The Pop-Up Employer: Build a Team, Do the Job, Say Goodbye<br />In addition to True Story, the two professors enlisted one team<br />that built an app to help emergency medical technicians communicate with hospitals, and another that built a web tool to help a consulting firm run workshops for clients.<br />When the writers, who composed short poems for each game card, first submitted their work, he<br />and his business partner had one overriding impression: “Most of the content was really bad,” he said.<br />Temporary organizations capable of taking on complicated projects have existed for decades, of course, perhaps nowhere more prominently than in Hollywood, where producers assemble teams of directors, writers, actors, costume<br />and set designers and a variety of other craftsmen and technicians to execute projects with budgets in the tens if not hundreds of millions.<br />Business Talent Group teams frequently work on the kickoff of a new drug — devising the strategy for reaching out to patient groups, journalists, doctors<br />and insurers — and help pry open new markets for existing drugs.<br />Dave Summa, who worked on a team that the Business Talent Group assembled to advise a major agribusiness company on which markets to compete in, said it fell to him to define the questions<br />that needed answering and the mode of analysis, while a colleague oversaw teams of workers who produced specific plans.<br />True Story was a case study in what two Stanford professors call “flash organizations” — ephemeral setups to execute<br />a single, complex project in ways traditionally associated with corporations, nonprofit groups or governments.<br />“One of our animating goals for the project was, would it be possible for someone to summon an<br />entire organization for something you wanted to do with just a click?” Mr. Bernstein said.
