The gig economy will continue placing pressure on HR leaders, HR policies and HR processes to become more agile so that they can accommodate the kind of turbulence now being created by contingent workers as a growing element of their talent pool.  

The word "gig" has its origins in the music industry and now can be applied to all sorts of part-time employment: adjunct professors, management consultants, lawyers, doctors, farm managers, architects, street vendors, barbers, auto mechanics, landscapers, cab drivers, caregivers, truck drivers and more.

 

Most organizations have embraced the need to effectively identify their key talent who will enable them to thrive into the future.  Many conferences, articles and books have been focused on the contribution of key talent identified and developed through a rigorous process of talent management.  

The proliferation of PowerPoint within the U.S. armed forces is nothing new, and its presence is no surprise to those of us who have served within it. But one could argue that its use is so pervasive that it even structures how people think and how they make decisions.

So in some ways, Microsoft PowerPoint is the deadliest weapon in the U.S. military's arsenal. The question, though, is one of targeting: Toward whom is this weapon aimed?

While serving in Afghanistan during 2013, a friend and I pondered this. Fortunately, we were both in roles that somehow avoided being directly responsible for the production of specific PowerPoint slides on a regular basis, although we were frequent contributors to them. This particular friend and I both have young children, and we reflected upon how the use of meetings and PowerPoint often coincided in a cycle of dependency much like what is described in Laura Joffe Numeroff's popular children's book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

 

So, in homage to that wonderful book, we wrote what follows.