I recently read a fantastic book called Agile Talent by Jon Younger and Norm Smallwood. If this subject sounds familiar, it may be because you have seen their article in last month’s Harvard Business Review. It’s been making the rounds. Their concept is to challenge companies to think about new ways to access and leverage key strategic talent and to deploy it order to fill in critical gaps in strategic capabilities. The way companies are accessing this talent is called “cloud resourcing”, and this shift from a traditional workforce to a contingent workforce (temporary positions for short-term engagements) is now changing how businesses are run.
I’ve heard that for every one full-time job added there are over four new part-time jobs and that number only seems to be growing. For many of us in the events, entertainment, and creative services industries, using a contingent workforce and dealing with all the moving parts associated with it is a way of life and has been going on for years. These industries are what put the “gig” in the “gig economy”. Companies in our industries employ this “expertise on tap” multiple times a day to ensure our events or projects are successful. In fact, it’s so important and invaluable to delivering top shelf experiences, I really can’t imagine it functioning any other way.
Because of the public nature of what these businesses do (think: concert of 60,000 people or a user group of 10,000 people), they are intensely focused on achieving their clients goals; and because the effort that goes into achieving outstanding results is absolutely relentless, these companies often miss out on opportunities to streamline or fix the processes that can actually lead to a better outcomes. In order for companies in these industries to continue to be competitive in today’s global economy, they need to be able to access high quality strategic talent sooner, and when they reach them, they need to communicate more efficiently and collaboratively, every step of the way.
The encouraging news is that most people leading companies in these industries recognize improving workflows for projects that rely on agile talent is a significant challenge to their ability to scale, and they are open to new solutions that will enable them to evolve and that industry standards might soon be on the way. Over the next several weeks, we will be discussing some of the main areas where industry standardization is coming into play and how businesses are using this opportunity to employ innovative solutions that result in improved workflows and streamlined processes so that they can successfully manage an increasing amount of complex and profitable events.
What are your thoughts? Let us know what topics that you would like us to address in the coming weeks.
