In The New Workplace, Everyone’s a Movie Star

April 28, 2015 Jody Greenstone Miller

Here in LA, where some of the best minds in business are converging on the Milken Institute Global Conference to share survival strategies for this era of creative disruption, it’s not surprising to think that some of the answers might come from our own back yard.

For example, back in the golden age of Hollywood, the big movie studios controlled an actor’s career by forcing employ with just one film company. Today, every actor today is in charge of his or her own career, moving from project to project with producers and agents assembling a new team for each film. Where Hollywood is today is where the rest of the economy is headed, fast. In the U.S., 53 million people – about a third of the workforce – are doing freelance work.

Whether we like it or not, the place where we spend a third of our lives – the workplace – is changing profoundly. The days when employees stayed with companies from college to retirement are long gone; Instead, as a Deloitte report stated, “access to talent is more important than ownership of talent.”

Accelerating this change are converging demographic trends: Retiring Baby Boomers are leaving huge knowledge gaps, while the Millennials replacing them reject antiquated notions of company loyalty –and why not since no one can guarantee them a job for life? Technology is also changing the way we hire, retain and think about talent.

So while a managers’ primary job was once to develop internal talent, today’s premium is on managers who are flexible and innovative about how to make this new workplace work for them. For employees this means “owning” your career; for employers it means drastically rethinking how work gets done, making sure that learning continues and that diversity keeps pace with the changing world around us.

Join me on Tuesday at 2:30pm for a Milken Global Summit discussion with business leaders about how to think about the future of work.

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About the Author

Jody Greenstone Miller

Jody Greenstone Miller is a Co-Founder and former CEO of Business Talent Group, the leading provider of on-demand business talent for project-based work. An outspoken thought leader on the future of work, Jody has been featured in outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fortune, Fast Company, Business Insider, The Economist, The Financial Times, CNN, Stanford University, Fox Business and Bloomberg. Clay Christensen in the Harvard Business Review cited BTG as a “disrupter” of the traditional consulting model and Fast Company referred to Miller as a “workplace innovator.” Along with her husband, Matt Miller, Jody wrote the “Big Idea” feature for the Harvard Business Review, “The Rise of the Supertemp” which observers cite as the definitive analysis of the independent professional talent trend.

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