Creating Agile Talent Ecosystems for DoD with Mike McGinley

Mike McGinley [00:00:00]:
We all understand we're in a great power competition. We know we need to move fast. So my challenge is, if there is that bureaucracy, I want you to prove to us why we can accept the risk of isolating talent that's already ready from the mission that needs to be accomplished. And if you take that view, it changes everything. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Through our blood and your bonds, we crushed the Germans before he got here. You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.

Ryan Connell [00:00:46]:
Hello. This is Ryan Connell with the chief digital and artificial intelligence office, joined here today with Mike McGinley. Mike, how you doing?

Mike McGinley [00:00:52]:
I am well, Ryan, thanks for taking the time to talk today.

Ryan Connell [00:00:55]:
Yeah, I'm very excited. Looking forward to getting into it. You want to just kind of give a quick overview, introduction of yourself?

Mike McGinley [00:01:01]:
Sure. I am Mike McGinley. I've been working on the Gig Eagle project, which we'll talk about, I think, in depth today for the last six years. I currently serve as the mobilization assistant to the commander of the Air Force Lifecycle Management center as my reserve job, and I work at Google as a civilian.

Ryan Connell [00:01:25]:
Awesome.

Mike McGinley [00:01:26]:
Appreciate it.

Ryan Connell [00:01:26]:
Yeah, that was one of the things I was going to ask you. I was, like, looking, getting prepped for today, and I was like, General McGinley? And then I'm like, wait, he works at Google? And I was like, I'm confused. It must be reserved duty. Okay, so. So what's your military career look like?

Mike McGinley [00:01:40]:
Sure. No, absolutely. So I've done a little bit of everything. Cats and dogs. So let's start off. We always do the caveat, right? So when I'm talking with you today, Ryan is as Mike, not as a DoD guy, per se. One things I hope we get to do is really push the boundaries. So I want to be open and say, hey, this is Mike speaking in my personal capacity.

Mike McGinley [00:01:58]:
I am a career acquisition officer in the United States Air Force, but I've been an officer training school commander. I've worked at the defense information systems agency. I spent four years as a military legislative liaison working on capital help. I've worked at US Cyber command for admiral riders on a public private partnership endeavor. And then in 2016, I was asked to come back on active duty to open up the Boston office of the Defense Innovation Unit, then experimental for the secretary of defense. And I said, that sounds phenomenal, and came on active duty from 2016 to 2020 to do that, follow that up with reserve positions at secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, working for General Richardson and then the Air Force Research Laboratory and ultimately to Air Force Lifecycle Management center, where I just started the 1 July. So a relatively new assignment for me.

Ryan Connell [00:02:53]:
Appreciate the background. So you mentioned your time at what was then Diux, and I think that's where gig Eagle was born. But let's just dive into it. So what's gig Eagle?

Mike McGinley [00:03:06]:
All right, here we go. So gig Eagle is DoD's first ever whole of nation talent marketplace. And if you step back, you say, what does that, what does that mean? Right. What I hope people say is, huh, that's pretty audacious. That is ambitious. And I would say absolutely, yes. That is what we're doing. We are building DoD's first ever whole of nation talent marketplace.

Mike McGinley [00:03:33]:
And we can get into the nitty gritty, the nuts and bolts of this, but that's what we're doing here, essentially. Think of it as a mashup between LinkedIn and Uber. It's a lightning fast way to match people to mission. And we talk all the time about talent permeability. We talk about extreme teaming between and among war fighters, technologists, acquirers and beyond. This is a talent marketplace to make that happen, and it fits within a concept, an operating concept called the agile talent ecosystem. And I'll give this a brief overview of that, and then I'll step back and we can talk through some questions. But I want you to think of the agile talent ecosystem as really three components.

Mike McGinley [00:04:21]:
On the demand side, there's something called beyond team collaboration. This is the concept of looking beyond your organization or unit to find, to identify and engage talent for a mission that you might have. And we're talking short term talent here of, well, I have a need. Where can I find that talent? On the supply side, the concept we call talent fluidity. And what we're doing there is saying, hey, Ryan, you have the ability to do more than one job, to be useful and help out across a variety of organizations, even beyond your own. And that is talent fluidity, and they meet in the middle. That's this marketplace we're talking about. That marketplace is called gig eagle.

Mike McGinley [00:05:01]:
And that really changes everything about the way that the Department of Defense identifies and engages talent. So I know there's a lot there, so I'll stop and pause, but that's the overarching concept.

Ryan Connell [00:05:12]:
Okay. All right, so, yeah, clear as mud so far. So I want to ask some questions. I'll just take me, for example. I'm a DOD civilian. I definitely have the need for talent. Are you filling billets or is this contractor support or. What's that.

Ryan Connell [00:05:30]:
What's that arrangement look like?

Mike McGinley [00:05:32]:
Yeah, sure. So gig Eagle is designed for short term work between 4 hours and roughly 90 days. So we're not looking to do is to find and help people move to new assignments, at least not directly. What we're trying to do is help people think differently about talent, and maybe I'll give an example that I think might help make this clear. So I want you to imagine we have an operational commander that has a new problem that he's trying to solve, and he's facing an adversary who's come up with a new way of engaging, and it involves a new form of technology that the US has never seen before. So that commander has the ability to certainly look within his own staff to identify and engage the talent. But if it's a new or novel concept or a new or novel approach that the adversary is using, that's hard to do. Right? Because maybe we haven't seen that before.

Mike McGinley [00:06:24]:
But what if we gave that commander the opportunity to say, you know what? This is the problem I'm trying to solve. This is what I'm seeing. Let me essentially form my own dream team of talent from across the country or our allies to come in, to form an ad hoc team to bring in people. Now, like you could talk about, I need someone who is a material expert from the Air Force Research Laboratory, maybe a Marine who has drone experience, maybe a reservist who has commercial drone experience, maybe somebody from, oh, gosh, Air Force special operations command. It doesn't matter. What you're able to do is identify talent at the skills level from anywhere around the country and to bring that in. And what we're doing is we're building this out in steps. The first step right now is limited to members of the guard and reserve who are actually providing that talent pool.

Mike McGinley [00:07:19]:
And over time, we're going to open the aperture and let additional groups, including those around the country, participate. But we're starting now with reservists and guardsmen. Now, you as a civilian, to answer your question directly, you do have that ability to go in and to say, yes, this is the problem that I am trying to solve. Just like that, commander. So you could say, look, I have a really challenging contracting question or an artificial intelligence question that I need help with. Ill give you another example that actually just came up the other day where there was an organization looking for an artificial intelligence related question. They said, hey, Mike, can you help out? I was able to go into the gig Eagle platform and type in and very quickly say, this is the problem that I am trying to solve. This is generally the skillsets that I think I might need because it's an AI based platform, it was able to reach out across the members we have on the platform already and to find members who had large language model experience and to identify them and then allow me to contact them immediately, which was phenomenal.

Mike McGinley [00:08:22]:
I was able to do that and then bring them back to engage with the active duty organization who made that request. Now here's the kicker. The requesting organization was an air force active duty organization. The members who had that skillset and who were able to support it were army reservists. Thats never been done before and thats what makes it so exciting.

Ryan Connell [00:08:44]:
Yeah, thats super interesting. So are they doing that in their official reserve capacity?

Mike McGinley [00:08:51]:
Thats right. Got it.

Ryan Connell [00:08:52]:
Okay. And then im a little ignorant to the rule set and maybe its different across the services and branches, but reserve time is something like a weekend a month and two weeks a year or something like that. But it can be all combined as aggregate.

Mike McGinley [00:09:07]:
Great question. And so what we've found is even over the last few years, this has become even more prevalent. Reservists have a lot of flexibility in how they serve. Traditional reserve units are in that two weekend a month, two weeks a year. You also have thousands and thousands of reservists who are, we call individual mobilization eventis who have a lot of flexibility because they support active food units. But regardless if they have their supervisors permission, reservists are able to provide this type of short term support using a variety of different authorities. And one of the challenges that we're working through right now and have a policy team that's doing this is to identify, okay, how exactly does that work? How do we navigate the byzantine pay systems policies that each service puts on its reservists to allow them to do this cross service work? Because for this concept to work, we need to make sure that it's seamless as possible. But that's incredibly powerful because what you start to see is the right talent.

Mike McGinley [00:10:09]:
He's almost got free agency. Market for talent. The right talent will go to where it's needed most, even if that's an outside organization. And it's important to clarify, we're talking about short term work. Right. This doesn't replace your normal job. You still do your normal job. But what allows you to do is say, hey, you know what, I can asynchronously meeting on my own time, if that's available provide work and say, I'm going to give you a deliverable after hours.

Mike McGinley [00:10:33]:
Certainly I can come on, I can do the orders or come tdy or temporary duty if needed. But there's just so much flexibility. So what we're doing is just building that platform and then the users can, can use it as they need.

Ryan Connell [00:10:45]:
Yeah, this is really cool. And so don't take my drilling of questions as anything negative. I'm just digging in because I want to know. So I'm curious, have you had any issues or hiccups? It's been six years. I mean, have you had any issues in terms of, like it, like someone getting a laptop to work this or not? Clearances, really, but just like permissions and all those types of things. Has there been any issues there? Have you overcome that?

Mike McGinley [00:11:08]:
All the time? All the time. Right. And that's why I love the name of this podcast. Right? This is defense Mavericks. We are battling against the bureaucracy every single day. And so I would never come in here and say we have all the answers. We do not. But what we're showing here is that the operational impact of doing this is just so strong that if there are necessary changes in statute or regulation or policy, then we need to confront them head on.

Mike McGinley [00:11:37]:
And the way to think about this, I would say, is really flip the script, which is, we all understand we're in a great power competition. We know we need to move fast. So my challenge is, if there is that bureaucracy, I want you to prove to us why we can accept the risk of isolating talent that's already ready from the mission that needs to be accomplished. And if you take that view, it changes everything. And so we've been able to start to show success. The actual platform has only been up, really. We had our initial public launch since this spring. A lot of that back end work.

Mike McGinley [00:12:17]:
Ryan has been battling through the bureaucracy. And as far as an acquisition itself, I wouldn't give a shout out to the defense innovation unit. Did a phenomenal job of identifying and engaging and using other transaction authority to get this contract moving quickly. In fact, from the time Diu opened the solicitation to the time the contract was actually delivered to MVP was about a year. Right. So a lot of this other work has been back in, in change. Management within the department itself is not a tech issue.

Ryan Connell [00:12:48]:
Interesting. Yeah, I remember, I don't remember how many years ago it was, but at some point, you and I have a LinkedIn thread talking about Gig Eagle, and I don't think it was that recent. So interesting to know that it recently launched and the DIU OT effort maybe an obvious question, but effectively, what you're procuring or what was procured or agreed to was the platform and the AI algorithm that is like the matchmaker, is that right?

Mike McGinley [00:13:15]:
That's correct. And so what we did is we adapted an existing talent intelligence platform. It's an AI based talent intelligence platform and customized it loosely for the military's use. And it's been phenomenal. And if you think about this, there are benefits, really, across the board. But if you're an a unit, all of a sudden, Ryan, you have access to talent that's across the Department of Defense. And eventually it goes beyond that, as I was living to earlier. Right.

Mike McGinley [00:13:41]:
You could bring in that professor from Caltech, and you can bring in somebody who is from Australia. Right. Some of our allies. If you're a headquarters organization, you get analytics about your people, because, remember, this is a skills based platform. So what you can do is understand at the skills based level all the people who have signed up. So you don't just see someone as in an MOS or an AFSC, in a military occupation special or an air force specialty code or naval. Right. It is really what skills they bring to the fight.

Mike McGinley [00:14:11]:
And if you're an individual, all of a sudden, you get access to a range of opportunities across the Department of Defense that are incredible. So, again, I hope that provides a little bit extra color and context to what we're trying to do.

Ryan Connell [00:14:24]:
Yeah, no, it definitely does. Okay. And I love your reference. The idea that this is defense Mavericks, and this seems like an obvious situation where there was a lot of red tape to get through. Have you had to, like, are there, like, blanket mous in place that support this now, or are you having to deal with that, a one off, or. It's not actually something that's required, and you had to fight through that just to get that green lit there.

Mike McGinley [00:14:48]:
Great question. We actually have some moas in place. In fact, we've had an MOA in place with the Space force for several years now for this use, and what we do is the gig. Eagle team, I have a people team, a policy team, a product team, and a communications team. The policy team's main thrust is how do we make sure we overcome the statutory, regulatory, and policy hurdles. What do we need to put in place? How many exception to policy memos do we need to engage? And every day there's some other block that we find. And I tell the team there's an old football running back, Barry Sanders, that I always refer to, and it was so incredible, Barry was that he just had these, just these legs that just kept churning toward the goal line, and you just couldn't get him. I mean, he would just spin away from the defenders and just keep pounding away until he came across the goal line.

Mike McGinley [00:15:39]:
And that's essentially my message to my team, is, we've got to do that. We've got to be that Barry Sanders to get into the end zone. And so we hit him every day, hit those policy blockers, but we just need to move in, hustle around.

Ryan Connell [00:15:51]:
Awesome. Yeah, I love that metaphor. Curious, you know, and maybe just kind of zooming out a bit in terms of, like, how you even something inspire you. Was it because you were a reservist, that you were like, oh, my gosh, I have this skill set. I wish I could help someone. Like, how did that even initiate?

Mike McGinley [00:16:07]:
Yeah, it was so when I showed up at the defense innovation unit and I was activated, it was amazing, right? We had the secretary of defense came in, and I'm standing next to him. I'm like, this is phenomenal. This is a game changer. We have our own office in Boston. I was with our chief scientist, Doctor Bernadette Johnson, who was brilliant. And it was the two of us. We had this big office in Kendall Square in Cambridge and outside of Boston. Then I said, okay, what do we do now? How do we hire people? And, Brian, I tell you what.

Mike McGinley [00:16:34]:
The diU, we had new missions that would come in every day, and people said, help us with this. What I realized is they required a level of specialization that was tough to find in the talent that we needed. By the time I found them, because I could get the talent, everyone wanted to work with us. It took me six, nine months plus to be able to engage them effectively. And what I realized is, that's an incredible amount of risk for the department. We're all aware of this. We talk about all the time, but there was no solution. And so this was 2017.

Mike McGinley [00:17:07]:
I started thinking about this concept, and then in 2018, I think it was, remember, I called for an Uber to go across town, and I'm literally getting into the Uber, and I reached out to close the door, and it hit me. I said, wait a second. This is a solid problem, right? I'm sitting in diu. DiU's job is to identify existing commercial technology and bring it to the department. I'm sitting in an Uber that I called using an algorithm that's already been developed that matches my demand signal with talent. What if we did the same for talent in the DOD, and that was the Aha moment that launched gig Eagle.

Ryan Connell [00:17:43]:
Yeah, that's incredible. Yeah, I like that. So from there, it was still Diux, it was still new. Not the DiU that we see in the news today with the big plus up in funding, I'm sure. So navigating, kind of like finding funding and was that an easy thing for you, or is that pretty challenging?

Mike McGinley [00:18:01]:
It was. Everything was. Every part of this has been a battle again, that's what's interesting for me is, and I never know, hey, is this the right path or not? But I've stuck with it to try to do this. Being in DiU was fantastic because we had access into members of Congress and their staffs, who were frequently come in, got word of this project, and they funded 3 million in seed funding for this and put it into the 2021 NDAA, which was great. But frankly, even getting support within DIU itself to get resources to run this program was a major challenge. And I also want to give a major hat tip to Chuck Kubik, who was with me. I came back and I said, hey, chuck, check out this crazy idea. What do you think? And he's like, okay, I'll look in to see what's out there.

Mike McGinley [00:18:50]:
And he did a ton of research to identify existing companies that were doing this, but then he went off orders for a little over a year and a half. And so I was back to square one, trying to do march through the woods. But once we got things moving again at DIU, what I found is the amount of talent that was attracted to this product was huge. And so everybody who would join the team would take things in a way that just. I never even considered it just made it better and better and better. And so that's what got us to where we are today, which is a team that's just phenomenal, who's working to make this and overcome a lot of the barriers that we've discussed.

Ryan Connell [00:19:28]:
Yeah. And so I think you said six years, did you say, or did I read 600 users?

Mike McGinley [00:19:35]:
So now, so that was in May 1, we had about 600 users. As of today, we have over 1100 users, which is great. I'm sure people will debate this ad nauseam. But the question is, how fast do you scale? You want to scale, but you want to make sure you're getting feedback from those initial users before you scale too much. We also have, in addition, those are just workers, Brian. We have roughly 350 gig managers, and those are active duty or civilian users. So right now, to be clear, the workers we have in the platform are reserve members of the reserve or guard from each service. And then the managers are active duty or civilian.

Mike McGinley [00:20:18]:
And the question is, hey, how do we make a market? Right. It only works if demand and supply balance. And that's a challenge. Right. So again, what, what I want to convey here is this is an idea that was built on existing commercial technology. We didn't invent this. What we've done is pulled together really brilliant people as a team to think about how do we use this technology to change the way that the DoD identifies, engages talent and in a way that can ultimately we aspire to hit a whole of nation level of collaboration.

Ryan Connell [00:20:47]:
Yeah. And so you said something that I didn't even think to ask, which was that it's currently staffed with active duty, which in addition to getting your funding, you had to at some point convince people that you needed billets to make this happen. So good for you. That's pretty cool too.

Mike McGinley [00:21:05]:
Yeah. So that's another question. So where does this go next? Right. And so these are all open questions of who's supporting. And a lot of this is, this is a coalition of the willing. Right. We don't have a program office. So this is something where I've pulled together a group of, again, of believers from across the department.

Mike McGinley [00:21:23]:
And what we also try to do is get direct feedback and honest feedback. And some people will say, hey, this doesn't work. And we want to hear that. We want to hear those voices because we need to shape this into something that is strong and resilience and can help us really provide a department with incredible resource as we engage and support. The military's part of great power competition.

Ryan Connell [00:21:45]:
The interesting part about the relationship to Uber and part of the inspiration is you want to collect user feedback in order to drive future requirements and iterate forward. You have two users. You have the reservists in this case where you're at today that potentially want to use their skillset. That may not be the specific billet that they're in the military for, but they're just super involved with AI and they want to lend that expertise. That's a user for you. And then you also obviously have the skill requirement owner. So you have to collect feedback on both ends of that.

Mike McGinley [00:22:18]:
We do. I'll hit that. I'm also going to add a third user. Right. Those are the headquarters functions because this is what I'm so excited about. Once you just imagine this, you have on the demand side. If you're the headquarters and you can see, almost think of like, remember way back, the movie minority report with Tom Cruise, back when this kind of, like, touchscreen was pretty incredible. People said, that's amazing.

Mike McGinley [00:22:42]:
Can we do that in your mind? I want you to imagine the left hand side. It's just demand signal. And you're thinking all these different nodes. And from a headquarters function, you can say, wow, all these nodes are different units. And I can see the demand requests and what types of talent are they requesting? And on the right hand side, all my users, hundreds of thousands of users, some of them dod, et cetera. But I can tell what service they're in, what department and organization they're in, and then down to the individual level, who's supplying that talent. Now, imagine if this kind of links in nodes image in your head. That's the value.

Mike McGinley [00:23:20]:
That's the third customer, and there's the headquarters function. That is incredibly powerful. We've never had anything like that. Think about what that does for global force management. So the feedback that they're getting is, wow. I can constantly see that the army is requesting support for artificial intelligence experts, and the air force is providing it. Are we resourced effectively? It changes the way that you think about talent and the way our military structure. Let me go back.

Mike McGinley [00:23:47]:
I get excited about that. So they go back to the first two that you mentioned in your right, the gig workers, when they finish a gig, right, in between 4 hours and 90 days, they can give feedback about the gig itself. And on the other side, the system is set up that the gig manager who started that gig and left that gig has an ability to provide feedback to the worker. And so what you start to see is, over time, you get that feedback loop, and it's like any market should be right. You start to get an understanding of who's providing quality work. And there's another piece in here as far as feedback that I'm hoping we can implement. We're working toward it. It is something I want you to think about as a digital insignia rack.

Mike McGinley [00:24:30]:
You think about what people will do for some kind of an accolade, even military ribbons. They're very hard fought and earned a. What we're doing is looking to build a digital insignia rack. Meaning, Ryan, let's say you come on the platform, and you say, hey, I see Marine Corps warfighting laboratory. McWill is making a request as a gig, and I can provide them with my contracting experience. And you do, and you give them 12 hours, and you talk a part of it's consulting. You tell them what you understand what they're trying to do, you talk them through it, and then you write a little white paper, you go up and you use generative AI to help you create a white paper and deliver that. Awesome.

Mike McGinley [00:25:06]:
So you're happy. You're like, wow, I supported McWill. That's awesome. Right? I've supported another organization. McWill is like, wow, this Ryan guy is brilliant. We should hire him full time. But he solved our mission problem. And then when it's done, you actually earn, on your public facing profile, the McWill unit icon.

Mike McGinley [00:25:25]:
Now, how cool is that? So imagine as you go through, you start to get and collect and can display the icons of the units that you've supported. When we think about what this means as an incentive to create and build a joint force that people understand how other organizations are working, that is incredibly powerful.

Ryan Connell [00:25:42]:
Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, nowhere to this scale, but that's something that I supported in my last organization was letting. It was civilian focused, but army civilians supporting an air force contract award, vice versa, that kind of thing, from a rotational perspective, so very different, but same purpose in terms of joint force. So, yeah, that's awesome.

Mike McGinley [00:26:03]:
Love it.

Ryan Connell [00:26:04]:
Yeah. So we talked a lot about history and where you are today. Curious. And you talked about the idea that today we're hitting the reserve units, potentially tomorrow, or whenever that future state looks like it's the professor from some university. Where is there a limit, like, in terms of where you want to kind of take this or your vision standpoint? Uh, would it be opening the ability for anyone to take gigs and. Or also opening the gigs to potentially more than a civilian or DoD or military unit? Like, would there ever be a reservist taking a job at a raytheon, Boeing, etcetera, private company? Or do you want to limit the use cases to internal DoD work?

Mike McGinley [00:26:48]:
Yeah, that is. That starts to get mind bending. Right. I love the way you're thinking through that. Okay, so let's kind of. We could talk through this. Let's start and say my initial vision here is this is a whole of nation collaboration for national security. And so the first few steps would really be to support the Department of Defense, primarily, but also other federal organizations.

Mike McGinley [00:27:12]:
Right. So this could be, you can name them VHS or FBI or the like, or even commerce. Right. And you can see how there is an overlap, and then you need to think about, how do we do this? How do we get somebody who is that professor or an industry expert, and how do we bring them in? And that's an unsolved problem. One of the ways that I'm looking to thinking about this, I would love to have feedback. If anyone is listening and has feedback, please let me know. Is thinking about the use of the standby reserve in a different way. So there are different categories of reservists law.

Mike McGinley [00:27:48]:
And so one category is called the standby reservist. And it doesn't require you to physical fitness test or to muster, et cetera. And so it might be a way for us to bring in that professor and allow them almost to become a member of the standby reserve. Okay, so that's the first part of how do we do that? And that's a, that is an open question that we are actually thinking through. So we'd love to have that discussion as a follow up then is, okay, can we use this outside to that? And I don't know why not. Right. If we really think about this, we say, okay, this is in the country's best interest, this level of collaboration. How can we do this? Let me give you another example.

Mike McGinley [00:28:28]:
So there are three, and we've been talking about right now of the standard gig eagle as a system, but we're also working on two others. One is gig Eagle high, and that's for classified work. And then in another one, which is actually thrilled and so proud of the team for working on is called gig Eagle Soar. And that's the spouse opportunity, access and recognition system. And that's gig Eagle for military spouses. And that is a skills based marketplace for those spouses over the course of their career. And so in some ways, it's getting closer to what you were talking about, Ryan. And if you think about that, being able to identify at the skills level and then to create those communities, that is all in the interest of national security.

Mike McGinley [00:29:14]:
So I think what you're saying absolutely has merged. It'll be interesting to see how this evolves.

Ryan Connell [00:29:19]:
Yeah, so that's interesting on the, on the soar element, because it's now you're bringing in, and I guess it's the same with the university professor as an example, in the standby reservists, they'd be getting paid by their standby reserve duty, whereas the military spouse, for example, now you're kind of introducing a monetary element of this, I assume, which that's probably a whole other thing to tackle.

Mike McGinley [00:29:41]:
Exactly. Exactly. And so what we're looking at is, okay, is there a business case here? And a lot of times it's going to come down to, is there an operational use case, is this important for the mission? And at this stage, the answer is looking like an absolutely yes. So we're working through, okay, well, who pays it well in any market, right? This is demand and supply. If you have a demand for account, you should be prepared to pay for that talent. And then we say, okay, got it. How do we do that? Right? And so these are questions that need to be solved, especially when you're talking about people who aren't currently in the department, and how do you bring them in in a way that's quick. Right.

Mike McGinley [00:30:19]:
I started off by saying the purpose of this is this agile talent ecosystem. So we can't wait for six months or eight months. It has to be done now as a use case. So those are conversations that we'll need to have at as we move forward.

Ryan Connell [00:30:33]:
Yeah, awesome. Do you have, like, in terms of where you are today, is supply equal to demand, or are there more gigs than people interested in gigs or vice versa? Just curious. I mean, potentially people that are listening may be interested in on both sides, but just curious if there's one particular side that's kind of more needed right now.

Mike McGinley [00:30:55]:
I'd say right now, what I want to see are more people creating gigs of, because I think there's a change management component of that. If you're coming in and you're a member, you're a gig worker, you're like, okay, I'm here, I've uploaded and it's actually, I should have mentioned this. If when you come on, it's, you log into www. Dot gig Eagle dot Mel. It's gigeaglemil. And the first time you log on, you'll need your common access card. You set up your profile. It's as easy as uploading your resume.

Mike McGinley [00:31:25]:
Or you can even copy the URL from your LinkedIn profile. Boom. It pulls it all in. And you can add additional skills as you like. Whatever you want to show up or not to show up, it's totally your choice. Once you've done that, you say, here, I'm ready to go. Then the question is, how do people even know that they are able to make a gig and get your support? Because no one's done this before. And so I would say for people who are listening, is to really lean into this, to say, okay, here's the problem I'm trying to solve, and the way I like to talk about this, as a concept anyway, is this is undistorting.

Mike McGinley [00:31:58]:
The demand signal, what I mean by that is an organization or person may have a mission problem that they need to solve. She says, look, I have this problem, I need to solve it. But if you don't know that you can reach out and frankly create your own team of four people who are expert in this from around the country, I mean, that's mind blowing stuff, then you don't even realize you have that demand signal. Here's an example for you. Much the same way before Steve Jobs told me I needed an iPhone, I didn't know I needed an iPhone. Right. Or you can even take it back to BlackBerry days. So what happens is you've undistorted demand signal, and that's what we're doing here.

Mike McGinley [00:32:32]:
So the message is, yes, if you are a gig manager, if you have a problem that needs to be solved, get out on the platform and post something and see what comes out.

Ryan Connell [00:32:41]:
Yeah, that's great. I mean, as I'm listening, I'm getting super inspired. So a lot of opportunity to hear from what it sounds like. Mike, anything else? Getting kind of close to time, anything else that you wanted as big takeaway that I might have not asked but you wanted to make sure is articulated?

Mike McGinley [00:32:57]:
Mike yeah, sure. I mean, we have the chairman of joint chiefs of staff, General CQ Brown, specifically say we are in a war for talent. And I think that is a compelling message. That and his, he followed that statement on by saying we need to challenge convention. And when you think about combining those, we have the chairman who says we're to work for talent and then continues to say we're going to continue to challenge convention to ensure that we have the talent that we need. This is a direct answer to that. This is challenging convention. This is a revolutionary way to identify and engage talented in a way weve just never done before.

Mike McGinley [00:33:40]:
And as you just mentioned, Ryan, look, all of a sudden, if you realize that that demand signal that you have, every one of us has, you now have a chance to unlock that and you engage across other organizations in that. Beyond team collaboration concept that I mentioned earlier, that is game changing and its exciting. All this is also fraught with challenge. We have hurdles from operations, we have hurdles that are bureaucratic, and we need to work through this. This only works if we come at this together as a team. Right? So I encourage people to think very broadly, to think creatively and understand we are in the middle of a great power competition. So people need to get out and move, right? Let's move fast and break things, try it out, see what works, and have fun when you're doing it. And I think that people will be proud to have the opportunity to serve those organizations around the department that maybe even be outside their own and to feel like they're making a real mishy impact.

Ryan Connell [00:34:41]:
Yeah, that's awesome. Thanks, Mike. If you listen to some of the podcast episodes, you're probably guessing what's coming next. But I got to ask, as we close, would you dip your grilled cheese into hot chocolate?

Mike McGinley [00:34:58]:
Ah, well, it's hot in Boston, right? It's. It's 93 degrees. It feels like it's over 100. And so that is repulsive to think about. But here's what I tell you. We're going to flip that, right? So when I went to. We had a local pool this week, and I went in and said, you want something to eat? I looked, I said, yeah, I'll take a twix. And they said, do you want it frozen or not? And I said, frozen, of course.

Mike McGinley [00:35:20]:
That's fantastic. And they pulled the twix out of it. So I'm going to say this. What if we did that and we kind of broke up both pieces and we stuck them in the freezer, and then you have something that's kind of more of like cheese and chocolate. I say, yeah, if we can just maybe change it into a frozen state, a little cool treat by the pool might suffice.

Ryan Connell [00:35:41]:
I like it.

Mike McGinley [00:35:42]:
Awesome.

Ryan Connell [00:35:42]:
Hey, appreciate today. Amazing story and ambition, and very inspirational for the rest of the defense community. So just thank you and appreciate your time.

Mike McGinley [00:35:52]:
Thanks so much. It's a real pleasure to talk with you today. Ryan.