Intelligence for leaders managing their total workforce as a single, strategic asset.

For 100+ years, companies were built around a single idea: the permanent employee... this has fundamentally changed.

Work was a place you went, and a career was a ladder you climbed inside one organization. An entire function, Human Resources, was created to manage this workforce. It mastered the arts of recruiting, culture, and long-term development. It built loyalty and belonging for the people on the payroll. This was the age of the employee, managed as a human asset.

At the same time, another function, Procurement, was tasked with buying everything else. It sourced raw materials, secured equipment, and, increasingly, purchased services. When companies needed specialized skills or temporary capacity, they didn’t "hire" talent; they "procured" a vendor. These workers—consultants, contractors, freelancers—were managed as a line item.

For decades, these two worlds operated in parallel. HR owned the people. Procurement owned the contracts. Each became highly efficient within its own silo.

Work has atomised into a million pieces.

The digital revolution didn't just change how we work; it changed who does the work. A single critical project today is no longer staffed by a neat team of full-time employees. It’s a fluid blend of services and talent and AI models to do the analysis

This 'blended' workforce is now the engine of the modern enterprise. Research shows that up to 40% of the average organization's workforce is comprised of non-permanent talent, a figure that is rapidly growing. Yet, the way we manage them is stuck in the past.

HR, with its focus on culture and experience, has little to no visibility into this vast and growing contingent workforce. Procurement, driven by cost and compliance, manages these individuals through purchase orders, not as strategic talent.

Jamie Gannaway and Mary Shaw are a brother and sister from Australia. Jamie comes from senior leadership in procurement and Mary from a HR and organisational design discipline. We believe the most important conversation in business today is the one that isn’t happening: the one between the Chief Human Resources Officer and the Chief Procurement Officer.

While companies have mastered managing the employee and the vendor, they have failed to build a system for managing the work itself.

So we created Bartleby

We believe that talent is talent, regardless of how it's classified on a balance sheet. We believe that building a truly agile and competitive organization requires a single, unified view of the entire workforce.

Our mission is to provide the intelligence, insight, and community for leaders to tear down the artificial walls between HR and Procurement and create a new "philosophy" (sort of) where every individual contributing to an organization’s goals is visible, valued, and strategically aligned.

It’s the future of strategic advantage. Watch this space