Partners in Business Innovation

The brave new workforce

It is the heyday of free agents, whose loyalty is to their own skills. Robert Morgan at Spherion, an employment firm, calls this the "emerging workforce". Today, he says, a third of workers have the portable skills and ambition necessary to become successful free agents. In an era of record low unemployment, it is a seller’s market; but even when the balance tilts back again, the traditional corporate hierarchy will probably turn out to have gone for good. "The war for talent has banished a lot of rules. Once they go away, they tend not to come back."

What makes today's young workers different from earlier generations is that new technology runs in their blood.

Creativity

...knowledge workers are valued most for their ability to think for themselves. They are trusted to steer their own path through business problems. Managers hold back, knowing that the more specific their order, the more it is likely to undermine their employees’ ability to find creative solutions.

Youth is a rising power, both at work and in society at large. Thank technology and ever-accelerating change (Chris Anderson).

Efficiency

As the Internet becomes built into corporate life, the economic foundation of the company changes. In an essay on "The Nature of the Firm", published in 1937, Ronald Coase, an economist who later won the Nobel prize, argued that the cost of transactions determined the boundaries of firms, making it more efficient for workers to band together in a company than to operate as separate agents. The impact of the Internet has been to reduce those costs. Because almost everything can be inexpensively outsourced, it is possible to create a company from nothing in no time: to go from idea to product in nine months. Many Internet start-ups are, in the neat phrase of Stanford Graduate Business School’s Mr Saloner, "plug-and-play" companies.

Innovation

Could companies inspire the sort of altruism that has gone into developing open-source software? In some other ways, Mr MacCormack points out, corporate innovation increasingly resembles Linux code-writing. The teams that work on it are often geographically dispersed. And design is increasingly modular rather than sequential: people no longer design the engine and then pass it on to a second group to produce the casing, which discovers problems with the engine design just as the first team has moved on to its next project. Besides, innovation is increasingly delivered not by a single company’s research-and-development department, but by a network of companies, each working on a different part of the project.

Authenticity

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.

"Everybody was looking for that big plum job. Everybody wanted to be a brand manager." She too was tending that way -- until she attended a few recruiting receptions. "They were fake, they were plastic." She was looking for authenticity.

"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.

Throughout the country, small groups of free agents are helping one another succeed professionally and survive emotionally. These groups belie another of the central myths about free agency: that without that office watercooler, free agents become isolated and lonely. As Lonier puts it, "Working solo is not working alone."

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