Observing Sam Altman and the Microsoft-OpenAI debacle, no one knows on the outside what the whole truth was and likely never will. When I have been in these kinds of discussions behind closed doors, most people—even those close to the action—don’t know the whole truth because many of the conversations take place behind the scenes, directly, indirectly through third parties, fourth parties. Those things never come out. They probably won’t come out here, either.
But what we do know—and what every CEO and board member in every industry should be thinking about—is that we’ve witnessed something new in the ongoing relationship between labor and capital. For the first time I can ever recall a pool of employees, with rare expertise, SuperTalent, really, claimed power for themselves over the board of directors of multi-billion-dollar organization. And won.
It would seem, at first glance, to be a one-off. OpenAI is a special situation, an organization built by a set of uber-talented employees with highly-specialized skills that helped the firm attract a $13 billion investment from Microsoft and generate a latest-round valuation reportedly set to hit some $80 billion. There is no physical plant, no network of retail stores, not even outsourced manufacturing. It is all about the employees—employees, it turns out, who could disappear at will and demolish OpenAI while also starting a new competitor. That’s a lot of leverage.
But what happed here is likely to happen elsewhere, perhaps not with the same amount of public attention, but with equally serious consequences for other kinds of businesses. That should come as no surprise given the way the labor market keeps shifting in favor of employees in the information age.
Companies are increasingly vulnerable as fewer highly-trained experts—and leaders—generate an ever-larger share of value inside companies. Non-competes are a useful band-aid, but they are not a corporate strategy. The failure here was a failure of governance, of imagination, of humility, and it offers plenty of new things to consider. Here are five lessons to take away from what happened:
Talent now is going to have a voice and it will challenge the power of capitalism when it is feels it is not being used wisely, creating new challenges for boards and management teams. Be prepared.
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