The primary task of the successful entrepreneur in the future will increasingly shift from life-long work within a single organization to the careful investment of time and resources ina portfolio of value-creating endeavors.

This will require careful and diligent self-management of the entrepreneur's own assets, and skill in building potent teams that can help them implement for-profit, non-profit and personal objectives.

However, instead of demanding that entrepreneurs devote more time to self-management, the rise of free agency is giving rise to what Daniel Pink has described as "a new breed of professional specialists who help the Free Agent Nation work."

Just as a professional athlete may be working with numerous professionals --including sports agents, independent trainers, motivational coaches, marketing professionals, their team managers and others-- the free agent entrepreneur can now enlist the coordinated support of numerous professionals in a unified agency program. Services delivered will include, on a primary or secondary basis, financial planning, strategic career coaching, family office management, accounting, legal, personal branding, media relations, negotiations counsel, research, and more.

Imagine getting-imagine needing-periodic reports on where your attention was spent, the return it realized, and how much attention you gained. It's inevitable that a whole set of mechanisms and players will appear on the scene to help each of us invest our attention optimally (Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer in BLUR).

In their recent book, BLUR: the speed of change in the connected economy, Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer describe the revolution of value creation that occurred in the realms of sports and entertainment when free agency became a possibility.

Although all-star centerfielder Curtis Flood lost his 1969 court challenge against the reserve clause in his contract with the St. Louis Cardinals (a clause that gave the Cardinals the right to trade him against his will to Philadelphia), his challenge opened the door to future challenges and helped introduce free agency to Major League Baseball. These days, value rests on individual players and their performance more than on team franchises, and star players often earn more money on their ancillary marketing activities than on their team contracts.

The same kind of revolution happened in the world of entertainment. In Hollywood, the big studios-MGM, Warner Bros., and 20th Century Fox-used to be vertically integrated autarchies. Actors and actresses had contractual affiliations to studios that left them very little personal control over the work they did. The power began to change hands when Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford recognized their value in the marketplace and formed United Artists. Now, the "franchise" stars rule, the studios are distribution companies, and the agencies that represent the talent are becoming the most powerful corporate entities in the industry (BLUR).

Now Davis and Meyer and many others are beginning to imagine the possibility of securitizing individuals. "It's safe to predict," write Davis and Meyer, "that Wall Street will devise new instruments to develop, measure, evaluate, and reward the knowledge and experience of individuals. He or she will be the investment vehicles of the twenty-first century just as small companies were in the twentieth and large ones in the nineteenth."

As securities markets open to help individuals as well as corporations finance their goals, previously unimaginable opportunities will open up for entrepreneurs who have honed their Personal Performance System and can demonstrate a measurable track record in creating value. Increasingly, one's personal "brand" or offering prospectus-like those of Michael Jordan, Stephen Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey today-will be more important to success than an entrepreneur's educational credentials or similar items from the traditional resume.

By helping clients coordinate the host of new professional services they will need in establishing their personal brands and agendas, new kinds of agencies will emerge that will provide them with the expertise and personal attention required to understand, improve and fully deploy their value-creating processes.

These services, which will be generally referred to as "life planning services," will be defined and refined with a very affluent clientele. But over time, these services will be commercialized to a broad and mainstream market, not unlike financial planning services.