Balaji Bondili is head of Deloitte Pixel, a business within the global consulting firm that helps clients tap into the power of external crowds to deliver improved outcomes. In this episode, MBO Partners talks with Balaji about his ideas for the future of crowdsourcing, his views on the open talent economy, and his ideas for how to help companies be more open to using independent professionals and gig workers to meet business needs.

Balaji talks about how, after years as an international consultant he realized he wanted to make his own product. Instead of becoming a carpenter—which had been an option—he stayed within Deloitte as an intrapreneur to help build a new way of contributing to client outcomes through the power of the global crowd. He speaks about using independent workers as not only a source of great ideas but as a risk mitigation strategy and about how the supply side and the demand side of the open talent market can and must do better to improve opportunity for billions of people on the planet.

About This Episode’s Guest

Balaji Bondili is head of Deloitte Pixel, a business within a global consulting firm that helps clients tap into the power of external crowds to deliver improved outcomes in market research, prototype design, and data analytics. He has decades of experience helping global companies entering emerging markets, particularly working within the global healthcare sector. To learn more about his success developing and launching Pixel into an incubation hub within Deloitte, see the Harvard Business Review case study, “Deloitte’s Pixel (A): Consulting with Open Talent.”

About MBO Partners®

MBO Partners is a deep jobs platform that connects and enables independent professionals and microbusiness owners to do business safely and effectively with enterprise organizations. Its unmatched experience and industry leadership enable it to operate on the forefront of the independent economy and consistently advance the next way of working. For more information, visit mbopartners.com.

Episode hosted by Aassia Haq; produced, edited, and engineered by Leslie Jennings Rowley. With music by Brian Burrows