Foreword

For 20 years, I had the best job in journalism. I led the creative team that built the Inc. magazine brand, created the Inc. 500 ranking of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S., and launched Inc.com. During the 1980s and ’90s, my colleagues and I had the privilege and thrill of documenting the transition from an industrial economy to one driven by entrepreneurship and innovation.

At first no one paid much attention to what we had to say. After all, we were a bunch of kids managing an upstart publication. Things changed when authorities such as Peter Drucker began to weigh in on what was happening. Drucker, for example, referred to the emergence of an entrepreneurial economy as “the most important development in the second half of the 20th century.”

Well, there is another transition playing out right now. It is still in its infancy, but gaining momentum and bearing down on us all. In the title of this book, Marion McGovern refers to it as the “Gig Economy.” At my new venture, The Solo Project, my partners and I refer to it as the “solo movement.” Whatever you choose to call it, this transformation in how the work of the economy gets done is, in some ways, more significant than the one we were documenting at Inc. This one is personal, affecting us on a profoundly individual level.

I think of it this way. While our economy continues to create work, less and less of it comes to us packaged as “jobs.” Thanks to the rapid change caused by technology and globalization, work is increasingly “chunked” into projects. Instead of going out and looking for a job, many of us find that the challenge is to figure out how to plug into this project economy. In other words, it’s increasingly up to us not to find a job, but to design one for ourselves, and become responsible for creating our personal professional and financial security.

My partners and I have talked to or interviewed hundreds of individuals— including some of the smartest folks we know in business, finance, academia, and policy—who still think of this as some distant phenomenon, as in “the future of work.” Well, as one of our favorite writers said, “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

Here are a few dispatches from this “future,” from research my partners and I did, in partnership with the Knight Foundation, about the implications of the solo phenomenon for urban leaders:

• According to a recent RAND-Princeton University study, from 2005 to 2015 the traditional workforce, people working in full-time jobs, didn’t grow at all. Meanwhile the population of people working in “alternative work arrangements” increased by 67 percent. The report concludes, “A striking implication of these estimates is that all of the net employment growth in the U.S. economy appears to have occurred in alternative work arrangements.”

• The most recent annual Gallup workforce survey revealed that only 32 percent of American workers are engaged at work. At the same time, two-thirds of people working on their own report that they find their work fulfilling.

• Eighty percent of individuals who make the transition from traditional to indie work and last for 12 months on their own report they can’t imagine ever returning to a traditional job. This includes “involuntary” soloists who went out on their own because they lost a job.

For some of us, this is thrilling. TED founder Richard Saul Wurman sums up the opportunity this way: “For the first time in human history, individuals can design a life around the pursuit of interesting work.” My partners and I would add that we can do this interesting work with partners we admire and trust, and for clients we respect.

However, we understand that for many this transformation is terrifying, requiring whole new skill sets and attitudes. After all, we’ve been raised and educated to be good organization men and women.

What we need is a re-education, one that will help us collectively build the skills and characteristics necessary to flourish. If management thinking has been driven by the question “How do we make our organizations better?” we urgently need a new inquiry driven by the question “How do we make our work better?”

This book marks a smart beginning of that inquiry.

While the shelves are filled with self-improvement titles, this book is different. First off, and perhaps most important in the world of entrepreneurship, the ideas in this book are road-tested. You’ll quickly see you’re in the hands of someone who’s spent the better part of her adult life creating structures and supports that enable other people’s entrepreneurial ambitions. Back in the late 1980s, when independent professionals were still thought to be people who couldn’t get a decent job, McGovern launched a wildly successful platform that created a market for independent consultants. McGovern’s M Squared earned a spot on the Inc. 500 ranking of fast-growth ventures, which is where my colleagues and I first met this remarkable woman.

In 1993, McGovern launched Collabrus, one of the first companies to tackle the unglamorous but crucial work of compliance and payroll services that enable independent contractor engagements. In 2001, she published A New Brand of Expertise: How Independent Consultants Are Transforming the World of Work. Today, with this book, she’s still at it, packaging up her know-how to share with new generations of individuals in the pursuit of good work.

Entrepreneurship is not a job, it’s a life. And choosing to work on one’s own is every bit as much entrepreneurship as starting a venture-backed company. On a journey such as this one, you don’t want a novice as an advisor. You want a veteran, who’s been there, done that, and doesn’t forget for a moment that the psychological and emotional challenges are as big as the strategic and the tactical. That’s what you get with McGovern. This book is the next best thing to having McGovern on speed dial.

—GEORGE GENDRON

George Gendron was the editor-in-chief of Inc. Magazine for 20 years. He was the founder and director of the entrepreneurship center at Clark University in Massachusetts, and is the cofounder and managing director of The Solo Project, a new venture designed to support independent professionals and creatives.