Free Agent Nation

So he started exploring. He talked to sports agents and Hollywood types, and he figured out the rules -- and then changed them. His first rewrite: software writers weren't geeks; they were artists. The software developers whom he represents work for companies like Sun Microsystems and Netscape Communications; they've designed products like Adobe Acrobat. To Rinaldi, they are "product architects" and "applied visionaries."

"I believe in a talent-driven model," he says. He has in mind something like the film industry. "In a temp agency, you test 'em and roll 'em out. In my model, everyone is a star." The new realities of computers and networking make several of the old structures obsolete. "In the new metaphor of work, the loyalty factor is still very high. In the new metaphor of work, you have a smaller-team model and a greater sense of loyalty to the team than to this artifact known as a company. Companies do not exist. Countries do not exist. Boundaries are an illusion. But the team exists," Rinaldi says. "The loyalty is also to you. This is the summer of love revisited, man!"

Our conversation is almost over, but Rinaldi is still grasping for a way to describe what he does. Then he almost bounces out of the seat he's been swiveling in for the last two hours.

"I create code farms -- places where people can sow the seeds of great code, work with these great geniuses, and grow these tremendous products."

I consider the implications: "If you bring enough talent onto this farm, you'll be able to build any piece of software that anybody needs."

Rinaldi flashes an inscrutable grin. "That's the idea."

The office is really an attic -- an upside-down flower box of a room with wood floors and a sloping ceiling. Out one window is a neighbor's green roof; out the other is another neighbor's green tree. There's a nifty laptop on a desk and a fax-copier-printer combo on a crate, but not much else of economic value. The only things saving the walls from complete bareness are a Roy Lichtenstein poster and three snapshots of a stunningly cute little girl with her very attractive mom. This is where I work. I'm a free agent.

A few months ago I was working in the White House. Now I tell people I'm working in the Pink House, since my office is on the third floor of our compact home in Washington, DC. For many years, I'd held down a job -- often one that people considered a "good job." But I'd grown tired -- tired of politics in general and of office politics in particular, tired of doing assignments I didn't enjoy on a schedule I couldn't control, tired of wingtips that felt like vises and neckties that seemed like nooses, and most of all, tired of seeing my stunningly cute daughter only when she was asleep and her very attractive mom only when I was complaining.

So I left. On Independence Day.

I became a free agent. That makes me a bit like the guy in those commercials who boasts that he's not simply president of Hair Club for Men: he's also a client. I'm not just a chronicler of Free Agent Nation: I'm also a citizen. And what has surprised me most -- both during my rookie season of free agency and throughout my dozen-city, 7,000-mile jaunt through Free Agent, USA -- is the extraordinary distance between this new world and the one I left behind.

For example, a new economic infrastructure is being built, and few people seem to notice. Since there's no well-stocked supply room here in the Pink House, I buy my wipeboards and Sharpies at Staples. If I've got major copies to crank out or a big presentation to prepare, I head for one of the three Kinko's within a four-mile radius of our house. Add email and the Web -- plus a nearby Mail Boxes Etc. -- and I've got as good a foundation to do my work as I'd have in a regular office. But still, people seem surprised that I'm able to function at all.

Or take public policy. While the private sector eagerly fashions this new free-agent infrastructure (in 1996, for example, Staples opened two new superstores every week), the public sector barely recognizes the forces driving all this construction. In conventional political dialogue, most of the talk continues to be about saving "jobs" or rewarding "entrepreneurs," with little understanding that lots of us -- and pretty soon, most of us -- live somewhere between those poles. The tax code is still geared to employees, and it imposes extra costs and annoying accounting demands on free agents. For free agents, keeping health insurance is a pain; getting it is even worse. Labor laws don't apply to us -- even though we make up more than one-sixth of the labor force.

But majority public attitudes still can't see it. For example, during my first month as a free agent, I described my switch to a friend, and he responded, "I really admire you for doing that. Most people wouldn't be able to handle the change in status."

On his map, the direction from the White House to the Pink House is straight down. Free Agent Nation is a land of exiles, an economic Elba. Many people like him ask me whether -- sometimes when -- I'll return to the other, more traditional world. It's a question that I posed to the 100 or so free agents whom I've spoken to in recent months. As it turns out, Deb Risi's answer is also mine -- and soon, I think, it will be the answer of millions more.

Would you go back?

"I can't imagine why."

Daniel H. Pink dhpink@ix.netcom.com , until recently chief speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore, is a Fast Company contributing editor.