Based on the title, it would be
easy to mistake this book for a treatise on wandering
samurai warriors.
What Beverly Potter has done instead, is use
the idea of the ronin, or
wandering knights of medieval
Japan, as a metaphor to describe the role of
today’s independent
professional in the changing economy.
Similar to Dan Pink’s
ideas in Free Agent Nation,
and my idea of the New
Entrepreneur, Beverly writes that the
fundamental structure of the
economy is shifting, and she submits that the “ronin”
of the economic world are
best suited to take advantage of it.
One of
the most prominent
characteristics of the economic ronin is
that their path is
nonlinear. Instead of following a clearly
defined corporate path, they
ride the waves of their career, becoming skilled in
many disciplines and making
a number of lateral jumps in their
career. Beverly tends to
over-romanticize the ronin, and by extension the path
of the independent
professional, but she does touch on many of the points
that makes them
economically powerful.
Big
Idea
As the
economic structure changes,
more people will adapt to a nonlinear career model
which will allow them more
freedom and control in how they pursue their work
lives.
Implications,
Ideas, and Questions
One of the most
interesting ideas she posits is that the average
intellectual worker in our economy is
over-specialized. This happens especially to
employees of large corporations because the
corporate model is based on a division of
labor. This has led to a lot of the economic
displacement lately, as people who are laid-off from
one company often find themselves with skills that
are not easy to translate into new
positions. Even when working with New
Entrepreneurs I often find that they don’t have the
variety of skills necessary to build a
successful business because they had been
pigeonholed in one area. One of the most
helpful things they (and you) can do is start
learning skills and developing competence
in multiple areas.
The biggest shift we’ve
seen in the last 20 years is the dissolution of
“corporate feudalism”, which
Beverly describes as standardization,
specialization, and loyalty. Because
corporations aren’t extending the same benefits and
security to their employees, the employees are
seeing little value to remain loyal cogs in the
machine.
Even though I think
Beverly overemphasizes the positives of being a
ronin without looking at some of the challenges, I
think her metaphor is incredibly apt. As she
says, ronin were forced to become masters of change
because of their economic and political
circumstances; even their name means “wave people”
(pg 57). Many people who become New
Entrepreneurs do so out of necessity, and it’s
their ability to adapt that determines whether
they’ll ride waves or be swallowed by them.
Beverly notes that a
number of Zen precepts lend themselves to ronin
success (Zen was the spiritual/philosophical outlook
that was prevalent in medieval Japan). This
echoes my personal philosophies on New
Entrepreneur success, and by extension how I’ve
built my business. Some of these concepts
which have helped me include (pg 90):
Acceptance of
impermanence,
Being yielding
Accepting paradox.
One powerful process she
discusses is the idea of nonlinear growth. It
finds expression both in the nonlinear growth of a
ronin’s career (bouncing from job to project to
contract), and in the nonlinear networks that ronin
create to help them accomplish their
objectives. In this way, it closely resembles
what Daniel Pink writes about in Free Agent Nation when
he describes how networks come together to work on
specific projects and then dissolve.
Should
you read this book?
If you
run your own business or
are an independent service provider, this book will
give you some interesting
strategies to help you grow yourself and your
business. The metaphor of
the ronin is useful when thinking about how to be
successful in the turbulent
economic times that we find ourselves in. I
think that Beverly touches on
an important trait of successful ronin that can help
the New Entrepreneur
today: