That excellent Business Week journalist, Stephen Baker, has a thought-provoking post over at Blogspotting. Its title is a telling “Knowledge workers: We’re on our own“, and it means what it says.

Face it, knowledge workers, if we’re not already freelancing, we’re heading in that direction. I’m typing this on a company-owned laptop, but Gartner predicts that within three years, one in 10 companies will be forcing employees to provide their own laptops. I’m surprised the number isn’t higher.

Well, as a full-time journalist, blogger and author I suppose “knowledge worker” is as good a description as any ~ better than “sex worker” anyway.

Stephen paints a grim picture : “Increasingly, we’ll be on our own.” Grim for some, at least. Personally, I’ve always been “on my own”. All authors are. But I can see it would be tough for the gregarious types who are addicted to office politics and the water-cooler mafia.

“Why is this happening? Companies have the data and the intelligence now to cut the jobs they need done into tiny slices, each one going to the person best equipped to handle it anywhere on the globe. It’s a virtual assembly line.”

This is my long-held theory that each critical decision should be taken at the point of maximum competence. I call it “superdemocracy”. I once sent the idea to Michael Howard, leader of the UK Conservative Party, but didn’t get a reply. It’s time had not yet come.

Now comes the juicy part of Stephen’s post. For those who blog more in hope than expectation, this is a Business Week endorsement of our little secret activity :

So what do we do? For starters, we blog. That way we build our individual brands, our knowledge, and our network of connections. These are going to be ever more vital assets in the years ahead. If we do a good enough job building them, companies may decide to bid for our services fulltime, even throwing in insurance and a 401K.

Soon, in the “ecosystem that’s unfolding, one teeming with knowledge entrepreneurs, I’m betting that most of us, by choice or circumstance, are going to be running our own show.”

This is happening now. Many of my friends are peeling away from the corporate system, and those who are not, would like to. Interestingly, as Stephen says, blogging is the centrepiece of that effort. It puts you out there and up there, in the neon lights of a business Broadway that’s tapping its way into the 21st century as the hoofers of old tap-danced into the 20th.