No Standing Gig
By Lisa Hammitt
“That was my gift…having the ability to put certain guys together that would create a chemistry and letting them go; letting them play what they knew, and above it.” Miles Davis, curator of the most popular and influential jazz recording of all time, Kind of Blue, created an experience where jazz geniuses of the time — Bill Evans, John Coltrane and Wynton Kelly — didn’t know what they were playing or who they were playing with until the recording. 50 years later, the US Congress reaffirmed Kind of Blue’s impact on American culture by naming it a national treasure.
Congress isn’t alone. Though he was considered an iconoclast at the time, Miles Davis’ effect on modal jazz and music puts him at the top of the list of influencers among musicians and artists as varied as Cicely Tyson and Jimi Hendrix. But, perhaps as he states, it’s his operating model that reveals his true genius: one that deliberately brought together talent to create an experience: a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Fast forward to January 2016. 90 million professionals are managing their careers with striking similarity to the way Davis’ players did in 1959. The Gig Economy, has Davis’ fingerprints all over it: it’s driven by peer-to-peer interaction, brings freedom to its members — shunning centralized control to share goods, services, purpose and meaning without any institution — and loyalty is solely to one another and to the experience. It’s nothing short of irreverent, introspective and, yes, iconoclastic. And, recently, I became a card-carrying member.
It was Roger Dickey, CEO of Gigster, or the Miles Davis of my present, who pulled me in. Like Miles, he’s hip, impossibly talented and cool — of course he’s a jazz lover — but the similarity is strongest in his ability to curate an experience. The godfather of rent-an-employee and 2015’s fastest growing developer network, Gigster pulls from over 1400 developers to staff its projects with an optimal mix of skill and chemistry.
His gig for me? Be part of a team creating a mobile app for recommending luxury gifts. My role in the ensemble was to apply the right underlying technology — akin to laying down the bass line. But from that workaday premise, we improvised our way into something that arguably extended the boundaries of mobile applications: leveraging a mixture of machine learning and rule-based logic to fuel recommendations, relying on intelligent algorithms to predict our next project move and building personalization and gamification into content curation.
The result may not be Kind of Blue, but it’s a pretty darn good app nonetheless.
In jazz, there’s the notion of “improvisational probability” — of all the ways to tear apart a song, which will work best with the players on hand? Gigster uses the same idea in app development, now basing it on IBM cognitive technology, in the sense that it uses predictive algorithms to guide the course of the project based on the experience and working styles of the people on its teams.
Trusting at our core that sharing this expertise would make it immersive, Roger and I took our gig to Westfield Centre in San Francisco for a live, 20-day holiday take-over, inside the mall. The result? A 12-week project narrowed down to 15 days, 259% over target for consumer usage and the most engaging experience of the holiday season in the city’s busiest shopping destination.
Like good jazz musicians, we broke ‘round midnight and are already on our next gig. Will we bring the band back together? Already in the works. Our gig has deep learning at its center, we have a lot of customers calling for it — from banks to aviation to micro-payment networks to agencies rebooting re-entrant professionals — and we will share it. So, if you find yourself at IBM’s InterConnect in Las Vegas this week, come share the experience or, if we miss you this time, check out the video on YouTube later.
