[DJC]
[design '97]

The jobless marketer: a new way to look at marketing services

By ALAN LAMBERT
The Atropos Project

People on both sides of the design and construction game tend to think of "contractor" as the one that does the building. Designers sometimes get confused when they are themselves described as contractors -- by, for example, military Contracting Officers (COs). But in this matter (as in so many others), the COs are correct.

A contractor is, very simply, a party under contract to provide something of value in exchange for payment. Typically, the arrangement centers on a singular source of need on the client's part. The arrangement is, by its very nature, temporary.

In this way, contractors are distinguished from payroll employees. Contractors exist for specific projects; employees exist to fulfill a functional role within an organization.

One such "functional role" for many architecture, engineering and construction firms is marketing -- or at least different parts of the marketing process. Some of my marketer friends don't like to hear it but, as employees, we often get locked into a kind of day-to-day functional drift -- until much of what we do lacks impact or focus for a firm's long-term success.

This drift is usually toward an organizational inertia we can't resist -- even if we know better. Some of us stay put and explore the many interesting phases of "burnout." (It's sort of like Dante's descending circles of the Inferno.) Many of us change jobs to break out of this career trap.

A few of us become contractors.

In the meantime, the range of marketing activity that a company may need frequently exceeds the capacity of what any one of us can effectively do. If a company achieves success and begins to grow, its strategic direction will often change or expand -- and so too will its marketing requirements. Some companies add staff.

Others turn to outside specialists.

Small to mid-sized companies, in some cases, never hire marketers. Instead, they break the marketing function into specific core services and periodically contract with different specialists to address those service needs. Some of these contractual arrangements are short-term, single-project affairs. Others are longer-term, month-to-month retainers. Either way, the nature of the relationship is temporary.

So, as companies become more sophisticated about the particulars they want from marketers, they will tend to outsource those particulars to specialists. And as marketers become more sophisticated about our own career interests and skills, many of us will become those specialists.

We will trade in our relatively secure functional positions to become itinerant workers who trade on our skills and the inherent value that we can bring to organizations. We will become one of two types of marketing contractors: consultants or contract workers.

Consultants and contract workers

What's the difference between a consultant and a contractor?

Consultants tend to evaluate problems as objective outsiders and offer recommendations. Companies who receive the advice are free to act or not act on it as they see fit -- though the advice itself is far from free. Consultants typically take no role in implementing their suggestions. In fact, they're not supposed to, because such involvement contaminates their objectivity (see "Flawless Consulting" by Peter Block).

Contract workers, on the other hand, are more hands-on and goal-driven. They focus on results, not recommendations. They collaborate with company owners and their management teams to define problems and action plans -- and then take a very active role in the follow-through. They are largely accountable for the end-product of those action plans.

Some marketing contractors take turns with these separate roles, but most contractors tend to lean in one direction or another.

My hunch is that contract workers will be a more likely resource than consultants as companies turn more and more to outside specialists to get problems solved and important work done. My hunch is shaped by several biases that I freely offer up:

Consultants came into their own during another era that emphasized command-and-control hierarchical management structures. Their services were purchased to provide "new ideas" to the management team -- which were then pushed down the food-chain for implementation.

Contract workers who have emerged during the last several years are linked more closely to an era of downsized organizations, flatter hierarchies, more fluid and technologically-driven workforces, and fewer workers. The concept of "knowledge worker" is more important -- the ability to understand what needs to be done and then get it done.

Consultants tend to travel in huge packs (Price-Waterhouse, for example) and offer much in the way of expert resources, research and academic pedigree. The cost of their services, therefore, tends to reflect this level of pricey overhead.

Contract workers tend to be independent free-lancers and therefore less costly than most consultants, as well as more flexible and adaptable to specific company needs. They are also relentless networkers and in effect create "virtual organizations" with one another to provide support and teaming arrangements for projects that require the time or skill of more than one person.

You and Co.

William Bridges ("Jobshift") sees the emergence of more and more contract workers, particularly in the service industries, as part of a larger trend toward a jobless culture.

He argues that the concept of payrolled jobs is relatively new in human history, a unique byproduct of the industrial age. As we move further from heavy industry and more toward services and information as the drivers of our world-wide economy, Bridges says we will revert to a process for accomplishing work with a much longer historical claim on human affairs: skilled workers who barter and trade on the basis of their own abilities.

He predicts that the concept of "jobs" will disappear and be replaced by networks of independent knowledge workers clustered in various industries who accomplish the work to be done on a project-by-project basis.

This image has a bit of a utopian cast to it, and may be elitist. Even some of my beleaguered marketer friends show signs of heartburn when I introduce the topic of "jobless culture" into polite conversation. Are hundreds of millions of payrolled workers all to become independent contract workers with no steady paychecks?

Maybe, maybe not. What is more important about Bridges' perspective is the larger point he is trying to make about "You and Co.": Think and behave like a contractor even if you choose -- and are able -- to stay payrolled.

What real value do you contribute to the organization? Not how many hours do you put in cranking out proposals, but what do you do that pushes the company's strategic growth? Adds to its opportunities for building new client relationships? Builds its credibility as a high performance organization? Helps it attract and recruit star performers from the industry? How do you provide leadership to the organization, irrespective of your job title?

Bridges is talking about the mental toughness to go it alone if you must or you wish. Take to heart that the notion of a permanent job, and loyalty for any one company, is no longer a defensible career plan. (It probably never was).

Consider your tenure with any company as a temporary arrangement that exists only so long as there is value delivered and received on both sides -- value to the company for its organizational development and growth, value to you so long as you can expand your knowledge and skills in line with what Bridges calls your "D.A.T.A.": what you really want to do (your Desires); what you are really good at (your Abilities); what kind of person you are (your Temperament); and what advantages you have (your Assets).

Contractors are in effect business owners ("You and Co."). They get educated in the skills and tools that they need to be effective at what they do or wish to do -- they don't wait on "company training programs." They steep themselves in what drives success in their companies -- design-production-construction operations, finance, quality control, technologies, organizational dynamics, team-based processes, client relationships, strategic focus, management structure. Oh yes, and marketing. The breadth of what they know and can communicate and can accomplish represents the value they offer.

The point here is both simple and difficult: the mindset of a contractor is what is crucial to a marketer's success in this or any other industry. It remains true whether one actually becomes a contractor or stays payrolled. And it remains true whether we as a society enter into a cultural transformation that revolves around a huge class of jobless workers -- or whether contractors remain a small (but growing) percentage of the workforce.

Either way, we thrive by what we choose for ourselves, not by what others choose for us.

Alan Lambert is founder and prinicpal of The Atropos Project, a Bellevue management and marketing consulting firm.

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