The Talent Market

Unlike a stockbroker, Mahan does not earn a commission on each trade that he handles. Instead, he receives a salary based on a formula that takes into account things like teamwork and learning. "Commissions give people tunnel vision," explains Chuang, who designed the formula. MacTemps does make a tidy profit each time Mahan places Garrison in a new assignment. Garrison's gigs vary in length from a week to several months. MacTemps bills him out at $75 to $125 per hour and takes about one-third off the top, leaving him with roughly $50 to $80 per hour. Garrison says he thinks of the spread as the cost of outsourcing his back-office operations: health insurance, pension benefits, tax accounting, payroll. To some, this arrangement might seem like a form of corporate paternalism, re-created in a kinder, gentler guise. To Garrison, it's a way to carve out more time to manage a stock called Curtis.

"Let me put it this way," says Garrison. "The only way MacTemps could be better is if it put in some kind of dating service. If I went out on dates that were as successful as these projects, I'd be a pretty happy guy."

III. The New Economy's Mood Ring

Established in 1792, the New York Stock Exchange operated for its first 25 years under a buttonwood tree at 68 Wall Street. Established in 1986, MacTemps operated for a time from a Cambridge, Massachusetts storefront that smelled like eggplant. John Chuang was a junior at Harvard in 1986, when he and two classmates took their Macintosh computers, bought a $5,000 laser printer on credit, and started a company called Laser Designs. The following year, upon graduating, they moved the venture into real office space - a space whose previous tenant had been Dominex the Eggplant King.

Today the company headquarters occupies four floors in a funky office building in Boston's Back Bay. From its vegetable-scented beginnings, MacTemps has become a global concern, with offices in nine countries and annual revenues in excess of $100 million.

But to see Chuang as merely a latter-day Horatio Alger and MacTemps as merely another inspiring dorm-to-destiny tale is to overlook a richer story. Chuang's company has changed so often in so short a time that it could be a mood ring for the American economy at the century's end. Consider: When desktop publishing was becoming the next big thing, Chuang launched Laser Designs. When computer prices began their inexorable slide, Chuang launched MacTemps to help staff corporate design shops. When DOS (followed by Windows) became the dominant computer standard, Chuang established a division called PC Temps. When "downsizing" and "outsourcing" became the new employment standards, in the early 1990s, Chuang set up offices across the country to meet corporate staffing needs. In 1993, when health insurance was dominating the national political debate, Chuang made MacTemps one of the first agencies of its kind to offer health-care benefits to its talent. When a presence on the World Wide Web became a must-have for every business, in the second half of the 1990s, Chuang started WebStaff. If you want to track the economy's recent past, just look at where MacTemps has been.

And if you want to chart the economy's future, look at where MacTemps is going. The future is about talent: the buying, selling, and nurturing of human capital. The job market has become precisely that - a massive, messy, moving market. And so the company is evolving again. The most powerful evidence: Within the next year, it will shed its name. Because the Macintosh has become a niche business machine, says Chuang, the first syllable of "MacTemps" has become too narrow. And because free agency makes temps of us all, the second syllable has become simply redundant.

Chuang has yet to decide on a new name but says that it will reflect the company's position at the front edge of an industry that is still being invented: "the career-building industry." His company is also exploring the possibility of becoming a one-stop financial-services shop for all free agents. He envisions solo workers coming to his company for mortgages, business loans, retirement plans, and other personal business services that free agents find it hard to secure. Imagine a merger between the William Morris Agency, Citibank, and the New York Stock Exchange, and you get an idea of both the genius and the audacity of his vision.

But Chuang has an even larger aspiration: "There's no reason why we shouldn't be the best place in the world to work."