#114—John Winsor: Unveiling the Potential of Open Talent

John Winsor is a prominent figure in strategic marketing and product innovation, known for his deep understanding of future work trends and open talent strategies. His
expertise in collaboration, co-creation, and open innovation has made him a key
influencer in innovation, disruption, and storytelling. He founded and chairs Open
Assembly, an organization pioneering the adoption of open talent and freelancing.

At Harvard Business School's Laboratory for Innovation Science (LISH), as an
executive-in-residence, Winsor significantly promotes innovation. He co-authored the
national best-selling book Open Talent: Leveraging a Global Workforce to Solve Your
Biggest Challenges with Laboratory for Innovation Sciences at Harvard co-founders Jin Paik, published by Harvard Business Press in January 2024. Additionally, Winsor leads the Open Assembly Community, a global network of 4000 members focused on
transforming workplaces worldwide.

In this conversation, we dive deep into concepts from Open Talent: Leveraging a Global Workforce to Solve Your Biggest Challenges, John’s most recent co-authored and national best-selling book with Jin Paik, published by Harvard Business Press in January 2024.  

We discuss the intricate layers of the modern workforce, including:

• The rapid shift of the workforce culture, with the rise of micro-entrepreneurs and freelancers at the core, transforming industries 
• The democratization of talent through digital platforms that provides companies a more varied, diverse workforce while providing individuals more opportunities for work 
• A growing shift away from traditional roles and jobs, towards a focus on tasks and skills to achieve desired outcomes, with an emphasis on speed and momentum given today’s fast-paced momentum 
• How to break through the mental and organizational barriers that impede them from embracing new workforce paradigms to fully take advantage of the modern workforce reality 

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Episode Timeline:

00:00—Highlight from today's episode
1:04—Introducing John Winsor + the topic of today’s episode
3:18—If you really know me, you know that...
4:24—What's your definition of strategy?
6:56—Using strategy to move things in your favor?
11:35—How Open Talent differs from gig work
15:44—Is the talent power shift permanent?
18:24— How is technology transforming talent acquisition?
21:52—Overcoming mental barriers to embrace Open Talent
26:14—The economic benefits of variable workforce costs
28:01—Why innovation is vital for survival
30:08—How can people follow you and continue learning from you?
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Additional Resources:
Personal site: https://johnwinsor.com
Book site: Open Talent: Leveraging a Global Workforce to Solve Your
Biggest Challenges
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johntwinsor/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jtwinsor

Thank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.

Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast

Transcript

Kaihan Krippendorff: John, I am thrilled to have you on thank you for being here with us.
 
 John Winsor: Oh, thanks so much for having me.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: So I'm gonna start with the same 2 questions I will start with, the first 1 is if you can complete the sentence for me, if you really know me, you know that.
 
 John Winsor: I have had such a crazy life you know, that I'd rather be, like, on some big mountain, you know, doing a first descent skiing or some big wave somewhere in the world that's really hard to get to or traveling down the coast of Mexico in my van.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: How did you get into that? Because you surf, you ski, you seem like an adventure sports kind of person. Where did you grow up, and How did you find that?
 
 John Winsor: Well, it's so, you know, I mean, I grew up pretty much of a traditional Midwestern guy, and I played football, and I went to Colorado College. Which is really renowned for a lot of adventure sport, really iconic people.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: That's why people go to Colorado.
 
 John Winsor: Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, I just started I started running, and then had this kind of I started a company called Sportsman for this publishing that kinda got me ensconced in that. And then when I did that, Black Diamond, which is a climate equipment company asked me to be on their board of directors. And so I was kind of squarely in that world as I grew these magazines, and I I lived that life here in boulder.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Fascinating and fascinating. So next question. What's your definition of strategy?
 
 John Winsor: Wow. So, you know, for me, like, I that's my background as well. I'm really a strategist, and and I kinda started in in more strategy because I built my own businesses. But then I built a company called Radar Communications. We were trying to figure out how to you know, 1 of the things we were really intrigued with was the idea that when we were I I bought a a magazine out of bankruptcy, women's sports and fitness, and 1 of the things I noticed is that in the pages of women's sports and fitness that they were spending to know, tens of thousands of dollars when they started with millions of dollars like GM and Nike.
 
 And so when I sold the company, I noticed this really interesting thing, and we had all these early adopters of consumers that were our readers of women's sports and fitness. So I thought, well, what about not making them the target? But let's put them at the top of the funnel of the whole, you know, of the strategy and help them design products and services for people that instead of getting, you know, participate up here versus down here, and it worked brilliantly. Like, we did all the strategy work for Intel and for HP and for Nike and Levi's and very much from what we call the anthrop generalistic perspective. Effective.
 
 We kind of voiced to the consumer. We kind of invented that category back in the early 2 thousands. But 1 of the things that was so insightful that probably was a thing that changed my life from a strategy point of view is I met this guy Alex Boguski. I merged my company radar with Christmann Porter Boguski, and he's this really wacky creative ad guy, and we together came up with this idea. You know, I think that companies look at the future and they look at culture as this Mississippi River Nile river that cuts through this landscape.
 
 Right? And so your whole job as a strategist to say, where's culture going? What products do we need to create? Where should we position the company? And run ahead and get, you know, Down River and, like, and let kind of culture wash over you.
 
 And so that that's the prevailing idea that was always around when we were there. And Alex and I came up with this idea from the experience that we had with our clients was that, well, that's not the way the world works. Right? The way the world works is if you can be provocative enough and if you can do the right thing, then literally, like, The changing culture is super easy to do, and you can change it to your advantage. And so I think that, personally, what's driven me is the idea of recognizing that the world and cultural is very and culture is very fickle.
 
 It's very it's easily moved. And that strategy is about trying to figure out that insight that allows you to move things in your favor. Right? So there's 2 examples that I like to use, the little work we did back then. 1 is that Volkswagen came to us, and they were really frustrated that they weren't listed in the top 10 safest cars.
 
 Like, this is, like, 2008. And so 1 of the things that we noticed is that everybody that was in that was in that space pretty much had the same you know, the safety rules made every car, pretty much the safe car. But, yeah, Volvo, predominantly, was just a safe car, you know, is this for us? That's their essential brand. Exactly.
 
 It's their brand. And so we try to figure out, well, what is what's the way that we can change that? And what we figured out was that, you know, nobody had actually had a real wreck in a commercial that proved the fact that the cars were safe. So, essentially, what we did is we went out went to LA, we took a car, a Volkswagen, strung it with GoPro's, took 2 actors, put them in the in driver and passenger seat. Had them have, like, a typical conversation, tell them that you're driving down the street and something's gonna happen, you're gonna have a car wreck.
 
 And so we did I think only 2 commercials. We launched those commercials, and the commercials were super controversial. You know, they got on every late night show saying, is it socially correct? Is it, you know, Volkswagen? Did they do the right thing?
 
 You know, are they taking advantage of these actors? But lo and behold, 2 months later, Bulk's wagon went from not on the top 10 to number 2 behind Volvo. And so that's a point. Right? It's a point of, like, what's not happening in culture?
 
 Instead of us trying to say, oh, we're 10 percent safer than Volvo, it's more saying, like, let's actually show you. Let's do that. The second story that is really important, I think, from a strategy standpoint, is that we won Domino's Pizza, and we're the we were the people behind Domino's. We surgeons. And so when Patrick, the CMO came to us, he was really frustrated.
 
 The whole c level team, you know, the stock was way down. They hadn't done well. And so the big cultural shift, there were 2 things that we did was they came to us and they said, you know, we know our pizza sucks. And could customers say our pizza sucks, but we're gonna make better pizzas. And so our point of view is, like, a hundred percent transparency.
 
 Let's say our pizza sucks. Right?
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Right. Right. I remember that.
 
 John Winsor: We called it the pizza Apologies. All of a sudden, it got all over CNN, and I think there was this this really amazing reporter for CNN that actually threw the pizza in the gutter of its, you know, in New York, and it picked it up and ate it. But the idea was, like, your pizza sucks. And so that that got so aligned with our, you know, with our customers.
 
 All of a sudden, people are like, yeah, your pizza sucks. Thanks so much for admitting that. Right? And then the second thing that was super important strategically is that they were really bombed that the whole 30 minute guarantee, I don't know if you remember back in the day, Sure.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: A 30 minute or you're running back.
 
 John Winsor: Exactly. Exactly.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: But pizza's free.
 
 John Winsor: Pizza's free. Right? So what happened was is that they couldn't do that anymore because there was a car wreck by a delivery person. And you could track when that message was out there, and then the stock price had gone way down because they lost their way. They were just the same as everybody else.
 
 So we decided, well, it we can't say 30 minute guaranteed, but we could say you've got 30 minutes. And so what we did is we said, hey. You order online and we created a POS system where we connected some technology. We built some technology into a POS system called the pizza tracker. So when you ordered Domino's, you saw exactly where your pizza was, oh, Joe's putting it in the oven.
 
 Julie just took it out. You know? Like, it it's in the delivery car. And there was actually an alarm that went off 5 minutes before saying, hey. Get the family together.
 
 Pizza's 5 minutes away. And all of a sudden that flipped everything upside down. And, you know, since then, I think there was a 10 year period. I'm not sure if it's still running. But Oh, yeah.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: They outperformed Google.
 
 John Winsor: Exactly. Exactly. And that was it. Right? We changed them into a technology company.
 
 We said our job is to deliver pizza, but we're we need to be a technology company to do the best job So we now they're implementing it 10 years later, but we came up with the electric car idea to build specific cars that have pizza ovens in the side, which now they're doing. So it it reskinned them, and investors saw holy shit there, like, the most advanced thing. So that's what I mean when know, like, you can take something that's really seen as, like, not so good and way behind the time and the stock's way down. And if you're bold enough to say, well, instead of us trying to just fit culture. It'd be a little bit better than, you know, another pizza chain.
 
 We can actually pull up the category and pull our customers to us. Pull our vendors to us. You know, we're gonna move make this movement. And so I think that's something that's really important to think about in strategy.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: So I really try not to self promote on this podcast, but Yeah. Do it. A book that I'm publishing in May, and I talk about the Domino's Pizza case, and I think it links to Open Talent. So here's the premise. The book's called proximity.
 
 And the ideas that across every sector, what we see is that, you know, people always want what they want, when they want, where they want it. And digital technologies allow us to deliver on that. So I the way I explained the what you did with Domino's is you didn't get the pizza necessary there faster. You got the experience of the pizza there immediately, and then people prefer that over pizza. Now let's now apply that to talent.
 
 The idea that people can do the work they wanna do, when and where they wanna do it, is bringing work into proximity for workers.
 
 John Winsor: I love it. You're totally right on. Yeah. And I think can you
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: tell us excuse me. Because I think when a lot of people read open talent, right, what they hear is gig work.
 
 John Winsor: Yeah. For sure.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: And that's not what you're talking. If you just define open talent for us, how's different than gig
 
 John Winsor: That's a great so it's 1. Certainly, that's a central theme. Right? So open talent is really this idea that, you know, we've had this radical shift. Right?
 
 Like, for a hundred years, the demand side, the companies determine what work was, when it happened, what a job was. And, unfortunately, right now, you know, according to COR CORON ferry, there's 85000000 tech jobs that will not be filled by 20 30. Costing company is 8500000000000.0 dollars. And that's caused all of a sudden is now the supply has the power. Right?
 
 So the worker has the power to say, I'm gonna work what I want and how I want And, you know, I might work for 4 companies. I might work for 1, but I have choice. What we see in the open talent, Mark, and I'll contrast that to the gig work in a sec. But, really, what we're seeing is this rise of a micro entrepreneur. Right?
 
 Back when I was at Krisp and when I was at Victor's and Spoils, you know, there were about 600000 people globally that worked in the global advertising market. And today, 10 years later, there's 600000 people that work in the advertising market. The difference is there are 60000000 creators that are making content, making money in in marketing now. And so it's a totally different thing. And the crazy thing to me is if you look at the numbers, these emergent creators, people are like, oh, that's not a big deal.
 
 But, you know, if you look at the ranking of the biggest industries right bit right between the railroad industry and the furniture industry is a little thing called YouTube creators that produced 37000000000 dollars of revenue. And so what you're seeing is this kind of the size of an organization has become so much smaller and people can, you know, earn money. Now so we're talking about creators and freelancers and, you know, being able to do really great higher end work. Gig workers, you know, has really been commoditized. Right?
 
 It's the Uber's. It's algorithm driven. You're told where to go and when to go and where to go and where to, you know, where to show up to pick up the person or so it's very much of a low end and it's being commodit commodified. The higher end is really changing work from a place to go and from just to a thing to do that fits into the rest of your life. And so 1 of the things I've seen, you know, back to Mexico, 1 of the things that I've seen, which I find super fascinating because of COVID, you know, just imagine you were a mid level strategy person at a firm you know, and you made 80 grand.
 
 You're kind of 3 years out of school, 80 grand a year. Unfortunately, living in New York, you probably spent 85000 bucks living. Right? It was just, like, scratching it, barely making it. And a lot of those guys remote work, a lot of people ended up in Mexico.
 
 In in my little village in Mexico, you can live a great life for a thousand dollars a month. You can, like, rent an apartment and surf it twice a day. And so people are like, I'm gonna go to Mexico, and I'm gonna put 65 k away in my bank account. And I'm gonna work same amount of time virtually, but I'm gonna surf twice today too. Have a great life.
 
 And so it's just, you know, I think what's happened because of COVID is people figured out, like, I'm not going back to New York and losing 5 grand that, you know, I can take a lot less and do what I wanna do on the schedule that I wanna be on. And it's just it's what companies don't realize in this whole RTO argument is that there's value arbitration going on the worker side, and they're saying, well, what's value, you know, like, works for part of my life, but it's not my total life.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: 3 questions that pop out of there, and I I love what you're saying. Because my mission in life is people loving what they do. And So I got 3 questions, but I'll lay out 3, and then you answer any of it. Alright. First of all, I love that you know, you say the war for talent is over and talent won.
 
 That, you know, that talent now has the bargaining power. But is that just a pendulum swinging, and is it gonna swing back? Can we argue that this is a semi permanent state That's the first 1. The second question is, I love that we can give the salaries of New York to workers in Poland.
 
 John Winsor: Exactly. Right? Exactly.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: But what does that do to the worker in New York or San Francisco?
 
 John Winsor: Yeah. I mean, I so the second 1 first, I mean, I think the reality is we've created these digital tools. That, you know, like, we before, the value of somebody working in New York is they had access to the best thinking, the best people, you know, the best materials, so they earned a higher wage. You know? But now you take it a, you know, graphic designer in Kuala Poor and graph designer in New York, and they you know, let's call them 27 years old, and they've done the same number of cycles with fast Mac and a, you know, an in design program.
 
 And so they're equal in skill and ability. The difference is it costs a hundred thousand dollars to live in New York, and it costs 5000 dollars to live in Kuala Lumpur. And so for a guy in Kuala Lumpur, he's like, wow. You know, somebody's gonna pay me 500 bucks. That's like a tenth of my annual need.
 
 Right? It's, like, 500 bucks for a project. Whereas, you know, somebody in New York wouldn't even wanna start for less than 5000 bucks or 10000 bucks. And so that's the big shift that's happening. Right?
 
 It's like, I think what we're seeing is the democratization. I think the other thing that we don't recognize in the talent space is that 1 of the stories I've been telling lately or just we've been talking about lately is remember the days when we had this big thing called the yellow pages, in a phone book, in our kitchens, and we'd say, you know, if you ask me, you'd say, hey, John. Like, where should we go dry cleaning to some for dry cleaning. You look through it and you say, oh, here's the biggest ad. Right?
 
 Like, here's the biggest ad. They must be the most stable. Well, who knows? They could've gone out of business? They could've changed ownership.
 
 That way, you're They could have, you know, like, had new staff or broken down machine. You contrast that to today with Google and you see what was the experience like, yes, today, you know, on Google and Yelp and things like that. And so the friction around finding the things you need to find is so radically chained, and that's coming to talent. Right? Let me just look at us.
 
 We're having this great conversation. 15 years ago, we've never have the ability to have this podcast so quickly just you know, interstitually between, you know, all the other things we have to do in a day.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Let me actually let me just dig a little bit more into that friction because I I think been thinking about it. I think I understand, but I don't think people really grasp how this is a real historical shift. I moved here to Miami from New York about a year ago. I had 1 option which was our moving company organizer. If I had to get something installed, it was just a hassle.
 
 I had to call someone who then referred me to Stu then called someone and then 2 weeks later. But instead, I used task rabbit, and the next day I had someone So just talk us through why, you know, what has changed in in technology or society or industry that now makes this possible when it wasn't possible before.
 
 John Winsor: Yeah. Do you remember back in the day when, like, you know, when Zapo started. Right? Like, everybody's like, ah, you can never buy a pair of shoes online. There's no way.
 
 Like, how the hell would you do that? Right. Exactly. You know, Zappos just came up with a really great innovation. Right?
 
 They just said, hey. We'll send you as many pairs you want. Just send them back. Right? And if that got over that friction.
 
 And so I'm seeing the same things, you know, with the clients we work with, like, their clients that, you know, are waiting 2 months, 3 months to find the right talent. They just can't find it in a traditional way. And we're going on to these platforms, and, you know, you have to substitute a full time employee to somebody who's gonna work on a project basis. But you can go find somebody more skilled than somebody who would work full time for less money because they're not you know, they don't go through all the kind of the points of friction of the intermediaries. And you can do that in 2 or 3 days.
 
 So 2 or 3 months, 2 or 3 days. Like, what do you wanna do to get the work done? Right? And I think that's just the reality. The reality in my mind is it's just going along the same lines of any of these other kinds of technology innovations.
 
 It's like, I think what we're seeing is the world of roles and jobs are gonna go away, and it's gonna be all about tasks and skills in order to get outcomes done. I mean, the thing that we always you know, talk about is to say, hey. You were just promoted. You got a new job as the Fortune 500 CEO. Right?
 
 And you know that AI is gonna be really important, and you're CPG company. And so you have 2 ways of solving the problem. Your goal is, I need an AI strategy. Right? So the old way of doing it is for you to call your CHRO and say, hey.
 
 Can you hire me an SVP of AI? But we know these days. That's a 8 month hire. Right? So you hire her, and then she hires her team, and that's another 6 months.
 
 And it takes them 3 months to kinda get together and do the strategy. And in today's world, 18 months, like, you toast in AI. The alternative is for you to say, I need an outcome. Right? I need what tasks the question is, what tasks need to be done to create that outcome.
 
 So you could go to a platform like business talent group or invisible or graphite. You could go on and find, let's say, 10 experts at AI with CPG experience. You could invite them to Miami, you could have a 2 day session with the rest of your team, and you could say, here are the hundred tasks that need to get done to create a strategy in 2 days. Right? And then you go out and you say, you know, you say, okay.
 
 Let's assign those to the teams ran you know, not randomly, but whoever is the best on those teams, First of all, you're interviewing people, you know, who do you wanna work with? Secondly, your internal team's learning. And in a month, you've got a strategy. Now It might only be 85 percent as good as the strategy in 18 months, but today's in today's environment, you can't let great be the enemy of good. Right?
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Then the value of speed.
 
 John Winsor: The value of speed. Exactly. And momentum. Well, and
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: so we go from roles to tasks. We go from jobs to gigs or whatever we wanna call it. And I can see so first of all, I just yesterday, I was facilitating a session for a public school system here in Florida. And they're looking at recruiting teachers. And I pointed out that there's this platform called wizen for tutors, and my kids use it.
 
 And you just put in a you put in something. I need a algebra AP algebra 2 teacher who knows something about blah blah blah. And you get a hundred people that are actually teachers who are working in their off time. Right? So what are some of the, like, talks a little bit more about the mindset shifts that that school district or any organization needs to make in order to realize, because they were like, well, that's not relevant to us.
 
 We can't hire them. We can't let our teachers work. Do part time work, you know, the we own them Right.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: just talks a little bit about those mental barriers that we need to overcome.
 
 John Winsor: Well, I think that's exactly right. Where the rubber meets the road. Right? It's really shifting from a scarcity mindset to a to an abundant mindset to say, it's not that I can't find anybody. It's like there's a ton of people out there.
 
 I just gotta change the way that I engaged them. Right? I was on a talk last week or, actually, earlier this week with a bunch of HR professionals and 1 of the people on was the CHRL from NYU. And she said, this is exactly what you talked about. She's like, oh my god.
 
 Like, I didn't know about this. I mean, I kinda knew about it, but this dress is my problem. It's like, I know for me and my small leadership team, I needed data scientist, but I only needed data scientist about a sixth of their time. And I know 5 other places in leadership that across the organization that needed data scientists, but all about a sixth of their time. The way our structure, our bureaucracy works is we have to hire 6 full time data scientists.
 
 Right. Like, why can't we hire
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: what we need?
 
 John Winsor: Right. Why can we hire 1 person that's get shared across that. And that's the real it's the change management side organizations. My sense is you have a better idea than I do. But I think that this is a, you know, the existential question in in today's environment technology environment.
 
 I've seen so many times in my careers where there was an established leader, and all of a sudden they just go away because it couldn't make the transition to a new platform. The 1 I'm super intrigued with right now is sports illustrated. When I grew up sports illustrated, it was, like, the most amazing thing. Right? It was the most amazing magazine, the content, you know, the writers, you know, all that stuff was amazing.
 
 And now they're just totally irrelevant. They didn't make the leap to the digital world. Whereas, you know, ESPN, because they started in film, they could make that leap much easier, and they kind of own the online environment. Yeah.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: I've heard you talk sort of similarly that. I mean, it was reminding me of, you know, you talk about starting with nudity
 
 John Winsor: Right.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: To printing magazines. So there's kind of like a that's another kind of mindset shift. Right? Because I guess sports culture was probably do you mind talking to us a little bit about Yeah.
 
 John Winsor: I mean, I think what's really important is how do you create communities around what you do. Right? How do you create passion? Mhmm. 1 of the things that I really, you know, respected.
 
 I did so much early work when I was in the magazine business with Nike. And so do you remember the ACG brand? No. ACG. ACG was in it's called was called I all conditions gear.
 
 And I can so, you know, 1 of the things I loved is, like, all of a sudden, I get a call from Tinker Hatfield and his team. I didn't know him at the time. Like, hey. We wanna come to boulder, and we wanna just experience what the community of boulder is like and what are the activities. And then from there, those 3 or 4 days, we went to Cannon Beach, and we started you know, I helped them kinda design the first line of that whole division, and it was really born out of how do we integrate into the community?
 
 How do we become part of the community? And I think, you know, 1 of the industries that's really a guiding light here that people forget is, like, look at what Patagonia has done. Like, Patagonia has become so strong. It's not about the clothing. It's about their badge.
 
 And it's like it's almost like when you wear Patagonia, you're saying, I give to the environment. This is who I am. Right? Like, I don't know who to give to. Like, I I don't know how to save the world.
 
 But if I give to Patagonia, I know they're, like, on it every day. And they're aligned with me. And that's to me is what's building a community. So how do you have this alchemy as an organization that, you know, your purpose driven. It's not just 1 thing.
 
 Right? Purpose driven, create a community, use the principles of co creation to allow the community to engage in the good work that the company is doing to design products and create marketing doing those things that really create the momentum.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: So I get that this open talent movement is better for employees and work more engaged. I get that you have access to a greater variety. I regret that you get more flexibility, but you also make an economic argument as well about the value of having variable cost, you know, have your having your workforce be a variable cost. Could you just walk us through that for people who are looking at thinking of this and just saying, yeah. But what does it do for my bottom line?
 
 John Winsor: Yeah. I think that's a great question. Well, I would say, right today, I mean, the question I always ask Right? It's like, how many people had a budget for AI pre, you know, 11/02/2022? And no nobody did. Right? But everybody has a budget now.
 
 And my point of view, you know, in the innovation space that I've always been in like you. And the key to companies being great innovators is that they have to have a super strong balance sheet. Like, they gotta have surplus cash to go burn. Right? They gotta say, oh, we're gonna try this.
 
 Oh, shit. It didn't work. We're gonna try the next 1 if
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: to invest in that explore part.
 
 John Winsor: Exactly. Exactly. Explore versus exploit. Exactly. Like, Mike just went to exactly.
 
 And so 1 of the things if you take that premise, you say innovative companies have strong balance sheets. Well, how do you get to a strong balance sheet? Well, you move more fixed cost to variable cost. You know? If you would just, like, in October of 20 22, it just you know, hired a thousand software engineers to do some kind of project.
 
 And you realized in November that you had to let go of all those people and hire a thousand AI software engineers, it would take months. It would be so expensive to do. But what happens if you had that on variable cost going? Thanks, guys. Really appreciate it.
 
 You know? But we're going a different direction. Turn that off. And the next month, turn on thousand people in AI. That's that the variable cost allows you to have the flexibility to be innovative as a company.
 
 And I would suggest that any company that's not an innovative company today is gonna be dead. Like, they're just not gonna survive. Right?
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Because why?
 
 John Winsor: Just because disruption's happening faster and faster. Yep. Right? It just it's blowing up. I mean, I thought back when I was in the magazine world, and the Internet was just starting to happen in the nineties.
 
 Like, it was a common assumption that Vogue would own fashion in every distribution chain. They would own it online. Right? They would they but the problem was is it that they weren't really a fashion company or a fashion magazine. They really were good at distributing and manufacturing printed magazines that had fashion as a content.
 
 And so they got so stuck in this tactical way of distribution that the people that ran the company is like, no. Our job is to create magazines, and we print them efficiently, and we distribute them efficiently, and they forgot that a lot of people were going online. They didn't notice it because their worldview, their strategy, their mindset, wasn't towards that. You still see that today. Right?
 
 I mean, I don't know if you've been watching this solo race across the globe sailing race. There's this woman. There's this girl 29 years old who's in second place. Cole Brenner, I think her name is. And I read this story this morning in the New York Times.
 
 It was so beautiful. It was she was she's 5 01:29 years old. Professional sailor, but never really allowed into the old boys club of professional sailing. Right? Because it's old school, it's East Coast, And so she somehow cobbled together a sponsorship to do this Solo's race around the world, but she had her sailboat wired with cameras that were all remotely connected through StarLink to her team back in the States, and they just create tons of content.
 
 She went from 10000 viewers on Instagram to 450000 viewers, and she's redefined what sailing is to the public. And I think that's what's happening. Right? It's like the generational gap between the people that are running the companies is saying, I can't work unless my teams in the office sitting beside me. And millennials that are saying, I can work from a sailboat in the middle of the southern ocean and blow up the world.
 
 Right? Like, it's just a whole new world.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: That's awesome. Oh my gosh. I got so many more questions. Know we were reaching the top of our time with you. You've got great content.
 
 John Winsor: I don't think so. I found
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: I found stuff on YouTube, podcasts, your website, your books well, how would you suggest listeners who've listened to you here and are impassioned by this for me, really human centric view of the future of work and organizations. They want to be part of it, where should they go?
 
 John Winsor: Just go to my website, John Windsor dot com, and you can find all my stuff and find my book, all of that stuff. And then, obviously, LinkedIn and Gram and everywhere else. But I love, you know, I totally you know, I love the way you said there because to me, being a micro entrepreneur and you're an entrepreneur. That's what I love about entrepreneurship. It's not about the bureaucracy or the system or the rules.
 
 It's about these human 1 on 1 connections. I think that's really what future work is, giving people choice of how they wanna live their lives and who they wanna connect with to create great things together.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Amazing. Oh my gosh. I'm practically crying. I
 
 John Winsor: love that.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: I love that. That's awesome. John, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for the work that you do for Give us a little taste of it.
 
 John Winsor: Thanks a lot.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Making it so accessible versus so great having on the podcast.
 
 John Winsor: I really appreciate it. It's been a pleasure.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Thank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.
 
 We'll catch you soon with another episode of Out Thinkers.