“A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future is a fascinating book about how people’s job rules are changing and what they must do to embrace this change. Focusing on a number of current trends, Pink states that the American economy is leaving an Information Age and entering a Conceptual Age. In this age, left-brain analytical skills will not be as important and instead, people should focus on several right-brain skills.
There are three main reasons that people are moving away from analytical skills and instead focusing on right-brain skills:
Abundance: now that everything is available in abundant supply; consumers are more focused on subjective elements like design and aesthetic value. “Abundance has produced an ironic result: the very triumph of Left-Directed Thinking has lessened its significance.”
Asia: most analytic and redundant tasks can be outsourced to other locations where skilled professionals will work for a fraction of the cost.
Automation: jobs that can be automated will be done by machines that can do the task faster and at a fraction of the cost. Like John Henry who was beaten by a machine in the industrial age, Kasparov was defeated by a computer in the Information Age.
This being said, the book does a masterful job of articulating the conceptual ideas the author is trying to convey. Additionally, the ways the ideas are presented make them extremely relevant and easy to apply to your personal life and career. The six ideas are:
Design: “It is no longer sufficient to create a product, a service, an experience, or a lifestyle that’s merely functional. Today it’s economically crucial and personally rewarding to create something that is also beautiful, whimsical, or emotionally engaging.” The most important aspects I took away from this idea is that design differentiates products, people, and companies and also that design can personalize a product or company.
Story: In a world awash in information, “the essence of persuasion, communication, and self-understanding has become the ability also to fashion a compelling narrative.” Though the book didn’t mention it, the concept of honing the ability to tell stories makes me think of ancient Greek, Roman, and Norse civilizations and present day Africa civilizations that could recite complicated and long historical events (e.g. Beowolf and the Iliad) by telling them as stories. Stories make facts easier to remember and also enable different cultures to relate to each other.
Symphony: “Seeing the big picture, crossing boundaries, and being able to combine disparate pieces into an arresting new whole.” The author describes symphony as a way to grasp many aspects of an organization and tie them all together. There are three main concepts that make Symphony important are similar to the reasons many people strive to get their MBA.
• The ability to see all the different workings of a project, problem, or organization and how they interact.
• The skill to form relationships between different entities and see similar patterns.
• Finally, the expertise to look at two different objects and find their similarities.
Empathy: “…Those who thrive will be (distinguished by) their ability to understand what makes their fellow woman or man tick, to forge relationships, and to care for others.” I really liked how the book illustrated empathy by first eluding to the similarities unrelated cultures have expressing emotion. All people throughout the world, even remote cultures that have never had any interaction with a different civilization, react to happiness, humor, and sadness in the same way (they smile, they laugh, and they cry). The book infers that empathy is important because it can unify people throughout the world and that it also allows people to connect easily on a deeper, more personable level.
Play: “Ample evidence points to the enormous health and professional benefits of laughter, lightheartedness, games, and humor.” What really brought this point home for me was the way the author used video games to prove his point. “… (Video) games have become a tool for solving problems as well as a vehicle for self-expression and self-exploration…. Learning isn’t about memorizing isolated facts. It’s about connecting and manipulating them”. I envisioned schools where students would compete to get the best time by answering science and history questions. Not only is play healthy, it focuses on easy, engaging, asynchronous learning.
Meaning: Our material existentialism has limited us from pursuing “more significant desires: purpose, transcendence, and spiritual fulfillment.” The book tells the story of Robert Viktor Frankl and how he wrote his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning”, on scraps of stolen paper in a Nazi prison camp. Frankl argues that “man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in life”. Meaning is fundamentally human and allows us to expand the human experience to accept loyalty, religion, and belief. Meaning also allows us to look past the physical cages so many people build for themselves and find what is truly important.
”
Jon Pape wrote this review Sunday, November 25 2007.
(
reply |
permalink )
