This book is about the free agent. If the term is vague, it is because I can think of no other way to describe the people I am talking about. They are free from the bonds of a large institution, and agents of their own futures. They are the new archetypes of work in America. The Free Agent Org Chart resembles a traditional organizational chart less than it resembles the human brain…, continually forging and reforging connections, constantly laying fresh pathways to another.
Daniel H. Pink, Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself
————————–
Yesterday in the Sunday Dallas Morning News Points Section, you will find this article: A freelance work force by Drake Bennett. Here’s a key paragraph:
“Right now I can’t hire a bunch of programmer experts in lots of different domains because I can’t afford to keep them on hand all the time,” he says. “But if I could hire them just for the five minutes I need them, individual people would have the power to create projects that require lots of expertise, and the potential for people to innovate and create things would increase.”
And therein lies the crux of the problem. Business owners don’t need employees — they need short-term helpers for specific tasks. They need assistants or collaborators, paid by the minute, not employees paid by the year.
In the free agent nation, more and more people will have to find their own “work,” and their work will not be a “job,” but rather a serial experience of task after task for owner/boss after owner/boss. It is the curse of the technological age, the information age, that will leave ever expanding numbers of people jobless. And, thus, it will require a new set of work skills. Every person will have to be a:
• self-starting
• new skill-learning
• personally and perpetually marketing
• ever-well-connected
• FREE AGENT!
And though Daniel Pink (who I really like) paints this bold new world as a world of freedom and possibility, there may be a fair number of people who are simply not up to this challenge.
This bold new world can be a nightmare for quite a number of folks. More from the Bennett article:
The United States Government Accountability Office has estimated that so-called contingent workers – everything from temps to day laborers to the self-employed to independent contractors – make up nearly a third of the workforce. And forecasters believe that proportion will rise. The growth is being driven partly by economic factors, with the uncertain economic climate making short-term contract workers more attractive to firms than full-time employees, but of course broader technological changes are at work as well; cellphones, PDAs and broadband make it easy to farm out work, even complex, interactive tasks that previously only made sense to do in-house.
This shift has begun to trigger a more fundamental examination of what a job is and what we expect to get from it. Despite the vast diversity of the work people do, the traditional notion of a job has tended to be a standard bundle of responsibilities, roles and benefits: We do our work for an employer to whom we owe our primary professional allegiance, and that employer pays us and provides us health insurance and a sense of professional identity. In the United States, many of the laws that shape health insurance, retirement and tax policy are structured around this model.
Tom Peters and others have been saying for quite some time that your only loyalty is to you – “Me, Inc.” Well, for a whole lot of “Me, Inc” types, the jobless recovery is painting us into a new world of ever-increasing circles of free agents.
The challenge is a big one – for each one of us, and for our country and society.
No comments:
Post a Comment