Business Talent Group (BTG) CEO Jody Greenstone Miller continues her discussion with host Chad Nitschke on his podcast, Ready. Set. Work. In Part 2, they expand further on the evolution of the gig economy, from the language that defines the industry—gig worker, freelancer, consultant, on-demand talent—to Jody’s long-term predictions for the Future of Work.
Here are two of our favorite moments:
“I joke that BTG is about 10 years old and we’ve been called 10 different things.”
When asked how she would categorize BTG, Miller said this is often a challenge because the central concept of the firm was and remains something entirely different.
“Part of the problem is that if I look at BTG, we’re a little bit of a lot of things right?” she said. “Ultimately, I think we are a marketplace and a platform. But you’ve got a little bit of consulting firm, a little bit of recruiting, a little bit of staffing, a little bit of an expert network, and a little bit of an e-lance kind of platform. It’s still a new category. And I think that’s what makes it challenging…To me, the notion of being on-demand, independent talent, captures what it really is for us and is probably as close as we’re going to get. So that’s kind of our default right now.”
“In some ways, we’d be going back to the future.”
Looking out to the future of the gig economy, Miller argues that the workforce will grow increasingly independent, citing that “historically, most people were independent and it was the advent of the corporation itself that created this new model.”
“I think the arc of history will favor ultimately an increased ability for people to move more rapidly between jobs. We’re seeing it even in the permanent world with the average job tenure going down, we’re seeing it with what Rick Wartzman calls the decline of employee loyalty. We don’t have companies like GE used to be—where people are expected to stay 30 years,” she said. “So what I really think will happen is that demographic changes will accelerate some of this, that as baby boomers retire and there is a real shortage of knowledge workers, as millennials like to work differently, you will see that come together and companies will have no choice but to think about how to do things differently.”
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