Clay Parker Jones

I found my way to this work through practice. When I moved to New York to work for Undercurrent in 2009, we were a practice focused on helping the world's biggest, most consequential firms figure out how to market in a post-digital world. In 2009, we were pushing the rock uphill, but by 2012 we started to realize that the world didn't need guidance on marketing or "digital" strategy, but instead needed to figure out how to reorganize to take advantage of the productivity gains made possible by new technologies. All of our work was focused on getting new stuff to market – new products, new initiatives, new services – and we stopped telling people what to do, and instead helped them get it done with new ways of working and organizing. We tried labs. We tried separate business units. Sure, we got stuff done, but nothing really worked until we started to change the firm itself by changing its foundational methods: how decisions got made; how work was prioritized; how work was assigned and assessed. It felt like we'd stumbled upon real magic. In 2015, along with a few friends from Undercurrent, I started August. We pushed this OD magic to the maximum. August continues to be an employee-owned, self-organized and self-managed, transparently operated, B-corp. In 2019, I left August and joined IPG: first with R/GA, and then with Black Glass. IMO, the operating systems that I've helped to set up are working. In 2023, Black Glass was named one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies, and August is going to turn 10 next year. Amazing. At the end of 2024, I moved on from Black Glass and joined Airbnb to lead their new Organizational Design and Learning team, and I'm so excited to see what new, creativity-first OD ideas and practices we'll bring to life.