Upwork’s annual Work Without Limits Executive Summit brought over 100 senior-level executives from Fortune 1000 organizations such as Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Oracle, LinkedIn, and Deloitte to discuss how work is evolving. Executives, HR visionaries, and industry influencers shared best practices for organizational transformation and leveraging distributed, flexible teams. Highlights from this year’s event include: 2 “The future isn’t who you are, the future is who you’re becoming. Who you’re becoming relies directly on who you hire” -Bodell 3 “We don’t want to sit around and wait for the future, you want to create it.” -Bodell 5 “The inhibitor to innovation is not the ability to learn new things but the inability to unlearn mindsets, behaviors and methods that were once effective but now limit success” -O’Reilly Leaders must UNLEARN, to impact mindset you don’t start thinking differently, you need to start by behaving differently. 6 “New platforms, applications and devices are connecting us like never before. We have extraordinary mobile computing power, allowing anyone to work from anywhere, enabling everyone to gather, generate and share data at warp speed and it’s not going to slow down anytime soon.” -Wade 7 “We’re all struggling to work out how to deal with this as many traditional rules and practices become irrelevant, or at least inadequate. Each one of us is interpreting these changes in different ways” -Wade 8 “The pace of evolution is going to pick up as more and more Millennials are in positions to not only influence but direct how work is done at their organizations” -Gregg 9 How Millennials lead differently 10. Many of us work in the traditional notion of a job that was created with the assembly line. Fast forward to today, we’re seeing the democratization of information and work and the rapid ability to deconstruct jobs, redistribute tasks to anywhere in the world, and the opportunity to reconstruct work in a fundamentally different fashion. It’s a tipping point of the future of work. 11 As skills and technology advance -- speed is the new premium. 12 In 1955, the average age of a Fortune 500 company was 60 years old. Today, less than 12% of the original list remains. The average lifespan is now 20 years old. They all have CHANGE in common and you can either embrace the change and thrive, or resist the change. 13 Work is changing: -Millennials increase earning power, while baby boomers seek learning opportunities to stay employable -The number of careers in an life is increasing. Business and talent leaders and workers must plan for careers that span 50–60 years -Millennials say business should prepare workers -Freelancers are proactively updating skills to stay marketable 15 “New technology allows you to do things in new ways. But fear holds people back. How do we create a tool that is ‘ordinary and boring’ that can serve as a useful ladder to go from early adopter to early majority?” -Winsor

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Upwork Work Without Limits
Executive Summit
“Embracing Change”
July 23rd-24th, 2019
The Langham Hotel Chicago

2. New Business Models + Partnerships
What will your company
be doing in 10 years that
it doesn’t do today?
Source: Lisa Bodell, FutureThink

3. Organizations That Proactively Transform
Selling Cars to “Renting Engine
Capacity” and Mobility Systems
Establishing venture fund to
make current business obsolete
Extracting to Growing Energy
(Geo-science to Bio-science)
Source: Lisa Bodell, FutureThink

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“Right now, your company has
21st-century Internet-enabled business
processes and mid-20th-century
management processes, all built atop
19th-century management principles.”
Gary Hamel
American Management Expert
Source: Barry O’Reilly, Unlearn bit.ly/unlearnbook

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Unlearning Leadership
UNLEARN
BREAKTHROUGH RELEARN
BEHAVIOR
MINDSET PERSPECTIVE
changes
impacts
affects
Source: Barry O’Reilly, Unlearn bit.ly/unlearnbook

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The Impact of Technology:
Faster-paced, interconnected, mobile, more
fluid, iterative work
Source: Sophie Wade, Flexcel Network

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All generations are trying to cope
with new circumstances
Source: Sophie Wade, Flexcel Network

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18-38Age of Gen Z and Millennials today
48%Director level or higher
58%Of the workforce by 2028
Source: Eric Gregg, Future Workforce Report (Upwork + ClearlyRated)

9. ~3x
More likely to take
the onus for reskilling
3x
More likely to prioritize
future workforce planning
74%
Have remote team
members
Millennials: Leading Differently
Source: Eric Gregg, Future Workforce Report (Upwork + ClearlyRated)

10. Industrial revolutions and work
Second Industrial Revolution Third Industrial Revolution /
First Machine Age
Fourth Industrial Revolution /
Second Machine Age
Features:
Companies as social institutions
Organization of work into jobs
Jobs as careers
Features:
Technology enablement and the web
Companies as the nexus of contracts
Streamlining of jobs to enable outsourcing
Features:
Mobile, sensors, AI, and machine learning
Companies as platforms
Disaggregation of work into activities
1960s – 1990s – “Nikefication” and core
competencies – The democratization of
information
2000s – “Uberization” – The
democratization of work
Talent on demand
Late 19th – early 20th century
– “The assembly line” – amplification of labor
“Nikefication” “Uberization”
The
Assembly
Line
Source: Ravin Jesuthasan, Willis Towers Watson

11. “Once the bedrock of competitive advantage,
legacy, whether mindset or infrastructure, is
increasingly the primary obstacle to sustainable
automation and the future of work.”
Reinventing Jobs
Jesuthasan and Boudreau (HBR Press, 2018)
Source: Ravin Jesuthasan, Willis Towers Watson

12. Less than 12% of the original F500
are still on the list today
The average lifespan of the F500 is declining
1930 1950 1970 1990 2010
Source: AEI

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In 2020, the global workforce will be made up of
Learning in
Flow of Life
6%
Boomers
35%
Gen X
35%
Millennials
25%
Gen Z
30%
of millennials say
business has the
greatest
responsibility for
preparing workers
70%
of full-time
freelancers
participated in skills
training in the past
6 months
49%
of full-time
non-freelancers
50-60/100
Careers can now
span 50–60 years
out of a potential
100-year life
Compare
to
Source: Steve Hatfield, Deloitte

14. It’s time to cross the
Chasm…finally.
Source: John Winsor, Open Assembly

15. LAGGARDSLATE MAJORITYEARLY MAJORITYEARLY ADOPTERSINNOVATORS
THE
CHASM
"Disrupters" "Thought Leaders"
Small gap
We are here
Make it ordinary and
boring "useful"
Source: John Winsor, Open Assembly

16. Steps in the Adoption Journey
LEARN EXPERIMENT BUILD SCALE
Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4
Goal: The learn phase is
about education, culture,
and communication.
Create a coalition of the
curious and the willing.
Goal: Practice using
new tools and systems,
measure results, have
results to share to get
buy-in.
Goal: Establish a Gig
practice within the
company with a specific
identity, a structure, and
measurable outcomes.
Goal: Scale means
that a Gig Mindset
exists throughout
the company.
Source: John Winsor, Open Assembly

17. 17 | Copyright © 2019 Deloitte Development LLC. All rights reserved.
Five takeaways for the executive team
Redesign jobs
Reskill your talent
Reengineer your
workforce
Reconstruct teams
Refresh the human
experience
Begin designing “superjobs” by identifying integrated roles that leverage
the significant productivity and efficiency gains possible when people and
machines work together and provide more meaningful work to employees
Develop a culture of continuous learning, incentives that motivate people
to learn, and a focus on helping individuals identify and develop new,
needed skills
Move beyond “managing” contractors and freelancers to “optimizing” and
“leveraging” the alternative workforce deliberately and well
The shift from hierarchies to teams is well underway. Prepare your
organization for the evolution to adaptable ecosystems and teams
Address the “human experience” at work—building on an understanding
of worker aspirations to connect work back to the impact it has on not only
the organization but also society as a whole
Source: Steve Hatfield, Deloitte

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Work Without
Limits
This is the future of work…
and it’s bright

19. Let’s build
a brighter future together