Just before I stepped out on my own, I read Daniel Pink’s Free Agent Nation, which I would recommend to every freelancer. The CS Monitor has recently featured Pink in an article on the end of jobs. Pink sees another shift in the employment market, speculating that off-shoring is going to continue, and that “There are going to be plenty of opportunities…. But it’s not going to be ‘knowledge workers,’ it’s going to be creators and empathizers.” His new book, A Whole New Mind, is based on this idea:
The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind. The era of “left brain” dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which “right brain” qualities – inventiveness, empathy, meaning – predominate.
I take this to mean that synthesis and conceptual thinking will be in high demand, as businesses and organisations keep up with technology, market and cultural changes. Seeing patterns will be necessary. If this is the case, then Dave Pollard’s critical life skills will be essential for more and more people [take the hint, educators].
Pink’s first book was based on many interviews with free agents across the US, and I hope that this next one will have good data to back it up. The book is due out in March 2005.
