need external talent. And it might be in the contractors that are already part of us, or it might be that we can go and get this talent through these platforms that we're using". It kind of upends the approach. I'm not saying that's the wrong thing by the way, but it kind of upends the kind of traditional approach to getting stuff done, both whether that's through employees, or whether through that's people we can bring in as contractors, etc. That's massive.
[0:20:02] John Winsor: It's interesting, right, because I think that's, I mean for me, I'm really naïve about this, because I've just been an entrepreneur that's been doing this the whole time. I'm always terrified with venture money, or whatever, that I'm always under some kind of existential threat. And so, the idea of like, "I have some tasks that need to be done, I have some outcomes I need, I have some tasks that need to be done. Who's the very best person to do that?" "Here are three people internally, might be awesome, they're busy on other projects". "How can I fill that in? I've got to get it done today, I can't sit around and do that". And I understand the startup mindset, lean startup stuff, is really foreign to large companies and large companies have a much longer runway.
But I was just giving a speech for the Advanced Management Program at Harvard with Mike Tushman, who's done such great work on Corporate Explorers, and Explore And Exploit, and the premise of his work's been that companies can renew themselves. And as I was giving this talk to 178 CEOs, we were laughing at dinner that night and Mike said, "You stood up there and you said that you didn't think that companies could get to the future. Like, current companies, they are so bureaucratic, they can't do it. And I thought to myself", this is Mike talking, "I thought to myself, this is 45 years of my work and you're telling my students that my theories don't work". And we laughed and he said, "You know, I think you might be right". I just don't know.
We used to have this big AI conference at Harvard called D^3, the Future of AI, and a few things fascinated me. One was that we planned on having 300 people there. 1,200 people and 6,000 people online showed up. And so, yeah, and massive companies showed up and some that are at the edge are going to get it, like JP Morgan and Chase and Rakuten, those guys are on it. But for the most companies, they're not there yet, it's just too hard to do. They're taking care of their knitting and doing their thing, but they're not thinking about what the future is. I don't know how you get to the future without really having to reinvent yourself.
[0:22:14] David Green: In your experience, talking to companies, doesn't matter necessarily what size, how does embracing and integrating open talent affect the culture, or how does the culture need to change to embrace it fully?
[0:23:22] John Winsor: Well, I think like anything, right, it's scary stuff, the idea that things are being done in a new way, really scary stuff. And I think the proof's in the pudding. If you can implement it, that'd be really focused on what are the goals, what are the outcomes, are we getting there, are we achieving our goals? Every person in every company wants to be involved if there's success, if there's momentum, so it's a real momentum thing, right? If you can create little, small projects where there's lots of momentum, then that's the way to go. And what we really recommend is never start big, never create a total implementation, even for internal talent marketplaces. But start small, do what SEI did.
The other great example is UST. Vinod Kartha, who's in charge of strategy, he had kind of read some of our writing, got a little bit interested. And one of the projects, it just was serendipity, he just had this fresh mindset. His HR department was really struggling because they had a database of a bunch of information, it was super-important, but they just couldn't take the time to implement it into their Oracle system. And he kept asking them, "What are we doing? We've got to get this done", couldn't do it. Their recommendation was to hire a big consulting company, three months of work, $250,000. And it just was Vinod's own curiosity that said, "Wow, I wonder if I could find some people on a platform to get it done?" He went to a platform, one of the smaller ones, found four people, those four people came together as a team, took them a week to do the work for $25,000. And so, all of a sudden, that's what happened.
What we're seeing, interestingly, and I think it's a big issue that people need to be honest about, is that when you look at some of the platforms, like from the Harvard research we've done, you look at a platform like Fiverr, or sorry, like Freelancer, Freelancer has the Fortune 500 companies, it has maybe two dozen enterprise relationships. Yet when we look at the data of who uses Freelancer as a customer, 70% of the Fortune 500 companies have an active corporate email that works on the platform on a weekly basis. And so, our assumption and the things that we've heard out in the street, in some of the research we do with Deloitte, is that what's happening is, you can imagine the scenario. You're a 25-year-old marketing manager, you just did some market research, it's going to be transformative for the product you're working on. You're really excited, you've got a big meeting in a week, you go to the corporate graphic design department and they're like, "Whoa, it's three weeks out, get in line, we can't do that, that's way too much". And so, the person freaks, so they go to the internet and they say, "Help me build a deck". Somebody pops up on Fiverr and they go to bed at 10.00 at night, give it to somebody in, let's just say, the Ukraine, where somebody really needs the work, a really experienced graphic designer, wake up in the morning and it's beautiful. Couple more turns, they present it, costs $200, they present it and they get a big raise, they get momentum with their career.
So, what we're seeing is that it's the secret sauce, that people are using freelancers all the time to do data, to learn AI, to do marketing materials, whatever those things are in their own career. And they don't want anybody to know because that's accelerated their career. It's unfortunate that the bureaucracy won't allow that to exist.
[0:27:09] David Green: What are some of the common challenges or resistance points that companies would face if they're looking to transition to an open talent framework? And then the second point to that, what would be your advice that people who are starting to integrate open talent into their people strategy and operations; what would be the initial steps that you could recommend? You talked about doing maybe small pilots to start off with, but I wondered if there's anything else?
[0:27:35] John Winsor: Yeah, I think that's the most important thing. Keep it small, keep it secret, don't make it a big deal, don't make it disruptive. The metrics are, as good or better results, four to five times faster and eight to ten times cheaper. And so, the metrics are there, the facts are there, this is a change management situation. So, start small, allow the culture to do it. Just the allowance is a huge step forward to say, "Hey, if you're stressed and you need help, go to a platform, pay for yourself. If you need somebody to help your job, get it done". That mindset has to shift around IP and legal and all those things, but I think it starts small and starts having those kinds of success. From an implementation standpoint, we always recommend a centre of excellence, in that even if it's one person that gets to have the knowledge and understand it and starts working through the system of meeting with legal, meeting with corporate and making sure that all the compliance and security stuff are taken care of, and making sure that the choices are good. Nothing is worse than jumping in to use any kind of thing that's innovative and have it fail, because it means that it won't happen for a long, long time. So, my sense is those are the kinds of the bigger things that you need to do.
[0:28:58] David Green: So, a couple of things on that. So, let's say an organisation tries this and they get some success. Now, obviously the numbers that you mentioned, that's going to get the attention of finance, they can do things ten times quicker; it's going to get the attention of operations and commercial if you can do it five times faster --
[0:29:17] John Winsor: It's actually the opposite. It's, yeah, ten times cheaper, yeah, five times faster. You're right.
[0:29:24] David Green: Five times faster. No, so straight away then people running the company, whether HR wants to be part of that or not, which I guess they do if they want to service the business, is number one, how do we scale that?
[0:29:35] John Winsor: Right.
[0:29:36] David Green: How do we need to think about our processes and ways of working? Because that's a different way of doing that.
[0:29:43] John Winsor: It's a reinvention, yeah, it's a reinvention. Honestly, we have not seen many organisations cross that chasm yet to really enter the scale. UST is probably the furthest along, and there are a few others that have really adopted it, but it's hard, it's generational. It's almost like you need this this current generation of leaders to move out, to have the next one come in that are more digitally savvy, that work in a platform world and know how to use that those kinds of tools. And it's down to a personal level, right? One of the things that John Healy does such a great job of, when we were talking about this change early on when I was doing the research for the book, my assumption was it was really a demarcation between big companies and small companies. And he was like, "No, no, it's a demarcation between our mindset at work and our mindset as consumers". I'm like, "Well, what do you mean?" He's like, "Well, look at your iPhone. Let's just say five years ago, those of us that have kids, all of us had a babysitter come to us and say, 'Hey, don't worry about paying me cash, just Venmo me'. And all of us went to our phone, we downloaded an app we'd never heard of before. We don't know it's by the Chinese government or some Russian hackers that are going to steal all our money. We downloaded it, and we paid somebody who we hardly knew, right?" And he's like, "There's no company in America that would allow that to happen for a corporate policy". So, how do we get that kind of exploratory use of technology that we all have in our consumer lives, whether it's using Google Maps instead of the old maps, all those kinds of things, inside companies that it's just harder to do?
I think it's a shift, not about talents, more of a shift of we need to be a digital company, we need to digitally transform ourselves and we need to attack that. Every area of every company needs to have a digital plan, like what are the ways that we can start with a mindset to say that we're going to change our business. Over the weekend, and you probably have more experience with this, one of my buddies, my age, was just overly excited because he showed me he's doing some improvements on his house and there's a new platform that contractors can use to upload all the legal documents, all the budgets, where they are. I have a massive home project going on right now and it's old-school, and I was just salivating at that idea, and you know that's where the world's going to go. Likewise, he's doing a bunch of physical therapy and his physical therapist meets with him and then uploads all the exercises with video onto a platform, and every time he clicks through, the PT gets to see what he really did, not just like, "Yeah, I knocked it out of the park with my physical therapy this weekend".
So, I think we're experiencing that in our day-to-day lives and companies are either going to decide to be digitally transformed or they're just going to go out of business.
[0:32:38] David Green: You mentioned a few companies that you think are doing this well, and obviously it's based on the research you did for the book and the research you are doing on an ongoing basis at Harvard. What are some of the ingredients that they've got within them that's enabling them to be successful and almost be pioneers in this open talent, or approach to open talent?
[0:32:58] John Winsor: Yeah, I think that everybody has to have this balance that Mike Tushman talks about, this kind of dexterity. You've got to keep the trains running and you've got to get to where you need to go, but you also have to have this explorer's mindset too to say, the past is not a prediction of the future. We aren't going back, especially with Gen AI now. This has opened up a whole new frontier. And so, instead of saying, "Let's talk about Gen AI", instead of saying, "Whoa, we're not going to use it, let's not worry about it", the mindset shift is like, "Use it, we want you to use it. Use it, break it, figure out what's wrong with it, how do we implement things? We will incentivise you to figure out how to use Gen AI inside our systems".
A great thing that I heard at the RAI Conference was the Head of Wealth Management for JP Morgan was on stage and he said, "We're not trying to compete with the LLMs, the big Gen AI companies, because we never will, even though we have 75,000 data scientists working for JP Morgan. What we're doing is we're actually pairing every executive in the organisation with a data scientist, including Jamie Dimon, and that data scientist, they sit beside the executive at the same desk, they look at every email that's written, they look at every process, every phone call, and they're writing systems and building those systems on Gen AI to make them more efficient. So, how does Jamie Dimon become super-Jamie Dimon?" And I would suggest that that would be a really awesome calling for innovative HR departments. Like how do we not just have employees, how do we have super-employees? But that takes a lot of guts, it takes a lot of guts to step out.
That's what I'm concerned with, and maybe it's a question for you, is how do we get -- I mean, obviously to me, strategic total talent belongs in HR, not in procurement. Procurement's great, but it services a lot of other industries, I mean a lot of other parts of the company too. It's more of a service organisation. But how do we help HR professionals, HR leaders become talent innovators, like have the excitement, have the spirit of exploration, the spirit of upskilling, all those things? I talked to Mark Levy, who's a college buddy of mine, who was the former head of HR at Airbnb, and he was talking about that he felt like before COVID, this was really starting to happen, that HR was starting to be more innovative. But because of COVID and remote work and trying to figure out where your employees are, they've kind of pulled back, and it's getting way more bureaucratic. And I think we're at this really interesting place, that HR as a profession can really step up and make a massive difference to the success of their organisations in a really innovative, new way; or they can continue to do the things that they do, and it's going to be kind of like a Titanic that might get hit by an iceberg and it's toast. But I think that HR, as an industry, has a lot more skin in the game, a lot more ability than they think they do to really innovate. And then who are those leaders that can really take it forward? I mean Diane and Linda are way smarter than me and I love their work, and I think those are the kind of folks that really need to lead the charge.
[0:36:40] David Green: We're going to speak to the question of series. I'm going to stick up the book. So firstly, for those watching on YouTube, that's what Open Talent looks like, you can see it there. And at the end, John, I'll ask you so you can share where people can find out more about the book. But firstly to the question of the series. So, we're asking everyone, every guest in this series, this particular question, and please feel free to frame your answer around the kind of concept of open talent. What key elements do you believe are essential to building a strong company culture?
[0:37:12] John Winsor: That's a great question. I think that it's the beginning is reframing a company culture, because I don't think it's an internal culture and an external culture, and I would give as an example Patagonia. Patagonia is a culture. It exists inside the company, that same culture exists for every customer that buys a Patagonia jacket and that's proud to wear it. So, I would suggest that breaking down the silos between internal and external culture and melding them together and thinking larger about what culture is your organisation trying to promote for, a holistic view of what culture is.
[0:37:50] David Green: So basically, being what you say your brand is inside the organisation?
[0:37:56] John Winsor: Exactly, it's got to go both ways, right? Like, Nike has to be for high performance athletics inside and outside. And I think if companies don't do that, there's a real schizophrenia going on, right? That's to me, in the early days, that's why Nike was really successful and Reebok died, because Reebok was a bunch of shoe salesmen. Great guys, but before Reebok, they sold fishing equipment. And so, they didn't really care about athletics and you could feel it, right? Employees could feel it, customers could feel it, and it's that feeling that made people come together and really want to support that culture.
[0:38:31] David Green: And also you've built a number of companies, successful companies over the years. As someone who's done that, what are some of the ingredients that you found really work from a culture perspective?
[0:38:44] John Winsor: It's the style in which you do it. It's the way that you embrace either innovation or how you do it. I think, honestly, I think that going back to the lessons of founder, CEOs, that's when, no matter what company, I would suggest that there's always this longing for that history, right? What were the ingredients that made this company really successful? And then how do you explore that, how do you bring that forward and have that conversation? So, so many great examples there.
[0:39:20] David Green: Well, John, I've really enjoyed our conversation. I think it's one that listeners will enjoy too. I think it will stretch some people's thinking that are listening to this, which is what we try to do with the podcast, so that's good. For listeners who want to learn more about the book, Open Talent, but also about the work you're doing at Harvard, John, how can they find out more; how can they stay in touch; how can they follow you on social media?
[0:39:43] John Winsor: Yeah, a couple of ways. Just I'm all over social media, like you are, everybody else's these days. It's easy to get just my name, LinkedIn, or wherever. And then, opentalentbook.com is the easiest way to access the book. And then our work is just under open-assembly. It's the work that we do. We kind of have a talent innovator group that we're starting to build, like what are the attributes; how would people become more innovative? And then likewise, the platform accelerator, how do we help the platforms really match with these talent innovators to accelerate everybody? But we really believe that high tide floats all boats and, you know, the future is going to be awesome.
[0:40:27] David Green: Well, you were right with women's sport, you were right with co-creation, you were right with social media, I'm sure you're probably going to be right with open talent as well.
[0:40:34] John Winsor: We'll see, we'll see!
[0:40:36] David Green: John, thank you so much for sharing your work and thoughts with listeners of the Digital HR Leaders podcast.
[0:40:42] John Winsor: Thanks David, really appreciate it. Enjoyed the conversation.