Last night, I was a guest on Blog Talk Radio’s Coach for Innovation with Dee McCrory. The subject under discussion was microbusinesses and jobs and the future of the American workplace.

Dee and I talked for an hour. We could easily have talked for two. It’s a big subject.

I’ve been writing about that subject here and everywhere else I write for a long time. Lately, it’s been a regular topic.

I’m sure it’s easy to write off these ramblings about how the labor market seems to be changing, especially when consumers remain concerned about traditional employment and policy makers are yelling ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ into every microphone that comes their way.

But focusing on a clear and present noise will keep you from noticing the new labor market rising.

Long before the economy crashed and burned, some observant economists were noticing that businesses were trending smaller. Improvements in technology and in productivity translate into fewer bodies needed and ever increasing benefits costs (particularly health care) acted as a disincentive to hiring.

Increasing numbers of individuals, finding that jobs were not materializing for them from either the private or the public sector, were creating their own jobs as a last resort. Others, who had perhaps always wanted to be their own boss, found that the same technology had lowered the barriers to entry in many industry sectors and reduced small business start-up costs altogether.

Even more importantly, however, was the way all these economic actors have begun interacting. Gone are the days were a company stood as its own citadel, complete in and of itself, performing all its functions internally, king of its own hill.

In the new economic landscape, companies intersect with empowered consumers and entrepreneurial employees and independent contractors. In many ways, no one is a boss and, at the same time, everyone is a boss.

It’s pretty cool, if you stop and think about it.

I hear that Jim Immelt, CEO of General Electric, has coined the term the Reset Economy to describe how this “Great Recession” is more than an economic contraction.

Immelt says it’s a fundamental change in the way the marketplace works and the way the actors in that marketplace interact with each other.

I think he’s right.

Hey, do you hear that? I think it’s the sound of a paradigm shifting.