Founder of Sparrow Advisors and all around brilliant Ana Milicevic joins Adam today for a talk on the future of work. Ana’s background around all different parts of the tech, entertainment and marketing complex gives her a unique perspective on what it’s all building towards.
The Gig Economy: https://hbr.org/2018/03/thriving-in-the-gig-economy
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Transcript:
[00:00:24] Adam Pierno: All right. Welcome back to another episode of The strategy inside everything. This is a big day. We have been putting this off between snowstorms and traveling and losing voices and all kinds of craziness over the past couple weeks. I am very excited to have today’s guest Ana Milicevic. Ana, how did I do in pronouncing your name?
[00:00:45] Ana Milicevic: You did very well, Adam. Thank you very much.
[00:00:47] Adam: Excellent. Well, if you don’t know already, you are about to know that Ana is quite brilliant. She is the founder of Sparrow Advisers. As most of the guests, I have been connected with Ana through Twitter. The power and wonder of my favorite tool. I’m a shareholder. I have to tell you that. I have to disclose that. I got a chance to invite her. Luckily for me and for all of you listening, she agreed to come on. We have a fun topic that we’re going to get into. Before we do, Ana would you please tell people who don’t know you, and even people like me who do know you a little bit about your background, and where you been, and who you are just so that they can get up to speed? Then, we’ll get running.
[00:01:27] Ana: Hey everybody. If you don’t know me from Twitter, [laughs] my name is Ana Milicevic. [laughs] For some reason I’m not a Twitter shareholder. I probably should be. [crosstalk] Yes, I know. I do spend a fair amount of time pontificating there. I’m the founder of Sparrow Advisers. We’re a management consultancy that focuses on the intersection of advertising and marketing technology and all of the adjacent categories and industries such as e-commerce.
Pretty much anything that touches digital interactions is something that we cover. It’s a company that’s been forming for a long time because in my track record and operational roles across media, entertainment, technology companies, and advertising over the years, I’ve always wanted to have a very dedicated management consultancy that I could summon to come and help me with strategy.
Which product lines should we be investing in? How do we take something to market in a specific market whether here in the US or globally? Then, how to support my staff without having to hire a whole team of people who wouldn’t really be utilized full-time, or didn’t really have the right expertise? Three years ago, I built or started building consultancy built by operators, four other operators. We’re the neutral team that you would bring on-board whenever you have any type of really gnarly problem that you want to solve.
[00:03:13] Adam: That’s interesting. It sounds like you’ve worked in a lot of different types of environments. Entertainment and marketing, both.
[00:03:20] Ana: Yes. I started my career as a computer scientist.
[00:03:25] Adam: Oh, man. You’ve seen it all.
[00:03:26] Ana: Yes. I’ve always been on the intersection of more than one discipline. My first venture when I was still in college was a very accidental software development company where I was the founder of one of the engineers, but I, also, very quickly realized that there’s this whole other business side that I seem to be able to straddle, but not a lot of people did. I’ve mostly stumbled into these very multi-faceted roles throughout my career.
I got into product management before that was really an established discipline and have shifted from industry to industry, from my perspective fairly seamlessly, but if you’re going to look at my experience, you’re probably going to go, “Wow, you’ve tackled the music industry, and other parts of media and entertainment. Then, really high tech and all these really, really large software conglomerates.” There’s a undercurrent that ties it all together and that’s some type of advertising or marketing related. The concepts. Yes, I have seen it all. [laughs]
[00:04:38] Adam: Yes. No, it sounds like it. That’s why today’s topic is going to be engaging. Today we’re going to be talking about the future of work and planning for that future where we don’t know a lot of things that will be coming down the pike. I don’t usually talk about myself on this show, but just for important conversation to provide context for listeners, and Ana even for you.
Right now, I’m at a small agency here. It’s called Santy. We’re in- based in Phoenix. I have worked at JWT in New York, which was the biggest ad agency at the time in the world, biggest office. I’ve worked at In-House at Verizon. I’ve seen the entire scale of agencies. Everything from the smallest to the biggest in four, or five different markets. I’ve seen a lot of stuff, and seen what works, and what doesn’t, and how things change and how agencies can get swallowed by change, or companies can get swallowed by change.
[00:05:34] Ana: That’s awesome because it’s amazing to me how different your experience can be even within the same industry, depending on the stage of company that you’re at. If you specialize in really early stage start-ups, that’s very different than being at a 500+ person company. I don’t think that we really realize how different it is unless you’ve been in all of those roles. I have seen at firsthand how challenging it can be for people who’ve had tremendous careers at one type of company.
They’re driven by a desire to try something different. They move to a company of different size. Then, all of a sudden, they’re not supported. They can’t really catch their bearings quickly enough. It usually happens when folks go from really large companies to start-ups, but I’ve seen it happen the other way around more often than not, too.
[00:06:31] Adam: I have witnessed people coming from big, well-supported, high-structure organizations going to the start-up, or the smaller model and just losing their mind when they don’t know who– I have to do my own expense report? I don’t even understand how to get started here.
[00:06:48] Ana: Yes. [laughs] It’s always something that seems so trivial like that that really, really trips people up. [laughs]
[00:06:55] Adam: It does. It does. It gets in the psyche, I think. Let’s talk a little bit. How do you see– how have you seen since you started Sparrow Advisers since you’ve said three years ago, how have you seen work change, and you found a space there that didn’t exist before for your company to exist, what’s changed, or what are you seeing as a trend?
[00:07:16] Ana: When we first started out, we were really testing out this theory that this type of expertise that we bring to the table, which is really, “Hey, we’ve seen every company size across multiple different industries. We can put together essentially a senior executive team for hire that you can task with really complex things. We’ll work alongside your team, and we will transition our knowledge to your team as you go along.”
Our hypothesis was that this was going to be a great model for young and old companies alike. I’m happy to say that three years and that seems to have been the right hypothesis to make because for younger companies usually somebody around series A or thereabouts. It’s a tremendous advantage to be able to come with really a team that’s put-together that can just start executing from day one and has the right industry knowledge.
Then, teach and train your team that’s usually consists of more junior employees who need to make a leap, but because you’re in this high growth mode, you don’t necessarily have the time or the effort to really put any mentorship efforts together or any training, or any of that. Then, for larger companies, it’s similar because we can work entirely independently of any existing structures and really plug in into what they already have. We initially set off thinking this is what the market needs.
We think that the market has proven us now that this is exactly what is needed. The bigger shift that we’ve observed not just over the last three years that Sparrow has been around, but I’d say probably for the better part of the last decade as my partner and I were in senior operational roles across sales, services, product in a variety of different companies is that things happen in cycles and spurts in companies.
[00:09:33] Adam: Yes, for sure.
[00:09:34] Ana: Yes. You do need a more flexible and fluid way of accessing really stellar expertise for shorter periods of time. I use concepts like flow a lot. If you’re operating at a certain flow as a company, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to have every skill in house, or have to try to build every skill in house. At the same time it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to open a full-time role for everything you possibly need. The biggest shift that we’ve seen is that companies started or are starting to here in the US and in other regions of the world they’re maybe a little bit ahead of the curve.
Is thinking about how to be more fluid about not just their internal resourcing but how they kind of form around executing a project. We picked management consulting and strategy consulting as one of the most traditional disciplines here. Where you’ll typically have a stable of folks who are quite expensive to not have working on projects all the time.
Tends to have a pretty generalist outlook and don’t really go very deep on certain topics. We wanted to do to flip that around for the 21st century. Instead construct a looser network of really high caliber experts, who don’t necessarily want to come and work full-time on a particular company’s problem but want to have solved that type of problem many times over.
[00:11:22] Adam: It’s you’re seeing the old chart turned into a skeleton of generalists. Then they recruit people that are the experts or the specialists in key areas that want to work on the types of problems they want to solve or they enjoy solving or they’re the best at solving. Just coming in and they’re willing to be that freelancer and solved that problem short term or long term as an outsider.
[00:11:45] Ana: Yes, I think that’s where we’re going directionally. Every industry will take a slightly different timeline to get there. When you look at how quickly things like the gig economy came out of almost nowhere but how quickly they were adopted, there’s this desire for on-demand services and quality on demand expertise. That’s very different to how companies especially larger companies budget for roles today. How they think about their organizations. How they think about how many people they will need to execute a particular project.
On the one hand side, we have something that’s very rigid and very kind of almost old-school now in its structure. Then on this other hand side, we have everything from being able to summon a car when you’re standing on a street corner, somewhere on your mobile phone or you’re ordering food via GrubHub or Seamless or whatever. These types of experiences are permeating all parts of our life. Except seemingly the traditional workplace relationships environment et cetera, where we still see that kind of monolithic thinking.
[00:13:11] Adam: How do you think something like — I don’t like the phrase the gig economy because it–
[00:13:15] Ana: I hate it, I hate it. Can we come up with a better name for it?
[00:13:20] Adam: The gig economy has become a brand. It’s become a terrible brand. The perception when you say the gig economy I go to TaskRabbit and all these places. Where I feel that lower wage workers are being exploited to a certain extent. That’s not the vision, you’re not talking about that.
[00:13:39] Ana: No and I’m glad you brought that up. Because I’ve been struggling with that term. I absolutely hate it. I think it instantly devalues.
[00:13:48] Adam: Yes, it’s 100%.
[00:13:49] Ana: Yes, it devalues flexibility of work and the ability to say, “Hey, I’m really an expert in this particular area. This is the part of work that I enjoy the most and I want to focus on that.” As opposed to identifying yourself by the company you work with. You could think about, “Hey, this is what I want to work on.” It’s interesting that whenever there’s a huge shift in needs. It seems like some of the first folks to take advantage of it are operating in the gray area. Mechanical Turk was great when it came up and it was very useful for a lot of very manual tasks. That there was really no easy way of solving before.
Until we realized that it’s basically being used as an alternative to minimum-wage jobs and in areas where there were simply are no jobs here in the US. Folks are working for like $2 an hour. Something that they really shouldn’t be — we shouldn’t be okay with that as a society. Companies like Fiverr for example who are advocating five-dollar design.
[00:15:09] Adam: It’s crazy.
[00:15:10] Ana: Nobody in their right mind should say I’m going to spend $5 on design. Like that’s no.
[00:15:17] Adam: I guess the question on is if you spend $5 on it because it’s still design.
[00:15:21] Ana: Yes, exactly. There’s a reason why you pay $5 for something as opposed to a slightly more reasonable price. It feels almost predatory at this stage. Really it’s an end run around companies no longer want to provide the level of benefits and services that they used to before. They’re doing a run around it with this gig economy. You know it’s great everybody wants the gig economy. Well the reason people are receptive to the gig economy is really twofold. One is for some people flexibility at work is much more important than, “Hey, I have a full-time job. There’s a really large population of folks who are in this group.”
Then the other is just out of necessity. Its people who would want to work full-time but they’re not able to find the right kind of job.
[00:16:33] Adam: Who do you think then– We’re transitioning from — I have a feeling you agree with me that the gig economy will evolve as that kind of predatory and a little bit of desperation gives away to whatever phase two of gig economy is.
[00:16:50] Ana: Yes.
[00:16:51] Adam: The future of work where we’re talking about experts employing education or experience, who will qualify for that. I mean I see it a fair deal already in the marketing world. Where I have, “Oh, I need help with a very specific type of paid social campaign.” “Oh, I know a person who’s an expert in doing those types of things I can bring them in.” How do you see this transitioning into the future that you’re thinking of?
[00:17:18] Ana: It’s exactly that. I think in the US, we’re a little bit behind the curve mostly because it’s hard to be an independent worker here, because there’s no health insurance and it’s not it’s not easy to get some of the basic benefits that other countries provide. When you look at Europe for example, job sharing, the idea of no two people working in the same essentially full-time role but backing each other up and providing for a seamless transition.
Let’s say from maternity leave back into the working world or similar. This has been in place for a really long time. It’s easier to have that amount of flexibility when you don’t have to worry if you get a cold whether you’re going to essentially go bankrupt because you can’t you have no access to health care. I think that what we were working on now and if we had this — if we were equating about two months from now I’d be able to tell you about this platform that we’re building. We’re starting to work on just that.
It’s how do you connect– First of all how do you build a network of highly qualified vetted and extremely capable people, who are wanting to work on other projects? Then how do you create a marketplace where companies can also find folks like that. Right now it’s usually word-of-mouth and it depends on your personal network and how you structure that. As a freelancer or as a want to be specialist for hire.
It’s really hard to get started you have to invest a lot of time in relationships and getting that off the ground. We envisions facilitating when I say we, at Sparrow we envision facilitating and really productizing these networks of high-quality people. Then working with the other side of this coin is really working with employers on getting them to think more along the lines of, “Well I should really be paying this person for three months of work, what I would normally budget for maybe an entire year in this role, but I won’t need this type of expertise for a whole year or that kind of calculation is so– We find really lagging in the US. I think that every person who’s [unintelligible 00:20:13] entrepreneur are very good at a particular specialist area, that this is their future, and that this is how they will think about work within the next five years, probably. As a opposed to conning or solving the same problem in the same company.
For a really long time, I think we’re going to see a lot more fluidity, in many ways very similar to how accountants or fractional chief financial officers operate today, where you have a skill set that’s applicable across a vast number of companies. You just need to be connected to the right companies that need your expertise at the right time.
[00:21:02] Adam: You brought up a critical point about why this is all lagging here in the US, which is benefits healthcare, specifically, but it’s an extra 15% to 25% of a salary that goes to paying on a full-time employee those benefits in a lot of cases here in the US. Just the cost of the infrastructure’s ridiculous. How have you seen that be addressed? I know different nations in Europe have their own open healthcare, or universal healthcare, or whatever. How do you think it’ll be addressed here in the US based on what you’ve seen elsewhere?
[00:21:36] Ana: Well I do hope that we’ll have a nationwide solution for healthcare pretty soon. In reality, it’s going to take at best a couple of years. I think, for the interim, I’m hoping that more states and insurance companies will make it a lot easier to sing up for the types of benefits that large companies provide, but if you’re a one-person shop or so, it’s something that we’ve considered also when we think about our platform whether we want to take on as a provider of benefits as well.
We’ll cross that bridge, or we’ll have to cross that bridge pretty soon. I think the best way to handle it short-term whether it’s just being a factor that in until whatever hourly, weekly, monthly rates the freelance experts wanted to set for themselves. That is still going to be overall smarter than– Just economically speaking, for companies to cover than any other method that we currently have.
It really is a really big headache. I think it’s preventing a lot of people from being more open about their flexibility needs. There are a lot of folks today who clock in to the office, do the usual nine to five. Especially in very creative industries like ours, when you think about advertising creatives, it’s mind boggling to me that there are requirements to show up a nine in the morning in agencies.
That just seems so counterproductive. If there’s one portion of a human work that really can’t be forced, it’s creativity. Requiring that somebody be physically present at a certain date and time in a certain place is really not doing much to foster what this person’s meant to be working on.
[00:23:53] Adam: We’ve only been doing this for 100 years. I guess we’ll get it in the next 150 years, eventually.
[00:23:58] Ana: Exactly. I hope we’ve kind of learned our lessons and we can deconstruct.
[00:24:04] Adam: I know that we haven’t.
[laughter]
[00:24:07] Ana: A girl can dream. [laughs]
[00:24:09] Adam: Yes. We’ll see how it changes up with everything going on at WPP. The P&G aspect for 75% of workforce to be creative inside the agencies. We’ll see how it all changes.
[00:24:22] Ana: Yes. It’s interesting that– this is such a fascinating time for so many different things, but we’er still operating in a fairly outdated system, so the structure, the approach to work. Then, there are these economic drivers that are starting to push folks in different directions like that P&G, ASCOR. WPP post– Sir Martin Sorrell. We’re going to be looking at a lot of restructuring, and I hope that somewhere at the nexus of all of that restructuring, we really get to reevaluate what work physically means. By that, “Hey, do you really need to live in one of the major markets to be successful in advertising?”
Since you and I are on this podcast, I think you’ve certainly proven that we can be based in other places. I think, from my work as well, I happen to live in New York. It makes a lot of things easier, but a lot of our clients are somewhere else. Being on a plane, traveling, or being on video conference all the time, these are things that by now should be normal. Do we really need the nine to five? We have clients that are across multiple time zones. If we stuck to nine to five, we would never be able to talk to some of them.
If we build in flexibility at the system now– I know this is going to be very challenging, going from very rigid regimen existent to a flexible and loose one. In this short term, it’s going to be a pretty big adjustment for a lot of folks, but I think it’s kind of easier if we start now. Ideally, a few years ago, we would have started this. This is really the only way we’ll be able to approach future work and work that is not very cookie cutter and clearly defined. This goes back to our earlier conversation about generalists versus specialists, and how that equation is going to change.
[00:26:56] Adam: Well, yes. I think problems are going to get more specific and unique. We’ll have less stamped-out, repeatable assignments in a lot of cases. I do have a question. If this is where it’s going– I was pretty fortunate, and I suspect you were too, to have some mentors that gave me time, pointed me in directions, and answered my dumb questions when I was really young in this business, even when I was still in school.
If those specialists are not present within the organization, who will mentor young people? Or not even necessarily young people, but inexperienced people that are looking to get that training or additional help. Have you seen any successful modeling of that kind of mentorship? Or is it all happening as an extra curricular?
[00:27:48] Ana: I think, at the moment, it’s all happening as an extra curricular, and I say this because I think I’ve been very fortunate in my career to have stumbled upon the right kinds of people. I’ve stumbled upon folks who would support this flexibility even before I could articulate what it really was. Now, when you think about how people form their mentorship teams, it’s not necessarily somebody from the company that you’re working at today. It’s more of a personal board concept, which is something that I’ve talked about quite a few times, actually.
I accidentally stumbled upon fairly early on in my career, but has proven to be a really transformative type of setups. Basically, at any given time, you pick five to eight people who are very close to you. Some family, some friends, some professional acquaintances, peers, et cetera. You consult with them on big professional decisions, personal decisions, just like a corporate board. Once a quarter, you kind of run through some things with this group of people. Like with corporate boards, the group of people can change over time and you don’t want to have all family or on group over-indexing others. You want to have this overall feedback.
I think structures like that are going to prove to be that type of mentorship network that folks need. Because it’s easier than ever to reach out to people online, I’d ideally like to see folks try to structure those kinds of mentorship groupings. I don’t have a really good word for it other than board. I guess like mentorship grouping or whatever.
[00:29:55] Adam: No, that’s a great concept. That’s the place where regional proximity can be negative. Being in a place like New York or somewhere a bigger market or more condensed market, being out here in Arizona can be challenging just because there are fewer of the people doing what I’m trying to do than you have. In the East Coast and most of those major markets or even LA. That’s a challenge I think individuals will see. I want to ask you about the flip side of that. We’ve worked out a model where I can go and accommodation of in-person and digital advisory board that I built which I love that idea of the board. What does it mean for a company though? If I’m starting a company, you started sparrow and you want to build that to 20 years from now, what does it mean that internally a company wouldn’t be mentoring people necessarily. Would that mean more people changing jobs and leaving jobs more fluidity and less long-term, even less long-term employees? How do you see that working?
[00:31:06] Ana: I think that the concept of how we value a length of employment needs to change too. I don’t think there’s necessarily a correlation between a length of employment and really anything because again looking at US companies in particular and just anecdotally looking at my own network, I know a lot of people who would have jumped ship or left to other jobs but they’re shackled by health care and similar things that we talked about or they’re just stimulated enough in their current roles not to rock the boat but want to spend extra time working on themselves, working on other projects et cetera. I think that how somebody perceives work, in general, is very individual. What I like to focus on throughout all of my companies in all of the teams I’ve built over the years is, for me flexibility is really religion and whatever that means to each individual person.
For some folks, it might be, “Hey, I need to finish my work every day at three, I’ll log in again at 8:00 PM after I’ve put my kids to bed, but I need that time to focus on other things,” Or it might be, “Hey, I want to work on a new project every quarter. I want to work with a new client. I want to work in a new region. I want to expand my horizons.” I think in the future companies that are able to understand better what motivates each person that they are employing as opposed to assuming that everybody wants to be promoted every two years, get a title bump and things like that. Those are going to be the companies that are going to ultimately win, and that goes back to the whole de-structuring of how we think about work today. I think we assume that everybody wants the same kinds of outcomes from work and I think there are a lot of people who are very happy with having stable employment and not necessarily thinking about changing roles, changing industries or changing professions. There’s also a really significant group of folks who think about work differently. There’s really no company model that matches that today and not to mention the gig economy again.
[00:33:37] Adam: It’s gotten a black eye, but I don’t think it applies to the people that we are talking about.
[00:33:46] Ana: This is driving me nuts because I have been trying to come up with a better name for it and as of late we’ve been calling it like the high-end gig economy which is somehow even worse than just gig economy. This is the thing that’s keeping me up at nights now. It needs a better name. It really needs a better brand because it’s not really doing justice to how empowering it can be, how creative it can be and how much of a better outcome we can get if we are able to transition into this new method of work.
[00:34:22] Adam: Also, it’s the black eye hasn’t been given to the economy part of that phrase, it’s been given to the gig part. Knowledge work is typically not thought of as a gig.
[00:34:32] Ana: Yes. It’s not, but when you look at companies and how they think about bringing in part-time talent, there’s very little distinction today between that. It’s like, “Oh, we need this person to do this one thing,” as opposed to, “We would need this type of person with these kinds of skill sets that could help with these 4 or 7 or 10 or however many different things.” The most difficult thing today for a freelancer, working for a large company is to when you’re working in one department to go and do that same thing for a different department or a different office. It really shouldn’t be that way.
[00:35:23] Adam: [laughs] I think you are right. I’ve having lived that.
[00:35:27] Adam: Another big driver around rethinking work, well there’s really two huge drivers that have inspired a lot of our thinking [unintelligible 00:35:40] this. We see this in our daily engagements with clients, it is the flexibility and transitioning. For example, “Hey, we are going to have a senior leader who’s about to go on maternity leave. Are we going to need to pause these three or four projects?” You go, “Well, no, that’s a really temporary state.” “Well, what happens if the person doesn’t come back from a maternity leave?” “Well, then that’s a different story. Why wouldn’t they? They’re a senior leader. They are really good at their job.” That kicks off two different kinds of conversations. One is, “Are you able to support people as an organization who are going through life changes?” That then goes into, “Well, wait a minute we have in the US we are about to have the largest generation of folks who are about to retire, or they’re going to reach retirement age but not necessarily want to retire especially if they’re knowledge workers.
What are we going to do with them? We don’t really have an easy way to– there’s no marketplace where you can go and find somebody who spent 30 years as a senior executive who now has extra time on their hands and whatnot. We’ve been thinking of these transitions whether with women it’s usually around maternity and leave. We’ve seen so much research around the pay discrepancy between men and women and how having children negatively impacts women from an earning perspective as to opposed to as really beneficial for men. Can more flexibility help with that. Thinking of retirees. Thinking of people who are interested in changing verticals.
This is the other things that’s really interesting from a how structured our work lives are. If you want to go from let’s say advertising into e-commerce, those two industries are very similar, and it’s very easy to transition from one to another or I should say, it should be. If you are mid-career and you’re looking to switch from one industry to another, it’s not so easy. Even within advertising if you spent most of your career on the by side and you want to see what it’s like on the sell side or you want to go and be an executive at a brand, for example, again it’s not how we think about somebody’s capabilities and what they bring to the table. If you’re running one type of company, you want to hire people who’ve had experience with just that type of company. In today’s world that’s’ pretty myopic. We are going through so much transition that people who’ve colored a little bit outside of the lines are much better predisposed to be successful in this coming economy, in today’s economy as well.
[00:38:52] Adam: That’s the kind of thinking you need to bring in as not somebody who solved that exact thing before but somebody who’s got a different perspective than the rest of the organization. That is the [unintelligible 00:39:02]
[00:39:02] Ana: Exactly. You hit the nail on the head. As companies, we still think, “Oh, this is the problem I have. Let me find somebody who solved exactly that problem.” The problem is that by the time that person starts you are no longer solving that particular problem because that problem has evolved. This is the reality of the pace of change that we’re seeing. The reality of a very digital-first world. If you’re hiring a vice president, it’s going to take you six to nine month to find somebody, and then it’s going to take them another month and a half to start and then the usual 90 days for the to rump up. We’re talking about a year. What problem in today’s world stays exactly the same for a whole year? I can’t think of many or any really. There’s that fluidity is here already. We are just not really equipped to deal with it
readily and that’s the problem that we see at current clients and the problem that we hope to solve moving forward.
[00:40:10] Adam: Wow that’s awesome. I’m really glad that I think that’s a perfect place to end. I’m really happy you just got to that point. That’s a very big exclamation point for me. Clients problems still remain the same every year.
[00:40:20] Ana: If you find one let me know. I’m really curious. I don’t think there are —
[00:40:25] Adam: Jesus, little remains the same in a week.
[00:40:27] Ana: Yes, I think well just look at the last week that we’ve had in advertising. This weekend with Martin Sorrell again resigning, this is going to have a tremendous impact on not just the structure of WPP but possibly how we think about holding companies and giving everybody a new found lease on rethinking how we’re going to market here. A few days before that, we had the Facebook hearings and GPRS is coming in a few weeks like nothing about this is static, except the way companies think about tackling it. It’s pretty static and anybody who now built like an 18 month plan has to be ready to reevaluate that plan, if not every quarter, then certainly every six months. That’s the reality of it.
[00:41:27] Adam: Yes, even quarterly seems hard to lock onto it.
[00:41:30] Ana: Yes, and that’s where we’re seeing a lot of friction because you need to come up with a new way of planning that can account both for short term, medium term, and long term and — This is maybe a little bit self-serving but I think folks who had product management background and had put things on a roadmaps have the advantage here because this is exactly the kind of challenge that you would solve regularly and many times over but that’s not really something that’s used in financial planning as a discipline like corporate financial planning or budgeting. That’s interesting and that’s how we get these newer disciplines that are kind of cross-cutting and covering couple different areas.
[00:42:20] Adam: I love that. Well, you know what? I think I would love you hinted at something that you’ll be releasing soon which maybe we’ll have to do a sequel to this because I have a feeling you and I could talk about this for another hour.
[00:42:29] Ana: Yes, probably easily but let’s play that part from one to two, it will be much more exciting then. We’ll have fun.
[00:42:37] Adam: Absolutely, we’ll set up a sequel for sure. Well, Ana tell people where they can find you.
[00:42:43] Ana: You can find me on Twitter as AEXM. That’s the easiest way to get in touch with me. Barring that, please come to hellosparrow.com. You can read more about our advisory business, sparrow advisors, and fairly soon be able to see this new thing that we’re cooking up for the future of work.
[00:43:05] Adam: I will be checking that frequently to see that for sure. Ana I thank you again for making time and for playing scheduling with me. I know we had some starting stuff.
[00:43:16] Ana : We did, but I’m very glad we connected, this is a lot of fun. I am very jealous it’s a really rainy miserable day today in the Northeast. I’m hoping we get Spring sometime pretty soon finally.
[00:43:29] Adam: We actually have a cloud here in Scottsdale. I feel terrible too.
[00:43:34] Ana: Well. [laughs]
[00:43:38] Adam: I’ll leave you with that.
[00:43:39] Ana: Okay, thank you.
[00:43:40] Adam: All right. Excellent. Thank you again.
[00:43:42] Ana: Thanks.
[silence]
[00:49:08] [END OF AUDIO]