Rating: 
Summary: The Other Side of the Coin
Review: Having been a member of the "free agent nation" since 1987, I read Daniel Pink's book with interest. There is no question that the American work force is undergoing what may be its most significant transformation since the migration from the farm to the factory one century ago.The author spent a year traveling the country talking with hundreds of these workers. The portrait that emerges is the death of what William H. Whyte, Jr. named "the organizational man" in his 1956 book of the same name. Replacing him or her is the free agent, the home-based business, temp, freelancer or independent contractor. The lure of freedom, authenticity, accountability and self-defined success are luring workers from their cubical farms, stock options and regular paychecks into a life, the author dubs, "of meaning." There is another side to this migration. Changes in three areas will be required before this migration becomes a powerful demographic influencing the economy and the nation: 1.Tax Changes
2.Access to Capital Markets
3.Attitudes First, amend tax codes have to give the free agent the same status as the business he or she left. Benefits need full deductibility and ease of implementation. If the country benefits from independents building businesses, the capital gains tax needs to stop being a political football. It makes no sense to sacrifice to build a business unless there is a carrot at the end of the trail. A reduced or no capital gains tax is a powerful inducement. State tax departments need to stop looking at independents as training grounds for their new agents. I have better things to do with my time than wet-nurse agents-in-training on a fishing expedition. Second, open capital markets to the free agent. Capital, if available, is expensive for the individual businessperson. Bank loan officers do not or will not understand the difference between pre-tax and after-tax income. Finders access outrageous fees for equity capital. Pink cites David Bowie's raising $55 million in 1997 collateralized by his song publishing and album royalties as an example of new financing opportunities available to free agents. For those of us who are not as successful David Bowie, this market place is closed. Democratic financial markets to finance startups, expansions and improvements are a necessity if the move to a free agent nation is to become a serious alternative to the bedrock of American work - the large corporation. Lastly, social attitudes need to change. For a free agent nation to work concepts of the workday and workweek need to change. The free agent works when there is work. Vacations represent an opportunity cost. Being a free agent is not an easy life, but one I will never leave.
Rating: 
Summary: Free Agent Nation - Totally On Trend
Review: If you already have or are contemplating striking out on your own and looking for ways to explain your decision to your parents, your maiden aunt and most especially yourself fly, do not run, to get this book. Free Agent nation clearly and precisely identifies the most important trend in American economic life with style, wit, meticulous research and astonishing prescience. Example: the author of this review recently shed the heavy armor of a highly successful ad agency to construct a company free from financial baggage and bureaucracy - one able to totally focus on the quality of the creative product. In the course of musing about it, I stumbled on the notion of the "advertising version of a film production company." Turn to page 17 of the book and read about how "America's going Hollywood." The nub of the idea: teams of highly skilled specialists come together to produce a creative product only to disband until the next opportunity draws them again. Of course, the fact that Daniel Pink agrees with this reader is of no particular importance. What is important is that this book offers value to anyone in any field that is amenable to free agency (yep, just about everyone). In part, by the sheer eloquence of the writing. In part, by the fact that Pink talks about who's doing it, how they're doing it, why they're doing it and what challenges they're blowing past to get it done. If this book is not on every B-school list it's a travesty. If it's not on the shelf of every restless employee, it's a tragedy. Sure, there are plenty of trend-spotting books out there. But precious few rise to the high standard of being a manifesto for a new, dynamic and exhuberent way to work. Get the book for yourself. And get a copy for Auntie Em next time she plaintively asks "how could you leave a good paying job?" She'll not only get the answer but also, mercifully, shut up while she reads.
Rating:
Summary: I just got this, and am looking forward to reading, but
Review: I had to point something out. Prior to my current career, I was a freelance musican. Every freelancer I know has been living this book their whole careers. One other reviewer described the point of one chapter as "teams of highly skilled specialists come together to produce a creative product only to disband until the next opportunity draws them again." This describes most concerts/performances/recording sessions ever done. Being a Free Agent may be a growing idea in "traditional" business, but in the music biz it's been a way of life for generations. And it was part of why I stopped depending on it for a living. No matter how jazzed you are about your work, if you're spending most of your waking time handling all the minutia that lives around the periphery of the act of work itself, it can be all consuming, no matter how fulfilling. Compared to being a freelancer, having a corporate gig for the past ten years has been a cake walk. Not having to handle payroll taxes, paying for health insurance, dental insurance, vision insurance, having paid vacation, having training paid for, working from home once in a while, not having to reinvent my work relationships every few weeks/months/years - those are all pluses for corporate work. I know, the steady corporate job is going the way of the dinosour, and I accept that, but let's not forget all the things we got from them that we didn't have to deal directly with, but will now. For those who don't have "hustle" in their genes, it's going to be a tough go.
Rating:
Summary: Powerful Insights for Free Agents AND Employers
Review: Reading this book was irritating! I've developed a habit of turning down the corners of pages when something on that page is particularly interesting to me. I discovered that I was turning down practically every page of Free Agent Nation! Daniel Pink has accomplished what most readers of non-fiction books desire: he's put solid value on almost every page. Your thoughts will be constantly stimulated as you move through this book. Our lives have changed substantially since William Whyte wrote The Organization Man in 1956. The work environment experienced by today's generation-and tomorrow's-is radically different. Instead of being captives of the organizational mode, income-earners are now free agents, including some 30 million freelancers, temps, and microbusiness owners. The lifestyles and philosophies of this growing group will impact the labor pool, retirement, education, real estate, and politics. Daniel Pink's name will go down in literary history for Free Agent Nation because he has so effectively covered the underlying philosophy of a generation. Free Agent Nation, an engaging, smooth read, is organized into five parts. The first part introduces us to what Free Agent Nation is all about. Chapter 2 gets right into "Numbers and Nuances" to give the reader a deep understanding. Chapter 3 explains how free agency happened. "Four ingredients were essential: 1) the social contract of work-in which employees traded loyalty for security-crumbled; 2) individuals needed a large company less, because the means of production-that is, the tools necessary to create wealth-went from expensive, huge, and difficult for one person to operate to cheap, houseable, and easy for one person to operate; 3) widespread, long-term prosperity allowed people to think of work as a way not only to make money, but also to make meaning; 4) the half-life of organizations began shrinking, assuring that most individuals will outlive any organization for which they work." Part Two explores The Free Agent Way, the new relationship between worker and employer. Part Three gets into How (and Why) Free Agency Works. Pink explains how people get connected-with work opportunities and with each other. While many free agents work alone, they are not alone. There is a growing community of mutually-supportive independent members in an evolving new design of society. But, all is not rosy in Free Agent Nation; this is not Camelot. Part Four examines the problems that arise from laws, taxes, and insurance. An interesting chapter (13) on Temp Slaves, Permatemps, and the Rise of Self-Organized Labor reveals the seedier side of this picture. Pay careful attention, and you can almost feel the changes that are coming. Part Five engages The Free Agent Future. Chapter 14 addresses E-tirement, confirming that older members of our society will be playing much different roles than in previous generations. The chapter on Education gives some initial insight into some different approaches to lifelong learning. Educators take note: your lives will be changing . . . are you ready? Concluding chapters explore free agent finance, politics, and how free agency will influence commerce, careers, and community in the years ahead. With all that said, let's take a look at who the author is and how this book was put together. Daniel Pink is a former White House speech writer and Contributing Editor to Fast Company magazine. To research this topic, he invested more than a year on the road conducting face-to-face interviews with several hundred citizens of the Free Agent Nation. He met with real people, who are quoted and cited by name in most cases. The text comes alive with the insightful stories of people who are living-and often loving-their free agent status. These case studies are beautifully interwoven, producing a delightful fabric for the reader to caress. Warning: you'll find your mind leaving the page and floating into day dreams and contemplations numerous times. To bring readers back to the reality of the core of his treatise, Pink concludes each chapter with what he calls "The Box." Included in this one-page-per-chapter feature are the key information and arguments of the chapter. The four components of this summary box are "The Crux," a summary of 150 words or less; "The Factoid," a particularly revealing statistic from the chapter; "The Quote," which pulls one representative quotation from the chapter; and "The Word," a novel term or phrase from the new vocabulary of free agency. As the author explains, "Read only "The Box" and you'll miss the chapter's narrative and nuance-but not, I hope, it's point." An appendix on the free agent census and a good index complete this book. If you're ready to learn about the evolution and revolution in the world of work, this book will be a treasure for you.
Rating: 
Summary: Great interviews, good writing, weak analysis
Review: Daniel Pink was doing quite well as publicist and speechwriter. He'd landed a job on the staff of the Vice President of the United States, in fact. Then he had one of those "Moments of Truth we've heard about. The Moment of Truth came when the pressure of politics and long days caught up with him. He had a fainting spell. He very nearly puked on the Vice President. And he decided that maybe there was a better way to live his life. Daniel quit the organizational life to work as a freelance writer. He got work right away. Having the White House on your resume usually helps with things like that. He worked out of his home and pretty soon he noticed that lots of friends and neighbors were starting to do the same thing. "Aha!" he thought, "this could be a trend and I could write a book about it." And so Daniel set off on a year-long jaunt around the country. He interviewed lots of folks. He researched the statistics on independent workers in the US. And he wrote his book. The book is a mixed bag. On the upside, Pink has done a good job of pulling together a lot of different sources. He's interviewed a lot of people and he's the kind of writer who can make the results of those interviews sing. Those individual portraits are the strength of this book. Would that he handled the statistics as well. In the early part of the book, Pink sets his work up as a sequel to William H. Whyte's Organization Man, one written for our times. The rigor of Pink's research and his use of statistics suffer from the comparison. There's a certain amount of Statistical Voodoo here. In the quest to figure out just how many free agents there are we're presented with lots of different estimates from several different sources. Numbers are adjusted up, down and sideways. In the end, Pink tells us that there are about 33 million free agents in the US. He divides those free agents into three groups. There are soloists. He's one of those. There are microbusinesses. Those have three or four employees. And there are temps. About 3 million of the 33 million are temporary workers. That's one weakness of this book. Including temps, who have different problems, prospects and possibilities takes attention away from the other free agents that Pink gushes about. Did I say "Gushes?" Yep. Sure did. Pink thinks that being a free agent is just the neatest thing in all the world and he obviously wants you to think so, too. For Pink free agency is the wave of the future, a New Agey kind of approach to work where everyone (except temps) wins almost all the time. Nonsense. I've been one of those free agents for a long time now. Many of my friends qualify, too. We make a wonderful living at it, but we've all seen enough folks start out on the free agent journey to know that lots of them end up as road kill. To succeed as a free agent takes talent and discipline. It takes a willingness to be totally responsible for your results that not everyone is willing to shoulder. It's, very simply, not for everyone. You won't hear much of this from Pink, though. He doesn't seem to talk to many folks who've tried and failed. And he hasn't been at it long enough himself to remember the legions of folks who call and write and email because they "want to do what you do" and then dwindle down to a precious few who are still at in years later. Granted, Pink was writing while the dot-com, new economy bubble was still round and full, but that doesn't explain why he simply leaves out mention of data (decline in business startups, for example) that don't support his conclusions or people (Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, for example) who don't agree with his assessments. I found that I loved the stories and interviews, but that I was increasingly put off by the analysis. Every time Pink moves to analyze what he found the language changes to something like a revival tent or a commercial break. That may be designed to make his concepts easy to remember, but it just made me tired and crabby. Read this book for well-written stories about people who are charting their own course as free agents. But skip the analysis until the next time you're in the mood for a theological argument.
Rating:
Summary: Spend Time Elsewhere
Review: Not a bad book if you have exhausted your list of other business and self-help literature. This book could easily have been reduced by a hundred pages and still made the point that the corporate world of the fifties has been transformed into the free agent world of the 21st century. When Pink focuses on a specific issue the quality of his analysis and the value of the book rises. However, like so many business books of the day it fails to create sustained value and interest. Off to the used rack. (Are there any editors left in the publishing world?)
Rating:
Summary: Empowering, well-researched and easy-to-read
Review: 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?
Rating:
Summary: A manifesto for worker independence in the 21st century
Review: As a traditional corporate employee in a slower moving country this book completely blew my mind. During my frequent travels to the United States I have been catching glimpses of this emerging movement towards free agency, but this book lays it out in full in a way nobody has done before. Not a single aspect of free agency has been overlooked: the economic, the historical, the psychologic, the personal, the social, and the political aspects, along with the advantages, disadvantages, and the plight of the free agents less fortunate cousins (temps), everything is here. The book contains a mixture of personal experience, anectdotes from others, and solid statistics that is just right, it's neither impersonally abstract and theoretical, nor too personal and unrepresentative of the whole. A word of advice: this is not a how-to book. There are no second person directives on becoming a free agent (you should do this...you should try that...etc). It's crafted more along the lines of a sociological study, except that the author's enthusiasm for the subject shows through. Even though he doesn't address the reader directly, all along he seems to be saying: what are you waiting for? You can tell that Pink had fun writing this, which makes his case for free agency all the more convincing. It's sad that most of the trends he documents will be confined to the United States for some time to come, but even then I will be measuring my potential for going solo against what this book documents. I have no doubt that the trend towards worker independence will prevail and prove very positive, and that this book will stand along with Future Shock and Megatrends as one of the most influential and prophetic works of the past 50 years.
Rating:
Summary: Dan Pink is brilliant. Period. This book is The Future 101
Review: Dan Pink is brilliant. This is not an overstatement. He gets a monster trend that everyone else has tripped over and ignored. He gets it. He articulates it. It's a GREAT read. Miss this book and you might find yourself in the unemployment line when you could be a thriving free agent. My hardcover copy looks like a textbook from my favorite class in college. His research is outstanding. And don't miss the paperback either - this is a fast moving topic and the paperback has additional material. This is a MUST READ book.
Rating:
Summary: Practical Reality
Review: Great book that provides more insight into our New Economy. We come across many more "Free Agents" today than in the past. Employers expect us to be ones as well. Planning moves, assessing the current work situation, and plotting the next adventure is a necessity whether the economy is strong or weak. Our co-workers, friends, family, and even our bosses say things regarding their work situation that wouldn't be thought of only a short time ago. The worker today needs to keep his and her eyes open, constantly looking for another opportunity, that will enhance their marketability. One needs to keep the Antennas and feelers out. For if the worker doesn't do it, there will likely come a time when the Employer will. Today's New Economy is one of constant change. People where I've worked have been referred to as "Old Timers," and they've only been with the company for three years. Very interesting and relevant book. It can help one asses one's situation. The days of Uncle Joe staying at the same corporation or shop ended in the 1970s. This is a very practical book, especially for the oder workforce that isn't particularly well-read to begin with.
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