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ENTREPRENEURSHIP, ELASTICITY, AND ED-MED

Overview

As Pink explores the reasons for the workplace transformation, he identifies three factors that contribute greatly to the rise in the number of non-sales sellers: entrepreneurship, elasticity, and Ed-Med. While technology was expected to obliterate the need for salespeople, it has actually created an opening for small entrepreneurs to enter the workforce, which has turned most people into sellers.

Chapter Summary

Entrepreneurial businesses along with the shrinking budgets of large corporations create demand for non-specialized workers—those who wear many hats, of which sales is only one. While these smaller businesses and more amorphous job titles at large companies proliferate, the fastest-growing sector of work is Ed-Med, Pink’s coined term for education and health services, where moving others is the key task to get the job done.

Entrepreneurship

Free-agent selling entities with no employees or with only a tiny staff, known as entrepreneurs, now make up most of the businesses in the United States and represent a growing sector. Economists predict that entrepreneurial business models represent the future of employment for the American middle class. Presently, being a seller on eBay provides significant income to about three-quarters of a million people in the United States. The free-agent business model is expected to skyrocket with the proliferation of smartphones—literally handheld minicomputers—which allow entrepreneurs to take credit card payments on their phones, essentially keeping shop wherever they are. So rather than eliminating salespeople as predicted, the author concludes, that technology has made more people into salespeople.

Elasticity

In contrast to the old model of large organizations where work was segmented and each person did just one thing or a set list of things, the no-employee businesses, or companies with only a few workers, demand that each person possess skills-based elasticity, the ability to do many things, including sales. Fierce competition and unpredictable market conditions over the past decade have even forced larger companies to adopt this model in order to remain profitable. The Palantir software company in Palo Alto, California, for example, sends computer scientists into the field to work with customers, requiring engineers to communicate and create solutions on the spot. The engineers are not taught how to sell but how to empathize the needs of the user and improvise. Although this is not direct sales, the interactions between customer and engineers do influence sales—indirectly and effectively. “As elasticity of skills becomes more common, one particular category of skill it seems always to encompass is moving others,” Pink elaborates. An inventor can launch a business built around her invention, but beyond the engineering of the product, she must convince a bank for a loan, write a proposal for a grant, or convince prospective employees to accept a lower salary until profits start coming in, and on and on. In every aspect of the inventor’s business, she is moving someone in a way that doesn’t literally move her product out of the warehouse.

Pink stresses that the act of non-sales selling does not discriminate when it comes to the hierarchies in bureaucracies. Even those at the top of the org chart find themselves spending most of their time moving others, even in the form of motivating those who report to them to produce or accomplish things effectively.

Ed-Med

The largest job sector in the United States, as well as the fastest-growing sector in the rest of the world, is education and health services—or what the author calls Ed-Med. The author considers everyone from college professors to test-prep companies and from genetic counselors to registered nurses members of this skyrocketing sector. While historically the Ed-Med sector has been linked to caring and compassion, the author claims it is presently more closely aligned with the tough world of sales, but specifically of non-sales selling; from doctors to teachers, for workers in the Ed-Med sector to succeed, they must be able to move others to give up old behaviors and ideas in exchange for new ones.

Pink concludes that, with the dramatic and continuing growth of Ed-Med, the need for elasticity, and entrepreneurial business sectors, everyone has inadvertently ended up in sales, but because of the less-than-stellar reputation of selling, many begrudge this reality. Therefore, the author further posits, to expand their elasticity and progress effectively as non-sales selling people, they need first to overcome some outdated stereotypes about salespeople and negative judgments about sales in general.

Chapter 2: Key Points