There’s a wave of discussion in the blogosphere today on rules for 21st century workers. It started over at Silicon Valley Watcher, and was updated by Mitch Ratcliffe and others.

I’ve blogged quite a bit recently about what H.G. Wells called “originative intellectual workers” so here’s my take on the current conversation.

Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher suggests three rules :

1. Carry and use your own cell phone/number for business. The workforce now is mobile and temporary even if you have a salaried job. You need to be in control of the center of communications: you.

2. Carry and use your own email address even at work. Otherwise your contacts and the relationships you build can be severed when you leave a job, and that is an investment that you have a right to maintain ~ as does your employer.

3. Carry and use your own health insurance. Because otherwise, you will be stuck in a job that makes you sick just to keep the health insurance.

To that, Mitch Ratcliffe adds :

4. Incorporate and work on contract rather than as an employee. This allows you to negotiate the same kind of stock compensation while allowing you to keep your business costs, even the ones you can’t get compensated for at work, on your own taxes while increasing the flexibility you have as a working person.

5. Carry and use your own hardware, building tech expenses into your compensation. This prevents lock-in to a job through access to technology. Sure, you may have to work with a less impressive laptop, but you’re also forced to think more like the people who really buy computers, software, services and so forth.

Two more rules are added in an update :

6. Create a blog and establish your personal presence in the new marketplace. In this new age of global inter-connectivity, linking and influence, a blog is a prerequisite if you want to build your own credibility, be found easily and connect with others. Forget the static website. Forget the fancy brochure. Do a blog. It works ~ I [Neville Hobson] speak from personal experience.

7. Join a business network like LinkedIn or OpenBC. However you actively use these or not, they can help establish your individual credibility and provide avenues of contact with others for mutual benefit.

So now we’ve got seven rules. What more can we add to the list? Well, buy your own books is also suggested, lest you leave them behind when you change departments.

The crux of all these bullet points is the independence of workers and the commoditization (securitization) of their skills. That means setting up a limited liability, private company in your name.

To retain ownership of what you produce is the most important aspect of today’s work scenario for the originative intellectual worker. To do that you must stay in control of the “permalinks” into that content. Moving your base, as companies are wont to insist upon, without an established personal infrastructure, will lose you the fruits of previous efforts.

Anything else is a form of slavery.