Guess what? When you have to work with remote talent as full-time, you have to learn to lead based on outcomes. Because you can no longer lead based on attendance. You no longer lead based on effort level. All you can do is manage and judge the outcomes because you can't see them. Well, and you have to get with the media. There's no management by walking around. So when you do that, you get unlocked. That's why I believe that the moved remote work was a huge unlock for gig platforms of all types like Upwork. Every year, over 800 tech and staffing leaders gather in Dallas for the SIA gig e-conference. We sat down with seven of them. Here are their stories. I'm with Tim Sanders, New York Times bestselling author. Does that ever get old? No, it doesn't get old. It doesn't get old. And VP of Client Success at Upwork, top-rated speaker on the speaking circuit, talks about leadership, financial services, technology, staffing, innovation. And has been spending his current research around speeding up innovation through collaboration. Tim, thanks for being here. Nice to be with you, Paul. We finally got it together, Danny. Well, I want to first start because four years ago, you were on stage. And I started using freelancers. And so I heard about this company, Upwork. And I went to San Francisco and you were on stage talking about love as the killer app. Yeah. And you had all of your energy, all of your insights. Yeah. And the one thing that I still remember was about being a love cat. So before we get into collaboration and the great redesign, what inspired you to write that book? Love as the Killer app was an epiphany to me. In about two years, ages 37 to 39, I was in the middle of a relationship with 7 to 39. I went from inside sales rep for Mark Cuban to Chief Solutions Officer at Yahoo, the youngest company ever admitted to the S&P 500. And it happened like two years and change. Let's say two and a half years. And it was like one of those things where, you know, I found the meaning of life and I stopped and wrote it down. And basically what I learned, Paul, is that over a very short period of time, by committing myself to being a knowledge pack wrapped like this, this student with urgency. And this teacher with generosity. And then learning how to organize a network so that I could give it away to scale. And then learning how to make much more personal connections with people at work by caring about them and showing them empathy. I realized that those were the three building blocks for creating an amazing career. So I was giving a little talk on the future of the internet is 1999, I want to say. And I'm working from Mark Cuban broadcast.com. I had just gone public and I was giving a little speech to a real estate group. And so every time I would give my future of internet speech, the last five minutes would be about this concept of love is the killer app. And I wasn't really calling it that last time. I just called it generosity at work, right? And so I said to them, you know, the internet's going to come and go, but people will always be the next big thing. And no matter how much you use technology, high touch business is always going to be important. So be a student. And when you learn something, become a teacher, always have a mentee, give your network away to three people every week, do it generously, but do it intelligently. So learn the proper way to connect people. And most importantly, love the people that you do business with. So I give that bit. And this lady comes up from the back of the room. She's here in Dallas, by the way. She says, darling, I don't know about this internet thing. But that last few minutes, that's, that's a book. That's a big book, son. And I'm like, yeah, I don't think so. And she goes, listen to me. I discovered Tony Robbins and Phil McGraw and Deepak Chopra. And I went home and looked her up on Prodigy. And she was the leading literary agent in the country. And she worked out of Dallas and she signed me the following week. We went to New York about four months later and got a book deal same day. So she was right. She believed that there was a time and a place and she was like, oh, I'm going to go to New York. And that was a time and a place. And this was it. Where in a high tech world, we needed to reinforce high touch relationships. So that's where that whole thing came from. I chose a love cat along with my writing partner because two things. Thing number one is I love the band, the cure. I love the band, the cure. And they have a song called love cats. And there's this line out of love cats called we move like KG tigers. No two can get closer than this. Kelleher at Southwest Airlines. And they said, that guy's a cagey old love cat. And that's what I was like, yeah, that's what I'm writing about. Cause that's what Herb was. Herb would mentor you, he would berate you, he would support you. If you were an employee and a customer wrote a letter complaining erently about the employee, he'd write back personally, don't fly my airline again. He'd stand up for his people. He loved them. As a matter of fact, their stock ticker was LUV. Yeah. So he'd championed love and practice it. So he's the archetypal love cat to me that I'm really talking about. I thought you'd know that that talk and that book inspired a lot of us, especially the giving nature of networks and collaboration was very helpful to me. So thank you. And I'm glad I got to hear the actual story from the man himself, IRL in real life. In real life. And I'll tell you something. So the book's been out over 20 years now. It's got over a million copies in print, 13 different countries have published it. Although most of my sales come from India, South America and North America. What's amazing Paul is I'm meeting people who read it in their 20s and now they're grown up executives. So that makes me kind of feel old. But something I got, I read it when I was 28 and here I do the math, they're 50 now and they're like the CEO of a company. But what I hear the most from people that read LUV is the killer app is it made them voracious readers. So it's almost like Seinfeld's like a show about nothing. It's like LUV is a killer app is a book about reading books. Really fundamentally, right? And what I've learned since then is that there is a significant correlation between the, that habit of reading business books, both within your core, within adjacent areas and then stuff you can find interesting. There is a correlation between doing that and income. Yeah. And what I also found out was from my agent, which she said, you know, if you study Tony Robbins and what turned his life around, it was one year in an apartment in San Diego where he literally read 500 books. You know, if you study Mark Cuban's turnaround, it was two years when he read about 80 books a year to master the space. So it's very interesting. I was in a process trying to figure out who I wanted to be when I grew up. I knew the path I was on wasn't the path. And every day I had a ride on a bus to the office and back. And so I forced myself to read and I read 50 books that year. And to this day, that those 50 books changed my life. And I could tell you every book in yours being one of them, what impact that has to this day. So I appreciate that and that's great advice. You travel a lot. You speak a lot in front of large groups of people. You know, we're post pandemic, it's been hard for everybody. When you get off stage, what are people saying? What are you hearing from people about how they're feeling, how they're thinking? Depends on the generation to be honest. I've noticed generational cohorts more than I've ever noticed it in my life. So the answer, Paul, is if they're my age, they say the rate of change is mind boggling. If they're my son's age, he's 37, they say the world isn't digitizing fast enough. So it's interesting, right? Like even in our industry, what we'll call the work industry. Millennials don't think about talent, they don't care about talent, they care about delivering work. So I'm kind of dialed into that now. I wanna talk to you a little bit about outcomes because you talk about we're moving to an outcome. Yeah, we are, well, yeah. The next generation of power, that's how they're gonna do things. So what I talked to millennials when I get off stage, they say white glove services code for really crappy AI. And when I get off stage and someone my age says, white glove service is what I wanna buy, what I begin to realize is that human service is going to be obsolete very quickly as the level one millennial level three generation Z that sweet spot right now of 18 to 28. When they take over human service as we know it, like account executives and a swivel chair to staffing company will be as antiquated as pagers and fax machines. It's slow, it's cumbersome. What I hear is that millennials want to turn money into results. They're used to it with services like Amazon web services or for that matter, Amazon.com. But where you never, you can't even find a phone number or a human agent. They just wanna turn money into results. They don't wanna turn process into motion like the parents do, filling out forms and waiting. Gig platforms of, you know, you're vice president over at Upwork. I'm a big fan of Upwork. I, you are. You're a great advocate of us. We appreciate you. I am, and actually I've hired two Upworkers today. Well, there you go. So I, I, I, I hired one yesterday. That's, yeah. Our contract of one, I should say, Astrid. There you go. There you go. But these platforms have been around for over 10 years. Yep. And there's, you know, we're at a staffing industry associates meeting and there's still a small part of the overall staffing movement, right? As a total spend, if you measure it by total spend. It's very small. Mitch Hedberg, to use a joke from the great Mitch Hedberg, he said that there was a pie chart for the spend on gig economy. It would be a slice the size of give it to charity if you win the lottery. Okay. That's the slice because it's considered separate from contingent. And that's the problem. Many organizations are just creating their own line item now for freelancers, contractors and virtual teams. And those are the ones that spend a lot on platforms like Upwork. When you think of the barrier, if you could wave a wand today and take one barrier away from an organization so they could adopt platforms like Upwork, what would it be? You get to be Tim Sanders gets to go to every 4,500 company and wave his wand. What would it be? Yeah. Get rid of the requirement that human supply chain go through a vendor management system. That's a bear trap. It was left behind by staffing companies to lock people in. And what it precludes is the ability to procure from a global workforce on fixed price, which I think is the magic of our platform. But it's also the reason we're not on VMSs for major organizations. That's why when you look at, for example, the fastest growing part of our business, which is private equity, back portfolio companies, they're pre procurement. So there no problem turning money into results. Jason Friedman, he wrote a great book called Rework. I love this book. He's the founder of Basecamp. Remember, he has this great quote. He says, policy is the scar tissue of an organization usually created as an over response to something that will never happen again. The entire motion of VMSs in procurement is about rogue spending that probably occurred in the late 70s when I was in high school for God's sake. So I think there are a series of policies that bake in a mistrust of freelancers and contractors and virtual teams that reminds me of the same motion at places like Blockbuster in 2006 when cloud computing came out. Same thing. Be kind, rewind. Yeah. You were like an idiot if you did cloud until the day you were an idiot if you did it. Did you? Right? And that's why I'm saying. And that's kind of where it is right now with this gig idea is that you're an idiot if you rely on freelancers until the day that you've increased your EBITDA significantly by leveraging freelancers. And then you're brilliant. Well, the thing I'm trying to, and I was talking to the folks at SIA, we're seeing it in tele-doc, in medicine, in tele-medicine. Those are independent doctors. We're seeing it with legal Zoom, with lawyers. The gig economy has gone well beyond in the business space, well beyond just platforms like Upwork. It is a way of doing business. And to your point, for digital natives, that's going to be the only way you get whatever service you're looking for. One of the ways I think about platforms like Upwork in your right, you can go on Craigslist right now and get people. You don't need Upwork necessarily to do that. But think about wealth management. If you have a wealth management portfolio that is any level of complication, like for me, I got real estate. I got cryptocurrency. I got gold. I got 401ks. I got cash on hand. I got alternative investments. I'm involved in a few family offices. It's very complicated. You know what I need? I need a dashboard. I need a single. And of course, I have one through my financial advisor, because that's a platform. So now I can go in with a single view, and I can see exactly what all my investments look like, what my distribution looks like. And not just whether I'm up or down, but whether I'm balanced, right? That's what enterprises get out of Upwork or platforms like Upwork, because we build this thing called talent clouds. You can think of it as a virtual talent bench. Whatevs. If you work with a freelancer and you like her, you can put her in your talent cloud and have instant access to her. And even better, Paul, all of your peers can have access to her too. And it saves the search. So now you don't have to go find it and start over from zero all over again. You can simply go rehire someone. So I see that as a central benefit to platforms, is it allows us to develop this muscle, if you will, of using this to scale. And the curation. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I want to move on to your stage presentation here at SIA. Let's talk about collaboration. And I have to believe that when you say you're spending research time that you're going down to the metal. I'm really starting to. Yeah, I do. I got a hard piece of my hard piece of my work research analyst and we've gone down to the metal. Let me give you the high level here. OK, we did a survey of almost 3,000 CEOs. And we asked them, how often do you collaborate? And we just said, how often do you collaborate? OK, 90% say we collaborate. Now we qualified it. We say, how often do you collaborate when your company is facing a complex challenge? OK. Then we drummed up three times that many contributors across the footprints of the very CEOs that we talk to, or C level, sweet people we talk to. And we asked the same question, but with a little bit more detail. We said, how often does your leadership team bring teams together across divisions where everyone is treated equal and are psychologically safe to reveal what they know and share what they think when they face a complex challenge? It was not 90%. I was about to say if it's anything over. It was 8%. OK, I was going to guess five. 8%. So there's this gap between collaboration and fake collaboration. I like to call that co-operation, OK? So when a CEO throws a bunch of knuckleheads in a room and says, I want to bounce an idea off you and we all give them feedback, that is not collaboration. There's a power dynamic going on. There's not a seeding of control where all of a share in the credit and the risk. And so what we do is we cooperate, much like a suspect cooperates with the police, OK? The suspect doesn't lose sleep trying to solve the case, but in a collaborative environment, you do because there is an involvement, an intrinsic motivation that comes when you bring people together, they're treated as equals, and they have a share in the outcome and the risk. So I'm going to talk about the idea of like, how do we move from a cooperative environment to a truly collaborative environment, right? And how do we distribute the ball, so to speak, because it's NFL season? How do we distribute the ball so that we can take advantage of the diversity of perspectives at work? Because that's where all pattern recognition comes from. That's where execution comes from. And I've learned innovation isn't about ideas. Innovation is about getting the solution to market. Now let's talk about the different types of collaboration. So you've got three. There's three. And let's start with the first one. First one. Distributed collaboration. What does distributed, because one would think if it's collaborative, it is distributed. So what does that mean? You know, Nielsen did research on product development, and they've learned that when four functions at a company come together as equals and work on a product, there's a 7% lift in its sales over its lifetime, which is a lot of money. But they also found out that over 55% of the time, the product developer is only working with one other person, and that's person in their own department. Now, they may ask for cooperation across the company. Can you give me data on marketing? Can you give me data on distribution? But they're not collaborating. It's not actually a team where everyone has a voice and a vote. So we don't. We typically collaborate tightly within our silo and see cooperation across the silos. That leaves a lot to be desired. Not only Nielsen research, my previous company, Deeper Media, we studied the effectiveness of a problem-solving medium. So you bring a bunch of people into the room. You're trying to solve a business challenge. If you just do it within your group, you have about a 20% hit rate on that meeting producing the next play that moves the needle. We learned. You get a second perspective in the room. Maybe sales brings in marketing. The hit rate goes up to 30% effectiveness. They bring a third group in, like customer success. That's a third perspective entirely. Now, the hit rate moves to 50%. But the power is the fourth perspective. So say they bring in the finance group to have a pricing discussion. When we saw that the fourth perspective gets added to a collaborative environment in our study, the hit rate was 80%. They walk out of the room with the next play that actually gets executed and moves the needle. And this is very consistent with my other research I've done. I had a wonderful opportunity to interview the late George Martin, producer for the Beatles. And he explained to me that what made the Beatles special was what he called the Four Humors. And if you go Google the Four Humors, you're gonna read, it's gonna sound like Ninja Turtles, you're gonna read that all innovation comes from four distinct personalities, right? So as Mr. Sir Martin explained to me, the secret to the Beatles' great success was replacing Pete Best for the Ringo star. Pete Best, much like Mick Jagger was with Keith Richards, Pete Best was kind of a confirmer of Paul McGartney. He completely shared the same point of view, basically supported him. It left them one perspective short of the Four Humors. When Ringo came in, he disrupted everything because he had the every man approach where he wanted music to be elegant but simple where, quote, any bloke could play it. And that caused the Beatles to become accessible with their original music. And they became the greatest pop band in history. So if there's a takeaway I would give you about collaboration, make sure there's four perspectives in the room. And different disciplines generate different perspectives. So sales has a growth perspective. Marketing has a position perspective. Customer success has, guess what? A customer perspective. Legal and finance have a risk reduction perspective. Those are just a bunch of different examples of how you can bring in different ways to see the room. Our is Kurt Vonnegut said, I got a dog. He craps in the front yard. I got to go pick up all the crap. I walk through the front yard. I get the bag half full. He says, when I get to the street, do you know what I do? He says, tell my turn around. I look back the other direction. You know what I find? More crap to pick up. Change the way you see the world, change the results you get. So that's the secret to collaboration. And it's hard. Because when you think about it, people say George Martin was the fifth Beatle. George said, no, I did not bring a perspective to them. I was the person in charge of managing the creative tension that comes with that kind of diversity. And that's the trick is that leadership in a collaborative environment should not be collaborators. They should be relationship managers. Because when you do bring these different perspectives together, you're bringing disagreement to the table. That's where magic happens. But that becomes the leader facilitator challenge. That's a really interesting perspective on leader. And I hadn't thought of it that way about leadership and the idea that it does find a way to manage the tension and protect psychological safety. That's it. It's really important. And you've got to stop trying to create common ground between people as a way of managing collaboration. That actually makes collaboration a lot less effective. It's OK to disagree. It's OK to bring a perspective. You guys all come from different point of views. Don't lose that. What you've got to help them understand is the higher purpose that causes them to leave their team behind and join the new team. Like Jim Collins did research on this. And he said, when you get these company initiatives that require cross-functional collaboration, he says, these department leaders show up like UNN ambassadors. So the technology leader shows up representing the engineering group to make sure that they're not blame for anything or given work they don't want to deliver. And they can get more money. And so he represents their interests. But when Collins went and researched the contributors that all these functional leaders represent, you know what they said? They said, we don't want our leader to represent us. That's condescending. We can take care of ourselves. We need them to join the new team and solve the damn problem. So I think as leaders, what we've got to do is convince people to buy in to the higher order problem we're trying to solve, leave their groups behind, and just bring their perspectives, not the representation. I think that's another trick in leadership to getting collaboration to really work. Now let's talk about disruptive collaboration. That's when you bring people to the table that are forbidden to be at the table. Or you bring people together that you would generally dismiss as not being valuable. So give me an example. Sure. When you came up with the term disruptive collaboration, what was in your head? All my experience in consulting the companies, Deeper Media spent the last decade mostly specializing in helping B2B sales companies land seven, eight, nine figure deals. So we basically worked on highly complex sales situations. And our closing ratio was super high. Let's just say it was over 70% of qualified opportunities against a baseline of, say, 20%. And what we learned is when sales would actually open themselves up to revealing their strategies to groups like finance and legal and marketing and customer success, they actually greatly improved their propositions and their ability to close and deliver and renew in that case. But they didn't want to do that. That was the biggest challenge I had was like sales is like, no, no, no, no. If you tell, for example, finance what we're doing, they're going to say, we can't sell it that way. If you tell customers success what we're promising, they're going to say, you can't do that. So these people were traditionally precluded from being at the table so that sales could do their job. Because once the deal signed, you ask for forgiveness, not permission. That's a simple example. Let me give you one I'm going to share tomorrow. Pixar. I want to talk about Pixar Corporation. So Paul, I want you to complete the sentence for me. You ready? Go. Toy Story was? A happy movie? It's a good one. Give me another one. I like that one. Give me another one. About misfits? That's a good one. One more. Amazing. That's what I told Ed Katmell, president and co-founder of Pixar one day. We were doing a speech together at a Disney conference about a decade ago. And I was like, man, Toy Story was an amazing idea. It was a brilliant innovation. Do you know what he did? He finished the sentence for me. Toy Story was canceled. What? I was like, I bought the DVD. It's a coaster now, but I bought the DVD, right? And he goes, let me explain something to you. Nine months in production on Black Friday, Disney, our distributor shut the production down and canceled it. Because we were just buried in technical problems, finance problems, character development problems. Like we didn't even have an estimate on rendering time. It was like in the months of what it was going to take. We weren't able to actually make the characters look lifelike, but not creepy. We just had problems galore. And I said, how did you solve the problem? He says, well, we went from skunkworks to asking everybody at Pixar to chip in. We went from disrespecting claymation specialists and stop action animators and brought them in. And they helped us hack our way into facial controllers. We brought psychologists in to help us think about adult crossover to make budget. We actually brought in novelist and fiction writers to help us improve the story and the character development. We just brought a bunch of people in that we would have never included in the first place. They call it the brain trust. That's a really nice example. So when you're putting together a collaborative team, you should ask the youngest person in the room, who's missing? And they're going to give you some feedback. And the feedback may make you uncomfortable. But if you can do that, you're going to disrupt everything. Going back to the original thing about reading, Creativity Inc. was one of the books that fundamentally changed. And the quote that I always use is tell bad stories. It has to start somewhere. And so people are afraid to go and have an opinion and just say, hey, it's a bad story. And now it's our job to make it better. That's right. And that's why I think the brain trust was such a brilliant idea. He often said that big ideas show up as ugly babies. And it's our job as a leader to protect them so they eventually get cute. So I love that. And that really is the point of psychological safety. Your former employer, Microsoft, for example, I believe there's a lot of things Satya Nadella did when he came in. But the thing he did that made the biggest difference was he created a culture of psychological safety in these collaborative environments. I've heard it from so many different employees. And I know that in the book, Competing in the Age of AI, by my friend, Karim Lakhani, and his partner, he said that was the secret to Microsoft becoming a cloud-first organization is that there was a real psychological safety. And if I get wonky here, what I mean is that Nadella would protect uncommon knowledge and demand that it be properly entertained. Whereas, being nice here, Bomber would destroy uncommon knowledge as being unfounded, obviously disproven, and that common knowledge was much more the important thing for us all to believe in. And if you Google it, there's the paradox of uncommon knowledge where there's basically research, that all the great ideas that solve all the hardest problems are very uncommon ideas, usually from an adjacent space, usually introduced by the most junior person president of a meeting. And we stomp on those, especially in professional environments. So I think that's the secret, too, is it's not just the safety to share what you know. It's creating psychological safety around the ideas and the opinions and the reveals. And if I were to give a leader an easy way to do that. So it's good to protect the uncommon knowledge and make sure it's been given its proper venue. But I think if we taught people how to collaborate, we should teach them to question the assumptions behind an idea and never criticize an idea. There is no bad idea. There are ideas that are based on faulty assumptions. So when I used to facilitate collaboration, when a person had an idea, they also had to reveal what they considered the critical assumption behind the idea. It could be a data point. It could be an experience they had. It could be a relationship they've noticed between two objects. But you say, idea, critical assumption. No one is to criticize the idea. They can only ask questions about the assumption. You would be surprised how much more forthcoming people are in an environment like that and how much less defensive they are. I was given great advice from. The devil's advocate is a loser. When I hear that, I'm like, you're a bully. You're an effing bully when you say that I play devil's advocate. Having lived through the transition between Balmer and Nadella, I agree with you. Well, and his ability to listen. And I worked for an executive at Microsoft who said something that was powerful to me. I think it's in line with what you're saying is, if you approach everything from curiosity, if every person that gives you an idea says something, you approach it, then you start to learn. And I always wanted this continuous learning. You hear all these sort of kitschy things. And that one really resonated with me. Because now, every time somebody says something, I'm just curious. Tell me more. Tell me more. I love that. That's how I like to drive conversations. And then you get to know about. And then you're all the way down three questions later into the personal experience they had that got this business idea. And you have these great insights. So Brian Grazer, the producer, wrote a really good book about curiosity. And he used to have these curiosity meetings. And he had all these great conversational tactics to pursue curiosity and to get the other person to do a deeper reveal than they intended on revealing. And he'd say things like, tell me more. That's a good one. But he'd also use little words like fascinating. And he would never cut off the joke. That's an improv thing. He would never stop the joke. In other words, when a person's unpacking an idea, he'd keep saying, fascinating. Tell me more. Huh. Pregnant pause. And that's all David Frost 101, if you researched the great interview with David Frost. That's how David Frost trapped Nixon. Killed him with a pregnant pause. Right. So I think there's a lot of ways not only to be curious, but to, as Brian teaches, have curiosity conversations that are deep and revealing and producing credible insights. It has to be authentic. You can't fake curiosity. You have to really want to know. You have to really want to know. You know, it's like, I don't try to learn things. I try to make sense of things. And it changes my approach to topics. Like when I was younger, I'd say, well, I want to learn how AI works. Forget that. Oh, it's a moving object. Right. I need to make sense of what weak AI means to a business. That's what I, and you, you can spend the rest of your life trying to make sense of that issue alone. But it causes me to read much more deep. It causes me to realize I've never done learning. So for me, we've got to make that transition from learning to making sense of the world. That's a great way to think of it. No, so collaboration, we've talked about distributive collaboration. Disruptive collaboration. If my kids are listening, this is your word. OK. Damn collaboration. Damn collaboration. So tell me about damn collaboration. My wife calls me Sheldon Cooper if you've watched Big Bang Theory. You're about to realize I am the same kind of geek. Sheldon was into flags. I'm into etymology. So collaboration actually comes from a Middle English phrase that meant to put forth. But where it became popular several years later, and it shows up in the dictionary, the original definition of collaboration was to confer treasonously with the enemy. So from an etymology standpoint, it is baked into our DNA. For people that might not be familiar with etymology, so explain the history of words. There we go. By how a word came to be used, how it becomes popular in our link language. Fantastic. I just wanted other folks to. So etymology creates mental mapping. Like it's the issue with freelancers. You asked me before, what's the biggest barrier to the adoption of freelancers? The word freelancer. What does freelancer mean? Bring me your freelancers. You remember that? That comes from Middle English. And freelancers at the time, they were mercenaries, by the way. They were people that weren't good enough for anybody's army. You might not have known that. So freelancer was a super derogatory term for centuries. And so we got to change the mental mapping, just like collaboration is a threatening term. Conferring with the enemy, we seek cooperation only. We maintain control of the things that we're given power over. So dam collaboration is the fear of collaboration that results in fake collaboration, the appearance of collaborating, but the reality of simply seeking cooperation and maintaining total control, and damning your own company. Fascinating look on how you view collaboration. And I think the thing that was most fascinating about the conversation was the actual advice you were able to give any leader that's trying to figure out how to collaborate or how to run a company today, especially across the multi-generational aspects. I want to cover one thing that you mentioned earlier. When you were talking about when you get off stage and you see a generational difference between how people look at stuff, is how we're moving to an outcome-based world. How it's not, I'm going to fill out your form, and talk to this person in this very laborious process I expect outcomes on demand. And part of this, the reason I started this podcast is because I believe that we're all starting to expect outcomes on demand. We are. And Upwork did a future workforce report. We did a PULT survey in the middle of 2021. And there's an interesting insight. We found that managers who develop comfort level with leading remote full-time teams also develop to comfort level with relying on freelancers for critical work. I wonder why. Guess what? When you have to work with remote talent as full-time, you have to learn to lead based on outcomes. Because you can no longer lead based on attendance. You no longer lead based on effort level. All you can do is manage and judge the outcomes because you can't see them. Well, and you have to go to the community. There's no management by walking around. So when you do that, you get unlocked. That's why I believe that the move to remote work was a huge unlock for gig platforms of all types, like Upwork. But if you think that was an unlock, wait till this recession that's about to hit. The Dow's going to be less than 10,000 by the time you publish this podcast. That's right. It'll be below 10,000. That's going to unlock everything else. Because then we're really going to start questioning, how can we deliver the work when we've got optics to manage headcount that we have to disclose publicly? So you're about to see an explosion of freelance contract work happen during this recession, which I think will last for several years because of inflation. Maybe 10, but probably two or three, but a lot longer than we'll be selling away. What's interesting, when I write about it in my book, when I started using freelancers, you have to communicate those outcomes. Well, that's the only way you manage. There's no in between. There's no other way to work with remote people. I don't care how hard a freelancer worked. If I asked for research to be done, I expect the data to be delivered. And the rating I give them will reflect that accordingly. And as an Uber driver taught me years ago, please give me five stars. Because if you give me four stars, I won't be discoverable in Uber's algorithm. And I'm like, that's right. So that's how freelancers that are very successful operate. Is they operate understanding that the quality of the outcome determines the quality of the review, which determines their discoverability on the platform, which guess what, Paul, is the greatest influence of forward-looking income. Because you can't write enough proposals as a freelancer to be six figures. It's got to come to you. It's going to come to you because the algorithms at places like Upwork show you to the customers. Why did we do that? Based on quality. Thank you, Larry Page. Tim, I've enjoyed this conversation. I follow your work. I know it's a 20-year-old book, but I really encourage anyone listening to Go Read Love is the killer app. Thank you. It was the first place I was introduced to what you do for a living. And I'm still appreciative of that. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you, Paul. Good talking to you, buddy.
