Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself [Paperback]

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.

Many of the footnotes were based off newspapers and magazines, or sources listed in the text appear to be secondhand, or credit was somewhat misleading in the text. For example in Chapter 2 the author gives credit to ¡§Wells Fargo (Bank) study ¡K.¡ to give it more credibility but when you look in the footnotes it give the lead credit is given to the an advocacy organization the National Federation of Independent Business along with Wells Fargo. In reviewing their website the research is on NFIB¡s letterhead with Wells Fargo also supporting the publications. In his chapter, ¡§The New Time Clock¡ on page 105, the author lists studies by the Families and Work Institute and another by a NYU economist and a University of Pennsylvania colleague, but upon further review in the footnotes he lists the sources as a Los Angeles Times article and another in Business Week. The impression is given that he did not read or analyze the original research.

Without defining what a Free Agent is beyond an individual, temp, micro-business it was easy to make a leap and estimate 33 million free agents. If I am a stay at home spouse who sells a few things on eBay, or have a couple of garage sales every year; am I part of Free Agent Nation. I see many hardworking, entrepreneurial, networked free agents everyday, but not at Starbucks or Kinko¡s. Each morning as I pass the Home Depot near my house I see many free agents; not many have cell phones, buy high priced coffee, speak English, or have a car. It appears the huge market of what we call ¡§day laborers¡ here in California was not included in the author¡s FAN census or demographic statistics.

There were few good tips or ideas in the book about health insurance, taxes, and education but the opening dialog in Chapter 17, Putting the ¡¥I¡ in IPO: The Path Toward Free Agent Finance¡ was a bit laughable. The chapter begins with two different dialogs for a FAN business owner seeking a $50,000 loan from his local ¡§traditional¡ bank and another dialogue were the same business owner goes to a financial federation for Free Agent Electricians. Whereas the traditional bank turns him down the Federation of Free Agent Electricians proposes to float him a $50,000 bond. Although this is a fictional account the author does describe why it is impossible today due to regulatory restrictions, the credit risk involved in floating an unsecured bond, or the fixed and marketing costs of floating the bond. While Michael Milken did lend money to the ¡§shaky, or the sagging¡ as far as I know he only floated public traded bonds to public traded companies.

As the back cover endorsement by Tom Peters states ¡§Twenty ¡Vfive years from now we¡ll still be discussing this book¡, I only wish there was a better book out there to discuss. This book is one reason why I read few business books these days; rah, rah.

I'm an amateur futurist keeping up with big-picture books on social trends since starting with Alvin Toffler's Future Shock in the late sixties to The Third Wave, Free Agent Nation and the Cluetrain Manifesto and many books in between. FAN is a very good book. As a microbusiness owner, it helps me understand myself and my situation better. It gives me LOTS of ideas and inspiration to take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves in this time of transition and economic challenge.

I started my business 17 years ago after reading a great book called Maverick Career-styles: The Way of the Ronin. The writing was on the wall even then - in the mid-eighties. I was willing to take a chance and strike out on my own after ten years of traditional employment because that book gave me a way of seeing that I might be more secure as a wiley and agile independent professional than I would be as a corporate drone in this new world we are living in. Dan Pink speaks my language! Well-written, entertaining and valuable read.