Free Agent Nation
One in four working Americans is a free agent. Do you know what that means to your company? Dan Pink does.
Today, it's likely that your mother, brothers, sister, or father is a free agent. Whether a freelancer, temp, or micropeneur, many Americans now make their living untethered from big business, having traded water cooler gossip for a couch at Starbucks and the paneled boardroom for their living room.
No one knows about this phenomena as well as Dan Pink. A staff speechwriter for then Vice-President Al Gore, Pink left the White House four years ago and went freelance, writing about free agents first for Fast Company, and then last year, for his book entitled Free Agent Nation.
Along the road, Pink uncovered a country in the midst of an extraordinary shift. Industries once known for their rigid hierarchies and dependence on the classic, full-time “worker” were starting to resemble the freelance structures of the media and construction industries. Fuelled by technology, mobility, and design—and a necessary self-reliance created by economic turbulence—a new labor pool was forming, some 40 million strong.
Independent and determined, says Pink, the free agent ethic is changing both the people who choose the workstyle and the industries for which they work.
We spoke with Dan about this new landscape from his (home) office in Washington.
Q. More and more industries are starting to look like Hollywood. A few big companies handle financing, marketing, and distribution—and a fluid labor pool of very small companies and freelancers handle idea generation or support.
A. Thousands of products and services today are created not through permanent rosters of talent but by quick, one-time assemblies of the right people for a particular task. So as Hollywood makes movies by getting a team together for a project that has a finite beginning and an end, increasingly, goods and services are being delivered in that fashion.
More and more forms of work and industries are simply selling the intangible product of human intelligence and creativity. Talent decides whether you have a good piece of software or a bad piece of software in the same way that talent determines whether you have a good movie or a bad movie.
Q. Or whether your call center operator can handle a product complaint and keep the customer spending.
A. Right. Another intriguing example is in pharmaceuticals. Many pharmaceuticals are created by people who have expertise in a particular set of genes in a particular kind of disease. You see fluidity as they move from employer to employer. So some of it has to do with the economics of a firm and the economics of a particular industry.
But it's not going to happen in every industry. It's not going to happen in an industry where some amount of vertical integration and economies of scale still matter.
Q. Yet even these industries are affected by the free agent ethic. The GM Hummer team was pulled from all over the country, and some key people were plucked from competitors. Seek the best…
A. Yes. The factor that's going to determine success is how much individual companies recognize, honor, and cherish the individual integrity of human beings. Good companies realized that sometimes talent is down the hall and sometimes it's on the other side of the continent. It doesn't matter whether that person is getting a W2 tax form from them or a 1099 tax form.
Q. It's a question of the right people for the job, whether they're on the payroll or not. Why doesn't HR tap into this opportunity more often?
A. Many organizations don't understand this territory and are intimidated. They don't have a good sense of the language or the values of this workforce, and, internally, they're puzzled when some of their most talented people leave to become free agents.
Q. It's an ownership thing. Like the old Hollywood barons.
A. Ironically, HR has to recognize that human beings are not resources. Timber, oil, water—these are resources. People, on the other hand, are unique and idiosyncratic. They have a soul, and brains, and volition.
Q. It's tricky to let them go.
A. Every firm wants to retain its best workers. But you can't retain human beings like cattle. Companies have to give up some control and let people be their authentic selves.
If you offer some liberty, you're going to get much better performance. And, the fact is, your most talented people are not going to stay at your firm for 30 years. They're probably not going to stay for ten years. But if you can work with them for a few years—and then keep them as part of your talent network, that's the way you're going to win.
Q. In the book you talk about how we'll need to rethink the role of managers.
A. The traditional manager has been like the vice-principal of the workforce. They make sure that you attend class and don't sneak out for a smoke. That's an extraordinarily outdated view of how to treat people. The best managers operate as a producer: they know the business, have good connections, can gauge and nurture talent, and can “package” the deal.
Q. And they're often women.
A. Yeah. Increasingly, the structure of work and the workforce is moving more towards a feminine style than a masculine style, more toward gatherers and less toward hunters. Women are simply better at relationships and fluid structures; they're less obsessed over who's the alpha and who's the beta.
Q. Managers also need to understand what you call horizontal loyalty and reciprocal networks.
A. Yes. We used to have loyalty where an individual gave loyalty upward to an organization. But the axis has shifted. It's now horizontal loyalty. It runs laterally, side to side. So you see intense loyalty to teams, to colleagues, to ex-colleagues. It's extremely robust because it's a matter of survival.
Good managers understand this. And smart companies are beginning to recognize and nurture their alumni networks. At a certain point, your alumni population is going to be bigger than your in-house population. It can be enormously valuable to a firm.
Q. So how does a company get from point A to point B?
A. It starts with the CEO. The paths to the CEO office are through marketing, finance, sales, operations—but never through HR. That has to change. Smart companies are making the CEO's job (partly) a talent job and making HRs job more strategic.
From there, we need to be obsessed with talent. Our goal has to be to have the most talented people we possibly can working to their highest capacity on every project we do.
Q. Give me a specific example.
A. Start by recognizing that we don't have “one-size-fits-all” career stages. For instance, when someone decides that they want to pull back a little —that's often seen as betrayal of the company. But it's smarter to say “ten hours a week is better than zero hours a week. And ten hours will keep that person in our network. That will have long-term benefit for us.”
Q. You actually describe four career stages in the book. Early Intensity when you're young, Parental Pullback for child rearing, a burst of Empty Nest Energy, and then “E-tirement” for the senior set.
A. There are huge numbers of people over 65 who are going to be working as part-time, sometime, or “anytime” free agents. So the idea that “well, this person is 70 years old and they don't have the intensity of a 25-year-old—write them off” is stupid. Again, if you can get 15 hours a month of that person's time and draw on their incredible reservoir of insights and experience, that's valuable.
Q. In the last two years, we've had the dot.com collapse, Enron, and economic malaise. Where do you see the talent market heading?
A. If you think of the combination of the collapse and Enron, you see a deepened belief that a company is not going to take care of workers and can't be trusted. People are saying “I have to fend for myself and make my own way. I can't rely on these large organizations to take care of me.”
Combined with 9/11, there's a sense that life is short and precious and we should be doing something that's worthwhile and gives us meaning. These feelings are going to deepen and lead people to free agency or to seek organizations that can accommodate these kinds of values.
Dan Pink is author of Free Agent Nation, a Washington Post bestseller and voted one of the best business books of 2001. His articles on business, work, and economic transformation have appeared in Fast Company, The New York Times, The New Republic, Salon, Reason, and Slate.
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