If you haven’t heard the phrase “gig economy” already, you may still be working at one of the few jobs left with benefits and a pension. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, 94% of jobs created in the past 10 years are outside the parameters of full-time employment.
That isn’t necessarily bad news, says Derek Miller, author of Six Figure Crowdfunding. “A platform like Kickstarter allows people a new pathway to building a career,” he notes, and he should know: two campaigns he ran garnered a combined $4 million. “Instead of going to Silicon Valley and looking for angel investors and venture capital, users who have access to a computer and are willing to hustle can get a product out there and make money on it.”
Of course, many gig-economy successes take the VC route, and forthcoming titles tell the stories behind such startups as Airbnb, Flywheel, Daybreaker, and others. All of these books have one thing in common: their authors have embraced modern work methodologies and are eager to share what they’ve learned.
It’s Only Temporary
Once upon a paycheck, “temp work” meant short-term administrative jobs filled by agencies for companies of all sizes. Today, being a temp might mean anything from routinely subbing as a personal trainer to working full-time as a consultant. According to journalist Sarah Kessler, author of Gigged (St. Martin’s, June), there’s nothing temporary about this new way of working. “Gig work is a microcosm of the larger trend that’s been growing since 2005,” she says. “It’s normal now.”
Kessler interviewed people who interact with the gig economy in various ways, such as a Kansas City Uber driver and a charity worker who believes that allowing the underserved to fill temporary jobs will revitalize the economy in his Arkansas hometown.
Louis Hyman, a Cornell University scholar who directs the Institute for Workplace Studies, says this variety of experience is the very nature of the gig economy. “It’s easier to define the gig economy by what is it not than by what it is,” Hyman notes. “A normal job is permanent and secure. This is about every kind of job that isn’t.” In Temp, he explains why corporations began to shift to short-term flexibility in the 1970s, and the reasons had as much to do with ideas as with profits. “This is not something driven by technology. Full stop.”
Many see the upside to, and even distinct advantages in, this new way of working. Thomas Oppong, founding editor at All Top Startups, has written Working in the Gig Economy (Kogan, Oct.) as a handbook for those looking to enter an arena he calls “a form of career insurance.” He says that “whenever you have the opportunity to work as a consultant, you build skills and contacts that can help you in a new phase.” Oppong encourages all workers to position themselves as authorities and share their knowledge. “You no longer need permission to show your work,” he adds. “Anyone could be a client.”
Online Tools
One of the difficulties of starting a business can be finding the capital to get off the ground; another is getting one’s name out there. In Six Figure Crowdfunding (Boom! Studios, July), coauthors Derek Miller and Noelle Pugh, with cartoonist Joy Ho, present a visual guide to best practices in crowdfunding, specifically on Kickstarter, “because that’s the platform we know best,” Miller says. In addition to sharing experience from their successful campaigns on the platform, the authors tap the knowledge of sources who together have raised $30 million from crowdfunding campaigns. Caveat Kickstartee: “The larger the audience you have ready before you hit ‘launch,’ the better your chances of success,” Miller says.
One Million Followers by Brendan Kane (BenBella, Oct.) aims to help entrepreneurs build their social media followings to capture a focused audience for their products and services. Kane, a digital strategist, says that while once success in social media was measured just in numbers, now “the hard work is afterward, actually doing something with that audience.” For instance, he says, the CEO of Fab Fit Fun, a beauty and wellness e-commerce site with 568,000 Instagram followers, goes into customer forums and chats with clients about their experiences with the company’s products.
Social news website Reddit has become yet another online tool in the businessperson’s arsenal. As Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, author of We Are the Nerds (Hachette, Oct.), points out, “Even Elon Musk posts on Reddit.”
Lagorio-Chafkin met Reddit founders Steve Huffman and Alex Ohanian in 2011, after they’d left the site to found Hipmunk. Reddit is back in their hands now—Huffman is CEO, and Ohanian is executive chairman—and has become the fourth-most-visited website in the U.S. In Nerds, Lagorio-Chafkin recounts Reddit’s tumultuous route to online ubiquity. “If you want to look at the future, look at how Reddit is run,” she says. “Reddit is actually encroaching, with its redesign, on big social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.”
Passion Players
Even the most successful entrepreneurs have experienced failure—a point Ruth Zukerman makes in Riding High (St. Martin’s, Oct.). “My openness and trusting nature did not serve me well on the business front,” says Zukerman, a SoulCycle cofounder who, at age 51, walked away from the cycling empire to cofound the competing Flywheel. When she left SoulCycle, she says, she was “rewarded with several opportunities that allowed me to start again, this time knowing the pitfalls.” Like other entrepreneurs, Zukerman emphasizes the importance of finding one’s passion.
In Belong (Workman, Sept.), Radha Agrawal, who, among other projects, cofounded international morning dance party Daybreaker, writes about drawing inspiration from those around her. “Many of us do huge audits on our professional and romantic lives, but rarely on our friendships,” she says. “But what we bring to a community and what we get from a community can have a huge effect on every aspect of our lives.” Her illustrated guide includes quizzes and prompts that aim to help the reader find connectivity, as well as visuals that chart her own path to success.
Chip Conley also understands the importance of drawing on the knowledge of one’s community. He founded Joie de Vivre Hospitality in 1987, at age 26, and built it up to a chain of 50 boutique hotels before selling the company in 2010. When he joined Airbnb as head of global hospitality and strategy in 2013, he lacked the digital fluency of his younger colleagues, but he had other desirable attributes, including the experience and emotional intelligence honed over decades.
In Wisdom at Work (Currency, Sept.), Conley explores the value he and his fellow “modern elders,” as he calls them, bring to the workplace. He encourages readers of all ages to be open to learning as well as to teaching—a flexibility that serves workers well across the 21st-century employment landscape.
