I've worked as an employee for ten years (5 government, 5 corporate) and have had my own microbusiness for the last seventeen. This book tells it like it is and reminds me why I'm so addicted to personal technology - these are the modern-day equivalents of the tools of production that Marx wrote about. These are the tools of liberation. OK, maybe they are fun toys too! But who says you don't get to have fun in this life?
I'm an amateur futurist keeping up with big-picture books on social trends since starting with Alvin Toffler's Future Shock in the late sixties to The Third Wave, Megatrends, and, later, Megatrends 2000, Free Agent Nation and the Cluetrain Manifesto and many books in between. FAN is a very good book. As a microbusiness owner in 2003, it helps me understand myself and my situation better. It gives me LOTS of ideas and inspiration to take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves in this time of transition and economic challenge.
I started my business 17 years ago after reading a great book called Maverick Career-styles: The Way of the Ronin. The writing was on the wall even then - in the mid-eighties. I was willing to take a chance and strike out on my own after ten years of traditional employment because that book gave me a way of seeing that I might be more secure as a wiley and agile independent professional than I would be as a corporate drone. Dan Pink speaks my language! Well-written, entertaining and valuable read.