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Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself (Paperback)
by Daniel H. Pink
| Category:
Career planning, Entrepreneurship, Social trends, Non-fiction |
| Market price: ¥ 168.00
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¥ 158.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
Advocating the megatrend of self-employment, this landmark book is a manifesto for worker independence in the 21st century. |
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Author: Daniel H. Pink
Publisher: Warner Books
Pub. in: May, 2002
ISBN: 0446678791
Pages: 384
Measurements: 9.0 x 6.2 x 1.0 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00061
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- MSL Picks -
During the 1990's, when everyone was working outrageous hours to keep their jobs, my wife and I had numerous conversations about what we predicted would be a nationwide mutiny. We wondered how long people would go on sacrificing their families and personal lives for an ever-increasing workload as a condition of employment. Well, it looks like the mutiny might already be underway.
According to Daniel Pink in his landmark book, Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself, the defining chasm came when employees could no longer look to their employer for security. Without security, loyalty to an employer became a thing of the past - replaced by a move toward self-employment (or free agency), and fierce loyalty instead to clients and to personal values and dreams.
If you're a free agent, you will find this book inspiring, empowering and enlightening. In fact, you might even find enough insight to finally explain to your friends and loved ones who "just don't quite get it" just what you do for a living. If you are considering self-employment, this book will be invaluable.
Daniel Pink makes a compelling case that free agency is a giant step in the direction of a new declaration of independence - this time from "The Organization." Free Agent Nation is a well-researched and easy-to-read study of this revolution.
In an economy where good ideas can be more valuable than last-century physical assets, there is little doubt that a significant shift in attitudes has occurred. Pink backs his case with interesting statistics (that's not an oxymoron). For example:
- Fewer than one in 10 people work for a Fortune 500 company
- Two out of three workers in California don't hold traditional jobs
- Most workers outlive the organizations that employ them
- Independent professionals are twice as likely as others to have personal incomes over $75,000
- Business incorporations are growing five times faster than the population
- 69% of all new businesses are located in the owner's place of residence
- The American economy has twice as many free agents as it has members of labor unions
The impact of such changes will affect each of us - whether we are a free agent or a W-2 worker - and Pink outlines how 20th century institutions and policies will be affected, too.
He even takes free agency a step further and refers to Abraham Maslow's legendary hierarchy of needs: "Only when man's more basic needs are fulfilled will he be free to engage his talents toward realizing his true human potential defined as self-actualization." Has our society reached that point? (From quoting Phil Chadwick, USA)
Target readers:
General readers
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Daniel H. Pink is a former White House speechwriter and the author of the bestseller Free Agent Nation. A contributing editor at Wired magazine, he has written on work, business, and politics for The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Slate, Salon, Fast Company, and other publications. He has also lectured to corporations, universities, and associations around the world on economic transformation and business strategy, and has analyzed commercial and social trends for dozens of television and radio programs.
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From the Publisher:
The Organization Man is history. Taking his place is America's new economic icon: the "free agent"-the job-hopping, tech-savvy, fulfillment-seeking self-reliant, independent worker. Already 30 million strong, these new "dis-organization" men and women are transforming America in ways both profound and exhilarating.
In this landmark book, Daniel Pink offers the definitive account of this revolution in work. He shows who these free agents are-from the marketing consultant down the street to the home-based "mompreneur" to the footloose technology contractor-and why they've forged a new path. His entertaining and provocative account of the new frontier of work reveals how free agents are shaking up all of our institutions-from politics to education to the family.
Are you ready for:
- The Peter - Out Principle-Successor to the famous "Peter Principle," this new rule decrees that when the fun peters out, the talented walk out.
- Unschooling - Individual-centered learning like homeschooling and apprenticeships will threaten Ivy League colleges and end high school as we know it.
- Individual Public Offerings-The upper echelon of free agents will issue these new "IPO's," or stock - in themselves.
- E-tirement - When Americans reach age sixty-five, more will enter a new stage of life. Working as full-time, part-time, and anytime free agents, they'll be finding and executing work over the Internet.
- Just-in-time Politics - This political version of just-in-time manufacturing will challenge the present two-party system.
- The Feminine Century-Women are free agency's early adopters: Many analysts estimate that by the year 2005, half of all businesses will be run by women.
Hip and hopeful, meticulously researched and joyously iconoclastic, Free Agent Nation will change your thinking-and maybe even change your life.
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Kinko's founder Paul Orfalea isn't much for fancy titles - or glossy photos. (He refused to be photographed for this article.) False modesty from a mogul worth an estimated $225 million? Hardly. It is an authentic part of the grassroots spirit that has infused Kinko's since Orfalea began the company 27 years ago.
Orfalea insists that he does not "run" Kinko's. His job, he says, is to "wander and wonder" - to visit as many of the company's 865 stores as he can, to spend time with coworkers, to soak up innovation, and to communicate new ideas across the Kinko's network. His favorite knowledge-sharing tool is voice mail. If Orfalea is at a Kinko's outlet and he hears about a good idea, he immediately dials into the company's voice-mail system, introduces the coworker who described the idea to him, and lets that person record a message - which then flows back across the system.
Lately, Orfalea has had a second reason to wander: he wants to reassure the company's 23,000 people that its spirit won't change, even as its structure does. A big investment by Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, announced in June 1996, was a watershed moment for Kinko's - not only bringing in needed capital but also acting as a force for organizational change.
Clayton Dubilier's "roll-up" plan transformed Kinko's from a decentralized confederation of locally managed stores into a smarter, sleeker, more disciplined global company. In return for its $214 million, the Wall Street firm got about 30% of the company. Orfalea kept an estimated 34%. His 130 partners were allowed to swap holdings in their local operations for shares in the new company.
Now Orfalea's challenge is to make sure that the Kinko's strategic roll-up doesn't roll over the grassroots enthusiasm and creativity that was so crucial to the company's early growth. "You can't take care of your customers unless you take care of your people," he says. "Everyone has good machines. Our coworkers are the only tie-breakers for us. I don't think the old feeling will change too much."
Nor will Orfalea's approach to his job. "People think I'm busier than I am," he jokes. "Basically, I've got this job down to about six hours a week. The rest of the time, I'm wandering."
Welcome to Free Agent, U.S.A.
Federal census takers can't tell you how many people actually live here. Government mapmakers have yet to give it an official location.
But if you go look for it, as I did, you can't miss it. It's out there, from coast to coast, and it's growing every day. The residents of Free Agent, USA are legion: Start with the 14 million self-employed Americans. Consider the 8.3 million Americans who are independent contractors. Factor in the 2.3 million people who find work each day through temporary agencies. Note that in January the IRS expects to mail out more than 74 million copies of Form1099-MISC - the pay stub of free agents.
So let's hazard a guess. If we add up the self-employed, the independent contractors, the temps - a working definition of the population of Free Agent Nation - we end up with more than 16% of the American workforce: roughly 25 million free agents in the United States, people who move from project to project and who work on their own, sometimes for months, sometimes for days.
And if you're looking for a place to start making the map, you can mark Deborah Risi's home in Menlo Park, California. A 40-year-old marketing whiz, Risi worked for many years at companies like Apple Computer and Pacific Bell, climbing her way gracefully through their marketing divisions, securing ever-better positions at ever-higher salaries. Then, about two and a half years ago, she walked out of a company she'd rather not name and reexamined her life. "I looked back on my work history and realized I had never felt really, really good about it," she says. "I had maybe one boss I could both respect and learn from. I was tired of working incredibly hard for companies that lacked leadership and didn't share my values."
So she declared herself a free agent, landed her first client four days later, and hasn't looked back. Today Risi operates out of a room in her house that overflows with computer gear, file cabinets, and a Magic 8-Ball ("my managerial decision-making tool"). She consults on marketing strategy for high-tech giants like Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and Cisco Systems, usually juggling four to six clients at a time and bringing in a lot more money than she earned during her years in corporate America.
She feels more invigorated than she ever did in a traditional job. No surprise there. But - and this is one of the many counterintuitive truths of Free Agent Nation - she also feels more secure. She pilots her work life using an instrument panel similar to the one she uses for her investments: plenty of research, solid fundamentals, and most of all, diversification. Just as sensible investors would never sink all their financial capital into one stock, free agents like Risi are questioning the wisdom of investing all their human capital in a single employer. Not only is it more interesting to have six clients instead of one boss; it also may be safer.
The concept eludes some. About a year ago Risi applied for a mortgage. The bank demanded to see every scrap of paper about her life and her finances, because a woman without a "job" was, in its old-economy view, an obvious credit risk.
"I showed them my resume and said, 'You're kidding me! I've been at Apple, Pacific Bell, Cullinet Software - all these high-tech companies. You're telling me that I would be a safer bet at one of those than I am with six active clients? If one of my clients goes away, I'm still going to make my payments. But if I'm employed by Apple and they let me go, I'm out on the street.'"
She got her loan.
"Unless you're into self-abuse, or you're incredibly lucky and avoid restructuring," says Risi, "being a lifer is no longer an option."
As you take to the highways found on the new map of work, you'll soon learn the foremost rule of the road: freedom is the pathway to security, not a detour from it.
Like many free agents, I'm looking for el dorado. el dorado, New Mexico, that is. That's where you'll find June Walker, 53, a free agent who lives in an adobe house in this tiny, nonincorporated area eight miles outside of Santa Fe. A tax and finance consultant, she advises other free agents on the intricacies and frustrations of the tax code. She says that if free agency changes the old equation between security and freedom - the either-or proposition of what Walker acidly calls the "W-2 world" - then the next challenging issue it raises goes straight to the heart of the matter: Why work?
"Free agency forces you to think about who you are and what you want to do with your life," she says. "Previously, it was only those wonderful, flaky artists who had to deal with this."
The old social contract didn't have a clause for introspection. It was much simpler than that. You gave loyalty. You got security. But now that the old contract has been repealed, people are examining both its basic terms and its implicit conditions.
Free agents quickly realized that in the traditional world, they were silently accepting an architecture of work customs and social mores that should have crumbled long ago under the weight of its own absurdity. From infighting and office politics to bosses pitting employees against one another to colleagues who don't pull their weight, most workplaces are a study in dysfunction. Most people do want to work; they don't want to put up with brain-dead distractions. Much of what happens inside companies turns out to be about… nothing. The American workplace has become a coast-to-coast "Seinfeld" episode. It's about nothing.
But work, free agents say, has to be about something. And so, instead of accepting the old terms, they're demanding new ones. Thus the second rule of the road for navigating Free Agent, USA: work is personal. You can achieve a beautiful synchronicity between who you are and what you do.
"A large organization is about submerging your own identity for the good of the company," says David Garfinkel, 44, from his apartment in San Francisco. "People have their game faces on." A few years ago, when he was a bureau chief for business publisher McGraw-Hill, Garfinkel decided he couldn't play that game any longer. "The appearance and title of the job were exciting, but the job wasn't using the best part of me. I felt like I was out of touch with who I really was." He's now a free-agent marketing strategist and copywriter.
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| View all 15 comments |
Tom Peters (author of In Search of Excellence) (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-28 00:00>
A beautifully written as it is profoundly prophetic…the best book on work since Organization Man. |
New York Times (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-28 00:00>
Provocative. |
Financial Times (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-28 00:00>
Delight. |
CNN.com (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-28 00:00>
Warning: This book may make you rethink your career. |
View all 15 comments |
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