Danile Pink’s Free Agent Nation: Freelance Writer Self-Employment Contract Worker Book Review

Daniel Pink was doing quite well as a 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.