Morten Bruun, VP Global Operations at Worksome, Forbes 30 under 30, Ex-McKinsey, Ex-Google
Leaders, Morten has an extremely rare background in driving change at both a global technology leader (Google) and global business management (McKinsey). In his leader portal Morten really stressed:
How technology can solve real business problems
How the enterprise is unique and how to drive change across these large beasts
Where the freelance economy stands today, where it will be tomorrow, and what was supposed to, but didn’t change after Covid
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An outline of his episode:
2:35: How Google and Mckinsey taught Morten how technology can solve real business problems
5:39: How to be ready for the recession
9:53: Market landscape and where Worksome fits
15:30: Why we can’t have a truly independent world
19:45: How do you balance the entrepreneurial spirit with corporate
24:34: What hasn’t changed since Covid when we talk about the ‘future’ of work?
38:40: What’s different about the enterprise?
43:11: How should leaders drive their freelance program?
46:44: How do you balance long term bets with short term validation?
Some our favorite quotes:
On navigating the recession:
When you're going into a recession, everything seems like risk. And when you're looking back at a recession, everything seems like opportunity, right? That is sort of, you know, whether you're like investing in the stock market or you know, a business owner or whatever, then right now feels extremely risky and uncertain. I think looking back at it, it will look like a lot of opportunity and edit and a time where a lot of things actually sort of will have to change. We're actually accelerated, which I guess is what we generally see in times of crisis.
being able to have a really flexible workforce will allow you to be agile, and to scale up and down and adapt to the different changes that is coming externally into you and hitting you as a company.
On the state of contingent talent:
It was just really eye opening for me, like how many companies are actually spending a lot of time going through these things manually, and seeing sort of the value that we could bring to that was just really fascinating.
We thought that the issue was actually finding the talent, sort of solving the same problem as Upwork. And I think, especially as we came to talk to more enterprise companies, we really saw that they had an awful lot of talent, or people in the network that they've been using for solving different tasks, but they were overwhelmed with the amount of paperwork and compliance issues getting people paid, especially getting people paid on time.
So they didn't need a place to find the talent, they really needed a place to manage it.
Why hasn’t the industry moved as fast as expected?
Two reasons for it, I think one is friction, and one is money.
You buy into this great vision of just hiring Matthew and bring him into a project, and then all of a sudden becomes overwhelmed by the amount of paperwork and compliance and legal stuff that you have to do on the back of it. So from this vision of like, I'll just spend the time on what I'm absolutely the best at, you actually ended up spending a lot of time on all that crap that you didn't want to deal with in the first place.
Result is that you have these intermediaries like the staffing agencies and the vendors and whatnot, that sort of take away that risk, and that compliance and the paperwork and whatnot, and end up making a lot of money on right. So there's also a huge industry. And it's important not to forget that right? There's a huge industry of companies that make a lot of money on this complexity.
What didn’t change after Covid?
I think this whole notion that you see full time workers as just time blocks of 40 hours, or 10 hours.
Really what you want to see is that people can execute on a project or help you do a certain body of work, right.
Importance of Community
There's lots of comfort to be found in building an external community around you with partners or peers within the industry. Everyone has like seen the same things, right. Everyone's struggling with vendor onboarding, if they work with direct talent, Everyone is struggling with worker classification, Everyone is struggling with getting people paid, someone needs to go on payroll, and someone will be just having a direct deposit, like all those things are all struggles that everyone in the industry are, you know, dealing with on a daily basis.
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