Author: feedengine

A reader (I’ll call them X), asked me for advice on a broad situation, concerning someone close to them who is relatively new to the indie game, which I think is of general interest. My summary, generalized version of X’s question is:

Why can’t they see that I have the solution to their problem?

Clearly, if you can answer this question effectively, you’ll make changes in how you position, present, and market yourself, which will result in more leads, which in turn will lead to more gigs, and to you living happily ever after, validated, fulfilled, and rich.

So it’s an existential question. It’s the product-market-fit question for indies.

The account X shared with me is something of a mini-essay in itself, and it walks through their systematic attempt to tackle the question. Their attempt falls naturally into a 5-stage analysis pattern that I think is pretty common among healthy minded, thoughtful and introspective people. It leads thoughtfully and inexorably to building a hill to die on and then… dying on it:

1. The evidence of value stage

2. The alignment of valuations stage

3. The systems lamentations stage

4. The building a hill to die on stage

5. The martyrdom stage

The first two stages are great and you should do them. The last three stages are bad, and you should replace them with a road-less-traveled alternative set of stages I will suggest.

I’m going to break up X’s mini-essay into pieces, and respond inline the way I would in a 1:1 email consult (which I don’t offer).

Evidence of Value

Reader X gets off to a great start here describing the situation:

[A freelancer] has evidence that what they do is valuable and useful – some past results that led to happy clients and measurable wins. People they’ve worked with have been challenged and then delighted, and have made more money.

I love this as a starting point for introspection. Many indies just assume what they do or have to offer is valuable, simply because they enjoy doing it, and feel they are good at it. They let go paychecks, but not the dose of validation that comes with it like clockwork.

From there it is a short leap to developing a simmering resentment when the world doesn’t deign to agree with them.

Looking for evidence that what you do is seen as valuable by others, and that they’re not just being nice, or flattering your conceits for their own reasons, or avoiding conflict, is hard to do. But if you don’t start that way, you are at severe risk of extreme self-delusion from Day 1. A delusion that you might never break out of.

So interrogate your presumption of value skeptically.

X believes they did that, and found evidence of value, and I believe them. So let’s call Step 1 done, and done well.

Alignment of Valuations

Our reader gets Step 2 right as well, looking for alignment of valuations, even though they fail to find it:

But … the broader field (copywriting/messaging in this case) is pretty illegible and full of bullshit. Lots of potential clients undervalue the work, assume they can do it themselves and just need extra hands to make it happen, or think it’s a “nice to have”.

Now we’re getting to the heart of the matter. It’s one thing for clients to be happy, and even unexpectedly happy/delighted at having gained greater insight into their needs.

But that still doesn’t mean your respective valuations are aligned. In particular, valuations of work between you and the client have to be aligned in a way that they want to pay you what you want to be paid.

Your client might agree there is evidence of value. They might even agree on the price. But there’s a strong possibility they’ll stop short of agreeing about the need to actually buy right now.

X’s problem here is a special case popularly known as the aspirin vs. vitamins problem.

The indie here thinks they’re selling a must-have service (aspirin, a cure for serious business headaches). The client thinks they’d be buying a nice-to-have service (vitamin, a nice-to-have well-being boost, but not having it isn’t going to kill the business tomorrow).

A client being willing to half-ass something for themselves instead of paying someone with experience to do it right is a clear sign that they think of that something as a vitamin rather than an aspirin.

To make it more stark, think in terms of surgery versus personal training, or even life-saving surgery (for heart disease or cancer for example) versus personal training.

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t attempt surgery on myself, or defer urgent surgery simply because I’m cash-stressed. I’d definitely get myself a surgeon and go into debt to pay them if necessary.

But I’d probably be willing to design my own fitness routine rather than hire a personal trainer if money is tight. In fact, even if money isn’t tight and it’s just simpler to do my own routine. Under some very special conditions, I’d pay (and have done so) for personal training (someone I find easily and get along with, easy scheduling at a gym I go to anyway, etc etc).

There are other ways alignment of valuation can fail besides the vitamin-aspirin impasse, but however it fails, the work is usually not being undervalued so much as being judged unnecessary, in a strictly logical sense. It is being contingently valued, its value locked away behind an if statement.

Every business person probably contingently values something like copywriting at a fair market value, but with an if clause: I should pay the market rate for quality copywriting if such and such vague conditions hold.

Undervaluation is easy to walk away from. If you don’t have identity hangups or insecurities, a lowball offer is both easy to walk away from, and easy to accept without damage to self-esteem if you’re really under cash stress. Oddly enough, the less lowball offers offend you, the less likely you are to get them at all. People can sense when somebody is not attached to a fixed idea of their market value, and don’t even try to lowball them.

But contingent valuation is a different game altogether. Contingent valuation means you disagree on which world you inhabit.

You think you live in aspirin world. They think you live in vitamin world. The two pills might even cost the same, and you might agree it’s a fair price.

Yet the aspirin will almost always get bought, the vitamin almost always will not. As sales people like to say, people only buy two things: happiness (vitamins) and solutions to problems (aspirins). Most above-the-API indies are in the vitamin game.

The mistake they make is trying to cast vitamins in aspirin roles. This leads to Stage 3: Systems Lamentations.

Systems Lamentations

A contingent valuation impasse will inexorably draw you into dangerous territory, where analysis starts turning into paralysis. Here’s X going there:

When they ARE looking, they’re usually focused on the symptoms, rather than realizing that there’s a deeper malaise.

This sort of sentiment commonly comes up in assessments of why clients are making the (unfavorable to you) decisions they are, like doing things poorly themselves, hiring cut-rate alternatives, trying to lowball you, or perhaps most galling of all, signing up for some scammy overpriced offering next door to yours.

Versions of this sentiment include:

• “They’re focused on band-aid fixes”

• “They only care about the short-term/next quarter”

• “They are not seeing the root cause”

• “They have a culture problem of not valuing X”

• “They just want to act like they want to solve the problem”

• “They want to sweep it under the rug/paper over it”

• “They just want the theater”

These are what I call systems lamentations. Systems theory analysis conducted by way of predictable laments.

If these laments sound familiar, and you often trot them out in your analysis of failed gigs or leads that don’t convert, I have bad news for you.

Usually, when you lament that the client is missing some “root cause” or “deeper malaise,” (or doesn’t care as you think they should) you are the one who is missing something by being trapped in a functionally fixed perspective.

Ie, this is the “when you have a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail” stage of paralysis. Of course if you offer good copywriting, you’ll be primed to see something upstream of bad copy as the root cause or deeper malaise behind the client’s troubles. Of course if you offering sparring services, the answer is sparring about root causes. Of course if you offer to crunch data in R, the root cause is insufficient data-drivenness in their culture.

The funny thing is, if you’re smart and good at wielding your hammer, you are probably even right.

The problem is, you being right doesn’t mean they are wrong.

See, to be an indie, you have to internalize the Five Noble Truths of systems thinking:

1. Thar be blind men and elephants: There are many correct ways of looking at a system, all of them partial, none strictly superior to others.

2. Everybody has a root-cause lament: Everybody always believes the system is broken in some fundamental way, and has an opinion on what the “root cause” is from their point of view. This is nearly always an opinion that renders them helpless, and is therefore expressed as a lament.

3. Nothing is broken: Complex systems are almost never actually broken. They’re just not always working for you. Even Covid hasn’t “broken” healthcare. It has just revealed that healthcare systems generally aren’t working to protect the health of citizens.

4. There are no bad systems thinkers: There are just people who are looking at the system from different perspectives, subject to different incentives, and each with a different opinion on how, why, and where it is “broken” in some fundamental, root-cause way. Systems thinking isn’t a skill. It’s a scope of interest.

5. There is always a righteous HiPPO: Every system will evolve to an equilibrium that validates, but does not actually address, the specific lament underlying the highest paid person’s opinion of what the root cause is. Every thoughtful person looking at the system is right about their view of the root cause in some way, but the HiPPO is in addition, uniquely righteous, representing the default morality of helplessness enveloping the situation via a default lament.

In other words, most complex systems in equilibrium are a case of a blind HiPPO touching an elephant.

Okay, I admit, this whole newsletter issue has been about trying to set up that particular joke (I was going to make a cartoon of it but couldn’t draw a good blind hippo).

You cannot dislodge a system from a hippo-default-lamentation equilibrium by convincing the hippo that your lament is superior to theirs. If you’ve come this far, and begun circling a pet lament that seems to apply to every failed gig or unconverted lead, you’ll almost certainly move on to the next grim and futile stage: building a hill to die on. Often in the form of a website.

Building a Hill to Die On

Having gotten stuck trying to win gold in the Lamentation Olympics, in a rigged game that’s designed to award gold to the HiPPO on the scene (silver is a set of steak knives), X reports:

The freelancer has created some valuable assets that go towards proving their expertise –- articles, a tool. And they’ve put those “out there” a bit. But there’s not a great deal of traffic to their website, and little response from those who do find it. Most of the work they’ve won is through contacts, and it feels like all the work they’ve done on creating a corpus of work and putting themselves “out there” hasn’t really made any impact at all.

Clearly the problem isn’t that they don’t understand marketing tactics — they offer copywriting and messaging services after all, and have evidence that they’re good at it. And like I said, I believe them.

So what’s going on?

When you find yourself competing for steak knives in a Lamentation Olympics contest; when you find yourself trying to boil an ocean by identifying root causes; when you find that trying to sell vitamins has led you to arguing about the kind of world we live in — you’ve fallen into the trap of building a hill to die on.

You’ve fallen into the trap of trying to “prove” that your way of looking at the system is the “right” way. That your lament is superior to the HiPPO’s lament.

“Proofs of expertise” are often works of lamentation art (though I’m not saying that’s the case here). Design fictions from the world you wished you lived in. A world where what you offer is aspirin, not vitamins. Necessary pills rather than contingent.

A manifesto section on a website providing context for the showcase of expertise is often a reliable tell that you’re looking at a lamentation artwork gallery.

In the parable of the blind men and the elephant, this would be like the blind man touching the tail of the elephant trying to “prove” that the system is a rope, while the client, a blind man touching a leg, is convinced the system is a tree. So the marketing exchange is essentially:

Blind Consultant: Here is a blog post and calculator tool showing how to fix broken ropes

Blind HiPPO Client: Interesting, but I’m working on fixing my broken tree here. If I’m ever in broken-rope world, I’ll call you.

This is not a winnable conversation because there isn’t one right way to view the system, and no absolutely compelling reason to view it in any particular way. So most people are naturally attached to their way of viewing it.

The best tactics — great website, great SEO, scintillating copy, a great little calculator tool — none of it matters if the client doesn’t share your systemic view.

So what happens next? Well you built a hill to die on, so what do you expect?

Martyrdom

Naturally the next step is to actually die on it. Often the sign that you’re doing that is taking solemn note of the Triumph of Evil over Good in your neck of the woods. It’s a sort of martyrdom speech from the gallows.

Lo and behold!

Finally, this freelancer is also scrupulously honest and diligent. One of the big challenges is seeing a load of people who appear to be complete chancers or lemons raking in loads of money, while they have turned away or lost work through being honest. The fact that scammers seem to win while this freelancer can’t seem to catch a break … There’s a sense of how unfair that is that forms at least part of the general “work is dry” challenge.

This martyred analysis is not wrong (in fact it’s more right than they seem to realize for reasons I’ll get to), and of course being scrupulously honest and diligent is a wonderful thing. It just doesn’t save you from the dying on the hill you’ve built. It merely cloaks your martyrdom in honor and nobility.

I mean of course there are scammers and grifters raking in loads of money from suckers everywhere.

Of course there is going to be a lemon market right next door to every real value exchange around deeply stuck systems.

Of course the world seems unfair because the bad actors chase out the good.

But it’s still you, the Good Guy, dying on the hill you’ve built yourself. Not them. Planting a flag and making a little speech isn’t going to change that.

So let’s back up to where things started going off the rails.

Validate, Resonate, Create

As I said in the beginning, the 5-step analysis model that derails thoughtful introspection and sucks you into martyrdom actually begins with two goods steps, but then falls apart at the system lamentations step and goes downhill from there.

To short circuit that, you need to go down a different path once you’ve assessed the alignment of valuation situation. Instead of:

1. The evidence of value stage

2. The alignment of valuations stage

3. The systems lamentations stage

4. The building a hill to die on stage

5. The martyrdom stage

We’re going to go:

1. The evidence of value stage

2. The alignment of valuations stage

3. The renouncing validation stage

4. The building a resonance stage

5. The creation stage

Ie, at the fork in the road after Stage 2, we’re going to go down a road less traveled.

Renouncing Validation Stage

Systems lamentations (go back and review the “tells” in the form of pet diagnostic phrases that go nowhere) are a kind of learned helplessness.

They are a mark of attachment to a helpless perspective of a system rooted in the misguided belief that it is the only true perspective.

We tend to get attached because the perspective has the happy property of casting us in a permanently valuable light.

If the world is always this way, then what I do is always worthwhile (even if nobody actually pays me to do it).

Renouncing validation is a simple idea. You let go the need to have others validate your view of the world you both inhabit. So when faced with a valuation misalignment…

Instead of mounting a principled defense of your perspective, you simply abandon your perspective and go validate theirs.

You’re both likely right about your diagnosis of root causes, and neither of your laments really matters. You don’t get systems unstuck from bad equilibriums by finding the right way to lament, or by getting validation for your specific lament.

So renounce the need for validation, and commit 100% of the validation budget to the client. They need it more than you do.

Operate as if their way of viewing the system is the only correct way, modulo things like simple factual errors. Assume you live in the world they believe they live in. It’s almost always a harmless assumption.

For bonus points, sing their laments more exquisitely than they do, to the point that they trust your voice more than their own. Not only do you see the world their way, you see it their way better than they themselves do. There is no disingenuousness in doing this because laments simply don’t matter. Every lament points to a roughly equivalent possible world you could inhabit around a complex system that feels broken. You’re equally helpless in all of them. Laments represent distinctions without differences among a set of possible worlds.

Just don’t get attached to any lamentation, yours or theirs. Renouncing validation for your laments in favor of unconditional validation of theirs leads to trust, which leads to the possibility of the next stage: resonance.

Resonance Stage

The next stage is building resonance rather than a hill to die on.

What do I mean? I mean you simply try to jam with them while tapping into your personal nerd energy. You’re not trying to “prove” anything. You’re not getting into vitamin versus aspirin arguments. You’re not doing ROI assessments or showcasing expertise at anything.

Now that you’re seeing the world from their point of view, by simply adopting it rather than arguing about it, you have enough of a common ground to start jamming.

Whatever it is you do — writing good copy, analyzing data, developing architectures, analyzing strategies, fixing technology roadmaps, writing code — show them the joy of doing it your way. The unbridled nerd energy that can be unleashed by going down an energizing bunnytrail of positive-feedback action. The exuberance and generativity you yourself feel when you get a good gig that allows you to nerd out in your favorite way. They’re not paying for a specific service. They’re paying to unleash broader reserves of energy from somewhere, and they probably don’t care much about where. If they can vibe with your nerd energy, they’ll pay.

The mark of building a hill to die on is planting a flag on that hill. A proud flag that flutters in the wind, proclaiming the values and truths you hold dear to all the world, while you die slowly clutching the flagpole.

In the indie world, you either die a martyr, or survive long enough to see yourself turn into a nerd. And to turn into a nerd is to open up a unique portal.

The opposite of planting a flag is opening a portal. Building resonance is about opening portals instead of planting flags.

I wrote about this in a 2014 blog post that is one of the few I revisit myself to keep myself reminded of (and energized by) this principle. If these ideas are new to you, I recommend you stop here and go read that post before continuing. It’s a brain-dead obvious idea — but only after you’ve learned and internalized it for the first time.

Portals eat flags for lunch. The offer seductions that offer an escape from your client’s pet laments. Instead of saying “my view of why your world sucks is better than your view of why it sucks,” you say “I agree the world sucks, in exactly the helplessness inducing way you say. Here is an energizing place to escape to, and maybe find a way out.”

Portals don’t just offer escapes from helplessness, they offer energizing escapes and the possibility of empowered returns with newfound agency.

When you go through a good portal along with a good guide, you emerge refreshed. Your own laments weigh less heavily on you. You likely still see the “system” the same way, and diagnose the “root cause” the same way, but now you bring fresh energy and imagination to the party. Instead of feeling helpless, you feel you can take it on and perhaps win or at least shake things up. Or if not, at least make dealing with the suckage worth it.

This incidentally is the lesson in the existence of lemon markets next to yours. People are hungry for anything that offers respite from the bleakness of the laments they are helplessly attached to.

A HiPPOs lament is hugely powerful precisely because everybody tends to agree with it out of pragmatism, if not faith, and share in the learned helplessness of their leader.

You’re going to agree with the lament too, and even validate it powerfully, but you’re not going to share in the helplessness. Instead you’ll open an escape hatch.

A good rule of thumb for doing this is: first follow the nerd energy, then follow the money.

If you can nerd out over something, anything, in your own unique way, you can probably open a portal into an energizing alternate dimension that people will want to pay to access. More people will come to you, and say, “shut up and take my money.”

Open up a portal and they will come. Plant a flag and you will die on the hill you built to plant it on.

Create Stage

Finally, once you’ve got good energy going and flowing into the stuck system from your portal, you can begin to create with your clients.

You need clients in the right stage in relation to a complex problem to want to do this.

They’re sick of being stuck. They’re bored of their own lamentations, even if they’re the HiPPO in the picture. They certainly aren’t in a mood to listen to your competing lamentations. They are tired of thinking in terms of disease. They don’t want to hear about malaises and symptoms and root causes and band-aids and other draining imagery that reinforces their sense of helplessness.

They want to feel new streams of agency surging through them.

They want to find a new source of vital energy and inject it into the system, to shake it loose from stuckness.

Your job as an outsider, no matter the specifics of what you offer, is to help dowse for the hidden ley lines of that energy, and then serve as a channel for it through the specific thing you do. Think of it it this way: you only account for 5% of the energy flows you help them tap into. You’re not draining your batteries to charge theirs. You are helping them plug into new renewable energy flows you help them find.

As an outsider you are free to stand in a place from where you can lever a stuck system into being unstuck.

It is that freedom that you are offering to share with your client, by inviting them into the portal you’ve built.

It’s right there in the two-word phrase we use to label ourselves: free agent. You’re free, they’re not. That’s the main source of your value. If you choose to tap into it and share it.

So don’t build a hill for yourself to die on.

Open up a portal for them to walk through.

Welcome back.

In October, I hit pause, and took around six weeks off from writing this newsletter. It was a much-needed break for me, and gave me an opportunity to reflect, both on the newsletter, and on my consulting practice. During the break, I also turned 46, landing on the “undeniably” side of “middle-aged.” My 10th anniversary as an indie consultant is also coming up. That will be March 1, 2021. Mark your calendars so you remember to please clap.

In a traditional job, I’d be expecting some sort of cheap plaque marking the anniversary, a “personalized” note from the CEO, and perhaps colleagues taking me out for a beer and roasting me. In the free-agent world, nobody would even know if I didn’t tell them. That’s kinda how I prefer it. Which explains why I’ve already lasted twice as long as a free-agent than I did in my only real job (4.5 years).

During my break (unpaid vacation?), I found myself thinking particularly hard about the next ten years. Do I want to continue doing more of the same sort of thing? Will I still be sparring with executives in 2030? Or will I be up to something different? If so, what?

Whatever I do, one thing I already know: I’m going to maintain my amateur status. No matter how long I play the indie game, I’m never going to turn pro at it, whatever that might mean. If you are thinking of going indie, I recommend you think of it as going amateur.

Nearly ten years into the game, I’ve convinced myself that an amateur posture towards work is central to the idea, appeal, and value of free agency. In fact, going free agent is going amateur, even if you were once a professional in some sense.

For a free-agent, being an amateur, as opposed to a professional, is more important than being paid by the gig rather than with a salary.

***

Sherlock Holmes, consultant detective, was technically an amateur in the sleuthing business. Doyle’s creation spawned an entire genre of fiction built around the premise of amateurs beating professionals at their own game, despite the handicap of fewer institutional resources.

A hundred years later, the appeal of the amateur sleuth as a literary invention remains strong. My favorite detective shows in the last couple of decades — Psych, Monk, Castle, and of course, the reimagined Sherlock — all feature amateur free-agent (or in the case of Adrian Monk, failed-professional), protagonists.

The conceit of classic detective fiction as a genre is that the amateur sleuth outwits the criminal, while outdoing the professionals, through an unconventional superior intelligence. But I want to offer you a contrarian take: it is the amateur posture that does most of the work, and looks like inscrutable genius to the professionals when it works out. As such, it is available to anyone with the courage to “go amateur.” Which, I like I said, is almost the same as going indie.

To understand why, you have to first understand the amateur in relation to the professional. After all, there would be no amateurs if there were no professionals to define them through negation.

***

It is easy to construct and tear down a strawman view of professionalism as an artifact of empty credentialism and risk-aversion standing in for credibility, but that would be neither fair nor interesting. Professionalism is a deeper idea, and amateur status only has meaning to the extent professional status has genuine complementary worth.

To be viewed as a professional is enjoy a certain earned dignity in default perceptions; a certain presumption of default value that makes for a great deal of psychological security.

The most subtle part of the security is not the esteem itself, but the certainty of esteem. Within certain institutional contexts, to be a professional is to give yourself permission to suspend your insecurities and let go of imposter syndrome. Nobody will ever wonder why you exist, because under the right conditions, it will be self-evidently obvious why it is good thing that you do. Nobody wonders why Anthony Fauci exists, and most of us in the United States are glad he does.

That’s what it truly means to be a professional. It’s not about credentials, empty or otherwise. Being a professional means you know your worth, and others do too — and not because you brandish your degrees and certifications. To be a professional, in the best sense of the word, is to care genuinely, and try sincerely to do the right thing, and for that to translate automatically into societal value and meaningful validation through the magic of effective institutions.

This is a condition that is worth something both to professionals, and to the society that views them as such. Something that is not to be set aside lightly.

To be an amateur, in the worst sense of the word, is to be an insincere bullshitting dilettante, and for that to result in casual destruction and pain for others.

The last few years have been a battle between professionals in the best sense of the word against both professionals and amateurs in the worst sense of those words.

But what interests me is the missing quadrant: what does it mean to be an amateur in the best sense of the word?

***

What it does not mean is striving mightily to create an ersatz version of the perception of trust enjoyed by professionals. That road leads to cringe personal brands: campy, failed faux-professionalism for free agents based on anxious, over-wrought perception management.

Thar be personal demons, not trusted brands.

No, being an amateur in the best sense of the word means embracing the lack of guarantees as a feature. Amateur status means you represent no guarantees — but people want to work with you anyway because you bring something else to the party. Something the professionals cannot bring, by virtue of being professionals.

When you are an amateur, there is no no guarantee that caring genuinely, and trying sincerely to do the right thing, will automatically lead to anything good anywhere.

It is this lack of automatic, default positive consequences (and expectations of such consequences by others) that leads to the neutral noun amateur turning into the pejorative adjective amateurish. When something is done amateurishly, the best you can usually hope for is “no harm done.” Amateurishness is not lack of skill necessarily. It is lack of predictability in outcomes.

The presumption is that even sincere, caring amateurs are at best inept bunglers who occasionally get lucky. They do not embody any deterministic causal relationship between effort and outcome.

That’s the downside.

The upside of being an amateur is freedom. Freedom from the confining expectations that accompany perceptions as a professional. Freedom from institutionally rigid notions of value. Freedom from the limiting self-perceptions that inevitably accompany ascriptive professional status. Freedom from the conflation of skills and guarantees. Freedom from standing on ceremony. Freedom to wonder and play without a lurking sense that it is undignified for “someone in my position” to do so. Freedom to take strange risks. Freedom to operate with insufficient gravitas (hehe, bet you didn’t think that link would go where it does).

In this freedom, there is certainly the power to destroy. But there is also the power to see and do things that wouldn’t even occur to professionals.

This freedom does not come for free. Merely declaring yourself to be an amateur does not buy you the freedoms of a consciously held amateur posture.

What does it take to earn the freedom of amateur status? What would a non-pejorative sense of amateurish look like?

***

In A Study in Scarlet, Dr. Watson describes Sherlock Holmes’ knowledge as follows:

• Knowledge of Literature: Nil.

• Knowledge of Philosophy: Nil.

• Knowledge of Astronomy: Nil.

• Knowledge of Politics: Feeble.

• Knowledge of Botany: Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening.

• Knowledge of Geology: Practical but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their color and consistency in what part of London he had received them.

• Knowledge of Chemistry: Profound.

• Knowledge of Anatomy: Accurate but unsystematic.

• Knowledge of Sensational Literature: Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.

• Plays the violin well.

• Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman.

• Has a good practical knowledge of British law.

What is notable about Holmes’ knowledge is that though he demonstrably possesses a lot of hard-won, high-value knowledge, to Watson’s eyes, it is unsystematic and idiosyncratic, with what seems like glaring gaps and odd lacunae.

Holmes wouldn’t pass a standardized test except as a side-effect of knowing things his own way (in a episode of Psych, the police detectives Juliet and Lassiter engage in a friendly rivalry over who scored higher in the detective exam — until the amateur protagonist Shawn reveals in a casual aside that he got a perfect score on it as a teenager — which could oddly be read as proof of validity of the test).

Watson’s list says as much about his own status as a true professional twice over — a medical doctor, and an army veteran — as it does about Holmes.

Note that he thinks in categories that sound like a combination of a university course catalog, gentlemanly worldly wisdom, and a finishing school designed to teach polite conversation.

Despite his clear esteem for Holmes, Watson is unable to see a pattern in Holmes’ knowledge. Watson is Seeing Like a State personified.

The only area where Watson dimly senses the gestalt of Holmes’ mastery is one that is not an institutionally recognized subject — “sensational literature.”

Today that sort of knowledge might translate, for instance, to being Very Online and having a vast knowledge of every meme that ever went viral on Twitter. Which actually indicates interesting things if you are not fatally wedded to a professional self-image and institutionally validated patterns of knowing.

In most areas in Watson’s catalog, Holmes is “unsystematic” or “limited” or “practical” (as in, vocationally rather than liberally educated on the topic), and somehow comes up short. In one case — chemistry — Watson characterizes Holmes’ knowledge as “profound,” which is an oddly mystical and exoticizing term to apply in an area where he himself, as a doctor, would be expected to have some expertise.

Note that there is nothing natural or necessary about Watson’s map of knowledge; it is as arbitrary as Borges’ encyclopedia, and arguably no more fundamental than Holmes’ own hidden scheme.

The whole list summarizes Watson’s essential puzzlement over the very essence of Holmes, despite being his admiring lifelong companion and biographer. The charm of Watson as a narrator of the Holmes stories is that he never does figure Holmes out. This is something Holmes himself often points out, in noting that Watson’s accounts of cases invariably miss what Holmes sees as essential, while emphasizing sentimental and romantic aspects he himself is indifferent to.

***

Is Holmes a genius? Or does his amateur status merely present him as such to professionals like Dr. Watson and Inspector Lestrade?

One good definition of genius is: talent hits the target others can’t hit, genius hits the target others can’t see.

Or as Alan Kay once put it, perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

Could it be that Sherlock Holmes is not a genius, but simply a talented amateur whose ways of seeing are inaccessible to the professional eyes of Watson or Lestrade?

Holmes is clearly no insincere dilettante in the stories, so we can eliminate the possibility that he’s the bad kind of amateur. He has accumulated a great deal of knowledge over many years of practice, so his is not a Zen-lucky beginner mind. He is not young, so he cannot be labeled precocious. But his knowledge is not systematic or disciplined, so he’s not a professional.

So having eliminated the impossible, we must conclude, however improbably, that Sherlock Holmes is an amateur, but not amateurish.

He is effective, but his effectiveness comes with no guarantees. He has depths, but his depth-dimensions are invisible to professionals (this is a theme I keep returning to; I first wrote about it almost a decade ago in my ribbonfarm post, The Calculus of Grit).

And it doesn’t matter what kind of professional. Lestrade is a policeman, and in theory should have a better read on Holmes. In practice, he is even more befuddled than Watson.

So it is not the subject matter of expertise that is the problem, it is professionalism as a posture and perspective. Watson and Lestrade both suffer from Seeing Like a Professional syndrome.

The unconventional workings of Holmes’ best-kind-of-amateur mind seem like mysterious but unreliable genius to professional policemen like Lestrade.

For Lestrade, Holmes is something like a magic Deep Learning AI algorithm. Not to be entirely trusted, and full of biases, but someone with unpredictable and sometimes uncanny input-output behaviors. Holmes appears to Lestrade as AlphaGoZero must appear to professional Go players.

So when he gets stuck, despite his confused mix of contempt and awe for Holmes’ methods, Lestrade trudges over to 221B Baker Street, accepts a cup of tea from Mrs. Hudson, sets his professional conceits and insecurities aside, and puts his case to the inscrutable oracle.

***

So I put it to you — Holmes is no genius. He is something better: an amateur in the best sense of the word. As everybody in the stories notes, his silly acts of abductive reasoning are no more than parlor tricks. His apparent genius is actually a lack of the professional blinders and attachment to institutional systematicity — the book in “by the book” — that limits what Lestrade or Watson can see or do.

And this is something all the characters are aware of. So it is not as though Lestrade or Watson are clueless about their professional blinders. They are aware of them, and aware that Holmes represents a way around their own limitations.

We see this, for instance, in the television adaptation of The Abbey Grange, starring Jeremy Brett (probably the portrayal of Holmes that is most true to the original stories). The episode features the following exchange, after Holmes achieves an unconventional resolution of the case:

Sherlock Holmes : It’s almost as though you disapproved of the happiness we have fostered today.

Dr. Watson : Oh, no. I approve of that; of course I do. I am uneasy that you took upon yourself the duties of advocate and judge.

Sherlock Holmes : You are too bound by forms, Watson!

Dr. Watson : Forms are society.

Sherlock Holmes : Hmph.

Dr. Watson : Manners maketh man.

Sherlock Holmes : Hah.

Dr. Watson : It’s just as well you are unique.

There is a resignation in the conclusion that Holmes is “unique.” The professionalism that is leveraged capability for Lestrade and Watson in the right institutional contexts turns into a sort of learned helplessness outside those contexts.

Even when Holmes demonstrates that they need not be helpless, and strenuously asserts “you know my methods,” (implying they are learnable), Watson and Lestrade insist on casting Holmes in the role of a sage with access to esoteric methods forever denied them.

***

It might be a self-congratulatory conceit, but Sherlock Holmes, I would argue, is the model every independent consultant ought to aspire to. Not in the sense of affecting the posture of a genius, but in the sense of ignoring the contours of knowledge held to be self-evidently meaningful and important by professionals, and navigating by your own amateur — but grounded — maps of the territory.

If you keep feeding your insecurities about your lack of a title and clear markers of professional credibility, you’re doing it wrong.

Whether you draw a salary or bill by the hour, the choice to view yourself as a professional is just that. A choice. It just happens to be an easier and more effective choice in more situations.

But it is not the only choice available.

You can always choose to go amateur. The more you know, the more courage it takes.

In a way, you don’t get to experience the essence of independent consulting — consulting as a mercenary calling — unless you go amateur and maintain amateur status.

Amateur status at work, play, and life. There’s just you, the wide-open universe, settling memories of what you have done, animating expectations of what you might do, and no guaranteed expectations for anyone involved.

Going amateur and maintaining amateur status. That’s it. That’s the whole game.

Note to subscribers: Billing, which was paused during my break, will resume starting today.

Heads-up: The annual meeting of the Yak Collective will be held on Thursday December 10th at 8 AM Pacific. It’s a public Zoom event, so do drop by if you’re curious to hear what we’ve been up to and what we are hoping to do next year. Here is the public calendar invite.

Greetings Readers!

I find myself over-committed on multiple fronts for the next few weeks, so I’m temporarily hitting pause on this newsletter, using the nifty pause feature that Substack recently rolled out. I expect to be off for about 4-5 weeks.

For paying subscribers, this means billing will be paused until I hit the resume button. Which effectively means the next bill date on your current subscription will be pushed out appropriately. If you have 12 days left on a monthly subscription right now, you’ll still have 12 days left when I resume. If you have 289 days left on an annual subscription, you’ll still have 289 days.

You’ll still have access to the archives as usual of course, so you can catch up on stuff you might have missed.

(if this email feels like deja vu, you probably also subscribe to my other newsletter, Breaking Smart, where I sent out a similar pause notice there — I’m hitting pause on both newsletters).

See you all again in a few weeks!

I was idly wondering earlier this week about the classic time-rich/cash-poor conundrum, when a question struck me that I’d never really thought to ask systematically and seriously.

Why can’t time-rich people live off time capital the way cash-rich people can live off money?

By the paycheck benchmark, you have 40 hours/week at 50 weeks per year, or 2000 hours of time capital per year, for the rest of your life. If you think you’ll live another 40 years, you have 80,000 hours of time capital.

You can do more or less risky things with it (devoting it to earning a paycheck is incidentally, not the lowest risk thing you can do with it, just the simplest thing logistically), and get higher or lower rates of return on your time investments.

Of course, you only get time at a rate of 24 hours/day, but then even the worst failsons typically don’t spend all their money on Day One after getting their trust funds. So though there’s a drawdown rate limit on time, it doesn’t actually matter for most things you might want to do with that time. So there’s nothing fundamentally impossible about the idea of time capitalism.

So I decided to do some very simple and naive math to investigate it, in particular ignoring ALL ruin effects (where you run out of time or money along the way), and inflation.

Living off Money

First, let’s look at money, because it’s more familiar. If you start with a certain amount of capital, and draw it down at a steady rate with the intention of dying bankrupt, you get this formula for the sustainable drawdown rate at various rates of return. I think I derived it right. It’s been a decade since I did this sort of math:

And here’s a screenshot of a spreadsheet (here’s the link, feel free to make a copy and play with it) showing the sustainable drawdown rate as a function of interest under some assumptions ($5 million initial capital, a typical fuck-you money target). The first row is actually not 0% but 0.001% (at zero the formula goes to 0/0 so you have to take the limit).

Obviously, if you have zero risk tolerance, your sustainable draw-down rate, ignoring inflation, is simply the initial amount divided by the number of years. The lower your risk tolerance, the closer you get to that limit. In this case, 125k.

Less obviously, the higher the return rate, the closer the drawdown rate gets to living off roughly the annual interest (it’s because as the interest rate and number of years go high enough, the 1 in the denominator can be ignored and the drawdown is approximately the interest rate times the initial capital).

But the basic point is, if you can invest at higher return rates, your drawdown potential goes UP dramatically, as does your risk of ruin. Conversely, if you have a target lifestyle that costs more than the risk-free drawdown rate, you have to take risks to balance the equation.

Note that I have not modeled running out of money along the way, which will obviously happen if your initial capital is too low and your drawdown rate too high. Non-ergodicity and Russian roulette are a bitch, that’s life. But if you stay away from the gambler’s ruin limits, the formula is good enough to get a sense of wealth dynamics and what it means to live off of capital.

So far, nothing special. This is the sort of math wealth management calculators do in much more sophisticated ways. But here’s the fun part. With a little bit of algebra, you can get a similar formula for the required intrinsic yield rate per hour on your time.

Living off Time

Caveat: this is the absolute dumbest, laziest model of time capitalism I could come up with. My narrative interpretation of the variables is doing a lot more work than the math here. Possibly a better version of this formula already exists in some economics textbook somewhere.

Here’s the formula:

As you’ll notice, the formula is just the previous formula with some re-arrangement and extra terms (initial wealth has basically been modeled as time left in life). Again, we’re not modeling running out of time or money, or the fact that you can’t actually invest more than 24 hours a day. The point here is to get a feel for this beast.

Here’s how to read it. If you want to hit a certain income target by working a certain number of hours per week, you need a certain intrinsic yield rate on your time that implies a certain level of risk. Here, “interest rate” is not return rate on capital, but a sort of “return rate on all the time you have left based on what you’re doing in this minute.”

Yeah, a janky interpretation, but it was that or more complicated math.

Think of it this way: to work with a 5% “interest rate” on your time is not about working harder, smarter, or more skillfully. It’s doing riskier things with that time. Being bolder basically.

This time, the spreadsheet (tab 2 if you want to play with it) looks like this. Again the first row is not 0% but 0.001%.

Again, as expected, with zero risk tolerance, your yield rate/hour basically has to be your target income divided by the number of hours you’re willing to work. So in the example, if you want $2000/week and want to work 4 hours per week like Tim Ferris, well then, you have to make $500/hour for 4 hours a week for the rest of your life.

If there’s sufficient demand for your consulting services at that rate, and you expect to work till your dying day, you’re set.

But maybe your skills aren’t valuable enough in the market to command a $500/hour rate. Maybe you can only command $215/hour. But you’re lazy and don’t want to work more than 4 hours per week. So what to do if you’re both too dumb and too lazy to earn the lifestyle you want?

Well, you take risks and hope to get lucky. If you can’t work smarter or harder, you have to work bolder.

In this case, you’d better be taking 5% “interest rate” worth of risk with your time.

The return on that risk could show up in many different ways.

• Maybe you build an asset that delivers a passive income stream or rent, like a published book or a small web app.

• Maybe you don’t get any smarter or more skillful at what you do (quite possibly you’ve gotten dumber and less skillful), but people simply want to pay you a premium for the same work because you’ve somehow worked it so you add brand cachet. You’ve turned yourself into a rent-generating asset.

• Maybe you simply live really frugally initially and invest much of your surplus, slowly converting time capital into financial capital.

Think of Y as the pre-risk “intrinsic yield rate” on your effort, not the actual return rate. The returns of working with a certain level of smarts and energy.

If that’s confusing, think of it this way — the effort/intelligence required to buy a stock is the same in terms of simply navigating the UI of the trading website, understanding what you’re looking at, and which button to press to complete the trade.

But if you get a bigger return simply by investing in a riskier stock with the same amount of research, and getting luckier, the “intrinsic yield rate” on your time is still the same. If you were doing it with someone else’s money as a paid professional, and they simply told you “invest in high risk stocks” as their intention, and took on all the risk, you could probably charge that intrinsic-yield-rate amount as your management fee.

“Management fee for managing your own time” is actually a good way to think about the intrinsic yield rate. There’s a risk-taker-you who sets the target risk level, and then there’s the manager-you puts in the effort/skill/intelligence to actually execute behaviors at that risk level.

The risk level you take on has nothing to do with the intelligence or skill level needed to correctly execute the actions required. Buying lottery tickets is about as skilled a job as taking out the trash. It’s just much higher risk/return.

But the fascinating thing is how quickly your required yield rate drops if you’re willing to take risks. If you take risks corresponding to a 25% return on your time, you can hit your target income rate at just $50/hour yield… averaged over a lifetime that is, not instantly.

Another way to think of it is how quickly the required smarts drops with increased willingness to take risks. Let’s say it takes a genius IQ to consistently get $500/hour for 4 hours/week with no risk at all. Well, take on risk corresponding to a 50% “interest rate” on time, and you can make the same at $25/hour level of smarts, which might be completely average, based on the risk-free jobs you could typically get that pay that much.

I’ll try to think of better math and a better interpretation, but I think the picture is already clear with this cartoon version.

The moral of the story is that taking more risks with the same amount of available time, skill, and intelligence makes a huge difference. It’s the essence of time capitalism.

Time capitalism is about understanding the effects of risk-taking with your time so you can work with time-rich/cash-poor conditions.

For those of us without a big pile of initial capital to draw down, it’s the only kind of capitalism open to us.

The philosopher and theologian James Carse, author of the sublime Finite and Infinite Games, sadly passed away on September 29. It is an adjective I rarely use, but this is one of the rare books that deserves it. It also happens to be deeply relevant to the gig economy.

(James Carse. image credit: Simon and Schuster)

I was fortunate to be invited to a Zoom salon with Carse hosted by a friend just a few weeks before he passed away, so I got to hear his own thoughts on his life work and legacy at the end of it. The most interesting thing I learned at the salon was that he was actually something of a jock in his youth, a football player. His philosophy of games was rooted in actual games.

Gigs and Games

Carse was best known for a simple but powerful idea that is of deep relevance to the gig economy, best articulated by the opening lines of his book:

There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite; the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

Why is Carse relevant to the gig economy? For a simple reason:

Gigification is gamification. At its worst, it is finite gamification, and at its best, it is infinite gamification.

A lot of what I attempt to do in this newsletter could be described as trying to think about, uncover, and share the essence of this infinite-game aspect of the indie life. And help shift the balance in our lives as gig-workers away from finite play and towards infinite play.

So much of what is written about the gig economy focuses on the dark underbelly that it can sometimes be hard to see that there is in fact a positive, deeply playful side. Carse’s core idea helps us see the gig economy in a balanced way.

• The finite game aspect of the gig economy correlates to the under-the-API side of it. The world of algorithmically coordinated games, and very clear and literal game-like rules administered by apps that encourage you to “play to win” in a way that traps you.

• The infinite game aspect correlates to the above-the-API side. The world of self-defined work, autonomy, free agency, and stimulating variety. A world where you get to both shape the rules, and decide how to play in a way that frees you.

It is important to note that the finite/infinite aspect is not a feature of the game, but a feature of the attitude of the player. You know you are free when you are motivation is infinite-game-like: you’re playing to continue the play. Finitude or infinitude is primarily in your attitude, and only secondarily in the structure of the game.

So in principle, it is possible to play under-the-API games with an infinite-game mindset. It’s just harder. And of course it is possible to play finite games above the API.

On the paycheck side of the economy, it is overall harder to be an infinite-game player, but again, it is more about attitude than situation. There are definitely infinite-game mindset people in both the paycheck and gig economies, but I suspect there’s more of us on the gig-side.

Mercenaries and Games

Yesterday, I asked a question on Twitter that was partly a joke, partly a troll, and partly serious: if missionaries believe in mission statements, what do mercenaries believe in?

To my surprise, while there were some fun answers, nobody offered an answer that pointed directly at play, which is what I was hoping for.

Indirectly though, by pointing to the “game pieces” of business life — contracts, invoices, annual reports, book-keeping — people did sort of go where I was hoping they would. While the answers were clearly meant as pragmatic, perhaps even cynical alternatives to smarmy mission statements, they do reveal a lively spirit of gamesmanship (in a positive sense of what is generally a negative term) at the core of the gig economy.

Unlike many in the paycheck economy, we are deeply aware of the game-like elements because we have to be, and we possess perhaps a better literacy around them on average, because we are forced to. Forgetting that we’re in a game — what is sometimes called ludic immersion — is harder for us. But as a result, we are better at actually playing and enjoying the game. We see the game. We value the game. We don’t feel trapped by it. Paycheck employees on the other hand, often can’t see the game, don’t value it, feel trapped by it, and fantasize about quitting it for good (the “fuck you money” dream is a primarily a paycheck employee dream).

It says a lot about the negative valence that attaches to the word mercenary today that it is so hard to directly see the positive element of play at the heart of it.

As you’ll know if you’ve been following my writing this year, reclaiming the word mercenary with a positive valence is one of the things I try to do here (see The Way of the Mercenary from June 11 and Messengers of the Medium from October 1).

Here is my own answer to the question, which you may or may not agree with. Since, at its best, the gig economy is about infinite gamification, the mercenary equivalent of the mission statement is game rules.

I made up a yin-yang symbol to represent this.

Why game rules?

Mission statements (and their doctrinal cousins, manifestos) are serious things. The talk about values and future utopian states of the world. The very term missionary suggests a solemn — perhaps joyless — attitude towards work. Mission statements center seriousness. They are born of a sense of duty and scarcity.

Game rules, on the other hand, are about catalyzing play. It is about constraints you impose on your own sense of freedom to make your life more interesting. Game rules center fun. They are born of a sense of agency and abundance.

Good game rules make you want to keep playing and stay in an indefinitely perpetuated state of play until you run out of energy. Bad game rules hook your worst instincts and drive you to win, once and for all, regardless of what it does to other players, and arrive at a permanent win condition and never leave.

Again, there are no necessary structure-behavior links here, but something of a default tendency or bias.

• It is possible — but harder — for a company (and its paycheck employees) to be game-rules oriented.

• It is possible — but harder — for an independent consultant to be mission-statement oriented.

Companies are naturally constructs designed to catalyze seriousness rather than play, which arguably is why the work-versus-play dichotomy emerged in the first place. I suspect it was much weaker in the pre-industrial world. In the pre-industrial agrarian world, work and play blended in interesting ways, through religion, country fairs, harvest festivals, and the like. Industrial work separated the two. The gig economy is trying to put the two back together in a more powerful way.

The Play Instinct

One of the things I try not to do in this newsletter is to reinforce the bad us-versus-them idea that the gig economy is somehow morally superior to the paycheck economy. It is not. Each side needs the other side to exist.

But there is an asymmetric belief I’ll cop to holding: the gig economy is a more evolved way of working. The gig economy is as far beyond the industrial paycheck economy as the paycheck economy is beyond the agrarian economy.

This has nothing to do with moral superiority. Gigworkers are no more superior to paycheck workers than paycheck workers are to farmers. The evolutionary leap has to do with technology. The gig economy uses technology to organize work in much more sophisticated and fluid ways. That’s why it is more evolved.

My buddy Seb Paquet came up with an eloquent snowclone of Clarke’s Law to capture this idea:

Sufficiently advanced work is indistinguishable from play.

This is why it is easier to be in infinite game mode in the gig economy than in the paycheck economy. This is why it is even easier in the above-the-API part of it. It’s about more advanced technological modes.

But enabling technologies are neither necessary, nor sufficient. The nearly necessary, and almost sufficient condition is that you possess what I call the play instinct — the ability to see and approach almost anything as a game, preferably an infinite one.

This is where Carse’s life play comes into the picture. It is a book that can help you develop the play instinct by helping you ask and answer an obvious question about games: why do we play?

That question is surprisingly rarely asked, and even more rarely answered. It is as fundamental as why do we work?

A very rich understanding of what games are, and how to play them well, can be found in many places:

• Mathematical game theory

• Practical views of games in gaming industries

• Sports subcultures

• Huizenga’s excellent sociological theory of societies as games in Homo Ludens

• Anthropological understandings as in Clifford Geertz’ famous article on “Deep Play” in Balinese cockfighting.

• Hermann Hesse’s thought-provoking satire of gamified understandings of the human condition in The Glass Bead Game.

I recommend exploring all of these if you’re serious about a long-term career in the gig economy. But direct treatments of the question of why we play games are vanishingly rare. Especially ones that point to such simple, but powerful answers as either to win, or to continue to play.

Besides Carse’s book, I can only think of one other work that directly addresses the question — David Graeber’s 2014 essay in The Baffler, What’s the Point if We Can’t Have Fun? (Graeber too passed away last month, on September 2 — and though I’m critical of his main body of work on debt and anarcho-socialist politics, there is no doubt that he too was a seminal thinker for our times).

Developing an infinite-player mindset is crucial to surviving and thriving long-term in the world of work. It is important in the paycheck economy, but doubly so in the gig economy, where it is almost a make/break condition of a worthwhile existence.

There’s many ways to do it. You can experiment with your own gig-rules-making. You can become a contracts nerd. You can master your medium. You can explore the literature on games. You can actually play formalized games. You can design your own games. You can write consulting fiction like I sometimes do here.

But do it you must. Because the only way you can make the gig economy work for you is to learn how to play in it.

And there’s no better place to start than with James Carse.

It is revealing that that the term freelancer pairs free with lance. As mercenaries, freelancers in the Middle Ages were free of the missionary justifications that bound feudal lords and commoners to their intertwined societal fates, but they were still bound to the nature of their medium: the lance.

The lance was the medium of work and creative expression for the knightly class. Its message was death. And unburdened by any other sort of mission, freelancers were its clearest messengers.

In the Middle Ages, feudal knights were the messengers of capital (land for the most part), peasants were the messengers of community, and freelancers were the messengers of the most important technology of the day: the lance. Together, they sustained a three-way conversation between capital, community, and technology.

I think of this as the original Business Discourse. It is the conversation that happens around and within every business, from feudal manor to modern internet platform. It is like the Public Discourse on social media (often represented by the classic meme image of a chef), except for businesses.

The Business Discourse revolves around official statements by executives and employee groups, corporate PR statements, and “whistleblower” accounts and opinions leaked into the public discourse. Often it sparks storms in the public discourse too, but it is fundamentally a separate conversational theater.

Unlike the public kind, the business edition exists in a much more fragmented form, as a set of islands and archipelagos around individual businesses and sectors. But it does have its own gestalt. At any given time, there is a definite tone to conversations around businesses. This tone evolves gradually over time.

A particular small storm in the Business Discourse has been on my mind for the last few days: the publication of a blog post titled Coinbase is a Mission-Focused Company by Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, and the broad response to it.

The Business Discourse

The three-way partition of the Business Discourse, which emerged in the Middle Ages, continues to this day within every business.

Today, executive management speaks for capital, paycheck employees speak for community, and gigworkers speak for the technological medium (more on that last one later, since it may not be as obvious as the other two).

Customers, non-employee shareholders, and the general public, though they have a stake in the actions of a business, are not directly involved in the conversation. Depending on the situation, they might end up siding with any of the three active parties.

The lines have gotten blurred somewhat since the early industrial age. With the rise of complex and broad forms of participation in equity, it is no longer very meaningful to talk of management and labor for example. But it is still meaningful to speak of the three core messages in the conversation, and their respective messengers.

Depending on whether your compensation is dominated by equity, paychecks, or gig income, you’ll typically (but not necessarily) tend to speak for capital, community, or medium.

Lately though, one of the three groups has begun to dominate the Business Discourse: employees. Employee activism around political issues has grown steadily over the last few years (I did a more general thread about it in June).

The results have been decidedly mixed. I actually suspect mixed feelings about employee activism is one of the more recent drivers of people opting into the gig-economy as a Third Way.

Employee Activism

Employee activism started out as a useful check and balance to executive power, which around 2014, in the wake of the recession, was increasingly growing beyond the ability of stock markets, customers, or politicians to regulate. Employee activism briefly played a useful role: helping focus a certain amount of useful attention on issues like climate change, and abuse of social media platforms.

But increasingly, employee activism is confused, economically illiterate, rife with grifts and political careerism, and often hurts the causes it pretends to be about.

The Coinbase kerfuffle apparently started (correct me if I’m wrong, I’m going by twitter gossip) with a group of employees wanting the company to make some sort of public statement in support of Black Lives Matter a few months ago. Armstrong apparently resisted the call, and the blog post lays out his the general principles behind his decision: the company has a clear but narrow mission, and he believes it should not get involved in political activism outside of issues with direct relevance to that narrow mission.

Faced with a backlash following his blog post, he has since doubled down firmly, offering employees who want a more expansive political agenda (and a bigger voice in shaping it) a generous severance package to leave. It is unclear how this will unfold.

While I’m user of the company’s services, I don’t know any of the principals here, and have no idea what sort of person Armstrong is, or whether I’d like him personally. As a user, I think the company does a good job with its product.

But I happen to believe he was right on this issue, and did a few short Twitter threads in the last couple of days about it.

In general, I believe well-run companies, unlike well-run nations, benefit from an element of authoritarianism in their leadership. It’s good to have leadership that listens sincerely to all stakeholders, and aspires to service in a broad sense, but ultimately owns the decisions, along with all attendant risks and consequences. That’s what executive means.

A business is not a democracy or a political party. A business leader who aspires to lead by the logic of some sort of democratic employee mandate, rather than by the logic of the offering and its market, will soon have no business left to run.

To the extent the nature and conduct of a business is an expression of politics, it is naturally and necessarily an expression of the politics of its key executives. Otherwise it will typically struggle. Rank and file employees have limited say, and this is as it should be.

For employees, the primary means of political expression lies in their choice of employment, not in what they get to do within it. If you are a militarist hawk, maybe work for Lockheed Martin. If you’re a pacifist, maybe work for a vegan foods company. If you’re a climate activist, maybe work for a renewables company. If you are a climate skeptic, go work for a coal-mining company. If you believe you can meaningfully alter the natural politics of a business from the inside, by all means climb the career ladder within to positions where your voice can matter.

If you’re unhappy with the choices available to you, go free agent or become an entrepreneur to claim your own business-political voice in the Business Discourse.

Somewhere between 2015 and 2019, a lot of people became unhappy with the choices available to them, but were apparently unwilling to pay any sort of significant personal cost, such as would be involved changing jobs, earning political capital within the company, starting your own business, or going free agent.

As a result, employee activism went from being part of the solution to the problem of executive excesses, to being a problem in its own right.

The general public now has two problems.

Starting around 2016, employee activism began taking over the Business Discourse entirely. It began drowning out all conversation around the actual role of businesses in societies: providing products and services, building wealth, and turning technological advances into prosperity.

Unlike traditional labor, which restricted itself to issues of pay and working conditions at the particular business, this new breed of activism is often driven by white-collar workers, and has a very broad range of political issues it is interested in. Also unlike traditional labor, it bizarrely acts as though the actual business mission of a business is irrelevant, and can be safely made subservient to a broad political mission without any significant loss of economic viability.

This will of course play out as it will play out. You may or may not agree with my views above, but the point is, the Business Discourse is a thing, and interesting shifts are happening within it.

Depending on your politics, executives might count as good, and activist employees as bad, or vice versa. But either way, if you’ll pardon the bad pun, free agents are the medium element.

The question for us here on this newsletter is: what role should the gig economy play here? What position should free agents attempt to occupy in the shifting Business Discourse?

Good, Bad, and Medium

I have already argued, in previous posts, that in the politics of the workplace, free agents are essentially scabs (see The Clutch Class from Aug 29, 2019, and Return of the Clutch Class, September 23, 2020).

Not surprisingly, they tend to be caught in the middle in the Business Discourse as well. What role do they play in shaping it?

In my June 11 issue earlier this year, The Way of the Mercenary, I wrote:

And while history is often written by both winners and losers, it is rarely written by the mercenaries who shepherd its less glorious chapters towards resolution. 

This is of course a point directly relevant to us. The history of late industrial modernity may be written by/for/about the “kings and popes” of our time — CEOs and Presidents/Prime Ministers — or by/for/about the “commoners” (in the form of say the history of the labor or social justice movements), but it will not be written by/for/about consultants or freelancers. But as in the 1350s-90s, a post-pandemic period that very much resembles today, ours may in fact be the most significant role for a while, even if not recognized as such by the history writers.

Because freelancers today, as in the 14th century, are necessarily, definitionally, mercenaries. In the stories of history as written by winners or losers, it is the fate of mercenaries to be cast in a role that is worse than the good or bad guys in any account: shadowy figures who refuse to pick permanent sides, and subvert, through their very presence in the story, any claims to absolute rightness made by missionaries on all sides.

Then as now, mercenaries were simply outside of the false consciousnesses of the many mutually inconsistent missions they participated in.

How does this cash out in relation to the Business Discourse? It is clear what happens to executives and employees:

1. Executives like Brian Armstrong make politically loaded decisions and take on the attendant risks. Maybe key employees will leave. Maybe the product will suffer. Maybe enough customers will boycott the product to make a difference.

2. Employees might leave for other jobs, or to start their own businesses or gig economy careers. Or they might stay in good faith (accepting limits on their political voices at work) or bad faith (staying with the intent of somehow sabotaging the company).

Gig workers tend not to express their politics in either of these ways. By working for many clients, and shaping the scopes of specific gigs, they are able to hedge their political portfolios.

At the level of rideshare drivers, a driver who has two phones with Lyft and Uber apps open on them can make a choice at the level of a single ride which company to support. At higher levels, you can choose how much attention you give different clients, and what parts of gigs to say yes or no to.

One way to think of this is that that political allegiances of gigworkers are not monolithic. Through diversification, we can craft a better political voice for ourselves, at lower cost, than either employees or executives.

But the cost of this power is that we are more bound to the message of the medium.

Rideshare drivers must become both good drivers earning high ratings, and good at coming out on top in the arms race with the dispatching algorithm (for example, by choosing when to work based on peak and surge pricing times, and the types of routes available in different areas).

Web designers must keep up with evolution in standards. Programmers must keep up with trends in programming languages. Strategy consultants like me must keep up with broader technological trends.

They must, in other words, become messengers of their mediums. By voting with their tools, they contribute to the success or failure of different companies that share a technological base.

I for instance, have primarily been a messenger of the internet as a medium. A lot of my gigs over the last decade have basically revolved around the question of how to transform businesses in response to digital technology trends. More recently, I’ve become a messenger of sustainability technologies as a medium.

Being the messenger of the medium is not a trivial role. Often, it is the invisible but decisive role, over the roles of speaking for capital or community. Because individual businesses riding a technological wave might succeed or fail, but there is also an overall trajectory to the evolution of every medium, with a clear beginning, middle, and end.

To be the messenger of the medium is to be dominant in the endgame, when the nature of the underlying medium finally expresses itself with full clarity.

Media and Endgames

It is a commonplace observation that business sectors tend to be driven as a whole by the nature of the technological medium. In the opening, visionary companies tend to dominate. Medium effects are swamped by early path-dependence effects.

In the mid-game, fast-follower companies tend to grow and dominate the market overall (though the visionary pioneers may continue to dominate the narrative and enjoy a brand premium). Medium effects are swamped by mid-game capital effects.

In the end-game, as the technology fully diffuses and matures, low-cost leaders dominate the commodity phase, and medium effects finally rule.

Not surprisingly, the gig economy plays a progressively larger role as a sector matures, and more and more of the “medium intelligence” so to speak diffuses into the general economy. Startups typically hire few contractors and consultants. Late-stage companies typically have entire gig-worker ecosystems around them, shared with their industry peers.

Elsewhere in The Way of the Mercenary, I wrote:

Missionary beginnings showcase the aspirational best side of humans, but missionary endgames usually reveal the worst they are capable of. When missionaries grapple with each other in an existential struggle for dominance, they can lay waste to everything else.

Mercenaries are not heroes. But they don’t claim to be either. 

Mercenaries are not virtuous, noble people. But they don’t claim any particular virtue or nobility either. 

But often in history, they end up acting more heroically than people claiming to be heroes, and exhibiting more virtue and nobility in practice than missionaries. 

And not because they are better people, but because they have no choice but to do what they must to continue the game to natural and logical conclusions, long after the missionaries have smugly declared victory, or admitted defeat, and gone home. Because unlike the missionaries, mercenaries typically have to live with the consequences of their actions. They have no safe havens to retreat to once missions unravel, but the fighting continues.

Today, we are in the long endgame of one of the longest technological eras in history, driven by perhaps the biggest business technology after the steam engine: the internet.

As messengers of the medium, free agents are often heard the least, but their actions often matter the most. In the Coinbase case, it is noteworthy that the cryptoeconomy — a late-stage internet sector — is strongly shaped by a large number of open-source projects and legions of freelance programmers.

It is unclear how the story of employee activism will unfold in the next few years. We are living through some of the most uncertain economic times in living memory.

But one thing is clear: there is a hugely powerful medium approaching maturity, and we are its messengers. To play our parts in the larger drama, we must understand the message of the medium better than anyone else. Others might start various games, but it is up to finish them well.

Just over a year ago, in The Clutch Class (Aug 29, 2019), I argued that within the historical relationship between capital and labor, gigworkers would be considered scabs, and that this is a position we should unapologetically own:

The defining characteristic of a scab is striking a self-interested independent bargain with the capital-owning/managing/leading class that breaks from any larger collectively bargained deal…

So yes, to a 1910s union firebrand, we are no better than traitorous scabs.

This defining characteristic of scabs is also the defining feature of the gig-worker class. We defect from collective actions and trade off higher security, better benefits, and lower personal overheads, for two things…

1. More personalized working conditions built around desiderata that may not be shared by any larger group

2. Continuous, independent maneuvering capability where aligning interests with a group might require too much lock-step marching, or worse, voluntary social immobility

In that post, I proposed that we should consider ourselves a clutch class, as in both the mechanism and in the sports jargon sense.

In that post, I also took note of a piece of legislation that was at the time making its way through the California legislative process: AB 5, which sought to reclassify vast swathes of the gig economy as part of the paycheck economy, subject to minimum wage laws, benefits expectations, and crucially scheduled hours.

The bill, as you probably know if you follow these things, passed. But the battle did not end there. We’re now heading into another crucial battle: over Prop 22, which seeks to exempt rideshare companies from AB 5.

From AB 5 to Prop 22

AB 5 passed in 2019. I don’t have mixed feelings about this. It was a decisive step backwards from the brave new future of the gig economy. It was an utterly cynical and regressive piece of legislation that sought to manipulate sentiment against large corporations to deny access to flexwork to a large class of people, in order to secure traditional paycheck employment for a much smaller class.

Instead of solving the genuine new problems created by the new economic sector, it sought to transform the new problems into old ones that the political class knows how to profitably keep alive.

There is no great mystery as to why traditional labor politicians would push this kind of legislation: it is better to have 10 people beholden to you for a paycheck job than for 100 people to have the option to work in a flexible way without being politically beholden to any source of political patronage. This kind of calculus is the foundation of what is known as clientelism. It is a kind of politics that is nearly 200 years old. It is the kind of politics practiced by Donald Trump, except in the case of AB 5, it comes from the old-school Left.

Around this time last year, I recall watching a television interview with one of the politicians supporting the bill. She was saying something like “you shouldn’t have to work more than one full-time job to make a living.”

The statement was revealing. Those who support legislation like AB 5 believe in a one-person-one-job world. Because it is a world they know how to control politically.

This is not necessarily a bad-faith agenda. There are laudable political efforts that are primarily focused on workers making so little at a full-time job they have to either take a second job, or access safety net benefits, just to make ends meet. The best-faith reading of AB 5 is that it is in the spirit of other regulations designed to prevent exploitative employers from essentially externalizing part of their labor costs to the state, effectively turning the existence of a safety net into a business subsidy for themselves.

This problem is one that should be solved.

Minimum-wage laws, which work as temporary palliatives while automation drives matters towards a more permanent resolution, are a painful but acceptable distortion to the labor market that do exactly that (I’m in favor of minimum wage laws, but not for the usual humanitarian reasons).

AB 5 was not about solving that class of hidden-business-subsidy problems. It was about trying to grow the set of people who are vulnerable to that problem. It was about creating and capturing a new class of worker within traditional clientelistic labor power models. It was about preserving a world where “worker” is a legible category, and every individual has a single worker identity that can fit neatly into a single political representation, as a client beholden to a particular political patron.

Politics is like business that way: like Drucker said, it’s about creating a customer.

The idea of someone who works more than one job out of choice. Who is a small-scale, capitalist who owns at least a small piece of the means of production (a laptop, a car, a guitar), who wants to play with risk-and-return decisions, whether they involve record deals, viral blog posts, or pricing surges on rideshare, is deeply threatening to how traditional labor politicians build and exploit a base of political power.

After AB 5 passed, there was widespread general criticism from many corners of the gig economy. Gig musicians suddenly had to worry about being able to work at all. Many publishing outlets stopped accepting freelance writing from California-based writers.

But the response from one group in particular set the agenda for the larger fight: rideshare and delivery companies.

Rideshare companies won a temporary reprieve from the courts to avoid complying with AB 5, and sponsored a new ballot initiative, Prop 22, that will be voted on in November. Prop 22 basically seeks to exempt rideshare and delivery companies from AB 5. The rideshare and delivery companies (Lyft, Uber, Doordash, Instacart, Postmates) have poured over $180 million into the initiative, which is a record.

Here’s the thing. However distasteful it might feel to support big platform companies pouring this much money into a political process, in this case, they’re on the right side of history. (So if you’re a California voter and inclined to take cues from a scabby neoliberal shill like me: Yes on 22).

Not because they’re the good guys, but because the politics behind AB 5 is even worse.

California vs. Rideshare

It was never a secret that AB 5 was aimed directly at the rideshare companies, and if Prop 22 passes, AB 5 will basically be hollowed out into uselessness.

For Lyft, Uber, Instacart, and others in the business of turning people with cars into micro-capitalist free-agent franchisees, AB 5 was obviously an existential threat, and equally obviously, they could not possibly comply with the law and continue operating.

How much of an existential threat?

In a previous, lower-stakes version of the battle, in Austin, TX, the rideshare companies left the city rather than operate under a much less severe regulatory threat (fingerprinting regulations motivated by a rider safety case). In that case, I could see the logic of the regulatory attempt, and was sympathetic to it. In the year or so that it took for Lyft and Uber to return to the city under conditions they could live with, several small local startups emerged as alternatives (I’m not sure how many of them are still around).

As these things go, reclassifying contractors as employees is about a million times more threatening than being required to fingerprint drivers. It is a big enough threat that it is likely worth giving up even a huge and attractive market like California.

It is, of course, really hard to root for the rideshare and delivery companies. They are the face of Big, Evil, Platform Capitalism right now. But for years, it’s been equally obvious what’s actually a good way to rein in their excesses. Let’s call it the Actual Plan™ to clean up the dirty business of rideshare and delivery:

Actual Plan™

1. Clean up the shady capitalization that is distorting the prices of rides/deliveries

2. Compensate drivers for the value of the data they generate

3. Make the dispatching algorithms auditable and/or open source

4. Create room for drivers to differentiate and earn a premium

5. Give drivers a piece of the equity upside of the trend towards driverlessness

If we could do this, the price of rides/deliveries would likely go up, demand would go down somewhat, and the market will find its natural equilibrium. There would be fewer drivers, but they’d probably make more. But it wouldn’t be the sort of artificial restriction of supply that would be achieved by artificially forcing paycheck employment on a natural flexwork sector, or worse, something like the old taxicab medallion scheme.

There are of course, many problems faced by rideshare drivers as a consequence of being in the gig economy that are not the fault or problem of the platform corporations. The big one in the US of course, is of course health insurance, which (no brainer) should continue to be available through means that are not linked to employment, let alone traditional paycheck employment.

Obviously, the rideshare companies would fight the Actual Plan™ too, and if that battle took shape, I’d definitely be on the other side from them. Right now, there are no serious groups fighting for anything resembling the Actual Plan,™ but that doesn’t mean we should back the wrong plan because the right one isn’t being backed.

The Actual Plan™ aligns with the natural structure of the gig economy, represents the interests of all current drivers (not just the ones who want to level up to a paycheck job), and crucially, all potential drivers, for whom possibly driving rideshare is an option in reserve for when they need to patch over a rough time. It also turns the rideshare sector into a positive example of expanding the power and quality of the gig economy, rather than giving it a bad name and hanging it like a dog.

And this isn’t just a matter for people working in the rideshare or delivery businesses. Versions of these problems exist in all parts of the gig economy, and versions of the Actual Plan™ are already really in some parts. For example, on the high-end consulting front, where things are much better, we already “own the data” from our work to the extent that it’s intellectual property we generate (such as workshop materials or general business ideas) that does not rely on proprietary data client data.

There’s no reason that kind of power should not be enjoyed by drivers in the rideshare sector.

The Outlook

Patching over a rough time with gig economy income, incidentally, is what a lot of people are doing right now thanks to Covid19 (though more on the delivery end than the rideshare end). So this is a particularly fraught time for this issue to be coming to a head.

So what’s the outlook here?

I have no idea whether Prop 22 will pass or not, but the two futures that loom are clear: either it passes and rideshare/delivery companies stay in California, or it fails, and they leave rather than subject themselves to AB 5, throwing thousands of people out of work in the middle of a pandemic. The latter outcome is drastic enough that as in the case of the Austin exit, I imagine a return would be brokered around some sort of compromise.

Whatever the current structural problems of the sector, the basic idea of the sector itself is here to stay. We will not be giving up the convenience of ordering rides or food/grocery deliveries through apps. It is a genuinely technological advance over people using phones to call inefficient human-powered dispatching layers that are obviously better handled by algorithms.

The way the service is provisioned though, is much more fragile.

Regressive legislation like AB 5 could easily spread around the world, making the app-based service sector something like the regulatory-captured medallion-based cab sector it replaced.

Or, the current structure could continue, creating a large flexwork economy.

This doesn’t mean things will be perfect. These services are natural oligopolies for now. Until we invent a truly decentralized (eg. blockchain-based) way to provision them, and/or full autonomy arrives, there’s always going to be 2-3 branded service platforms offering rides and deliveries in every local market.

And of course, the serious capital-structure and price distortion problems of the industry will remain, and need to be gradually sorted out. Some now-familiar big names might go bankrupt, while this sorting out happens. But whatever the ultimate set of winners, it will likely still be oligopolist. Drivers will still be the relatively weaker party, even if they are not so weak that clientelistic political patronage is the right solution.

This means all the cronyist problems that come with oligopolies, the asymmetry in relations between the platforms and drivers, and the continuing struggle around the Actual Plan™ will continue for the forseeable future.

But like I said, that’s the worthwhile fight. The one worth fighting.

Unevenly Distributed Freedom

Though I think AB 5 is cynical political opportunism, there is a very real problem here. One traditional labor politicians are exploiting rather than actually solving.

The gig economy is creating a genuinely new class of worker-consumer-citizen with genuinely new kinds of representational needs, calling for a genuinely new kind of politician. Unfortunately, though it is big and growing, it is still too small to be worth cultivating. If you have political ambitions, trying to genuinely represent gig workers who want to be gig workers is not a smart career move.

Unlike most valuable political constituencies, we are not legible, concentrated, and easy to target and activate for political purposes. We also do not have a sufficiently cohesive and predictable set of political attitudes or interests. Our interests cannot be summarized in a single, simple political message that a politician could ride to power.

But this will not always be the case, and I hope savvy young political aspirants see that.

We free agents are not labor, but we’re not full-blown capitalists either. Owning a car (even debt-free) or laptop is nothing like owning a big share of a platform company. But the balance is swinging in our favor with every passing year.

We free agents are not pure producers, nor are we pure consumers. We are prosumers who “consume” work at our discretion, in a way that combines variety, risk-taking, and opportunism. An environment full of flexwork potential is critical for us. But at the same time, we do require some of the protections and safety nets that traditionally, labor movements have sought to win for their constituencies.

There are political representation needs here that are just close enough to old labor that we are vulnerable to capture by them if we don’t find our own political representatives.

One way to understand our economic and political condition, and why our interests keep running up against those of traditionally organized labor, is to consider the classic leftist slogan, “None of us is free until all of us are free.”

The slogan comes from Marxist theory, and can be roughly understood as the philosophical point (entirely valid) that patterns of structural oppression trap the oppressors as much as they to do the oppressed. That the freedom apparently enjoyed by the oppressor or capital-owning class is illusory, and that true freedom won’t exist until it exists for everybody, in the worker’s paradise to come. In practice, of course, the slogan serves to consolidate class solidarity within the traditional labor class, rather than underwrite any sort of universal philosophical debate about the psychology of oppression and the futures of all classes.

The pragmatic alternative to that slogan is the much less catchy, “Some of us are somewhat free, somewhat sooner than everybody else, and that’s probably a good thing up to a point for the universal cause of freedom.”

The future of freedom, with apologies to William Gibson, is unevenly distributed, and the scabby clutch class is creating it.

I am in the gig economy, I enjoy no employment based benefits like a minimum wage, paid sick leave, or unemployment/disability insurance. Yet I don’t feel oppressed. The freedom I enjoy feels very real, even if it is not perfect or complete or universally entangled with freedom for everybody.

Of course, as a well-paid management consultant, my situation is vastly different from those who rely on lower-valued work like driving or deliveries, but I’ve spent enough panicked months wondering how to get through lean patches, and deal with delayed invoices, with rent coming due, that I do in fact know what that’s like.

And cliched and Tom-Friedmanesque though the move may be, I’ve talked to enough rideshare drivers who clearly actually enjoyed their flexibility to know that this class is not a figment of my imagination.

The attempt, by traditional labor ideologues, to pretend that the freedom of the gig economy is some sort of false consciousness, or that everybody in it is really actually yearning for the security of a paycheck job and is being coerced by Evil Corporations to pretend otherwise, is gaslighting pure and simple.

So it is probably time for the gig economy to get real political representation, rather than expecting old labor to speak for us honestly. And I for one am happy to get behind any visionary young politicians with both the imagination and boldness to fight for the future rather than for the past.

<< Staying With the Questions | Yakverse Index | Yakverse: Endgame

This is the first of the two-part finale of the Yakverse Chronicles.

The call from Agent Guy Lestrode of the FBI G-Crimes division came at 3 in the morning, waking me from a particularly vivid apocalyptic corona dream.

“This is Lestrode. Agent Jopp needs you at a crime scene right away. Get dressed. I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes. Wear a mask.”

“Wait, what…where? What time is it…it’s three in the morning!”

“I don’t know anything either. I’m bringing coffee. I guess we’ll both find out together.”

Fifteen minutes later, I was climbing into Lestrode’s car. He grinned at me through a KN-95 mask, and offered me a cup of gas-station coffee and an alcohol wipe.

“I already finished mine. Feel free to take off your mask and drink yours while we drive. We can drive with the windows down. ”

“Where are we going?”

“It’s about twenty minutes away, up in the hills somewhere.”

We drove in silence. I drained the tepid coffee in a few large gulps, and put my mask back on. Lestrode rolled the windows back up.

The route seemed oddly familiar.

“I feel like I’ve driven this way recently.”

“Yeah? Well, we’re almost there. Just one more right up there.”

I figured out why the route looked familiar just as Lestrode made the last turn. It was the street with the mansion where Gao, Anscombe, and I had met up with Khan back in early March, just as the pandemic was starting.

It couldn’t be a coincidence. Could it?

***

I had my answer a couple of minutes later. Lestrode turned into the driveway of the exact same mansion where we’d had our meeting. A police cruiser and two unmarked vehicles were parked along the semicircular driveway.

“Shit, I’ve been here before. Back in March.”

It wasn’t a coincidence. What was going on? I hadn’t heard from Khan in months.

Agent Jane Jopp, the senior partner of the Jopp-Lestrode G-Crimes duo, met us at the front door.

“Rao says he’s been here before,” Lestrode volunteered.

Jopp didn’t seem surprised. “He does, does he? This way, both of you. I have to warn you, it’s not pretty.”

The cop at the front door held it open for us and nodded at Lestrode. We walked through the anteroom, past the dining room, past the skullduggery room where we’d had our meeting in March, down a long hallway, and into a large conference room.

Six bodies lay slumped in their chairs around one end of the long, rectangular conference table. Phones, tablets, papers, and half-empty wine glasses were on the table in front of each of them. Some had been knocked over. There were two wine bottles on the sideboard, one empty, one half full.

There was no mistaking the tall, powerfully built body slumped back in the chair at the head of the table, the head thrown back at an awkward angle.

It was Khan.

Ulysses Alexander Khan. Legendary former McKinsey engagement manager. Scholar, but no gentleman, of consulting.

“CSI is on its way, but looks like a mass poisoning. Probably the wine. We haven’t yet id’ed any of them. You recognize any of them?”

I nodded, and said carefully, “That’s Khan, the tall guy… Ulysses Alexander Khan… we’ve worked together a bit. I was here in March. How did you make the connection to me?”

“We found three packages in the anteroom addressed to you, your friend Gao, and somebody named Arnold…”

“…Arnie Anscombe?”

“Correct. So you know him?”

“The three of us were… exploring a new gig with Khan. Nothing’s panned out yet. Pandemic and all. But why is G-Crimes here in the first place?”

A new voice spoke from behind us, “That would be my doing. Hello again Mr. Rao.”

I turned around. It was Agent Q. I still didn’t know his name, or which three-letter agency he worked for.

“Agent Q! Somehow I’m not surprised to see you here. Does this have something to do with the counterfeit yak coins thing you’ve been investigating?”

“Got it in one. Yes. We got wind of Khan in connection to some Covid-vaccine deals in Russia where a bunch of the fake coins turned up, and we’ve been watching him for the last month. We had this place flagged, so we got the alert when the butler called 911.”

Jopp said, “There was no other staff around last night besides the butler. He served the wine and left them to their meeting around midnight. When he came back to check half an hour later, they were all dead. Says he heard nothing.”

Agent Q said, “This mansion belongs to a Russian oligarch friend of Mr. Khan here. He was part of an organization we’re watching, it’s called The Club… heard of it?”

I opened my mouth to answer, then shut it again. This was starting to look dicey for me. Fortunately, I was saved by the bell. The cop from the front door popped his head into the conference room.

“The G-Crimes search team is here. CSI’s five minutes away.”

Jopp said, “I’ll get them started searching the grounds. Lestrode, you’re with me. Rao, look around, see if you can spot anything else or if you recognize any of the others. Don’t touch anything.”

Agent Q’s phone rang.

“I need to take this, excuse me.”

He stepped out into the hallway, leaving me alone in the conference room with the bodies.

I looked at the others. Four of them I didn’t recognize: all middle-aged men. Two white, one black, one Asian, probably Chinese. All four had a certain air about them that seemed familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

The fifth was a woman. An older woman, in a long, flowing dress, slumped face down on the table. I went around the table to try and get a better look at her face.

It was then that I recognized her. It was my long-time mentor, The Ancient One. Veteran indie. Trickster. Rider of helicopters. Owner of one of the last known strategometers.

Her long sleeve was obscuring her wrist. Did I dare…?

I peeked quickly out into the hallway, it was empty. I scanned the ceiling. No obvious cameras.

I took out my pen, and carefully moved her left sleeve back. The strategometer was on her wrist.

I hesitated for a second, then made up my mind. Carefully, but quickly, I took it off her wrist and pocketed it.

In my defense, there are only about a dozen strategometers left in the world, and if it vanished into the evidence lockers of the G-Crimes division, it would be lost to the indie world forever. Besides, tradition has it that strategometers aren’t exactly passed down from indie to indie, but sort of…. ritually stolen, shall we say? By tradition, you’re supposed to tell the person you’re stealing it from the time.

“I guess it was your time, Ancient One,” I whispered into her lifeless ear, and stepped back around the table, just as Agent Jopp returned.

***

“Well, we are searching the area, and Lestrode is questioning the butler and looking at the security footage. You got anything else for me, Rao?”

“I’ve met the woman a few times over the last decade…I don’t know her name, but everybody called her The Ancient One.”

“The Ancient One? What is this, some sort of LARP?”

I shrugged. “You meet some odd people in this line of work. She was well-connected. Top-tier indie. Involved in lot of deals in Asia and Europe. Secretive. Flew around in helicopters. Expect-me-when-you-see-me sort of person.”

“What about the other four men?”

I frowned, “I don’t recognize them, but there’s something familiar…”

Then it hit me.

“Bainies! They’re Bainies. I didn’t recognize them without their hoods and cloaks, but that haircut is unmistakeable. Plus the fact that they’re getting haircuts during Covid. But they’re not wearing their shareholder-value-maximizer bracelets, so I’m guessing they’re ex-Bainies.”

“We’ll follow up on that. So we’ve got an ex-McKinsey guy, a bunch of ex-Bainies, and a mystery indie consultant who called herself The Ancient One? Great.”

Footsteps sounded in the hallway.

“That must be CSI. Let’s head over to the library. Q said he’d meet us there.”

***

Lestrode was just wrapping up with the butler when we entered the library. I recognized him. It was the same butler who had let us in back in March. He didn’t seem to recognize me.

“Hang around for a bit, I may want to talk to you some more,” Lestrode told him, as he left the library.

Jopp and I settled into armchairs.

“Get anything from the butler?”

“He swears he personally cut the foil and uncorked the bottles and cleaned the glasses before the meeting. Says he didn’t see anyone else besides the people at the meeting.”

“Can he identify the others?”

“No, but he says the group has met here a few times since June. And that Khan once referred the group as the Potsdam group.”

Jopp frowned. “Potsdam? As in the failed post World War 2 conference that started the Cold War?”

Lestrode said, “I did get something off the security cameras though. Took a picture of the screen with my phone, we’ll get the files later. But it’s pretty clear. This was a few minutes after midnight.”

He handed Jopp his phone. Jopp frowned, then looked at me, hesitated, then handed me the phone.

“Anyone you know?”

It was a picture of a picture, but perfectly clear. My hands went slightly clammy.

It was a face I had only seen once a decade ago. A face I wasn’t sure was real. The face of the Bhutanese monk who had given me my first two yak coins a decade ago, when I was first getting started as an indie consultant. He was looking straight up at what must have been the front-door camera, with a serene expression. He was dressed in a western-style suit, but it was him alright. You don’t forget people who do magic disappearing acts in front of your eyes.

I frowned and squinted, thinking furiously. How much should I share? Just how entangled was I already, in every aspect of this mess?

“Not sure. I don’t think so. Didn’t the butler say nobody else came in or out?”

Lestrode said, “Maybe one of the meeting attendees let him in.”

Jopp said, “Looks Thai. Or Burmese maybe.”

“Bhutanese,” said a voice. Agent Q had joined the conversation unnoticed. He had an unsettling way of doing.

He was carrying a small plastic crate, with a bunch of packages and boxes inside it. He put it down on the floor and stretched a hand out towards me. I handed him Lestrode’s phone.

“Is that the package addressed to me on the top of the crate there?” I asked.

“Yes, and several other very interesting things I found in the skullduggery room. Sorry, but you’re going to have to wait a while for your package Mr. Rao.”

Jopp interrupted, “Bhutanese? You don’t seem to be guessing.”

Agent Q was looking at the phone and nodding knowingly.

“I’m not. Our friend here has been seen all over the world in the last decade, but especially in the last few years. Comes and goes. Has an uncanny way of being somehow around when the murkiest deals are going down. We call him the monk. The only thing we’ve been able to figure out about him is that he’s Bhutanese.”

“What is he, some sort of deal-maker? PLA agent?”

“We thought he was a PLA agent too initially, but it doesn’t seem likely. He never seems to be actually involved in any deals. And he’s definitely not one of my… ahh… Chinese peers, look at how he’s staring at the camera. But if anything big is going down in the global gig economy, I’ve come to expect him at the scene. Doesn’t bother to hide his presence, and there’s always a few people who recall seeing him or even speaking with him. But we can never find him afterwards either. We think he’s from the Order.”

Lestrode said, “You mean the Order of the Yak? I thought that didn’t exist anymore?”

Agent Q shrugged. “Well, let’s just say the yak… motif… seems to show up wherever the monk shows up.”

He turned towards me. “Maybe Mr. Rao can help us out here. Weren’t you in Bhutan a few years ago Mr. Rao? I seem to recall you writing about that in your newsletter? And I hear you’re involved with a new yak organization….”

“That’s the Yak Collective! Nothing to do with any of this! We just took some naming inspiration from the Order, which of course is just ancient history. And you all know my newsletter is half fiction! Surely you don’t believe all that crap about actual yaks and vanishing monks!”

“But you really were in Bhutan in 2011 weren’t you? Are you sure you haven’t seen this man before?”

He thrust the phone towards me again. A subtle change had come over his face. Jopp and Lestrode were looking at me strangely as well.

Suddenly, I realized I was being interrogated. And not too subtly either.

“I swear I haven’t seen him. Why would I hide it if I had?”

“I don’t know. But on a different topic, we were talking about The Club earlier when we were interrupted. What about that? Khan ever talk to you about that?”

I decided it was time to show more of my cards. A record of cooperation would be good if this thing went sideways.

“Yes,” I replied. “In fact that’s what Khan was trying to get us hooked up with. He said the Club was a group of high-net worth individuals who wanted to revive the Order of the Yak, and would support us doing so. That they’d send gigs our way.”

“Hmm, did he say why? Or what they wanted?”

“No. Everything fell apart with Covid. We haven’t heard much from him since the initial meeting in March.”

“Have you done any work for the Club? Any paid gigs?”

“Not that I know of,” I said truthfully. “Of course I can’t tell if they had a hand in lining up any of my recent gigs, but I don’t think so.”

“What about your friends, Gao and Anscombe?”

“You’d have to ask them, but I don’t think so.”

“We will. What do you think might be in these packages Khan was going to mail you?”

“I honestly don’t have the faintest idea. You’ll have to open them and look.”

Agent Q paused and looked at me appraisingly, then seemed to come to a decision. He sat down in an armchair and pulled the crate towards him.

“Quite a few things here of interest. Besides the unmailed packages we have here a large box of fake yak coins,” he pulled it out, set it on the coffee table, and threw the lid back. It was, as he said, a pile of yak coins. I picked one up and examined it.

“Yeah, these are fake,” I said, and put it back.

Agent Q looked at me but said nothing, then reached back into the crate and pulled out a smaller box.

“…and more interestingly, this smaller case of what appear to be real ones.”

I was eager to continue cooperating where it couldn’t hurt.

“Yeah, I recognize that second box. He gave the three of us coins from it back in March. They were genuine.”

He looked at me, and again said nothing.

“Finally,” he said, pulling out a thin folder, “We have here, a folder labeled Potsdam.”

Lestrode spoke up, “The butler said this group was called the Potsdam group. What’s in the folder? Is the Potsdam group the Club?”

“Perhaps. There is just a single sheet of paper with a list of names and 32-digit hexadecimal numbers in this folder. Encrypted identifiers I’m guessing. We can have the cryptanalysis team take a crack at it.”

I decided to brazen it out. I was either a suspect, or part of the team. There was only one way to find out.

“Is my name on it? Khan never mentioned this Potsdam thing to me.”

Agent Q looked up at me, “These look like code names. Greek gods. Prometheus, Zeus… mean anything to you?”

I shook my head.

Lestrode looked at me and smiled cheerfully. Maybe I wasn’t a suspect after all.

Jopp looked at me and nodded, in a not-unfriendly way, and nutshelled the situation.

“Well, it looks like we have a lot to go on. Six bodies, a clear photo of this monk character. This Potsdam list, fake and real yak coins… and I am guessing CSI will be able to get us something once they run a tox screen on the wine and look at all the papers and phones in the room.”

Agent Q looked at her with an undecipherable look. “I wonder…” he said.

Before Jopp could continue with her overview of the mise en scene, there was an interruption. One of the CSI techs walked in.

“We’re still photographing everything, and we’ll get the stuff to the lab as soon as we can, but we thought you’d want to see this now. We found these coins, one clenched in each of the victims’ right fists.”

He placed a small evidence bag containing 6 antique looking coins on the coffee table, and stepped back. We all looked at each other, then leaned in to peer at the bag.

They were yak coins, but unlike any I’d seen before, real or fake, and quite a bit larger. Each was a bimetallic disc in the form of a yin-yang. Except, instead of a circle, each of the fish-like halves had the head of a yak for an eye.

I looked up to find Agent Q staring at me.

“Looks like these are new to you as well, Mr. Rao,” he said.

He picked up the bag and handed it back to the CSI tech. “Put a rush on these, would you?”

The tech nodded and headed out of the room. Agent Q stood up, but the boxes back into the crate, and picked it up.

“Well, I’d better get to work on these. You’ll let me know if you find anything else Jane?”

Jopp nodded, “I guess we’ll be done here pretty soon as well.”

Agent Q walked to the door, then paused, and turned around to look at me.

“And Mr. Rao….”

“Yes?”

“Don’t leave town for the next few weeks.”

To be continued

The great irony of the gig economy is that free agents have some of the most rigidly prescribed roles imaginable in industrial-style corporate machines. Late-capitalist corporations are some of the most machine-like organizations ever seen in history.

The classic image of Charlie Chaplin caught in a gear train (from Modern Times) is perhaps a better visual metaphor for under-the-API jobs like driving for Uber or delivering for Instacart than it is for actual factory jobs. The addition of software makes the underlying industrial machines more machine-like, not less.

But even when you don’t have an app as your boss, providing you with precise micromanagement cues and feedback to drive your work, it is surprisingly hard to get your mind free of the industrial cog-in-the-machine mindset.

You can take the cog out of the machine, but not the machine out of the cog.

And believe it or not, this is a good thing. There are aspects of coghood you want to preserve when you go free-agent, whether it is above or below the API.

If you’re smart, you want to be a free cog. You don’t want to fetishize complete freedom from structure.

The Upside of Coghood

The thing is, despite the pejorative and dehumanizing connotations, there are many excellent aspects to being a cog in a machine — and excellent for you, the worker, not just your boss, or evil capitalist owners.

To understand why, it is worth taking a moment to understand how gears actually work (cog is an alternative term for both a gear and a tooth on a gear).

Gears transmit torque from one shaft to another, via forces transmitted between the faces of interlocking teeth. Modern gears have what is known as an involute profile — the path traced out by the end of a taut string being unwound from a cylinder. Involute gears have the special property that a steady force is transmitted smoothly at the contact surface (gif from Wikimedia Commons):

Involute gears are the result of centuries of refinement and evolution in gear design. They are the reason why modern machines are efficient, low-noise, and low-vibration. Helical gears (which add an angle to the gear tooth edge), improve things even further.

With the right lubrication and bearing designs, modern gear trains can be nearly noiseless, highly efficient, and capable of generating and transmitting incredible speeds and forces.

If you’ve never watched a gear train in motion, it’s worth finding one and looking closely at it. There’s lots of fun gear videos on YouTube. There is an ASMR-like oddly satisfying quality to many of them.

Take a moment to reflect on the beauty of gear technology. Clever geometry produces a smooth, continuous, and efficient emergent system behavior out of fundamentally non-smooth and discrete individual behaviors. A single gear is a disc with a discrete arrangement of teeth around its rim, yet it can participate in the production of varied smooth movements.

For a paycheck employee at well-run business, the upsides of coghood are automatic, and don’t require much maturity or self-awareness to realize and appreciate. Being part of a smoothly functioning machine can be deeply satisfying, if it is the right machine for you. You are in deep synchronization with people you work with, smoothly handing off your work. Your current work also sets up your own future work, creating a satisfying path of habit refinement and growth for you.

As a free agent though, you have to work to recreate the benefits of coghood for yourself. The key to that is understanding follow through.

Follow Through

What makes an involute gear better than more primitive kinds is that it embodies better follow-through in its geometry. It disengages smoothly, setting up smooth engagement for the next tooth, without interruption or jerkiness in the work being transmitted to the next gear in the train.

This is follow through as in golf or tennis swings: a way of refining atomic actions so they flow better into bigger chains of actions, and set up your own next atomic actions better.

All long-term value is built from the follow-through aspects of atomic behaviors.

An example from my consulting work is writing up notes after meetings. It is one of the very few disciplined follow-through behaviors I’ve managed to develop and actually stick to over years.

During a meeting with a client, I just make take very brief notes in the form of key points and phrases. They are memory cues, not verbatim transcripts. Actually recording and transcribing is not just overkill, it actually works worse.

Afterwards, I write up more careful notes and send them to the client. Before the next meeting, I take a couple of minutes to review the last meeting’s notes (many of my clients do so as well). That’s it. Follow-through doesn’t have to be complex.

This single “involute profile” habit turns a staccato thread of thought and conversation, with lots of potential for inefficient rework/redundancy, into a smooth stream. Before I learned to do this consistently, meetings with clients were often frustrating. I felt like we were unnecessarily going over ground already covered, forgetting relevant things that were said in previous meetings, and even backsliding from good decisions to bad decisions on occasion.

Once I started my note-taking, all that changed. Meeting sequences began to feel like steady forward progress with very little backlash. Context-switching between clients got much more pleasant (particularly important on days when you have back-to-back meetings with entirely different clients, which I try to avoid, but sometimes happens).

Clients often don’t recognize the value of the notes initially. Superficially, it seems like make-work. But as the relationship develops, they realize that it’s the core of why sparring with an external consultant is valuable at all. Even if you never refer back to the notes, and your client never does either, the very fact of writing them up lends a smooth continuity to the conversation track, and a sense of accumulating insight and value. It is at the heart of the deliberate practice element in executive sparring.

The idea generalizes.

• If you do design, you should have follow through around how/where you save your design files after each session, and how you log the evolution of a piece of design.

• If you do contract programming, your disciplines around checking in and checking out code during work sessions, and your commit messages, are a big part of your follow through.

• If you conduct workshops, debriefs with participants, and reviewing your own “game tapes” when available, are part of follow through.

The basic idea is simple, but not reducible to a formula: identify the threads of repeating behaviors that make up your consulting practice, decompose them into repeating actions that are like gear teeth, and audit their follow-through structure. If the atomic behavior feels frustrating, chances are the frustration is where you need to focus, to discover better follow-through profiles.

Discover, not invent or design.

Invention and design tend to add artificial ritual and ceremony rather than follow-through per se. While these can be helpful additional elements, they are not substitutes for good follow through, which must be discovered, and evolved through trial-and-error refinement.

The Natural Shape of Work

Follow through is about respecting the momentum of every atomic action, and uncovering the value inherent in the “extra” effects that appear naturally when you let that action run its course. Follow through is about letting the action end where it wants to end, not where it stops producing legible, billable value.

Follow through is about letting work assume its natural shape. Paradoxically, it can feel very unnatural the first few times you do it. Remember it is not the natural shape of your mind or body. It’s the natural shape of the work, which involves elements besides you. This is the idea of “good form,” which is about the relationship among you, your tools, the work output, and the behaviors of others for whom it is work input.

Often, the sign that you’ve discovered the natural shape of work is that you can describe it in a simple way. Note how I explained an involute profile — in terms of the unwrapping of a taut string wrapped around a cylinder. If you have good mechanical instincts, you may be able to see why that implies smooth contact forces. Even though the mathematical equation of an involute curve is complex, there is something very natural and intuitive about this common description (it’s how instructors typically explain gears in machine design classes).

Discovering the natural shape of work means looking carefully at the “geometry” of your atomic behavior and improving it through trial-and-error.

If you do it right, follow-through will be simple enough that you can learn to practice it almost unconsciously, but not so simple that it doesn’t do the job of transmitting work to the next person, and setting up your own next action, smoothly.

For a paycheck employee in a good job, a good manager might instill good follow through in you, if you if you’re lucky. As a free agent, you’ll generally have to do it for yourself. And in a way that generalizes across your gigs.

If you offer a single skill, think of that skill as a single gear wheel, with each instance of use of that skill as a tooth. Whatever you do must smoothly hand-off useful work in two directions — to the tooth engaged with yours (the customer or client’s complementary behavior) and to yourself in the future — the next tooth coming up behind the currently active one.

If you offer complex combinations of skills, things get more complex of course.

Designing for Cogginess

As you refine the core behaviors of your consulting practice, you should build the follow-through into the definition of your work, and incorporate it in how you price your services. You should design your services for cogginess.

If your client is not willing to pay for follow through, they don’t understand how you create value, and it’s your job to explain and market yourself better so they do.

While it can be easier in the short term to simply hide the follow-through behaviors in an opaque pricing structure, in the long run it’s better for you and your clients if follow through is visible to both of you, and appreciated by both of you.

If you are a well-developed free cog, everything you do will smoothly drive value for the client, and set up your own future behaviors. That’s the definition of a good work habit, and a good — as in satisfying for you — work ethic is built up of many different good work habits.

And if you’re positioning, explaining, and pricing your services correctly, your client will recognize all this. And be willing to pay for it.

That’s what it means to be a free cog.

I had a lightbulb Doh! moment yesterday: there is an eerily close rhyme between the evolution of the coffee industry and the evolution of the consulting industry. Like coffee, consulting is entering its fourth wave. Even the dates line up fairly well. Here is a graphic laying out the analogy in detail. For those of you unfamiliar with the 4 coffee waves, I’ll briefly explain that (it’s a great story) and elaborate on the mapping.

The Four Waves of Coffee

Pre-industrial coffee was some mix of global luxury commodity, like spices, and local artisan markets where there was supply within cheap local reach. Then 4 waves played out, each wave creating its own kind of customer.

1. In the first wave, coffee grew from a limited market to a huge, global mass market, thanks to industry consolidation, reliable commodity supply chains, and the rise of large mass-market brands of cheap blended coffee, like Folgers and Nescafe. Coffee became a domestic staple everywhere, like tea before it.

2. In the second wave, brands like Starbucks created a premium retail coffee industry globally, a market for differentiated blends/flavors, globalized differentiated supply chains, and an early-stage single-origin market. They also created a lot of flashy, faddish products, and signaled more quality than they actually delivered in the base product. The also created an experience economy around coffee: a scaled-up version of the Viennese coffee house, and fueled growing aversion towards the low-quality first-wave product.

3. In the third wave, a wave of independent coffee shops (often with their own roasting and sourcing operations) took advantage of the globalized, high-visibility supply chains created by the second wave, and more advanced artisanal brewing technologies, to create a connoisseur’s market based on single-origin beans and careful brewing. They created an educated consumer sensitive to terroir and suspicious of faddishness. Many connoisseurs became home-brew experts as well. Many baristas ran coffee appreciation and brewing classes, making the industry more like the wine industry. Starbucks tried to join the third-wave market with its Reserve and Roastery outlets, with limited success.

4. In the fourth wave, the curated indie cafe experience turned into newer high-end chains with values-based brand promises, like Stumptown, Blue Bottle, Verve, and Intelligentsia. These chains cultivated both their own high-end coffee experiences, and sold premium roasted beans for home-brewers. The artisanal brewing methods evolved into more of a mix of science and art. The fourth-wave outlets are unabashedly ideological, with strong politics on display in the business model, gleefully overwrought mission statements, art-gallery level attention to aesthetics, and highly visible secondary charitable missions.

The big takeaway here is that each wave created its own class of customer for coffee, adapted to the capabilities of the wave. Individual businesses couldn’t really fight this. The dynamics were bigger than them. A couple of quirky anecdotes reveal the nuances of this story.

First there is the story of the Clover, an extremely high-end $11,000 brewing machine that was effectively positioned as an AI barista, able to finely control brew temperatures and times customized to beans. It arrived in the middle of the third wave, and was quickly acquired by Starbucks. But it never quite made an impact. Some think Starbucks bought it to kill it, but I believe it was the right machine at the wrong time, at the wrong price point, rather like the Segway. A little too early, and with an element of thoughtless over-engineering, a bit like the Juicero. As many commentators pointed out at the time of the acquisition, the output of the $11,000 machine could be replicated by a skilled barista using pour-over equipment worth $200. All you really needed was a temperature-controlled kettle, a hand-cranked burr grinder, a decent ceramic filter, and good filter paper.

Second, there is the Nespresso. During this period, Nestle went after the home/office automatic brewing machine market. Previously you either had crappy drip coffeemakers or high-end espresso rigs. K-cup machines occupied the uneasy middle: apparent ability to handle different blends and beans, but not really. Nespresso machines on the other hand, with their bar-coded custom capsules and smarter brew control, did change the game. I bought a Nespresso Vertuoline (now Vertuo) when it first came out around 2013, and have been using it daily for 7 years. During that period, I also got pretty good at pour over at home. They are not directly comparable (Nespresso machines basically produce espresso and dilute it into Americanos for drip-coffee sizes), but of similar quality.

The Clover failed to challenge the fundamentally artisan orientation of the third wave. I suspect an equivalent could be made for under $1000 today, and have much more success within the fourth wave (for example, in franchisee locations of brands like Verve or Stumptown). The Nespresso machines succeeded in finessing a part of the discerning consumer demand for artisanal coffee into a proprietary, vertically integrated coffee-machine/capsule market (it’s possible, but quite hard, to hack Nespresso machines by refilling your own used capsules).

The takeaways from these 2 anecdotes is: you cannot really fight the really big megatrends, but you can time things right, and finesse the trends on the margins. What drove the four-wave history of retail coffee was simply globalization, growing business and technical knowledge, improving equipment, and better quality control.

Now let’s apply the story template to consulting.

The Four Waves of Consulting

Pre-industrial consulting was basically advice from Robber Barons in their memoirs, and local business savvy supplied by Rich Uncles. Then four waves played out.

1. In the first wave, starting with BCG in 1963, as the world slowly started getting off the highly planned, regulated, and protectionist path and into globalized competition, consulting became a meaningful activity. It accelerated with the oil shocks and Japanese competitive threat of the seventies, and came into its own with deregulation in 1980. BCG, Bain, and McKinsey dominated the game, with support from “positioning school” management academics like Michael Porter, who came from an economics background. The Big 3 tended to focus on the very basic “Folgers” grade corporate-wide strategy functions: restructuring, layoffs, efficiency/productivity.

2. In the second wave, starting in the late 80s with small boutique firms headed up by marquee-name thought leaders (often heretic-alumni of the Big 3) like Tom Peters, Jon Katzenbach and others, consulting acquired a big secondary market of premium customers. As with wine and coffee connoisseurs, there was a lot more signaling than taste cultivation going on, and frequently, faddish and shticky value propositions based on esoteric theories du jour, like chaos theory, “design thinking” or “systems thinking.” The idea that consulting is about “flavor of the month” offerings can be blamed squarely on the second wave, just as Frappuccinofication of coffee can be blamed on Starbucks. As with Frappuccinos, boutique firms often peddled sugary coffee-flavored desserts as coffee. They favored flashy thought leadership, airport bestseller writing, and keynoting. Just as Frappuccinos are great as dessert but not as coffee, second-wave consulting output is great as entertainment but not as consulting advice. But there was also genuine movement away from CYA consulting in service of 80s deregulatory playbooks, and towards real curiosity about management as an art and science one could get better at.

3. In the third wave, powered by the internet and blogging, around 2000, a wave of indie consultants hit the market. Like their barista counterparts, indies were unconstrained either by economies of scale or by the reliance on marquee-name airport-bestseller rainmaking. Using small, online personal brands and networks, they were able to find and cultivate a clientele for their fundamentally bespoke, high-trust offerings. Though the third wave had its share of second-wave style faddishness (*cough* lean startup *cough* four-hour anything), most indies tended to play a longer, more self-effacing game, developing substantial offerings over 4-5 years of trial-and-error practice rather than flashy ones piloted as a TEDx Podunk talk, and hastily repackaged into a book. They moved away from both first-wave cynical CYA consulting and second-wave theatrics, and towards genuine business nerdery as a calling. But the price was a sharp limit on scale. Like the early third wave coffee shops, they tended to be too dependent on founder-baristas and struggled to open even a second location.

4. In the fourth wave, which is just over two years old, the indie world is transitioning from individual business nerdery and personal brands/networks to more of a science, and creating a landscape dominated by shared networks rather than individual indie consultants. The Yak Collective is one such network that I’ve helped instigate, one with a focus on pragmatism and delivery, and devoted to consulting as something of an empirical science you can study and get better at through trial and error. There are others with different shared values. For example, I just read this NYT article about an emerging network/subculture of indie consultants devoted to spiritual counseling. I hate every element of this particular example, but the point is, the fourth wave is made up of varied subcultures of indies with shared values.

It’s really early days yet with the fourth wave, both for coffee and consulting. But there’s definitely something going on.

Waves and Generations

At the risk of over-simplifying this, for both coffee and consulting you could say:

• First wave is the Silent Generation with a cronyist ethos and no taste.

• Second wave is Boomers with a flashy charisma ethos, some taste, and a lot of stagecraft.

• Third wave is Gen X with a retreating/self-effacing nerd ethos and skeptical but deeply held tastes. It’s obviously the best wave.

• Fourth wave is Millennials with an ironic/kayfabe ethos and cynically performative tastes.

This shouldn’t be too surprising. Both coffee and consulting are products for minds. Psychoactive products that link to producer and consumer personalities. You should expect to see echoes of generational personalities. Both are also mid-career markets. Your coffee tastes settle down around when you settle down into an adult career.

You typically land in indie consulting in mid-career too. By age 30-35, you know how you like your coffee, and have enough work experience to be fuel a consulting career.

That said, this is just a fun aside. Don’t take the generational mapping too seriously.

Third-Wave Blues

I’m a pretty stereotypical and representative third-waver myself, I’m frankly suspicious of a lot of the things the fourth wave seems to stand for. This means I occasionally suffer what I call the third-wave blues witnessing the rise of the fourth wave and the slow passing of the third. What I dislike about the fourth wave:

• It’s more uncritically communal than I like

• It’s more theatrically ideological and political than I like

• It vastly over-indexes on aesthetics and appearances

• There is a certain self-importance to it

There’s a clear third-wave/fourth-wave generational tension. If third-wavers were trial-and-error consulting nerds, fourth-wavers are consulting auteurs who have Theories about How the World Should Work, and expect to arrive on the scene with ideological documents, and be listened to.

Still, on some fronts, it feels like the Fourth Wavers are onto real doctrinal discoveries and innovations that perhaps the empirically wired “show me” Gen X third-wavers are too skeptical of. I try to watch out for this tendency too much skepticism in myself. My general approach to mitigating this risk is sometimes betting against my own instincts, and on the instincts of younger people. They might not have logged the hours of experience I have, but they might be attuned to weak signals in the environment I’m deaf to. They can log the experience over time, but my attunement is only likely to get worse. So it’s time for me to listen despite my suspicions and instinctive dislikes.

To some extent, I’m probably going to stay stuck in the third wave for the rest of my career. I’m 45, and a bit set in my ways. That said, I’m open to many elements of the fourth wave, which is part of why I’m devoting significant bandwidth to the Yak Collective experiment, which is definitely a very fourth-wave thing. In some ways, I’m too old by about a decade to be part of that kind of experiment, but in other ways, I’m enough of a business and consulting nerd to want to learn from it.

Will the fourth wave grow up and disrupt the first three waves significantly? Will it stumble and fail? Will I grow into it, or stay stuck in my third-wave niche?

You can ask these questions about both coffee and consulting. I suspect the answers are actually going to be the same.

***

This has been one of the occasional free issues of the Art of Gig newsletter. In the four weeks since the last free issue (July 30th: Leverage Curves and Career Paths), I published the following subscriber-only issues:

1. August 6th: The Art of Being Unmanaged

2. August 13th: The Prosumer Gambit

3. August 19th: Dog-Fooding for Indies

4. August 27th: Reality-Arbitrage vs. Dog-Fooding

For those who signed up recently, Art of Gig is a weekly newsletter on the gig economy, with a particular focus on indie consulting. I typically do a free issue at least once a month.