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book is the result of tireless support from many friends and colleagues.

      We thank our colleagues at Towers Watson, particularly Juliet Piekarski, who reviewed and read every chapter countless times, Jorn Janssens, who helped advance some of our original ideas, and Shatrunjay Krishna who helped us tell the intriguing story of Bharti Airtel.

      We are also grateful for the sponsorship and support of Julie Gebauer, who embodies all the attributes of the engaging leader in her leadership of Towers Watson's Talent and Rewards segment.

      We wish to thank the executives at each of our case study companies for sharing their stories with us.

      We are also grateful for the comments and feedback from many trusted colleagues, particularly John Bronson, Jim Duffy, Doug Milroy, Sandy Ogg, Scott Sherman, Laurie Siegel, and Mara Swann.

      In addition, we wish to acknowledge the editorial staff at Wiley publishing; Karen Murphy, Shannon Vargo, Judy Howarth, Tiffany Colon, and Abirami Srikandan, for their support.

      Part One

      The Background

      Chapter 1

      Leading Work – Not Managing Employees

      We create boxes to make sense of the world. We talk about organizations and jobs as boxes. Employees sit inside jobs that sit inside organizations. This is how we think things get done. In practice, it's never really so cut and dried, but the simple mental model works – or at least it used to.

      Now we are seeing those comfortably familiar boxes begin to disintegrate.

      Have you heard phrases like “nonemployment work arrangements,” “freelance talent platforms,” and “labor market intermediaries?” They reflect an emerging trend in which work and workers exist “beyond employment.” Many leaders have hardly noticed the rising frequency with which these terms crop up in discussions about the future of work. To leaders, “nonemployment work arrangement” may sound like something to be delegated to specialists in procurement or personnel. Or they might ask, “Are these new arrangements just simple extensions of cost-reduction techniques we've seen for years, such as outsourcing, temporary contract workers, and consultants?” Sometimes they sound familiar, but increasingly these new approaches to work are already fundamentally changing how you compete and achieve your organization's mission. Leaders who overlook them risk making the same mistake that taxi services made when they dismissed the emergence of the Uber ride-sharing service.

      A world where work moves “beyond employment” will challenge fundamental strategic assumptions in virtually every industry and sector. The world is changing, and the role of a leader is not to stand back, or marvel at the change, or delegate the decisions to administrative rules. A leader's job is to achieve organizational goals through the work of others. Leaders must develop the tools to grapple with this new world. Work is escaping the confines of regular full-time employment, and it is leaving your organization. These changes create opportunities that should not be ignored.

      This shift is reminiscent of the diversity movement that seeks out talent regardless of gender or ethnic origin. The beyond employment opportunity is to seek out talent among free agents, anywhere in the world, who prefer free agency to employment. In particular if you are looking for authentic innovators and creative agents, this is where they are likely to be found.

      The problem for leaders is that they face a bewildering array of stories and examples of how work is changing, but no framework to guide their decisions. It's like seeing lots of bright shiny objects in the sky, with no framework of astronomy to guide you. The stories and examples tend to focus on two things, and have omitted a vital third element.

      Many stories and examples focus on the Workers. You hear a lot about the plight of contingent workers, the exploitation of part-time workers, but also about the freelance coder who is earning $100,000 a year sitting on a beach in Bali, or the crowdsourced gamers that solved a thorny riddle in AIDS treatment. You wonder if you should be using such workers, or even whether you should become one yourself.

      Other stories and examples focus on the Client for the work. You hear a lot about Netflix saying that “adequate performance gets a generous severance package,”1 companies like Colgate-Palmolive producing ads for the Super Bowl through crowdsourcing,2 and early-stage companies that consist of a few employees who lead the work by tapping a vast global network of workers connected through cloud technology and personal technology. You wonder if you should adopt some of these practices in your organization when you are the client for the work.

      These examples and stories can appear like the lights on a Christmas tree in a dark room. If you can't see the shape of the tree that holds the lights, it's often difficult to understand their pattern. What you need is to see the tree underneath the lights. This book focuses on the decisions you make about the Work. It draws on the excellent ideas that others have proposed regarding the Worker and the Client, and then builds upon them by illuminating how understanding the Work helps to explain the stories and examples. More important, because a leader's job is to achieve a mission through the work of others, this book's focus on the work gives you a way to navigate this emerging world beyond regular full-time employment.

Work: Escaping Traditional Regular Full-Time Employment

      Does being a leader mean leading your regular full-time employees? What does it mean to lead when workers are not employees? For example, should you and your leaders be the best at leading free agents or contractors?

      Let's look at some examples of work being done by workers who are outside the confines of traditional regular full-time employment for your business. These workers may be “free agents” who work for themselves, employees of an organization you are allied with, employees of an outsourcing firm, or even volunteers. In these next three examples the workers are as important in getting the work done as the firm's own employees.

How Free Agents Built the Software for Managing Genomes

      The leaders at Ion Torrent had a problem. Managing the huge data files that result from sequencing DNA,3 even with fast computers, was slow and expensive. The company's IT leader was tasked with finding ways to radically improve compression and decompression of the data. But where to find the right kind of programming talent? The existing employees didn't have the time or expertise, so the leaders at Ion Torrent turned to Topcoder for help. Topcoder, despite its name, does not employ an army of software code-writers. Topcoder reaches out to its pool of 700,000 freelance technologists and sets up a competition with an attractive prize. The challenge this time? Find a great compression solution for Ion Torrent's problem. The result? Many programmers proposed novel ways to tackle the issue, with the best one improving compression by 41 times. Through Topcoder, Ion Torrent leaders found the right talent, and achieved outstanding results quickly and cost effectively.4

      How might Ion Torrent have gotten this work done without Topcoder? The most traditional way would have been to hire coders as full-time employees. Ion Torrent leaders would need to either motivate and retrain their existing coders to solve the compression problem or hire and construct a team of some of the highest-performing coders in the world. Would the existing in-house employees or the high-performing coders outside the company be available to take the job? Could Ion Torrent bring them on board quickly enough to solve the problem in time? Did Ion Torrent have the internal training and development resources to bring coders up to speed? When you think about it, the “natural” decision to hire or deploy your own regular full-time employees to get work done is actually complex and risky.

      As an alternative, Ion Torrent could have used someone else's employees, like hiring a consultancy to do the work. This approach offloads the troubling burdens of employment onto the consultancy. Yet the consultancy must maintain or hire coders on its team of permanent employees, and that cost shows up in the higher price of using consultants to do the work. A consultancy may have employees with skills that Ion Torrent doesn't have, but few consultancies can tap a population of coders as large as the pool accessed by Topcoder. Also, it's still not certain that the best-qualified coders for this particular work would want to work

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