Free Agents: An Interview with Dan Pink

Introduction

“Free agents” aren’t found exclusively in sports any more. But free agents everywhere are highly paid and share a common motivation: to make their own choices and to make an impact. You are a free agent, as are those who work for you. And understanding this new game can give you a different perspective on your career as well as help you see how your employees think.

Dan Pink is contributing editor to Fast Company and former head speech writer for Al Gore. He was asked to keynote a conference we co-founded, and this interview followed that presentation.

Dan became a free agent himself, traveling the country interviewing individuals very much like our clients and wrapping his findings into a book published by Warner Books: Free Agent Nation: How America’s New Independent Workers are Transforming the Way we Live. In this interview, B is David C. Baker, and P is Dan Pink.]

Interview

B: I wanted to interview you because the concepts you’ve articulated so well really apply to our clients. Many of them view themselves as “free agents.” And many of the people they hire openly think of themselves as “free agents.”

P: From my point of view, I was interested in doing it was because of my hunch from speaking at the Cancun conference you put on, and from talking to you and getting a sense of the work that you do, that the people you are reaching are the people that Seth Godin [author of Permission Marketing and Unleashing the Ideavirus] would call the “sneezers.” Your clients are the sort of people who drive ideas and drive conversations. These are the people who affect what people talk about and what ideas are in the air.

B: I have some questions for you. We can stray from these if you want, but reading the book and hearing your perspective has left me wondering a few things. When I first read the book, I defined “free agent” in my own mind as those who were working for the company, but about one-third of the way through the book I realized that no, that’s not the point. The principals of these firms are free agents, too, and that’s almost more relevant. But my questions revolved around how our outlook as employers should change because of the changing employee landscape. But as I read the book I realized that this is more relevant to the employers than the employees precisely because the employers have not recognized that they are free agents. They are moving from job to job, working through placement firms, demanding higher salaries, etc. But the employer has spent more time trying to handle these free agents than recognizing his or her own role as a free agent.

P: I think you just hit on a core issue of the book. More and more it is hard to draw tight boundaries around who is a free agent and who is not. To write a book, you have to define your terms. I’ve found that there are three species of free agents: soloists, temps, and microbusinesses. Your clients fall mostly into that last category. They’re micropreneurs—proprietors of very small businesses. Still, whatever you do, in this labor market, everybody needs to think of him or herself as a free agent.

B: But when I look at what prompts these people to start their own businesses, it’s almost the realization that they are a free agent. That knowledge itself is the impetus to jump off the diving board. But when they get into the process, the first big mistake they seem to make is they let growth happen to them. They hire a bunch of people, forgetting that this might not fit the plan they have set out for themselves to be free agents.

P: Excellent point. There is an inherent conflict there between being a free agent and growing a business. To run an operation, you have to give up some of the freedom you have if you worked totally on your own. Giving up some of that freedom in running your own business. That’s why a number of people that I interviewed and wrote about in the book had a great idea, were very talented, and began building an enterprise. Because they were talented, it grew and grew, and then became more and more of a hassle. And it took them further and further away from what they actually love to do.

As a result, some of them downsized themselves. From my vantage point, that’s a remarkable thing. Particularly since our culture equates bigger with better. We are taught that growing bigger is how you make your business more successful. But for a lot of people, “big enough” is good enough. For them, bigger isn’t better. Better is better. That’s a substantial cultural change—and probably a healthy one.You probably see this in your clients, who are trying to come to terms with both the upside and downside of growth.

B: Absolutely. Growth itself isn’t good or bad. Having said that, I’ve seen many firms who have grown for the wrong reasons. They felt more accepted among their peers as they’ve grown. Adding employees, moving to a larger facility, achieving more peer recognition—all these things are deeply craved, almost to the point that a “free agent” will mortgage his or her future simply to achieve those things. It’s short sighted and sometimes carries significant negative circumstances.

P: Running a business is a hassle. Some people love it, and some people are exceptionally talented at it. But some people aren’t. I think that there is a growing cultural acceptance of “free agents” who say: I have this small group of people. I love what I do. I don’t want to turn it into a chain or a franchise or an enterprise with multiple locations. I’m perfectly content making a very nice living, having a very good life, and doing work that I love.

B: One of the other speakers at the conference was Michael Gerber [author of the E-Myth]. How does that book dovetail with yours? He says that there are no entrepreneurs, but really technicians who have suffered an entrepreneurial seizure. And doing the work is not the same thing as running a company that does the work.

P: I think that’s mostly right. Where I might differ is that I don’t think you can necessarily separate the two functions that cleanly. Anybody who is a free agent has to handle both roles to some extent. Suppose someone is a designer by trade. She is a technician in the field of graphic design, but she is also an entrepreneur. She has to worry about marketing, costs, as so forth. It’s very hard to disentangle that. I don’t know if you can point to many people in the workplace who are either an entrepreneur or a technician. There is a blending of functions that are inherent in many professions. Even within a single company.

B: So it seems like free agents are by definition generalists who may not be deeply brilliant in any particular area but can do a good job at most anything.

P: That’s right. Think of free agency as a decathlon. There are ten events, and you have to be pretty good at ten different things. But you need to be great at one or two of them. Those are the things you can’t pass the buck on, and they are the areas where your firm thrives. But in the end they have do lots of things that are a pain, like human resources, accounting, etc. But then they ask themselves: a pain in relation to what? Working for someone else? I don’t think so.

A lot of the people who start these firms realized that they weren’t getting their market value inside a large organization. If you are truly talented, the market generally will reward you. But inside a company, there are always these barriers to getting rewarded properly, and they can be very frustrating. I’m not talking just about monetary rewards. Especially in the creative industry, people want their work to be respected. They want to be understood for what they do. Here’s an example from my own experience. When I started as a free agent after leaving my most recent employment, I did speech writing. I had a fair amount of experience doing it, and in my old job, you would have these people lay these annoying assignments on you, and say things like “it needs a little wordsmithing. Just add this. It’ll practically write itself.” But I do the same thing in the marketplace, and people say, “Great work, Dan, thanks a lot.” People have a different appreciation for your work. In the creative industries, that is a part of what makes people get up in the morning and actually want to go to work.

B: That’s right. And that’s why they still covet that client contact, because of the constant stroking. Even if at some point it would be better for the company to back off that much client contact and concentrate on management.

P: Sure. But not even necessarily stroking, as much as clear feedback. I think this is really true in these industries. Suppose a client looks at something and says, “that sucks.” At least it’s feedback. It’s better than working in a company, giving a product to a manager, who gives it to her manager, who takes it into a presentation to the big boss, and somehow the feedback never gets back to you. Free agents want more direct relationships.

B: So how is it, then, that people who have tasted free agency sometimes go back? Our clients have occasionally hired ex-free-agents who didn’t like it. But hiring those people can yield mixed results. Some of them are forced into it because of failure and still haven’t given up on the idea. Others discovered what they didn’t like about free agency, and make great employees because they are now more grateful for what the employment environment provides.

P: Remember that in the free agent economy no condition is permanent. So when someone goes out on their own, they and their colleagues don’t expect them to be a free agent until they die at age 95. I think people’s career paths will continue to be more idiosyncratic. Many people go in and out of free agency. And enlightened companies will be able to deal with that. The smart companies recognize that when you hire a talented person they aren’t going to stick around for a lifetime. They are going to come for a mutually beneficial stint. And if that stint is two years, and they produce quality work, terrific. Enlightened companies really look at a period of self-employment or micro-entrepreneurship as a favorable stop along a career. It’s not as if you have to pick a side—Free Agent Nation or Corporate America—and live there the rest of your life. More people are going to begin holding dual passports—one in Free Agent Nation, another in Corporate America—and they’ll migrate between the two rather easily.

The bigger issue is defining success or failure. I’ve gotten several emails in the last few days from people who’ve read the book, who are lamenting that they did all the right things, went to the right school, took the right job, but still aren’t happy. This one woman talks about going to her ten-year high school reunion and filling everyone in on her new career at a dot.com. Everybody oohed and aahed. But she didn’t tell them that she went home at night and cried out of frustration.

B: Because she was working for someone else?

P: No, because she didn’t like it. She was labeled with success (outwardly, like on a resume), but in fact she didn’t think she was successful at all because she was miserable. So in a way terms like success and failure are beginning to acquire idiosyncratic definitions.

B: It seems to me that many people become free agents because they want to work less. Or they want more control. But it’s pretty obvious that they don’t work less. And in many cases they don’t have more control. In fact, they may even have less. They can’t walk away as easily now.

P: Yes, but I’m not sure whether that is as much about control as it is about having your heart in something. But you are right. There is this great myth that free agents don’t work as hard—that they spend their days padding around the house in bunny slippers and watching Oprah. One of my neighbors said to me : “I don’t know how you get up and go do your work when there’s nobody making you do it.” Well, one reason I go do my work is because the alternative is starvation. The other reason is that I actually enjoy what I do. It’s not as if I have the Sunday night dread that employees of the large corporate world have. I don’t dread going to work. I have bad days, of course. But the dread is gone. The bad part about being a free agent is that you have to work 24 hours a day. The good part is that you get to pick which 24 hours. Actually, I think there is greater control working as a free agent. Sure, there are clients and employees over which you really don’t exercise absolute control, but I really think you have more control. Though maybe not as much as you’d like.

One thing that’s definitely true: free agents have more responsibility, but that’s the difference between being a child and being an adult.

B: Your point that bigger isn’t better strikes home. I’m always urging my clients to not let growth happen to them. Why is it so infatuating? The fear that unless we are getting bigger we are stagnant?

P: Yes. That’s a big part of it. I also think that we’ve been conditioned to think that more is better. If you are making more money, everything is better. That feels good, because it means that people want you. But sometimes you have to say: no thanks. And that’s very hard to do. It takes guts to turn down business.

B: So, if you are hiring people with tendencies toward free agency, how do you brand your firm if it’s like an ant farm, with constant movement in and out?. Service industries over the last decade have made a large positioning point of saying: “here, our people are different.” But it sounds like they really aren’t. Or that it would be more accurate to say “we have different people” than “our people are different.”

P: I think that the way to brand your firm is as a great place to work. And that requires a rather radical step: you need to treat people like adults. I think you will find talented people to work for you if you simulate inside what it would be like to operate outside the operation. Let people be free agents. It means not monitoring their email, focusing on output instead of input, not requiring ridiculous amounts of face time, setting high standards and then letting people figure out how to get there, providing any help they need along the way.

B: Are you at all worried that this free agent movement might expand beyond what makes sense? Sort of like the ESOP movement? It was supposed to help us work for very different companies because they were “employee owned.” But statistically, it just hasn’t worked. And the ESOP movement is no longer the hot thing. Do you ever worry that this free agent thing is more of a fad than a movement that is changing the landscape permanently?

P: No, because one of the things I’ve seen as this movement has evolved is an organic capacity to change. For example, people are afraid of isolation. So small clusters of free agents are getting together, holding small group meetings—sort of a cross between group therapy and corporate board of directors. There will be some sort of move toward better health insurance options for small firms. The underlying forces are just too powerful for it to go away. But your analogy with ESOPs is interesting. In that case, they had to take on a more elaborate legal structure, involving lawyers—a sure sign that something is doomed. But free agency is more organic. It flexes and evolves and morphs with the needs that arise.

B: Have you done any personality testing to see if there is any correlation between certain personality types and successful free agents?

P: I didn’t. Though I would imagine that there are some traits that make open more successful. Like tolerance for ambiguity. A thick skin. Not being too terribly risk averse or risk prone. A sensible risk taker, in other words. Being comfortable with internal validation along with external validation. Some skills in self-promotion and networking. Though lots of that can be learned behavior.

B: But when it’s not, it seems like we have to get used to the implications of failure. When an employee invests time, she might lose her job. But nothing worse than that happens. But a free agent might be chasing a dream on borrowed money that must be paid back. We should have the freedom to fail, but is it smart to nurture this dream that I have to enjoy my work? Are our expectations too high?

P: You have to deal with both. You can’t focus only on your own pure enjoyment. You can’t ignore it. It has to be integral. But it’s not the only consideration. You have to be selling something that somebody wants to buy. Hopefully that will align with what you want to enjoy. I don’t think it’s as difficult as people think. But we don’t dare make the perfect the enemy of the good here. You might not enjoy your work 20% of the time, but that’s a lot better than not enjoying it 60% of the time, working for someone else.

B: So is the free agent movement driven by a search for meaning?

P: Part of it, but not all of it.

B: The big company doesn’t care about me (the employee). I don’t care about the big company (the employer). The big company doesn’t care about its customers—big shock—so what do these free agents care about?

P: I think they care about doing great work. About their colleagues. Their clients. Their families. Making an impact. This last point, in fact, is a major reason why people leave big companies: they want to have an impact. And I think working on your own allows you to make a more direct impact. People care about their community, leading a happy life, and setting an example for their children.

B: So a free agent launches on their own and becomes enamored with the notion of growth, but then wakes up and says: I want to go back to do this on a smaller scale. What is it that they are recapturing?

P: I think they’ve gotten a sense of what they love to do, and what contributes to meaning and purpose in their lives. But that’s different for everybody. Some people are fulfilled by running a large operation. But other people love to “do,” not necessarily running an operation where other people “do” the stuff they love to do! It takes some courage to make those choices. Particularly if it means going back to some place you’ve already been and left.

People need to trust their instincts. I speak from some experience, here. When I was working in the White House as Al Gore’s chief speech writer, I had a terrific, amazing job. I was doing pretty well in the Washington DC cocktail conversations. I had interesting answers when people asked me what I did. But it wasn’t for me. I wasn’t happy. And life is too short to not be happy.

And I was feeling like I really wasn’t have enough impact. It took awhile to reckon with those feelings, allowing myself to admit that maybe I shouldn’t be doing this. And some people to this day can’t understand why one would leave the trappings of a prestigious institution and all its reflected glory to go and work on the third floor of my house, sitting in shorts. But I come up here every morning glad to do what I’m doing.

B: Fast forward a bit to 20 years from now. Do you think you could look back and find some inordinately selfish aspect of this movement?

P: Uhmm. Interesting question. Perhaps. I think we might view it as selfish if we realize that in an economy built on skills and connections we risk leaving a portion of the population behind. I do think that enlightened self interest is a lubricant for the free agent nation. So I guess my hope is that it is enlightened enough.