Solo Project

THE NEW WORLD OF WORK IS HERE
AND WE ARE NOT READY

Download the Free Report here
Understand New Employment Options
Live And Work Better
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Here are Excerpts with data and direction:

Learn about the solopreneur that you are, or want to be, or will inevitably be!
There are 53.7 million soloists already, a third of the U.S. work force. 

Also get some blunt facts, such as... 




Solo Project Mission - www.SoloProject.com
Launch a national conversation about the role that government, universities, corporations, and the social sector can play to help individuals and communities make the transition from the traditional, employer based economy to the emerging one in which individuals design their own work, create their own jobs, and take responsibility for their own financial and professional security. Thank you KnightFoundation.org



25 Takeaways:

01. Grit. (And the 12 other personal qualities demanded by the new world of work.)
02. The “Hollywood Model” goes wide.
03. New worker, new workplace.
04. Write the indie FAQ.
05. “Up until a hundred years ago, there was no such thing as a ‘job.’”
06. Virtual organizations aren’t new. Reactions to them are.
07. “For the first time in human history, individuals can design a life around the pursuit of interesting work.”
08. The perfect commute is 10 minutes long.
09. Create a shaming platform.
10. For many soloists, the only coworking spaces that work are the ones they invent for themselves.
11. “Trust is not built digitally.”
12. What would an organization look like if it valued its freelance talent as much as its employees?
13. It’s important to feel like you matter.
14. Schools prepare us for a world that doesn’t exist anymore.
15. To compete for talent, “let the true voice of the city speak.”
16. Collaborators are the best counselors.
17. Needed: new forms of credit to finance the new world of work.
18. What soloists want. (A checklist.)
19. Create an association of placemakers.
20. “I don’t look at candidates just for the job I’m trying to fill. I look at them as people I want long connections with.”
21. Raise the ‘bump rate.’
22. Social media is useless.
23. Blend soloists and city hall.
24. “People value human space far above ofice space.”
25. It’s not money, it’s “risk capacity.”


Feel free to Read More about the 5 items that should guide every urban leader’s thinking going forward... and the 13 Elements - What it takes to be a soloist:

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Here are the five items that should guide every urban leader’s thinking going forward:

1 “Place” Matters More, Not Less

Despite technology, mobility and the ever more-networked,
virtualized business world, soloists need actual places as much
or more than traditional jobholders do—for interactions that
produce collaboration, learning, stimulation, social ballast,
and billable business. They need places to convene and work,
whether on their own or in small teams. They need neighborhoods
that supply what organizations routinely supplied to
traditional employees. Traditional employees get an ofice, a
shop floor, a workplace campus. For soloists, it’s the neighborhood
surrounding them that is the new corporate campus—the
new “indie commons.” City hall, then, becomes for soloists the
Chief Cultural Oficer.

2 Connection Trumps Cohesion

Connection, like place, grows in value as the workforce becomes
increasingly disaggegated and distributed. Warning:
creating connection is a messy process. City leaders will need
to fight the impulse to try to guarantee outcomes with mechanistic,
fully cohesive programs and instead support a hundred
small-scale experiments, each designed to foster connection,
friction, and ungoverned contact among players in the indie
ecosystem. Make networks of networks, create learning communities
of place makers and innovation hubs, cross-pollinate
soloists and city hall, and soloists and business leaders, and soloists
and education leaders. Enable knowledge transfer, relationship
building, and deal making to happen organically.

3 Don’t Trust the Data. (We Need a New Typology of Work)

Existing data about the new world of work is worse than useless;
it’s dangerously misleading. Because the systems for
collecting it were created in the middle of another century,
back when a 40-hour-a-week job was the norm, it now can’t
accurately track how independent work occurs, or how it
creates economic value, or the crucial interdependencies
between it and traditional corporations. The outdated statistical
lenses can make it hard for the new world of work even to 
be seen. Hence: too much talk of Uber drivers; too little talk
of increasingly indie attorneys, lawyers, software developers,
and environmental engineers. Too little understanding of how
individuals increasingly assemble portfolios of work, or how
they move back-and-forth between traditional jobs and indie
projects, or how they do both at once. Our data system needs
more than a tweak. We need new definitions that reflect the
infinite variety of work arrangements that exist and the speed
with which individuals move in and out of those arrangements.
We need a new, dynamic typology of work.

4 We Need to Prepare People to Create a Job, Not Find One

A massive infrastructure (entire industries, in fact) exists to
help people find jobs or help jobs find people, both online
and of. Think CareerBuilder, Monster, LinkedIn, the executive
recruiting industry, career-services departments at universities.
A smaller but still highly evolved infrastructure exists to
support mainstream entrepreneurs aiming to create jobs (plural)
in high-growth companies. What doesn’t exist is a support
infrastructure, body of knowledge, or education system designed
to help individuals create one job—their own. Building
a career as an independent requires a new cache of capabilities
and attitudes (see Finding #1). We need to re-imagine
every aspect of formal education, as well as less-formal skillsbuilding
eforts, to prepare people for this post-industrial age.

5 Market Forces Won’t (Fully) Drive Us Where We Need to Go

The infrastructures serving either the traditional jobs market
or the entrepreneurial economy were built, in large part, because
lots of organizations had financial incentives to build
them. Wealth was being created, whether by entrepreneurs or
enterprise-level corporations, and organizations as diferent
as venture-capital firms and universities could grab a piece of
this new money. Market forces drove innovation and supply.
Creating comparable supports for independent talent is
diferent. This time around, while the stakes for individual
prosperity and security couldn’t be higher, with few exceptions
there is no comparable financial motivation driving the
private sector to respond. The wealth created by a population
of distributed independents is comparatively small and disaggregated.
Still, making a successful transition from a nation
of “employees” to one of “independents” may be one of this
country’s biggest challenges, and new business services, educational
approaches, and public policies will be key—which
begs the question, If the usual economic incentives won’t fuel
the needed changes, who’s going to foot the bill?


13 Elements - What it takes to be a soloist:

1. Grit Resilience; 
the ability to endure setbacks and
mistakes, to correct missteps
quickly, to learn from failures

2. Tolerance for Ambiguity
Ability to work hard for an
uncertain outcome, and to
make decisions in the midst
of incomplete information

3. Creative ProblemSolving Skills 
Ability to frame problems; to diferentiate
between critical, relevant
info and “noise”; to identify
ways to test potential solutions quickly

4. Collaboration Skills Capacity
to work on projects
with highly diverse team members

5. Network Savviness
An intimate understanding
of social networks, their ever
increasing importance in
getting things accomplished;
ability to grow, use, and
contribute to them

6. Self Awareness Fundamental
understanding of
one’s own strengths and
weaknesses; ability to compensate
for weaknesses

7. Business-Finance
Literacy Understanding of
value creation and the crucial
issue of cash flow for independents
and small teams; familiarity with personal
finance issues

8. Resourcefulness at
Getting Help How to recognize
when you need help;
the ability to ask for it; how to
identify trustworthy sources
of advice and expertise

9. Sophisticated ability
to Learn, Continually and
Intentionally How to identify
your learning needs, find
ways to meet and integrate
them into professional routines

10. Business-Development
Skills How to identify opportunities;
how to “market” self;
how to build sales pipeline;
how to close a deal

11. Adroitness at Personal
“Branding” How to create
visibility in marketplace; how
to build reputation capital

12. Communications Skills
How to explain, pitch,
present, write, persuade

13. Design Awareness Understanding
the role design plays in communicating the
value of business ideas


This all started last September at this event I was invited to

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