Jobs in the "DNA" Economy

Chances are that if you live in a big city and lost your job or ar looking for one, you might find it on your fingertips, using Apps like TaskRabbit, or Uber, that match supply and demand for specific tasks and competencies on a "on demand", "job-for-hire" basis.

A recent article in T he New Yorker called it "the gig economy", but it is much more than that. We are looking at the future that the "gales of creative destruction" are building as they blow across the globe.

Or perhaps you own a house and you no longer have a permanent income -or just need extra time to work on earning a degree but have not enough money to be a full-time student-.

Gigs -as Americans call informal jobs- are as old as humanity -what was Joseph the carpenter doing around in Nazareth for a living if not a carpenter "gig"?-. We still have sharecroppers and temporary workers helping collect the harvests, but they are also increasingly replaced by automation.

Gigs are the best way to make the economy flexible and enable us to earn an income while keeping our freedom to pursue a career, study or just take care of our family.

The middle class was long defined by owning a car and a house -or as a friend humorously said, a mortgage-. With formal, 9-to-5 jobs becoming scarcer year after year, chances are that we will look at other options, What if we can make some money out of our car or our house?

That's what Uber, Lyft or Juno do for part-time drivers. Using these Apps, car owners can earn a living working flexible hours.

Passengers can find safe and fast rides anywhere anytime, and pay online,

Thousands of car owners that do not have the money to buy a cab driver license can still make the payments of their cars and extra money, which in turn helps car dealers, car companies and put money in the drivers pockets to spend locally.

Or perhaps you are temporariliy unemployed and still have to pay your rent or your mortgage.

Using the same P2P model (you can translate P2P as Prosumer-to-prosumer" or, less pretentiously, "People to People" trade) you can use the Airbnb (for Air Bed & Breakfast) and rent all or part of your house to pay for itself.

On the visitor side, Airbnb and its competitors create alternatives to expensive hotels and lack of rooms, while keeping control over who and where are they staying with.

The company started as most successful startups do: combining two points ot view: the one of the customer experience -in Airbnb, the users of hotels, bed & breakfast or rentals- and that of the business owner's -the host or the person that is trying to make a living out of the property.

In the "gig economy" you must learn to wear two pairs of shoes at the same time. You must think as a customer and also as a business person. And you hav to find a win-win formula to make it work. That sounds simple, but it might be cumbersome for someone who has always worked on traditional 9-to-5 jobs.

Here you can learn how the founders of Airbnb started. and see how ir might work or you if you want to join a DNA company or start your own.

In the Performance Improvement Institute (PII), we help develop DNA startups and teach in virtual bootcamps to develop them.

Here is one example of our App Vecinos (Neighbors) that helps residents and visitors turn a former shanty town in Buenos Aires into a new neighborhood or "Barrio" by providing