Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself by Daniel H. Pink

From Barnes & Noble

Author Pink argues that athletes aren't the only Americans who are renouncing traditional team allegiances. Citing the country's 25 million self-employed workers, he predicts the incremental undermining of conventional corporate society. The job that your parents knew, he contends, is defunct. Pink believes that post-baby boomers subscribe to creating their own destinies, not to old company loyalties. Instead of looking to mega-corporations, he says, they think small, noting for example that since 1994, firms with fewer than 20 employees have created 80 percent of new jobs in our economy. An eloquent manifesto about a glacial shift.

From the Publisher

Hip and hopeful, meticulously researched and joyously iconoclastic, Free Agent Nation will change your thinking--and maybe even change your life.

Stephen M. Case

The trend Dan Pink writes about so knowledgeably is already transforming the future of business. FREE AGENT NATION is the shape of things to come in the Internet Century.

Alan M. Webber

A brilliant book. Pink defines...with the keen eye of a trained sociologist, the literary skill of a masterful prose stylist, and the irreverent wit of a stand-up comic...a must-read — an instant contemporary classic.

Scott Adams

Free Agent Nation will turn your notion of a career upside down. It might even set you free. It's the defining book on the untethered workforce.

Naomi Wolf

A groundbreaking book ...for the new digitocracy, this book represents both a readable and persuasive benchmark.

Paul Orfalea

FREE AGENT NATION ought to be on the reading list of anybody who runs a business... a smart book that is this fun or a fun book that is this smart... an original!

Library Journal

Not all "free agents" are highly paid athletes whose main skills are dunking a basketball or hitting a baseball. In fact, as Pink (contributing editor, Fast Company) reveals, over 25 million Americans are now self-employed, and fewer than one in ten works for a Fortune 500 company. This excellent work synthesizes the seismic shift in attitudes about and patterns of work in the economy from the early 1950s era of William Whyte's The Organization Man to today's independent worker, the free agent. Pink astutely summarizes what this major shift in the definition of employment now means to millions of Americans and explains the various types of free agents (including soloists, temps, and those involved in their own microbusiness). Other chapters cover examples of how self-sufficiency works so well for numerous life situations, while in many cases free-agency employment does not work well at all. This work may not be rooted in empirical research, but Pink's thorough review of the literature and his extensive roadwork interviewing hundreds of independent workers successfully merges psychosocial data with pragmatic reality. This major contribution to better understanding the trend toward independent contract work is highly recommended for all university libraries and larger public libraries. Dale Farris, Groves, TX Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Soundview Executive Book Summaries

Over the past decade, in nearly every industry and region, legions of Americans are abandoning one of the Industrial Revolution's most enduring legacies -- the "job" -- to become free agents -- as self-employed knowledge workers, proprietors of home-based businesses, temps, freelancers or independent contractors. Daniel H. Pink spent a year traveling the country, talking with hundreds of these workers. The composite sketch Pink reveals in Free Agent Nation displays the political, economic and personal effects these individualists are having on all our institutions.

Pink explains that the American working economy for several generations had a single, human emblem -- the "Organization Man," so dubbed after the 1956 book of the same name by William H. Whyte, Jr. The label described what was then the quintessence of work in America - an individual (nearly always male) who ignored or buried his own identity and goals in the service of a large organization, which rewarded his self-denial with a regular paycheck and job security. Organization Men abided by what Whyte named a Social Ethic, a secular theology that placed the organization at the center of the universe, and defined entrepreneurs as "selfish type[s], motivated by greed."

Beginning in the 1980s, conditions and attitudes changed. Companies that had formed the bedrock of American work began winnowing their work forces in response to economic stimuli, corporate restructuring, and technology that could do people's work for less money. Pink writes that the social contract of job security was broken; the Organization Man was relegated to the annals of history. What replaced him as the archetype of work in America is the free agent - the independent worker who operates on his or her own terms, untethered to a large organization, serving multiple clients and customers instead of a single boss.

Pink explains that free agency has already begun overturning many of today's central assumptions about American work and life, among them the following:

• Loyalty is dead. It's not dead; it's different. Instead of up-and-down loyalty that runs from individual to institution, free agents practice side-to-side loyalty - an allegiance to clients, colleagues, teams, projects and industries.
• The work force is adrift, operating without a broad social contract. The implicit employment promise that reigned in the days of the Organization Man has disappeared, replaced by a new one that trades talent for opportunity.
• The free-agent economy makes workers less secure. As free agents compile a diverse portfolio of clients, customers and projects, they often find themselves in a more secure position than traditional workers.
• Parents must try to balance work and family. Corporate and government efforts to be more "family-friendly" offer a one-size-fits-all approach to the work/family balance. Free agents tend to erase the boundaries between the two, blending, rather than balancing.
• "Empowerment" and "retention" are wise strategies for corporate managers. These concepts are built on the fact that organizations hold all the power. In a free-agent economy, organizations need individuals more than individuals need organizations, which can inspire and challenge people, but cannot "empower" or "retain" them.
• Rampant individualism is fraying our social fabric. Critics claim our common culture is corroding, and the free agent economy is speeding the problem. In actuality, it may be providing a solution, mending bonds and repairing our concepts of community.

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