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“Employee What?!” 17

Researching “Brand You”
If you work with a lot of free agents,or just want to know
more about the phenomenon,check out Dan Pink’s book,
Free Agent Nation,Tom Peters’ slim tome,The Brand You 50: Fifty Ways to
Transform Yourself from an “Employee” into a Brand That Shouts Distinction,
Commitment,and Passion!(Knopf,1999) (an easy read—the book isn’t
much longer than the title), Fast Company magazine,and
www.guru.com.
For other resources,fire up a search engine such as www.google.com
and type “free agent” or “Brand You” in the search box.

proper work-life balance at home.
The first argument has much validity: it’s merely an exten-
sion of the reason why people have long become consultants or
self-employed—to gain more control over their future. It’s an
echo of one of the most basic of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—
the need for security.
The second and third arguments—often combined in a con-
cept called “Brand You” and much promoted by Fast Company
magazine, management guru Tom Peters, and others—lured
many people into becoming free agents for all the wrong reasons.
Many free agents found out the following facts of free agent
life:
• Except for a few exceptional individuals, life as a free
agent brings even less chance of work-life balance than
the average full-time job.
• Life as a free agent is very lonely: most people are too
gregarious to thrive in the socially barren world of free
agency.
• Free agent status is exactly how not to concentrate on
your core competencies. To be a free agent, you also
have to be good at “non-core” activities, such as mar-
keting and selling yourself, writing proposals and negoti-
ating fees, bookkeeping, and typing letters.
• If you really want just to concentrate on core competen-
cies, the best bet is that boring old concept, the full-time