We are becoming an economy of free agents. Even full-time employees are paid depending upon their performance, their billable hours or commissions or performance bonuses. Or if they're blue-collar employees, their income depends upon overtime. In this new world, the self-promoter wins, not the organization man. Today's rewards are going to people who make sure they stand out.
Today there's a brittle difference between friendship and a commercial relationship.
People get together and make connections for all sorts of reasons and often there are ulterior motives that have a commercial nature. You get a call from an acquaintance or a friend for lunch or for breakfast, and rarely is it simply to catch up with one another's private lives. Often it's in order to make a deal. There's a new sense of relationship in which personal and commercial are intertwined that seriously threatens the quality of friendships and even the quality of one's own sense of self. The solution begins with the individual.