I was delighted to see Dan Pink interviewed by Fast Company magazine for a 10 year retrospective on Free Agent Nation. Many ideas still reasonate here especially around small business. I particularly like this answer:
Q: With the economic downturn and the evolution of the business world since the book came out, has people's ability to succeed by themselves changed?
A: I think the changes that have taken place are really interesting. The book came out in '01 and so we are talking about a 10-year retrospective. But I think if you go back and look at some of the causes of this phenomenon, the causes have only intensified. One of them was the end of corporate paternalism, this idea that companies would take care of their employees the way parents took care of their children. It was clear that was ending around then, but in 2011, I don't know if you will find anybody that would believe this idea that companies would take care of people. That notion of what a company does for people has profoundly changed. It's kaput! It was evaporating back then, now I think it's fully gone. The financial collapse has made people more cynical about trusting large institutions.
The other thing I also wrote about is that today individuals have longer lifespans than organizations. All of us can expect to live longer than any organization that we would work for. That continues apace. Human longevity is increasing, corporate longevity is decreasing. And if you look at technology as a great enabler, it's kind of quaint looking back at 2001: there wasn't widespread broadband. There wasn't YouTube. There wasn't Twitter or Facebook. There weren't many smartphones. It seems almost impoverished. One of the reasons why technology matters is it gives the individuals the kind of firepower that was once reserved for organizations. So that has intensified as well.
