Shifting landscape of global talent with John Winsor, Open Assembly CEO

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with John Winsor co-author of the new book, Open Talent. John and I talk about the shifting landscape of talent and tools and dive into what companies need to do to adapt and thrive in a new global marketplace for talent. Let's get started.

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Transcript of Interview with John Winsor, CEO and founder of Open Assembly and Co-author of Open Talent

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another Inside, outside episode. We are here today with another amazing guest. Today we have John Winsor. He is the CEO and founder of Open Assembly and Co-author of the new book, Open Talent: Leveraging the Global Workforce to Solve the Biggest Challenges. Welcome to the show, John. 

John Winsor: Hey, thanks, Brian. Psyched to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on for a couple different reasons. One, you've been at the early days of experimenting in this whole world of talent, you know, before covid, before people knew what remote work was and that you've been an advocate for that. I think you started your career in the creative space.

You built Victors and Spoils, which was the first creative agency that was built on crowdsourcing principles. You've started Open Assembly and that, so what's this term, open talent, and what does it mean to you? 

John Winsor: You know, I think people got confused and when we were doing research on it, you know, I started using kind of what I would call alternative, you know, talent models way back in the eighties.

Because I owned a magazine, I couldn't afford to I have a bunch of editors and writers, so I had the readers write a lot of the stuff, and so it worked out really, really well. I sold one of the magazines, Women's Sports and Fitness to Conde Nast, and it was a, you know, pretty a great win. But what we're talking about is we're talking about really the digital transformation of talent writ large.

And so, we believe that there's this kind of seismic shift between companies that set the terms of employment because there's more supply than there is demand. Today, there's more demand than there is supply. And so that's just kind of basic economics that, you know, especially in tech these days. I mean, Korn Ferry says there's 85 million jobs that will go unfilled by 2030.

In the tech world, it's going to cost companies $8.5 trillion. I suspect that's going to be reduced a bit just because of, you know, generative AI and things like that. But my sense is that's still a big deal. We're excited about that. So, one of the things we started talking about, I kind of used the term back in the day, co-creation.

And that was an idea that came out of the magazine work where the customers were actually co-creating, and I coined that word in a book called Beyond the Brand 2002. But as things got going, you know, we started using the word crowdsourcing and then obviously gig got big. But I think gig is a misnomer in that gig to me is all about having somebody be told by, usually by an algorithm of where to work and when to work. 

You know, I need to pick up, you know, Brian at the airport at this time. Whereas, you know, open talent is really a mixture of freelance. We kind have three legs to the stool in this kind of digital transformation of talent at the higher end. It's building external talent clouds, building internal talent, mar