Access usually includes use of conference rooms, training rooms, and meeting rooms on a sign-up basis, and there are often other amenities, like big screen monitors and a special connection for broadcasting available. Some makerspaces focus on the artist movement side of independent working, some on the industrial side and can even include machines involved in prototyping design ideas. Others tend to be hubs for software developers – often called hackerspaces (if you still think a hacker is someone who breaks the law, you’re out of touch). And yet others are packed with design people and various web 2.0 company operators.

I have an excellent home office, but I also need a place off-site where I can write creatively, apart from the distractions of multiple businesses and the demands of home life. Coffee shops are often uncomfortable with loud thumping music or emphatic ideological discussions that get in even around headphones, or there are lots of flies, bone-crushing seating that can make working painful, dim lighting, amplified musical acts, or other problems. Ordinary diners often don’t have reliable internet, or they’re just too hospital-sterile and brightly lit, with not enough other people around engaged in creation and innovation. So I rent my 3hrs/day of time from a collaborative coop and get what I like about coffee shops (coffee and other creative people around) but with more of an emphasis on work and productivity. I get what I like from a corporate office (high dollar office chairs, professional workspace, solid connectivity, and a pro environment) – but without the sort of ever-present feeling of corporate hegemony, needless restrictions, or accountability to an HR department. It’s a place of self-direction and independence.

Think of it like this: Why would any startup or independent professional go to the expense and hassle or taken on the responsibility of leasing a whole building, setting up utilities, maintaining security, etc. when, through a coop,  you can get all that for a much more reasonable fee, without the obligation, but also be in the company of other people who are what you want to be, doing the things you want to do? We’ve learned that innovation is social – it’s about momentum and collaboration and likemindedness. Even technies are part of this ‘artists movement within work itself’, if you’ll permit me to borrow an expression from my colleague Steve Pruneau at Free Agent Source. We’ve figured out that a lot of us, perhaps most of us, work best when the hassles are removed, all the right stuff is taken care of, and the opportunity exists to collaborate and socialize with others going similar directions (or even radically different ones). I mostly keep to myself, but having the other people around, working, does a lot to keep me engaged with my own work. Some small companies like it so well, that they just go ahead and set up shop in coworking spaces indefinitely.

If you’re interested in collaborative workspaces or other types of shared arrangements, check out coworkingregistry.org and sharedbusinessspace.com as well as hackerspaces.org and coworking.com and makerspace.com - Also, kudos to my own current coworking coop at okccoco.com - they’ve got a great facility in a perfect location, and they’re steps from a great coffee shop too.

Major Premise: It is government’s prime responsibility to ensure basic subsistance for everyone.

• Minor Premise: And the primary way governments ensure subsistance is creating or providing a job.
• Hidden Premise: A job system (career for life, regardless of market needs) should prevail over a work system (continually adapt to market needs)
• Conclusion: Therefore, the government’s primary concern should be job creation or job protection.

Major Premise: The government’s primary concern should be job creation or job protection.

• Minor Premise: If the government had more money, it could create jobs.
• Conclusion: Therefore, the government’s primary task should be acquiring wealth.

Major Premise: The government’s primary task should be aquiring wealth.

• Minor Premise: The wealthy have created wealth/capital that is currently not engaged in job creation (sleeping capital).
• Hidden Premise: The government can more competently manage that capital than the wealthy who created it.
• Hidden Premise: Taxing the wealthy will result in the creation of jobs and a better state of affairs for the jobless.
  
• Conclusion: Therefore the government should take that wealth from the wealthy, so that jobs will be created.

I contend that, beyond laying out the structure of the arguments, and utilizing logic to test their validity (not whether they are true – an argument can be valid without being true), it isn’t possible to have a meaningful discussion of these issues in the US, any more than it is to have a meaningful discussion about race or homosexuality. So I’m not going to do more than present a precis of my reasons for not accepting the syllogisms above. I won’t drill down into specifics, but I feel it necessary to simply say that there’s a meaningful tradition (I think the tradition is capitalism) that has decent science and excellent reasoning behind it, as an alternative to the views expressed previously.

Giving jobs to people as charity, when we don’t need what they’re offering, rather than requiring them to continually create ways to add value to the economy, as needed, adapting to the evolving market place, dealing with obsolescence by innovating, is both subsidizing dependence and reducing incentive toward ingenuity. It disproportionately taxes success, punishing those who add the most value, and further inhibiting their ability to innovate, and it does nothing to equip others to take their place. Such solutions pretend to equitably redistribute wealth, but they harm all parties involved, including the recipients of the forcibly extorted capital, tying it up in mere expenditure, and robbing it of its potential for investment. It sabotages those who actually do create demand for work (whether employers or entrepreneurs) and reward those who refuse to act creatively or who cannot.

We hold corporations to a standard of constantly innovating to compete, and don’t heed them (generally – the recent banking fiasco sure makes it seem otherwise) when they whine that no one wants their stuff and they’re losing money. At the same time, we allow individuals to think they’re entitled to a job, and that a job is a lifelong entitlement, something someone gives or provides them if only they do the right formulaic things (get a certification or degree and don’t offend the wrong people). Unlike companies in the market, we don’t insist individuals keep innovating, keep up with the market, keep finding ways to add value. We let corporations go under every day, taking scores of investors with them, but we contemplate protectionism for individuals – they simply cannot be allowed to fail. It’s not consistent. If we give people jobs, we should also give corporations profits. If we expect corps to constantly adapt to the market and innovate in order to earn and compete, we should expect the same think of individuals whose skills have met with obsolescence. And we should stop telling the post-WWII lie that a college degree is a guarantee of a lifelong career. We not only know that it’s not true, it’s a fiction that’s doing a lot of harm by convincing people not to be prepared, not to develop adaptation as a primary skill over and above specific trade or professional skills, and to turn to government when the market changes and they are out of work as easily as a company can go out of business.

What if each of us was a company? Want to know what law I would support? I would support mandating that every adult in US society incorporate themselves, and have the legal protections due a corporation, the rights available to a corporation, and the responsibilities we expect of a corporation – ethically and in terms of market competition. After all, in a society that has achieved the hegemony of corporate entities over personal rights, the subordination of personal freedoms to corporate control, and the demoralization of personal initiative at the behest of dependence on corporate jobs, elevating the individual to corporate status would simply mean giving him the original rights and responsibilities talked about in the constitution and which the founders of the country had in mind. It would be an answer to both the Republicans who want to replace personal freedoms with corporate privileges, and the Democrats who say they want maximum individual liberties and opportunities. In fact, the basic concept has been envisioned in a book called The Unincorporated Man by Dani & Eytan Kollin, in which “every individual is incorporated at birth, and spends many years trying to attain control over his or her own life by getting a majority of his or her own shares”. Incidentally, there’s nothing to stop you from incorporating yourself. A good S-Corp in Nevada, Wyoming, or Utah ought to do the trick. It might be a while before you can draw capital gains, but it’s a good exercise – learn to run a company properly, and you might be able to act on an idea for value creation when it comes to mind. You could be John Fucolaki Inc.

Those in our society who create value right now are responsible for the good in the economy – they are the engines, as Ayn Rand put it, and it is partly to them that we owe the prosperity of a host of people who depended on the results of their initial idea. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they are solely responsible. In a creator society, in which we are all interacting with the ideas of each other, drawing upon them, adding our own, modifying the mix – it’s very much like a mythopoetic society, where each person is contributing part of the whole – value creation in an ideal environment is collaborative – there is always room for people who add value. So the goal shouldn’t be to get people jobs – it should be to get people into the mentality of constantly seeking ways to add value. The Republicans want to see self-reliance and individualism – put your money where your mouth is – stop playing politics by promising job creation and start demanding that people at every level of society create ways to work – stop intellectually subsidizing dependence. The Democrats want to empower people over against big corporate dominance? Sure you do – let’s see it – help them become individually motivated to generate their own industry.

Those who merely hand someone a job, whether or not it makes business or financial sense to do so, out of the kindness of their hearts, rob the economy of genuine innovation, and deprive a host of people who could be employed by even one man who is employed for a good reason. It’s not just that I don’t agree with Warren Buffet – I don’t agree with the entire attitude of the government trying to “create jobs” – which is like cosigning for a bad debt – a desire to guarantee work for people who, by themselves, can’t adapt or innovate in a changing economy and expect lifelong entitlement and have even, in general, conveyed that is their very attitude by turning to the government to make a job for them. It’s no different than bailing out banks. Don’t bail out the jobless. Instead, tell them the members of our tribe, the capitalists, must learn to swim in the market, because that’s how we as a people not only survive, it’s how our culture grows, and how we prosper.

I’ve said it many times, and I’ll keep saying it: the fundamental vocational skill in this society is the ability to adapt, to create multiple income streams, to find new ways to add value, to minimize dependence on institutions and government to provide all the work you do. In the old days, they told people who went to college to also learn a trade, because times change. Unless grandpa’s advice was utterly stupid (and I don’t think it was), the modern equivalent advice would be, everyone with any sense should have multiple irons in the fire – more than one way to add value, in other words. If you’re down to one, are you really shocked that gee, one day it becomes obsolete, and you’re completely hamstrung. Someone who gambles that way with their credit, we call foolish. But with vocational matters, we wink at it. It’s not good enough now to say “I’m going into Human Resources” or Communications or Software Development or Database Administration. The response should be “and… what else?” If there’s only one thing, you’re screwed – it’s just a matter of time. The one career for life mentality is part of a big vocational bubble that existed from 1945 to its final death rattle in 2003. Pretending we still live in that world is even more irresponsible than pretending it was a solid reality in the first place. Mom and Dad were wrong – deal with it.

Most common question: What about the people who can’t adapt or innovate or change or add value? Why? Are they mentally ill? Do they have low IQs? Why do you believe they are incapable of doing what people all over the world are having to do when their industries are phased out? Is the average guy a lout who can only learn one repetitive task – to sit but not to roll over? And why do we have to solve the problem of the chronically dull, senseless, stupid, and uncreative anyway? If we acknowledge that the proposed solution will not improve their situation, on what basis do you insist that a solution actually exists? Stupid people get run over in the road every day, along with some pretty smart ones. We can’t save everyone. And it’s not the job of government to save everyone. Not in our legal tradition. It never has been. It is our job to remove as many barriers as we can to people innovating and creating value. We should minimize license restrictions for small business, simplify regulations, stop subsidizing and protecting industries and corporations that keep them from competing effectively, and work to streamline the ability of individuals to go from idea to industry without making it a system of welfare. In short, the job of government is to make sure that government doesn’t interfere, and that no one uses the power of the gun in all its forms to interfere. Other than that, it should keep its hands out – of my job life, work life, entrepreneur life, company life, etc. Safety and health things I have some tolerance for, but unnecessary control or contribution by any arm of government is poison. And that goes for the average guy clamouring for going after the rich. Instead of taxing the corporations of the wealthy more, try subsidizing and protecting them less. Are you brave enough to argue that one at the Starbucks and to your congressman? That will do more than most things to give Joe the out of work airlines employee a chance to start his accounting practice or his travel concierge service, or whatever he’s planning in the wake of his industry’s downfall. But handing the airlines money to hire him back, paying him to sit at home or sweep streets, is just prolonging the problem.

Next time you hear a politician claim he’s going to do anything to create jobs, ask him not to. It’s not the job of government to create jobs. Next time he says we need to subsidize an industry, and that will create jobs, tell him he’s just recreating the problem, stifling innovation – not adding to it, and protecting the corporation over against the entrepreneur – even if he’s a Democrat. Stop listening to the gospel of dependency, and do something for yourself, and do it now if you’re employed, before you’re next. Don’t listen to those people growing up who told you that the goal is to acquire a career and protect it at all costs – you can’t. Get a second line of work and moonlight on the side to keep it fresh and active, for the same reason you have an emergency fund, or savings, or health insurance, or insurance on your roof. And when you find yourself saying let’s tax the rich more, because it’s not fair that they get more, look in the mirror, because you’re jealous, you’re spiteful, and you don’t know what fairness is at all. It’s never depriving the other guy, it’s merely not stopping you from adding value and profiting by it. Didn’t you learn anything in kindergarten, or were you the kid who believed it when the teacher said if one person has gum, they have to bring it for everyone? Good thing we don’t have that rule for your girlfriend at parties, or your billfold the next time you whip out a twenty. Focusing on who you can get money from for the government just gives the government more things to spend it on, and doesn’t do anything for you but make you stupid and distracted. Stay focused, because no matter who you are, or where you’re at, you’re vulnerable, and the government isn’t actually here to help you, and never will be.

So, the socialism of jobs as an entitlement, as welfare, as something owed not something competed for and won, and the focus on jobs instead of work, is going to be the operative premise of political life for a while. I encourage you to join the rest of us. We’re not waiting for a handout – and yes, you are, if you’re asking government to create a job for you – we’re off thinking about how we can make new things – how we can do it without permission, entitlement, sanction, or as part of a plan to ‘restore America’, whatever the hell that means. There’s an entire movement of us, everywhere across the United States, in every locale. Find us.

For contractors, our concern is for preserving the integrity and freedom of work in a sea of freelancers too often willing to act like commodities, indeed like serfs. Conceding to an employee-like existence, without at least employee-like protections (which aren’t that great to begin with), sentences you to an unsustainable future that will seriously impede your business growth. To grow and to compete, you must be free, and you must choose clients who will not presume upon that freedom. You have to be willing to take time for yourself, say no to people sometimes, not bend over backwards when clients miss deadlines, and not give up all that is good and precious about your life for your business. It might seem good for business, but it’s really bad for business in the long run. And the short run almost always *becomes* the long run when it comes to concessions. The client I respect the most insists that I take time for me when I need it. He says, “you’re no good to me worn out and burned out. I need you to take care of yourself, so I get the best value out of you when I really need you.”

For clients, letting that happen and wanting that control is foolish, too – it’s just not sustainable, and you won’t get the quality of work that will always be outdone (among your competitors) by free agents that are truly free, or the longevity out of brilliant talent when you do find it, because they can’t really sustain their business that way. Free agency is the way the brilliant people go. As a client, you should hope your talented contractors stay almost too busy for you, and aren’t sitting around waiting for that one phone call, where they are immediately available to do exactly what you want when you want. It’s counterintuitive, but you should desire to get just the time you need from the very best. After all, it’s part of why you’re taking on contractors, not employees. The need for control, and non-critical needs met immediately, can become economically pathological  - you still see large and less competitive corporations insisting, to their own detriment, on bringing on employees in order to retain control where contractors would deliver better economy in the long run and higher value. Competitive companies in the future will prefer one hour of the best person they can find, at a premium rate, over full work days where they find stuff for lower paid, less valuable contributors to do.

So here are the five signs: While this article is not legal advice, and we have no special legal expertise, the following principles are at once our take on the meaning of the new legal requirements, insofar as they shape the work culture of free agents and limit the control of clients over people they contract with, where control is at odds with productivity and the best interest of the company. These are also good general principles to keep in mind, whether you are client or contractor, about the distinction between contracting and traditional employment. The items here are things we should already realize, of course – the new laws are just designed to keep relationships honest. As principles, they help keep it sustainable too, profitable for all, and best suited to the business growth of all participants.

1. You can tell an employee when, where, and how to work, or require them to act as a fully integrated part of your company processes. A contractor is a free agent that sets their own hours, duration of work, work places, and work methods. In other words, if you tell someone “I’m available 9-5, and I need you available 9-5″, then you pretty much have to pay them for that entire time frame (they’re “on call”). Otherwise, they can work from 4:30pm-1am if they want, or 2am-6am every 3rd day.

2. You can tell an employee to be available at specific times and engage in specific tasks at specific times. You can indicate specific times that specific tasks will be performed. With contractors, you mutually agree on mutually acceptable deadlines – time frames are agreed, not dictated – and work depends on availability and other work loads the contractor may choose to take on. In other words, it’s one thing to say “Can we get this done by Monday end of business” or “within 24hrs, if I get it to you before Thursday?” and another to say “Do this on Monday morning at 8am”.

3. You can dictate work methods and the manner of work to an employee, such as whether the work gets done all at once or in parts, or whether the person works on one project at a time. With contractors, you agree on mutually acceptable deliverables and outcomes, not method and manner. The contractor can work on many or few tasks, from one or several clients, simultaneously or separately, and take as much or as little work from whatever sources they see fit. It doesn’t mean you can’t say “look, I want pure HTML, not XML code” but you can’t really dictate whether they write it from scratch or use a tool to create it.

4. You can require an employee to attend various meetings and pay for that. A contractor cannot be required to attend at all, but can be invited. Contractors typically work by appointment, and may charge different rates based on what kind of time is being contracted: consulting might be charged differently than labor; on-call time might be charged at a much higher rate, if its agreed upon. You can ask a contractor to meet to clarify instructions, if they’re not delivering what you agreed on (they can turn down a request for one medium – e.g. phone – and indicate a preference for e-mail or another asynchronous medium, of course – live time is premium time, and might be billable, if you require that method), but you can’t demand unlimited consulting time to answer all your questions about a topic – consulting is always billable and subject to the schedule of both parties.

5. You can prevail upon an employee’s specific use of time and where and when they work. You can require an employee to be at their desk at a certain time, take vacations at certain times, etc. A contractor may take as much work as they wish from whatever sources they wish, and may refuse work or take only the work they wish. A contractor may work or not work at any given time of day or night, days of the week, weeks of the month, months of the year, etc, as they may wish. In other words, you may have a right to ask an employee “where were you yesterday?” But contractors might decide to go to the Yukon for two weeks in between contracts. When you call, they might be out on the tundra, not necessarily standing by for a call. Most contractors make arrangements for some kind of response within 24hrs, with a few exceptions, but you still can’t presume on their schedule. Contractors take vacations, have medical appointments, and sometimes just decide not to do anything related to business for a few days. If you’re going to need them at a certain time, on a critical basis, you have to book that time with them. And then, if you don’t deliver your part or can’t make it to the appointment, they get to bill for it anyway without reasonable cancellation notice from the client.

These are general principles of contracting which traditionally contract professionals know quite well. They’re not absolute laws, but they are the starting place in most cases, and price tends to go up to the degree they get pushed. Contract laborers, on the other hand, have often participated with clients in bending these rules, and both parties should now be aware that the US is onto this. Freelancers, though, are where the lines seem to be blurring the most rapidly, with clients attempting to utilize freelancers as integral parts of their office operations. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, if the pay structure (including benefit structure) is equitable and honest. Regardless of the drawbacks or benefits of that approach, the distinctions between contractor, freelancer, and entrepreneur (and where they overlap!) are key emerging areas of negotiation, posture, and distinction that contract professionals are finding it necessary to emphasize.

If you went into contracting for the freedom, the ability to grow your talent, and to create an economic enterprise, you don’t have to worry about holding the line vs. becoming essentially and employee again, if you deliver at a high enough quotient of value. Contract professionals who try to live like employees will ultimately over-spend and under-deliver. The point of competition is not what other people are willing to yield or concede to; it is what you can deliver that earns you the status of contract professional, and retains your credence in that status. And even when there are clients willing to choose less expensive, more compliant talent, you’ll know that you are, instead, working for those clients’ competition. Clients, too, should take note of that, and consider the value in getting the best they can afford, and figure out what they *don’t* need. Usually, clients don’t need to govern when, where, and how contractors work.

Related Sources: Findlaw, IRS

They are called robo-signers, putting their names on thousands of documents tied to mortgages facing foreclosure….

Until now, Mr. Stephan was an anonymous middle manager whose job is to sign affidavits, assignments of mortgages and other documents that establish a bank’s ownership of a mortgage, thus giving the bank the right to foreclose….

In two sworn depositions given by Mr. Stephan over the last 10 months, he said that assistants brought as many as 500 documents a day to this desk at GMAC’s office in Fort Washington, Pa. Some months, he would sign more than 10,000 documents related to home foreclosures. By signing the documents, he was stating that he had personally reviewed the details of each case….

Ice Legal… took a sworn deposition from… another robo-signer. Working as an operations specialist for Chase Home Mortgage, a division of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., she said she regularly signed off on about 18,000 foreclosure affidavits and other documents each month, without ever personally reviewing the files associated with the loans. [original article]

Bank of America Corp. and OneWest Bank have also been found to have robosigners.

Here’s the thing. These “middle management” guys (what were they “managing”, a 1hr lunch to stretch their fingers after doing the human equivalent of machine work?) – these guys and gals were basically set up to violate the law, trained to be indifferent to the law, and set to work flaunting the law. But more important than the question of legality is the morality of it. It’s not that they were immoral, but that they were amoral. Soulless. Sure, when you’re ordered to break the law, you’re supposed to say no. These guys didn’t. I’ve been there. In my first job as a clerk, I was ordered to fudge documents (I said no), and even once to sign documents as someone else (we call that ‘forgery’ and I said no to that too). And yeah, I wasn’t well liked after that, and I was making waves. But what about all the stuff that’s wrong but isn’t technically illegal, or skirts the edge of the law? A person that’ll simply bow his or her head and do what they’re told about the law, will certainly do it when the law doesn’t account for something.

It’s like the Milgrim experiments, based on Kohlberg’s theory of moral stages – they give a stronger group of people (let’s call them middle managers) power over a weaker group of people (let’s call them people with financial trouble). In Milgrim’s labs it was people with buttons that administer pain and people who receive that pain. Then an authoritative figure orders the pain administered regardless of the cries of the victims. You can decide who we’re talking about there. I don’t fear the malevolent goon as much as I fear the amoral nobody – the latter is capable of anything – they are the machine people – the robosigners of a culture. In the words of the song from Sesame Street, they’re “the people in your neighborhood”. Amorality is the truest evil. As Hannah Arendt pointed out, in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: the Banality of Evil, evil is ordinary – it’s the stuff most people are capable of. Which makes it all the more apropos that Ohio Attorney General Richard Corday said that to claim they were just following orders is “the Nuremburg Defense”. He’s been falsely characterized as comparing the simple mutts we call robosigners to the Nazis, but that’s not what he said – he correctly identified a well known argument (like “fire in a crowded theatre”) that any attorney would be familiar with, precisely because it was the famous plea of all the middle managers at Nuremburg, those “faceless” underlings who were simply amoral, compliant, loyal, and did what the authority figure told them to do.

We all know that the phrase “middle management” is so nebulous, refers to just about anything or anyone who is ‘less’ than an executive and more than a mere corporate tool – the office version of a line worker, that often times what we mean by it is simply “hack”. It can be anyone who is given a title with a word like ‘manager’ in it and a decent salary in exchange for loyalty and for quietly going about what they are instructed to do, quite amorally. Simply put,  middle managers are often just the mercenary grunts of corporate life – mercenary because they do more or less whatever you like for money, and grunts because the work can even be something as repetitive as mindlessly sitting in one spot scribbling their names over and over for 8hrs per day. How they “manage” to think of themselves as still human is the real question.

Come on, how would you like that job? Imagine that’s your life, sitting there scribbling John Doe over and over, all day, every day, not knowing or caring whether what you’re signing your own personal, individual, human name to is true or not, real or not, right or not. Each scribble bleeding any integrity you have out on the page, disconnecting your identity from you as an individual and making it just part of a company program, your mind drifting off into meaninglessness, your words and reality never touching, your work accounting for nothing. The daily endeavours of your hands, the summit of your activity, of the most lively hours of the bulk of your days in the most productive years of your life, accounting for absolutely nothing. How would you like that to be your job? We can’t call it “your work”, because work is more dignified than that. The key question is not “was it fraud?” but “Is that what work has come to in contemporary corporate life?”, “How can anyone accept such a fate?”, “Is most of it, most of what passes for work in the corporate marketplace, from the cubicle to the warehouse, really just a more elaborate form of robosigning?” I don’t know, but I’m willing to ask the question.

There are good, decent people who work in chicken factories, doing the same repetitive, menial tasks all day. And it can be dehumanizing work. One line worker in such a factory said ‘I’m not thinking about anything at all. I have to work so quickly. I’m exhausted, emotionally if not physically. And if I think, I’ll think about the pain of this being my life.” Good people turned into robo-somethings by consumer gluttony and corporate greed. But when those repetitive, menial tasks involve stamping out someone’s life, in a depersonalized atmosphere of mass processing, it really wouldn’t be that far off to compare it to some of the jobs defended at Nuremburg, in principle, if not in degree.

I always wonder about guys like Mr. S. He pleads that he didn’t have enough training. For what? And do you really need training to know that what you’re doing is so banal and empty, that it must be some form of evil, despite what it’s doing to other people, if for no other reason than what it’s doing to you. I’m sure, in some ways, Mr. S. is very “nice”, is a ‘nice guy’. But frankly, I think nice guys suck. Nice guys are the enablers that allow the world to trod down a lot of its inhabitants quietly and easily and most of all efficiently with a minimum of fuss. Nice guys are the machine parts that don’t just serve good will or evil will – they serve any kind of will, without asking questions – they don’t make waves – they offend no one – they don’t ask uncomfortable questions – everyone is happy with them – most people they affect don’t even know them – they cause no problems, seemingly, for anyone – because they’re so ‘nice’. Nice guys either stand by while the big eat the small, using their salaries to buy nice houses and fill them with nice things, so they can invite over nice people, or they help turn the crank, because helping is what nice guys do. Niceness is nothing. Niceness is compliance, unquestioning, meaningless. Nice guys follow their orders. Nice is what I think of as evil. Nice is amoral. Ethical – not nice – belongs to the good.

So here’s the question this piece comes down to: are you a robosigner? In your life, in your work, in your relationships? Are you a nice person or an ethical person? Nice people can’t stand people who ask questions like this, you know. Nice people find this to be just too caustic, too dangerous, to apt to create conflict and uncomfortable feelings like guilt (which, if you’re guilty, is the first sign that you have human feelings). Nice people feel guilty if they offend anyone; ethical people feel guilty if they’re guilty. Are you… a robosigner? There’s not much more I can say past that question, because there’s nothing I can say to a robosigner that I haven’t said already in this blog and that wouldn’t get reprocessed, anyway, into the system of self-congratulation and acceptance that enables a robosigner to think of himself as a nice person in the first place. Nice people are nice to themselves. Ethical people ask the questions, even if it smarts to do so. So this has been my stab at all the news traffic over the foreclosure freezes and the spectre of fraud in taking people’s homes away.

The Bootstrap Era: When I was young and jobless, seemingly talentless, and officially skill-less, my grandparents would describe the world of work: You go where they’re hiring, you do what they’re needing, you do what your boss wants, and you never bite the hand that feeds you. Those were the rules. If you got out of the military, like my Uncle, and “they were needing” computer scientists, you did that. You didn’t ask what you loved to do, you didn’t search yourself for the answer like all the morality plays of the time where the promising kid runs off to be an artist only to learn that his place was in his father’s footsteps. You asked what “they” were needing. It was never specified who “they” were, of course – “they” were the unacknowledged nexus of corporate, military, and political interests – but for my grandparents, loyalists who didn’t bite the hand that fed them in the great war, “they” were just “society” – or “the world”. If you were like me, 17 years old, your talents cast aside for the necessity of a job, any job, and when those talents surfaced – they had no explicable ‘resume’ of acceptable contexts to prove themselves, you went where “they were hiring” and “started at the bottom” and “worked your way up”. Supposedly, a job sweeping or tossing fries at a burger joint would result, with enough hard work, in a respectable position like assistant manager some day, and if ever “they were needing” managers, you might just, if you kept to the rules, become that (and get a house, wife, car, retirement plan, and all the things that give one’s life meaning). But the world *did not*, in fact, work that way. By the time that advice was given, the world had already changed. Fry cooks didn’t become managers. Managers came from a special centralized school, and needed at least a college degree. To my grandparents, college was for the well to do, the ones with trusts funds, so this just didn’t compute. Keep scrubbing those floors, and somehow loyalty will make you ascend. But the era of loyalty being rewarded as such had died with the pension fund.

The Authoritarian Era: When I was a bit older, I got a succession of jobs working in a business shirt and tie. My parents ‘ generation were the source of advice then: don’t make waves, please your employer, and give the corporation what it wants. But did it know what it wants? The mythical system of boss and bootstraps was gone, to be replaced by the near anonymity of the faceless attitudes steering a corporation. Reputation (which came from everywhere and nowhere) was everything, because it was a system of waiting for rewards in exchange for which you provided uniformity, nobody sticking out or sticking up too much, compliance, and moral ambiguity. The idea was to maintenance the career, maintain the resume, keep dirt off your name, and look for ways to climb. But the needs of the corporation are limitless, and demands often increase in response to the talent one brings, and they do not in fact necessarily allow one to remain uniform and quiet – they often sense and demand the exploitation of talent in a variety of ways that challenge character and potentially transform individuality and personality. The results, also, are not always clear cut. You might succeed at producing exactly the results requested, and wish you hadn’t. For example, you might be asked to educate internal execs on the use of a new software package designed for them by an outsource company, but those execs might find the software package they purchased does not in fact deliver much of what they had understood or been promised when they purchased it, and then the corporation is actually unhappy with the result, and looks upon the diligence and fulfillment with ill favor instead of appreciation and satisfaction. The moral ambiguity means right and wrong are relative to the outcome, not necessarily fulfilling what is asked. A corporation is often confused about what it wants can provide no assurance of the means of success. The corporation, too, had come to combine so many disparate communities and interactions that it could act almost like a body without a head. It could cry out for talent but reward mediocrity, only to punish mediocrity with layoffs shortly thereafter, retaining the talent and then demanding more mediocrity, which would be employment suicide. By the time the parental advice was given, authority had already become so ubiquitous that it was disconnected from purpose, and the system was taking on its greatest sources of talent from contractors who could draw the occasional firm, logical line in the sand: “Yes, we can do that; it’ll take more money or more time, which do you prefer?” But at least you got results – in the contractor, leadership – authority – came attached to competence and purpose. The system was already rewarding not people who did what they were told, but Free Agents it brought in from “the outside” – that magical place that the people came from that always seemed to save the day – people who thought less in terms of loyalty and authority than of competence, clarity, and excitement.

The Era of Free Agents: Daniel Pink, of “Free Agent Nation: How America’s New Independent Workers Are Transforming the Way We Live,” has said that Free Agents are “free from the bonds of a large institution and agents of their own futures. They are the new archetypes of work in America. It used to be that the bargain between employee and employer was that the employee gave loyalty and the employer gave security… The bargain now is that the individual gives talent and the organization provides opportunities.” What’s a Free Agent? A Free Agent is a professional contractor. Don’t think of a staff agency temp, once again cowed and controlled by two companies not one, no benefits, badly robbed of more than half their billable rate. No, a Free Agent contracts to bring in expertise, buys his own health care, funds his own retirement plan, and negotiates his own rate, which has to cover his taxes, benefits, and the rest. He bills back expenses and, at some point, in a worst case scenario, he is able to cut the cord if the corporation doesn’t hold to their end of the contract. Free Agents can work for Fortune 500 companies, for another one-person shop, on-site, remotely, travelling, locally, part-time or full or flex, and at nearly any level or type of talent or expertise. There are variations on this: some companies hire “contract employees” which basically means project workers with full employee benefits that drop off upon completion without further obligation. But in a troubled economy, hiring in any capacity has its own risks and headaches. You can’t build the core of a project team out of staff agency temps, though.  There are risks and headaches to bringing in 1099 contractors – one example: a lot of them are suing – successfully, because in most respects they’re treated like employees and argue they should be entitled to benefits – and now the IRS is cracking down with new rules on the contractor/employee distinction. It’s a dilemma, all right. I make no secret that I’m affiliated with Free Agent Source, the company that connects Free Agents with Client companies but with a corp to corp contract (no 1099), and keeps contractors in benefits and provides them a W-2 without taking half of it – Free Agents set their rates with the Client and FAS keeps a small, transparent portion to provide back office services, legal, accounting, etc. You can bring in just about anyone in any capacity as a Free Agent that way, without the problems attendant regular employment, staffing agencies, or 1099 contracting. But regardless of that being our solution, there’s a shift of culture, here, as Pink was suggesting. Whether the fabled economic “Recovery” comes one day, or the Kingdom comes first, there’s strong indication that this way of working may remain the fastest growing trend. Why not? When you’re up, it still makes as much sense as when you’re down. The Bootstrap Era is gone, and the results of the Authoritarian Era are mixed at best, and just not practical anymore (if they ever were).

Your view of the legitimacy of each successive shift will depend on what era you personally are currently living in. One of the things I hope to achieve is to live always in the next era. As an entrepreneur (a solopreneur – another new skyrocketing trend well before the bust), isn’t that the goal? To live with vision, with insight into where we are going, not mistaking the past for the present, but staking (a little exhilirating risk, to be sure) on what works rather than simply on what is and what was? Well, that’s certainly a key to prosperity for a lot of people whose version of Free Agency is self-employment. It’s an exciting time for work. Maybe I always liked to drum to my own tune, but that’s getting rewarded a lot these days – it’s what companies (like Google) actually say they’re looking for. Look at Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube. One of the many signals social media sends to business is that talent and conformity are often inversely related. This is good news. This is the work I wanted to do when I was a kid – work where the person doing it defines it as much as the recipient, and where the line between recipient and provider is a little fuzzier.

I don’t fault my elders, incidentally, for living in their time. It’s just that now a lot of us are taking apart the clock and asking whether it really was always the inevitable way that things worked. Time itself will tell, but some of us are already forging our own solutions.

Rule of Work: Your work is not the venue. Whether your work is best conducted as an employee, contractor, entrepreneur, or volunteer, pursue the venue where you can derive from your work all the meaning you are intended to have.

But it’s sort of like my friend who has a Doctorate of Philosophy in Patristics from Oxford. He used to get asked, as a professor, by prospective employers in the U.S. for his transcript. He was typically met with blank, inflexible stares when he informed them that Oxford is an 800-year old university – it doesn’t issue transcripts. 75% of the doctoral candidates fail – if you make it, at all, that is the transcript. The assumption was that education is everywhere and always has been mass education, and rather than having to write books to graduate, you need to prove yourself by appealing to grades. Oxford is pass fail – for the degree, not for classes. For those interested in this topic,  you don’t even have to attend lectures (classes) at Oxford. You can sit under a tree all week and read, if you like, or just stay drunk all the time. What they require is that you read everything in your field, and take a final exam at the end that lasts about a week and is 100% written (essay form), and that you defend your thesis (which is what your book is arguing – your dissertation). That’s it. Read everything, write for a solid week intelligently discussing everything, and defend your own original idea expressed as a book which takes into account your knowledge of everything, and you get your degree. No transcript. Is it accredited? No, it’s 800 years old… etc. It’s like pulling teeth getting past assumptions.

The assumption of employment, though, is similar. It’s already been elsewhere observed that employees can get a home loan lickety split with two paychecks under their belts, or one paycheck and a letter from their employer. A self-employed person has to show a history of substantial profits on past years’ tax returns. That’s how the mortgage system assumes employment as the standard. Conversely, the tax system rewards self-employed people only if they show the least possible profit and claim the maximum possible deductions. That conflicts with the mortgage industry assumption and leaves lots of self-employed people without access to a mortgage, while showing up for a job for a month results in a home loan. The system is geared toward assuming employment is the norm. What do all the forms say – government forms, bank forms, even forms at the gym? Employer. What do employment applications ask for? Past employer. Sure, you write in your own company, but most people don’t seem to be aware that the relationship you have to your own company, as an entrepreneur might actually not be that of employee. Corporate structures are varied, and you might get shares, not paychecks. You might contract for your company, etc. You might be a “member”, a “partner”, and so on.

A pronounced example I encountered was when the market ate half of my 401K, because I foolishly listened to the “stay the course” crowd (i.e. Vanguard and the traditional investor braniacs who couldn’t acknowledge reality, only throw out doctrine, and tell the rest of us not to be “immature” investors who pull out our funds too soon and don’t stay in for the long haul. In other words – the people who told us it’s better to go broke than to question the received wisdom.) Honestly, the amateur hour stuff was not smelling the brimstone in the Judgment Day that was coming down all around them. Little devils kept saying, “Nah, this is just a “fluctuation” in the economic climate.  Let’s say I had $9000 invested, and I lost half, so $4500. My employer had matched at least half of my contribution, so someone actually said to me, “Well then you didn’t lose $4500. You basically lost nothing, because you still have what you put into it.” Now THAT, my friends, is a blind, dogmatic assumption of employment as the norm. But wait, it’s worse than that. A person who sees his services as valuable, something he ‘sells’ an employer, at best, knows that the matching contribution is part of his COMPENSATION. It’s part of the package of remuneration for his work.

In other words, if your employer cuts health care, you’re getting a pay cut. If your employer assigns you added responsibilities without added pay, you’re getting a pay cut (or at least getting snowed). I like that phrase they foist off on people young enough and inexperienced enough to believe it (or just craven enough to pretend they do) – “you’re investing in your marketability in the company” . Ha. The only thing you’re investing in is your reputation for price cutting – selling premium quantities and qualities of work for the lowest possible compensation. You’re the Walmart of employees. Or there’s the similar one, “because you care about the company”. Hey, caring is a two-way street – it’s like a marriage. Would you ask your spouse to do 100% of the housework and keep a full time job, because the spouse “cares about the family”? Not bloody likely.

But this isn’t even a pay cut. My example is one of robbery. The abject, and outright robbery of the system by (well you know who is responsible, if you’re paying attention – sure it’s AIG, but it’s more widespread than that – it’s an entire sector of society stealing from the other sector) – robbery that resulted in a LOT of us losing half or more of our retirement funds. Losing all of it, for those who left their money in until it hit zero. What they stole is the same as if they stole my paycheck. That money wasn’t legitimately lost to the “fluctuations of the market” – it was robbed by the looting and devastation and plundering and pillaging of the market. I know pretty much where it is. It’s driving around the Eastern seaboard with European leather and a blonde trophy wife in the passenger seat. It’s stopping to refuel on the way to a resort and spa where I can’t afford to eat the moisturizing cream it took a bushel of rain forest plants and a dozen children making a penny a day to produce for 3000% markup and some penthouse-dweller’s name on it. And on top of that, someone has the audacity to say, “but it wasn’t really your money.” “You didn’t really lose anything.” “Your employer *contributed* it to you. Like a gift. You can’t get upset over a stolen gift, now can you?

Well, it’s not a freaking gift. It’s one of the types of paychecks. It’s part of the compensation, part of the deal. Keep in mind, it’s taxable. Now or later, but it’s taxable.

The assumption is so strong that employment is the norm, that one easily forgets that the lingo you hear around the office isn’t real. A contribution isn’t really a gift. Caring isn’t really caring, it’s working for free. Marketability means gullibility. And ‘market fluctuations’, if you happen to work in the financial services sector, means causing a blackout, then coming to your house and stealing your TV set, then kicking you out of your house and taking that too (we don’t have an ARM, don’t worry), selling your home, and then offering you a credit card with a mafia-like interest rate so you can “rebuild” your “good standing” with the financial services industry. Oh, and lastly, telling you that none of what you lost was ever really yours in the first place. Equity meets late fees and cost of foreclosure. Finally, you blame it on an act of God, vibrations, hiccups, tremors, and “fluctuations” that no one could have prevented. So now you can’t even go to Church and pray about it without looking at your priest suspiciously, and he’s thinking “What did I do?” Good thing he lost his house too, but you’re all going to be moving into his apartment because you just lost your job, and your 401K is so devastated that pulling it out should just about cover the government “penalty” for pulling it out. Prison is starting to look good, but your Priest doesn’t like that idea, and they just told prisoners they have to pay for their own healthcare. You take your unemployment check to the bank, but they won’t open an account anymore without pulling your credit, and you know where that leads, so you give a chunk of that to the check cashing place, fill up with gas at double the price when this started, and drive home to watch TV shows about people living “successful” lives (as though nothing happened in the TV universe), and you figure all those guys work for AIG or had stock in munitions. And you fall asleep hoping you’ll get that temp job you applied for, where they “try on” employees, one after another, without having to give you healthcare or retirement benefits. And your only hope is starting your own Youtube reality show, except that everyone else is in the same boat and what, ordinarily might be fascinating, is now just banal and taken for granted.

Ahem. Yes. Well, the point is this:

Rule of Work: Nothing is true if it confuses an exchange of value for value with a gift given to either party. See Ayn Rand. Corollary rule: If you got something as a result of honest work, taking it away from you without a fair exchange is always theft – calling it something else turns wages into slavery.

Yes, the assumption of employment as the normative form of work relationship prevails, but some of what comes with that assumption isn’t employment, it’s at best what the old South used to call “wage slavery” and, at worst, is just plain robbery, snake oil, machination, and exploitation. There’s nothing wrong with employment, if it’s honest, if both parties are exchanging fair value for fair value with their eyes open, in a transparent environment. But treating employment as a privilege, as though one should aspire to it independently of compensation, accept it as normal without reference to the entitlements governing every other form of trade (rhetoric venerating “the market” aside), is an additional set of assumptions that amounts to drinking the sacrificial Koolaid.

It’s bad enough to assume that life, ‘legitimate’ life, revolves around punching a timeclock or getting a salary, in contrast with the work itself. It’s unacceptable, though, to swallow down the notion that it’s really all about the love, and what’s in the contract is just Christmas gravy. Dunno about you, but I can get a turkey anywhere – I’m up for the gravy.

What we’re seeing is a lull in the parental relationship between employer and employee, and I think that’s a good thing. But it’s like listening to 30-year old men complain that they can’t live in Mom’s basement forever. The idea that employee status is superior, is the goal, is in fact the pinnacle of success in our culture is assumed, as an unaccountable absolute. Didn’t we just learn the opposite? Apparently not. This is my biggest gripe with those who keep saying, “it’ll turn around soon” – like Napoleon – “this’ll all be over by Spring”. Besides the fact that they’ve been saying that for the last two years, a tiptoe through the tulips faith-in-magic kind of optimism that has no basis in how economics really works, there’s no real learning – no real sense of cultural repentance – it’s as if there were nothing wrong with the system as it was, and this is something that just happened to us. It’s like listening to a culture of perpetual adolescents who ruined their credit, present it as if they just had some bad luck – the universe didn’t smile on them, and are clearly going to be shopping like mad as soon as they can be, applying for that credit card the moment they’ve got a chance.

There are three lessons of this economic event for adults. By adults, I mean those of us who aren’t looking for yet more dependency on the cultural parents that failed us so spectacularly. The first is that you obviously can’t dump trillions into a global policy of invasion and not break the empire’s bank. This is not primarily a political blog, so we’ll just say that and set it aside, but if we don’t believe things just magically ‘happen’ to us, we’ve got to say the cost of hubris is a factor. The second lesson is that it’s your fault, all this, and my fault, and we all share in this fault in some way. It’s silly to explain it as just a few rogue bankers, or the entire lending industry, or an irresponsible bunch of poor people (if you’re that type). You did this too, and I helped, so adulthood means not blaming everyone *except* ourselves for “getting us into this”. The third lesson we’ve mentioned before – all the BS that gets parroted from previous generations about job security, education being the ticket to vocational wellbeing, economic stability being the same as having a job, etc – it’s hoodoo – and we can’t go on believing in the face of empirical evidence.

What this economic shift offers us, actually, then, is a chance to grow up – a chance to get ourselves a little cleaner – an opportunity to live soberly. It’s interesting to watch even those who pride themselves in the rhetoric of self-reliance wail about “jobs”, as though that’s all that matters – someone coming to bail us out as individuals, all the while lamenting the “bail out” of the banks (which we all generally agree is a looting). Jobs. What’s wrong with going freelance? The CBS piece linked it with the notion of a lowered wage standard in most jobs. Well, that’s likely true, wage standards are likely going to be lowered for some time to come. Partly because we used an unprecedented portion of our economic potency to take over a number of pipeline routes and petroleum deposits in the Middle East. But are we really saying that the big disaster is we might end up working for ourselves? Or freelance?

And the notion that freelance work necessarily pays less, I find dubious. At first, some of it will. After all, there’s the silly notion in some corporate circles that freelancers are less valuable, more transient, and somehow ‘deserve’ less than employees. Sensibly, the opposite is true. We pay our own benefits, our own taxes, our own expenses, and there’s cost involved just being freelance. On top of that, you survive by being superior. Someone wants to pay me employee’s wages, and the discussion is over – it’s got to be a lot more. Desperation is going to make some people foolish in what they’ll accept, and they’ll price sell. OK, for a while. But it won’t last. A lot of us are going to get strong, while they just get robbed.

First, think about it – shouldn’t you, if you were a freelancer, be entitled to what they’d pay a staffing agency for a temp? I don’t mean what they’d pay the temp – I mean what they’d pay the agency itself. You incur the same costs, so damned straight that’s what you should be paid. Probably more. The staffing agency won’t pay for your doctor bills – you’ve got insurance costs to cover.

Second, the shoe is going to shift feet. As the number of freelancers doubles, we’re going to find new ways to organize, connect, and consolidate resources. The Freelancers Union is seeing a nice influx about now. The growth of social media indicates that a coming trend is for any set of disconnected people fending and fighting for themselves to, as they grow, utilize the attitudes and techniques of social media, which in turn will further that growth, and in turn further consolidate their ability to support one another, act in concert – in mental, emotional, and physical unison. In other words, what’s coming is an initial feeling of desperation followed by a transferrance of clout – a shift of power – from the employer to the contractor and to the freelancer.

What’s beautiful, from a freelancer’s perspective, is that they don’t see it yet. Opportunity is glowing in the dark, and they don’t see it. And this will help further the future of freelancing. The other thing that’s going to happen is an intellectual and emotional campaign to retain employer-like control in the context of contractor and freelance relationships. Be ready for it. Yes, it’s already there. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. But not to worry. The social media trends would seem to indicate an incredible likelihood of taking this out of their hands.

So, I’m not ready to lament about being out on my own, or wax nostalgic about mom’s sofa. I’m not sitting around and mourning the growth of freelancing and looking at it as a social problem. For one thing, some of us are thinking about how to make it a source of prosperity. For another, the freelancing trend offers genuine hope for a more mature, more self-aware, more ethical set of relationships – a more equitable exchange of value between service providers and service buyers.

Instead of standing out there shouting “jobs, jobs” with the obfuscators, the anti-benefits crowds, or the people who are just going along, why not ask for reduced taxes on the self-employed, and opportunities for access to the same kinds of benefits (especially group health care) that employees have long relied upon? The Freelancers Union, Free Agent Source, and congressional legislation allowing the self-employed to act as groups for purchasing healthcare all seem like positive directions for this.

I’ve only one thing to say to the CBS group about their report: I hope to remain *unemployed*. I’ve no problem with employment per se, but it’s not the holy grail – doing what you love for a fair exchange – that’s the target. I like being freelance, or self-employed, or an entrepreneur. I have no desire to trade freedom and prosperity for the illusion of security – if employment is an end in itself, rather than meaningful work, great pay, good benefits, and diversified sources of income, then why? Just because Mom has a nice couch? Relying on a single, canned income source wasn’t a good bargain at the start of this thing (just look what happened). It’s not a good bargain dealing with the fallout. You CBS guys should look on the bright side, or at least acknowledge that there is one, even if the cost was, in the estimation of many of us, unacceptable.

In the area of technology, this is particularly common. The now classic book net.wars discusses how the internet came to be initially as a community of people who had certain protocols and standards for interaction that prevailed until online services (chiefly AOL) opened their gateways to the internet, spilling the first wave of people into the net who hadn’t played a role in creating these protcols, and largely weren’t aware of them. The best example is, of course, SPAM. It was AOL users, when first gaining access to usenet groups, that began to flood them with the first SPAM, starting a mutation of what was previously a more open and purely collaborative community into one that was necessarily more restrictive and protective. The F.A.Q. is a less negative example. The protocol for interacting in any forum, BBS (bulletin board system), or newsgroup has always been to first read the Frequently Asked Questions (F.A.Q.) before posting new ones. This both respects the users – keeping their attentions from being flooded with repetitive material and demanding redundant and wasteful effort in a collaborative environment – and also conserves storage, bandwidth, and general traffic over networks. If you came from an online service, however, it was provided initially by a corporation, not a collaborative community per se, and your expectations may have been to be able to post your question without reading anything at all, and to get an answer back from a customer service person. When the paying users of online services were let loose onto the more or less free internet, one of the things they brought with them was the view that discussion forums, newsgroups and the like were “help” forums, not *collaborative* communities.

The rules for each are different, obviously. In a collaborative community, you take into account everyone else’s time, attention, and interests before you post. The emphasis is on sustainability, more self-sufficiency and self-directed learning, and new questions and discussions should do what created the net in the first place – add to and extend what has gone before – grow it – further the development of the community itself and the technology that sustains it. In a help forum, the goal is to get your question answered quickly by an expert, regardless of whether it has been asked before by someone else. The result of these differing expectations was, as you can expect, that the original netizens (a term reflecting a sense of citizenship and civic-community responsibility – adherence to sustainable protocols for behavior) – the original netizens often viewed the newbies as uncivilized, arrogant in their demands to be spoonfed assistant by what are essentially volunteers and in the continual complaining over how things work, often without a lot of understanding of why some things are in place. The ‘newbies’ from the online services often viewed the original netizens as arrogant, “techno-geeks” who think you’re inferior or unintelligent if you don’t understand things, and too arrogant to “help” when there’s a document somewhere that explains the answer, and another document that explains the terminology used in the first document – which is of course, quite natural if these documents developed naturally over time, contributed to by a growing community of people who gradually learned their way around in a new society rather than paid $25/month (in 1993) for fast “walk-throughs” from large corporations like Prodigy, Compuserve, and AOL.

It’s no secret where my sympathies lie. I think you don’t barge into a community and demand it accomodate you as you pitch tent on people’s front lawns. And of course, having been involved relatively early, I have a strong respect for self-sufficiency – for people taking responsibility for their own needs to learn more – and for people who make an effort to learn instead of just demanding “walk throughs” all the time. But of course, I’m glad there’s a demand for training – I just insist that it be something we pay for rather than treated like something everyone else owes us. Community is where you collaborate by trading value for value – in that sense, you’re paying there, as well. If you just want the answer, not the community, and don’t want to contribute, then it’s got to be dollars.

A lot of the online communities have been transformed under the sheer pressure of humanity onto the internet, but a few exist now as services with paid memberships, precisely on the theory that if you pay, you’ll freeload less, though they work very differently than the service-oriented ones of the past. I’m thinking of a particular community that is mostly West Coast.

How does all this apply to business and work? Well, it’s precisely differing expectations that have to be managed in client-business relationships, and technologies and assumptions of protocol are the arena for working that out.

E-mail: Those of us that came from the world of typewriters and faxes, may not be aware of the many protocols. I have a colleague who used to try to treat it as chat. If I refilled my coffee before replying to an e-mail, I got back a bewildered response, a mere three minutes after the previous message, “Are you THERE?!?” Most of us know better, but a lot of people treat it like a walkie-talkie. Ever gotten or sent an e-mail that just says “OK”. Not every statement needs a reply. Then of course, there are people who don’t reply when they should. You make a substantive point and just never hear back from them. “Well, you didn’t ask a question.” All-caps is another one. It’s difficult to tell if it’s for emphasis, or if you’re shouting. So we end up sticking emoticons (smiley faces) on everything to make up for shouting. That piece of netiquette is well known. In corporate life, everyone loves to make fun of the person who hits “reply-all” to an e-mail from the CEO for a one-word response “OK” that then goes to all 5,000 members of the organization. It’s even worse when someone puts you on their “mailing list” and includes your e-mail address in the TO: or CC: line along with everyone else, effectively handing that ready-made “mailing list” to all the multi-level marketers he knows. Ever get that joke someone you know mails out to everyone in their address book? You know, the one containing that virus you got? Same thing.

Telephone: A much older technology, of course, but it has in fact evolved greatly. More and more of us are ditching land-lines for cell phones, or ditching cell phones for SIP phones (SIP is an internet protocol for telephony), etc. I make all my outbound business and personal phone calls in Skype. My inbound calls come to me as transcribed e-mails, allowing me to not interrupt my workflow. I don’t have a land line. And my cell is for emergencies, or for calling Google to get a phone number or address, if I’m away from home. But the way people talk on telephones has changed, too. My wife is a hair stylist, and a lot of her clients prefer to make appointments via text message. Cell phones are creating massive causes for car accidents, too – the mobility of communication is changing the protocols people follow. Some people think nothing of driving in two lanes while they chat about who is dating whom, or talking in a loud animated manner about things you’d expect to see on Phil Donahue when they’re inches in front of you in line for a cashier. I don’t even bother calling most clients on their land lines anymore – they don’t know why they have them, and neither do I, since they don’t answer them. The land line is more like “the voice mail line”. If I need to get through now, it’s the cell. But how business is expected to use the phone, even small business, is largely shaped by large corporations and paid subscription services. Sometimes people wonder that I don’t answer the phone 24/7 or have a staffer doing it. I can have someone do it, but you won’t get the expertise, so it’s just an appointment booking mechanism, and then the price of our services to the client has go to go way up. The overhead of having that staff around the clock as well as making all those appointments, and then hiring someone of equal talent and experience to keep them or else to do the work we’re doing for clients, means we now pay five salaries instead of one, just to answer the phone.

I figure not every client is my client, and just don’t do it. It keeps our costs to the client lower, my headaches fewer, and that’s a win-win for our target audience. As a small business, I don’t let large corporations set all the standards for me. After all, if we copied the way they build web sites, our clients’ marketing would suck. Small businesses have more flexibility to be more responsive than the large corps, and their advantage is in using it, not tying on tons of dead weight just to be “respectable”. If you want that, quit your business and go get a job. If you want to run your own shop, run it like your own shop. But you see, that involves considerations about how to manage expectations between company and client, specifically in the area of technologies. And should we, you may ask, put so much emphasis on technology as the arena for working this out? Yes. Yes, because what is contemporary technology in business all about? Primarily it’s about interactions and interactivity. From Twitter to live documents (like Google Docs) to Skype, it’s about connectivity, community (there’s that word again), and sociality (made that one up), and yes between company, client, and actually the rest of the world at large. And when that’s the case, when it’s a revolutionizing set of changes, as I believe it is, all these questions about our assumptions – our expectations – the protocols – the “rules” (as I like to frame them) – of our interactions come up. One of the things I’m continually talking about with my clients is how to be successful doing internet marketing in social media. The prime protocol – the primary rule – #1 – is don’t spam your audience. Don’t pitch them. Don’t confuse marketing with advertising. The surest way to alienate them and find twitter and facebook “useless” (which is something you convince yourself – not something that’s really what it is), is to keep telling them what you offer and how to get it. Instead, the protocol for social media – for the new Web 2.0 communities – is much, much more like what it was before 1994, than what it has been from 1994-2007. It is to give something of value away. To contribute by giving away your insight, analysis, information, expertise, and build a community through social contribution, drawing on your background and experience, earning you the place of resident expert. People who do that have no trouble ‘finding’ clients – the clients find them. The people who spam, find themselves in a pulpit without a congregation.

My advice, read two books. Tribes by Seth Godin, and net.wars edited by Wendy M. Grossman. Get yourself the picture of where we’ve been and where we’re going. It’s strongly related, because people are social animals, even the least social of us.

IM (instant messengers): Ever been in the middle of a really important thought, or activity, or finally trying to shut down, and up pops that <beep> instant message with “Hi. I saw you online”? Yeah, me too. It’s why I stay invisible all the time. Synchronous communication is for the absolutely lowest level of support in your organization. That’s why there are automated chat clients that do “automated support” for you, using artificial intelligence. If the chatter asks, “How do I reset my password?” the chat client dutifully responds with the link to the instructions along with some nice verbiage – “I have it right here, sir.” (it gets your gender from your client file, or guesses it from your name). If you have time to play that role in your business, by all means, put up one of those “Talk to me instantly” widgets on your site. I find synchronous communication to be a workflow-destroyer and, while it’s easy for clients to add me, I don’t use it for clients, I use it for staff. With e-mail, I can keep some structure and flow in my life. As an asynchronous communication form, it lets me have more than one client at a time, which is necessary to survive at all. I eliminate the expectation of instant responses, and usually set a standard of a reply within 24hrs. Ever seen those auto-responders that say “I’ll get back with you asap?” I don’t use them, but I understand why they are there. For one thing, the worst thing you can do to spam is auto-reply to it, thereby confirming your address as a sale-able part of the list, and exponentially increasing the likelihood of further spam in a never-ending snowball of e-garbage. Think before you automate. Some of us who have automated other things have, occasionally made mistakes, only to come back and find a serious mess on our hands. Wow, I can’t even tell you about a couple of things I’ve totally &*^%$-ed up that way. Automated payments, too. Remember that thing you thought you cancelled a year ago? Automate the expense, automate the payment, automate the renewal – argh! Anyway, managing client expectations for communications – synchronous vs. asynchronous – response time, times of day, etc. is key.

One of the things I always struggle with is how you make sure your clients know you work with multiple clients at once, so no you can’t stop and do six hours of straight work on their project on demand, just because they took the day off to focus on it. You may have six clients’ projects to touch that day. My best solution right now is to focus on turn-around time and response time. By conveying average turnaround time, up front, I am leaving myself free to have enough clients at once to survive, and hopefully communicating, at least subtly, that one client’s project is not all I’m doing today, one at a time, etc. If you’ve got good ways to get this across to set client expectations, please comment and add your advice.

Reminders: I send out action items frequently, and reminders if I haven’t heard anything in a few days. It’s interesting, because large corporations do the same thing, of course – I find the majority of clients appreciate it. Sometimes, if they’re feeling harried by other work obligations, and you’re dependent on them for deliverables to complete the project, they can feel pressured. Moreso, actually, because you’re a smaller business, your reminder is more personal, and it altogether seems more personal. This can prompt another exchange over it not being pressure, but just being what one client termed “due diligence” – staying up on it. We do what we can to manage the feelings of the recipient, but there are limits. If you’ve got ideas, please share them.

Online Documents: One of our solutions to the above issue is live, collaborative, online documents (like Google Docs). We’ll share a list of action items and other project documents that we maintain online in a secure environment, so they can at any time see the updates. The challenge is, of course, not everyone is yet used to live documents. Most people still think of documents as something you possess, that may be on your hard drive, rather than an interactive construct that you share and collaborate on and maintain. The former is the Microsoft mentality, who finds themselves haplessly trying to copy Google with Live Docs, though without the fundamental reasoning behind it, and the latter thinking – much more in tune with Web 2.0 and with how businesses really need to work to be efficient and effective – is Google’s. I’ve seen large corporations struggle, to much amusement, with sorting out and exchanging and collaborating on different versions of documents as e-mail attachments, meaning no two people can work on the same document at once (it’s “checked out” to use Microsoft’s early term when they first tried this), or else you can, but then you have to have another person who reconstructs a new version of the document out of the pieces worked on by each team member. That’s 2009 productivity for ya! So many useless jobs that technology gives us a way to live without. All it was waiting for was the motivation to waste less money. The only comforting thing for those of us that compete with big corps, is the assurance that they’re just finding different things to waste it on – it’s moving the peas on the plate, not making them disappear. Anyway, if you’re really, really not experienced with much beyond e-mail, the concept of a shared document, and even creating an account or logging in to see it, may be new to you. A lot of people get stumped, so it’s not the only solution. We fall back to e-mail until those clients’ own companies’ needs demand that they catch up.

Filing: That brings up e-mail again. Ever been asked for the same e-mail again and again – the client can’t find it, or deleted it, or doesn’t know what folder he put it in, etc.? It slows him down – he has to e-mail you to get his e-mail. And of course, it takes a bite out of your productivity and efficiency. This is why you’ve got to charge a substantive fee for your work. Because you’re going to serve as either tutor or efficiency triage for a percentage of your clients – one or the other. I’m not trying to pick on clients. I like my clients, and you probably like yours. What I’m saying is that we also have to talk about, and they about their clients, how you manage those expectations and what are the results. If my client is a real estate appraiser who is constantly having to stop during the day and take “What’s the status?” calls from his clients, he’d benefit from pro-active status updates – which is something my company uses, too. You get your clients started, then when they call, you wean them off of the phone, “Oh yeah. I sent you the status this morning. Did you get my e-mail?” Not an accusation, just always including the point that there’s another process already in effect, that they’re being taken care of. In the same way, we provide pre-designed tutorials at the completion of every project. And the tutorials indicate that custom instruction is also available for a reasonable fee. That sets the expectation. Before that, some clients would wonder why hours of custom instruction weren’t included in the spec. Now, we set the expectation by being proactive and also offering alternatives. That’s not all we do, but it’s enough to make the point here. Offer self-sufficiency and self-directed learning – offer the F.A.Q., so to speak – but make the “walk through” available for a fee. That’s the hybrid of the two protocols we described at the beginning.

Calendar Items: We send these and not everyone knows what to do with them, which is to be expected. They’re a protocol in corporate life, or in large offices with shared networks (server-installed e-mail/calendar applications like Outlook) where lots of meetings take place. Still, it works more than it fails. Some clients treat it as a confirmation, some as an invitation, and some as a calendar item. We love it. Rarely, but still sometimes, we get back “what am I supposed to do with this?” or the client gets confused over time zones. More commonly, because the client isn’t using these productivity tools in his own office, the client forgets about the appointment and is surprised at our call, which is exactly why calendar items were invented. Whether you are a one-man shop, a contractor, or working in an office of two people, calendar items can increase your productivity and minimize disparities between business-client expectations. I recommend Google Calendar. It’s faster and easier than Outlook (time is productivity), it’s compatible if your recipient uses Outlook, Lotus Notes, and a host of other e-mail/calendar applications, and it offers extra features if you’re a Gmail junkie like me.

Attachments: Ever ask for a .jpg or .gif and get a word document? Sometimes, you can’t even pull the image out of it without Microsoft reducing the quality down to garbage. Ever send an attachment, and your recipient has trouble viewing it? That’s why PDFs are helpful. Send a .jpg or .gif which is smaller and quicker, and your client might open it in Microsoft Picture Viewer which comes with Windows. Not only is the size it shows not real (it scales it without telling you), but your client might have trouble even finding an application to open it. What if it opens in Paint for them? It can be slow, and confusing. In the area of graphics, for that matter, it’s a very large number of people who can take photos but can’t locate them on their hard drive to attach and send to you, let alone crop or resize them (especially if Picture Viewer is displaying an scaled down size, when the real size – if they take photos at full resolution – is bigger than the wall behind their monitor). Attachments can be a pain. What I do is keep an eye on what my clients use every day, in their own profession, and that’s the format I prefer for that client group. If in doubt, I send PDF. A PDF printer driver is essential. Without it, your Word doc is going to open in Open Office, or vice versa. Your .jpg or .gif may be hopeless. Your Excel sheet may open in Excel, but if their default template is messed up, all the columns might get reset to standard width or something like that. What if they’re on a Mac, and you’re not? It’s not worth it. I manage client expectations by sticking with a cross-platform file format like PDF.

Social Media: What about Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn? I’ve had friends write things on my wall that I’ve had to delete, because my clients see them. I’ve had clients spam me, just like I’m one of their clients, because they’re hitting their entire contact list. It can be confusing if you haven’t learned the protocols and netiquette of being a netizen to graduate to understanding effective use of Web 2.0 social media. That’s why we teach this stuff, and provide consulting on it, etc. It can be used effectively, and it can be frustrating if you charge in not knowing how to do it effectively. I set up a blog for a colleague who promptly created an ideological flame war with it. I knew it would happen, but it was actually a good learning experience. You bring the assumptions of what you’re familiar with in other venues, and have to discover that “how the world works” isn’t really how it works – it’s just how it works in one place, at one time, among one group of people. The world is big. And if you see the world as big, the world is bigger. Remember, as we wrote about personality types and personality-based marketing, you are not normal – 75% of your clients are specifically *not* like you – they have a different set of assumptions, needs, and a different focus and direction. If you market to yourself, you sell 25%. Better put, you rule out 75% up front and pitch to a quarter of your audience. If you market to everyone, you’re at least reaching all those that are currently in your auidence with your message – then whether you grow your audience, and how they respond, is about the other things. The world isn’t the “how the world works” – that’s just my version – the quarter I’ve carved out. The world is also the 75% you don’t know. Anyway, after eventual frustration, the blog became an abandoned blog, like so many. But now the opportunity exists for him to rebuild, taking lessons learned – not overreacting by restricting discussion – monoblogs are overrated – not simply dumping the entire medium – “social media doesn’t work for me” – no, you weren’t working for social media – it’s you, not it, that must adapt, or else yeah, you’re tossing that audience away – that’s ok, more for the rest of us. Not to be cute, the point is that it’s a learning curve. Social media, whether for you, or your clients, is not Web 1.0. It’s not a “web site”. It’s not waiting for you to charge in with your existing assumptions.

It’s like 1994, when AOL allowed their users access to the internet. Do you go in and alienate the people that are already there, or do you choose to humble yourself, learn, and gradually come to understand the rules – the protocols of community in the new environment. Do you park on someone’s lawn or do you check into a hotel, visit the diner, and get to know the local vibe? Social media is a great venue for learning once again to learn, to become more self-sufficient in technology and, if you do that, you get to build amazing business potential. Rember the first spammer, who saw the gateway to the net as a license to blast every Usenet newsgroup with advertisements for multi-level marketing? That could be you, also. Ever seen a blog that was a series of ads? Or just a huge portrait of an otherwise boring personality? Here’s my favorite color this week. The rule is value. Give it away. Contribute. Focus on that, and only that, and all the rest follows. Your brand isn’t your logo, it’s what you say and do, folks. Social media is a great clarifying process. Your brand is who you are. It’s the substance too, not just the image. It’s the man and the mask – it’s both.

That’s it. Yeah, I know my writing style is unusual. It’s not wrong, tho. It’s part of the delightful incongruity that is me. As always, I hope it was helpful.

A lot of employed folks would look at this as a good case for not going out on their own. It’s actually the best case for why freelancers need to charge high rates. You just can’t do it for nothing. And what, freelancers aren’t supposed to have healthcare, or savings, or be able to eat? So, the goal is to figure out how to bring those fees up. Seth Godin offers a great quotation (don’t remember his source): “There are two kinds of companies: those that want to lower prices, and those that want to raise them.” Those who shoot for the bottom, price-cutting, price-selling, appealing to price shoppers, and those who look for ways to add value, be the best, and raise prices. I’m with the latter. And I encourage my family members to hold the line on that, too.

I looked in on a conversation in LinkedIn where a person offered a service for $100, no conditions, to anyone, regardless of criteria. I provide the same service, and I can tell you it’s twice that, minimum, to do it right and do it consistently. I didn’t respond – no need – the entire community of freelancers jumped on him, asking if he realized that this wasn’t sustainable, that by aiming for the bottom he’s just appealing to the guy that wants it at $95, and encouraging the person who’ll do it for that, and not have healthcare, and not eat right. They ate his lunch – I couldn’t believe the amount of traffic pounding this guy down. He didn’t get it either. Bills himself as the president of his company but made a crass, rookie mistake in public, and should have copped to it quickly but wouldn’t. Who hasn’t done that kind of thing in one form or another? So you have to feel sorry for him, but wow – he made the 2nd mistake too: he just kept holding the line. “If someone doesn’t want my services, they don’t have to buy them.” He was missing the point.

A lot of us have had a prospect walk away because the price was obviously too low. And they’re right to. You can’t sustain good, consistent work that way, and companies that are in this for real want good, consistent work. They don’t want to watch a price cutter self-destruct, which is where it leads. A family member is a hairstylist, and a friend of hers comes from the Supercuts environment. The price difference is shocking. And you can’t invest in growing your business if you’re geared for the bottom. And once you do that, it’s really hard to break out of it. You can’t win, without retooling, infusing your business with some funds and a lot of effort, and changing the way you do business, willing to lose some clients. It’s a rough road to hoe if you’re taking care of a family and depend on repeat business; I don’t envy it. But that’s what Supercuts, superstores, super-anything does to an industry – it leaves its people scraping the bottom for the cheapest prospects there are, without decent health care, with an impoverished diet that takes years off their lives, and having to explain to people that work is worth something.

There’s a related principle. Not only is the compensation model for freelancers really fundamentally different than for employees… and we all know this, but when you’re rearranging your life accordingly, it’s something to meditate on and ponder… but so is this model for time. If you spend 8hrs at the office, your ‘work’ is presumably done, because your work is defined by the man. Your work is your job. But it’s really not done. You still have to pick up the kids, wash the car, buy the groceries, go jogging, and all the other things you do. What the freelancer realizes is that these are work too.

Occasional clients think a freelancer should be waiting at his desk at all times, when they get back to their office, ready to respond in an instant. “Where were you yesterday?” You don’t take vacations, don’t take a day off, don’t go to the gym. You work when they work, and you work when they sleep, because 24-hour turnaround is in demand, too. But that’s not sustainable. What, freelancers shouldn’t get 8hrs sleep or go to the gym? You can’t hire an assistant to work out for you, or get proper rest so you stay healthy for another day. The real story is that the model of work has been distorted somewhat by separating it from the home. I’m not suggesting there’s something inherently wrong with office work, just that it doesn’t explain, describe, or account for everything. The truth is that when a freelancer cooks the meals, provides the transportation, goes to the gym to stay healthy, or just engages in personal hygiene (how long does your full regimen, day and night, take from your day?), that’s work.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Work is what you do when you wake up, and what you do before you go to sleep. Not that there’s not room to go read a book and rest, but that rest is part of the work, too. If you read, it’s fuel. If you rest, it’s preparation to work – it’s restocking the shelves. When you relax, it’s to be ready for the intensity and energy. Same thing if you blog, folks. That’s the truth. In my case, without it, I can’t think at the pace that’s necessary to do what I do for clients. We’re *whole* people, and we need a *whole* life, sustained by work, involved in work, and linked to our work. This is yet another reason work had better be a primary source of meaning your life.

Income, though, is not what’s left over after the things that sustain your life are taken out – like healthcare. Income is what you use to take care of your whole life, including your health. When you short the one, you’re shorting the other. Likewise, time for work is not the time spent on a task someone else makes you do, or a task that you have to drive to get to, or a task that directly impacts your client. Time for work is time spent on the entire person, the *whole* source of work, your whole life. It needs to be balanced, thought out, and reasonable – you can’t just sleep for two days every week and expect, in most freelance scenarios, to be successful. Even if that’s the sum of leftover time, what about riding your bike and, again, personal hygiene, etc.? Time spent on work is, appropriately, time spent on your whole life, precisely on *keeping* it in balance, keeping it functioning at optimum, and in keeping with the very things you need to get paid for. I get paid so I can buy healthcare. I spend time and the gym so I can stay healthy. You can’t throw either one over your shoulder.

Get paid a lot, work 16 hours, not 8 (or acknowledge that it’s work) and, though you’ll then realize that our taxes really are obscenely high, you’ll at least be able to explain what you do without feeling quite as harried. A little harried maybe, but not because there’s no reason for half of it. And no, you’re most likely *not* overpaid.

But now Google’s doing it again. While other companies never peep a word about government hacking into mail accounts, Google blows the whistle and points out an ongoing pattern of hacking from Chinese government IPs. It’s doing this in the face of censorship demands that, so far, everyone has honored to some degree. Google’s now saying ‘enough is enough’, and we’ll pull out altogether (leaving you in the dustheap of information history – you farks) before we’ll cave. And in fact, they’ve stopped censoring results in China.

If we spent as much time studying the heroes of information ethics as we do heroes of ancient Greece, Google would be our Hercules. As a member of the Google nation, I feel more affinity with her than with my own body politic. More a part of her culture than the culture at large. What’s this got to do with work and the world of work?

Everything. Ethics is everything. Righteousness is everything. The world of work could use a healthy dose of righteousness. Not self-righteousness. Think Microsoft there. “We have done this, so we are entitled to what we want.” That’s entirely different. That’s the culture of expedience. But goodness, we need, for our work to be a font of joy, for it to be a primary vehicle of meaning, to be like Google. I meet people all the time who “love their jobs” and “find meaning” in them, but sometimes when they describe what they’re talking about, it seems to be the ability to afford Starbucks every morning, or eat $15 lunches, or to be thought of well in society. They’re not describing meaning or joy at all. They’re describing gratification and convenience, but not meaning and joy. And there is a distinctive difference.

I’m convinced that joy in one’s work comes partly from doing it well and partly from one’s work being a legitimate contribution to the wellness of the world. To wake up and work dishonestly cannot convey those things, regardless of the shifty guys that tell you they’re OK with it (that’s a commentary on their absence of the basic moral equipment, not a commentary on work). To wake up and contribute nothing, to neither lesson the agony of the world nor contribute to the mercy in it, cannot convey meaning. I don’t mean the cheesy substitutes of just making people feel good. Junk food makes people feel good. It also makes people obese, shortens their lives, and contributes to their suffering. And I don’t mean doing whatever for a corporation that “gives something back”. The fact that there’s an annual United Way drive or toys for tots walk or whatever, while good, aren’t the same thing. Nothing wrong with that – we’re just saying that the work itself should be a contribution too.

Work, for us to really feel it like we were meant to, like we’re built to, must shape the world into wellness through our day in and day out activity. The Christmas bonus doesn’t make a lousy job great, and the annual drive doesn’t grant the employees of an otherwise morally useless entity the kind of meaning in their work that they are designed for. To wake up and be a force for righteousness in the world, that’s a necessary path to the meaning derived from work. Substitutes need not apply.

Life is too brief to look back and ask why we’re clinging to something, to anything, if we can’t derive the primary experience from work that we’re  meant for. If it’s just an income source, or just something to be endured, or if it’s about as subtle in its attempts to compensate as an oil company that gives a few thousand to rain forest funds, we’ve got to change directions, don’t We? Look at Google. That’s what heroes are for. They’re there to give the rest of us an icon of what we want to be like.

Have you told your kids about Google yet? I’m serious. Why not? I’m talking about what Google means in the world. Microsoft puts people into bankruptcy for treating the software someone buys like they own it. Google frees people from prison by protecting their files from torturers and totalitarian regimes. Who’s the best example?