We're All Entrepreneurs

This morning I got the news that McGraw-Hill had sold BusinessWeek to Bloomberg. It's unclear at this point what the sale will mean for small business coverage at BusinessWeek, or for my contract there.

While I obviously hope that my contract gets renewed at Bloomberg BusinessWeek and that I'm able to continue doing what I love - providing advice and insights to entrepreneurs - the news is a good wake up call. And not only for me, but for all of us.

Increasingly, technology and the changing economy are forcing individuals to become more pro-active about their careers. It used to be fairly common for someone to take a job at a large, powerful corporation out of college, move up through the ranks and eventually retire - from that very same company - 30 or 40 years later.

Now? Not so much. I know a few people who've followed that model, but not many. As Choire Sicha wrote in the New York Times last week:

Now that we are all on Facebook, we are each a sole proprietor. We are all perpetrators and victims of promotion (for the most part that promotion is tediously of the "self" variety). That every consumer is now a retailer is capitalism's ultimate and most logical evolution.

I don't know about the logical evolution of capitalism (not being a macro-economist myself) but I have to agree with her sentiment, and others', about all of us being more akin to sole proprietors than we ever expected to be.