Land of the Free

Law 3: Free to be you and me? We've got to be you and me.

As free agents around the country told me their stories, they repeatedly used the language of disguise and concealment to describe their previous jobs. They spoke of putting on "masks" or "game faces" at work. They talked about donning "armor" and erecting "smoke screens," because exposing themselves in a large organization could be perilous. Only when they returned home after work could they return to being who they truly were.

This personality split exacts a cost. Deborah Mersino, a 33-year-old public-relations free agent whom I spoke with in Evanston, Illinois, recalled a conversation with her then-fiancé and now-husband that persuaded her to go solo. After she'd returned from another bruising day at her job with a PR agency, he told her, "You're not you anymore." Shortly thereafter, she went out on her own.

The Organization Man workplace -- and to some extent, the cultish firms of the new economy -- tended to homogenize individuality. In the new flight to quality, more and more of us are pursuing work that will celebrate, rather than suffocate, our authenticity.

Listen to Joni Joyner-Tyre's story. She spent 20 years working for such large companies as Sheraton and Miller Freeman, where she planned meetings and organized conferences. But in her forties -- in an act that "was the single most scary thing I had ever done in my life" -- she became a free agent. She now works for herself from her home in Brooklyn.

"When I was working in a corporate environment, I would put on my little corporate suit -- a Stepford Worker -- and I went in there and did what was expected," she told me. "The minute I walked out of the building, I was Joni Joyner-Tyre again. But this way, as a free agent, I'm me all of the time."

But, of course, with profits down and layoffs up, Joyner-Tyre must be ready to give up the luxury of authenticity for the security of a "normal" job, right? Wrong. Even the thought of returning to traditional work, Joyner-Tyre said, "terrifies me. It would be like muzzling myself, gagging myself."

Law 4: You're on the line. Where else would you want to be?

Yeah, authenticity is groovy. But if it's your only goal, it can be hard to get anything done. That's why an equally important rule of the free-agent frontier is this: You've got to put your livelihood and your reputation directly on the line.

The fact is, most people want to be held accountable for their work -- provided they reap both the rewards for success and the penalties for failure. And most people instinctively seek variety, challenge, and passion in their endeavors. However, many independent workers told me that in traditional jobs, accountability was often diffused through layers of management -- or, in flailing dotcoms, was completely missing through no management at all.

Free agency makes the lines of responsibility and contribution absolutely clear. "In working on your own as a free agent, you have tremendous freedom. That's one of its great lures," marketing analyst Michele Foyer told me one afternoon near South Park in San Francisco. "And you also have immense responsibility. You're determining everything."

For many free agents, accountability means liberation. They put their names on their businesses and their livelihoods on the line. "You don't have administrators who don't understand what you do telling you when and how to do what they don't understand," explained Claudia Slate, a 49-year-old "virtual assistant" who lives on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation in south-central South Dakota. "You succeed or fail on your own merits."

Sure, times are tougher now. Which means that most traditional employees are left twisting in the winds of uncertainty: Is my job secure? How am I doing? Will I be the next to go? Free agents know how to keep score: Is my project a winner? Am I delivering what I promised? If you're a free agent exploring this new frontier of work, you know where you stand.

Law 5: Up isn't the only direction.

In the Organization Man economy, the higher you climbed, the more successful you were. Each spot above you on the org chart was like your mechanical bunny at the greyhound track for careers, taunting you to race faster to catch it. And when you did catch it? For a lot of people, it turned out not to be worth the chase.

Denise Apcar, 45, began working for pharmaceutical and medical-devices companies in 1980. In the early 1990s, her employer was acquired. "I was promoted into a meaningless, thankless job where I was on a plane to New York almost every other Monday. It was middle-manager hell," she told me on a rainy November night at a cramped Starbucks in Foster City, California. "The mentality was politics first, quality second."

The more time she spent in the high reaches of her company, the more she yearned for the freedom of the flatlands. "The higher up I got, the more I lost everything I enjoyed doing," she said. "I wanted to do what my staff people were doing. It was one of those things in the corporate world that you're not supposed to admit." She quit in 1995 to become a solopreneur.

I call this the Peter-Out Principle. The Peter Principle, formulated in 1969 by management professor Laurence J. Peter, held that workers would ascend the ranks of an organization until they arrived at a position where they were incompetent. Its successor, the Peter-Out Principle, holds that people rise until they stop having fun.