Daniel H. Pink tells you why in his book A Whole New Mind, which is one of the best books I’ve read in recent months, and also one that I don’t mind reading over and over again till I can quote his writing verbatim.
This is not a “why” book in its entirety, but also a “how” book. Pink firstly shows the differences between the left brain and its right counterpart. He then showed why right-brainers will eventually rule the world.
Next, Pink suggested 6 essential aptitudes that we ought to master to remain competitive in the future. Each chapter devoted to these essential aptitudes is then coupled with a “how-to” part, providing readers with fun ways to develop these aptitudes that he proposed.
Differences between the right brain and the left brain
I used to think the differences between the left brain and right brain is as simple as the left is logical and the right is intuitive. Of course, there’s more to that, according to the book:
Difference #1: Left brain controls the right side of the body. Vice versa. - In all honesty, I don’t see how this is relevant to his subsequent argument. But it is a nice-to-know fact.
Difference #2: The left brain is sequential, the right is simultaneous. - The left brain knows that the letter after A is B, the one after B is C. The right brain sees things at once. It knows at once that that’s called the “alphabetical order”. As Pink puts it so aptly, the “right hemisphere is the picture, the left hemisphere is the thousand words”.
Difference #3: The left brain specializes in text, the right specializes in context. - Pink illustrated this point rather aptly with an anecdote. Say your spouse discovered that you forgot to buy something, he/she then grabs the car keys and say, “I’m going to the store”. The left brain interprets it as “someone is going to the store”, but the right brain puts things into context and sees it as “someone is angry”.
Difference #4: The left brain analyzes the details, the right synthesizes the big picture.- The left brain does the analysis of information, while the right brain does the synthesis, as it is “particularly good at putting isolated elements together to perceive things as a whole”.
So, with the sufficient knowledge of what the functions of the left and the right brains are, he later showed why things that the left brain can do, will no longer be sufficient to mankind, or rather, to Americans. (Americans? Why? You’ll see it later)
Why right-brainers will rule to future?
Pink provided three good reasons:
1. Abundance - In the age of “scarcity of shortage”, if you will, there are just too many things going on or existing in the world, competing for our attention simultaneously. So, an engineer who designs a toilet brush that (in a sequential way) follows the design of a, well, toilet brush, will have a hard time selling his products.
2. Asia - More and more jobs previously held by Americans (now you know..), like computer programming, financial accounting, routing calls, are now being outsourced to Asia, to places like India, China, Singapore, and even Malaysia. With a growing number of knowledge workers in these countries, many of those jobs can be done equally well, if not better, by Asians. Of course, at a fraction of an American salary. So, the left brain jobs will appear redundant in American society in near future.
*On a personal note, Pink seems to forget that his books will eventually made their way to Asia. I’m in Asia and I’m reading this, so maybe this does not apply to a small percentage of people from Asia who had read the book (*evil grin*). I used to want to pursue engineering or management science. Now I don’t think so anymore.
3. Automation - This one seems rather obvious. Computers and machines are doing things at a faster rate, at a higher efficiency level, and they can go on and on without stopping. Computers and machines are great at sequential ability and analysis, and they will, if they haven’t already, provide an alternative to a worker specializing in left-brain oriented jobs.
So, what should the people who wants to rule the future do?
Pink proposed that we are heading towards the “Conceptual Age” in such a fashion:
Agriculture Age (farmers) → Industrial Age (factory workers) → Information Age* (knowledge worker) → Conceptual Age (creators and empathizers)
*Information Age, by the way, is where we at Malaysia are heading now. We are not even there yet! Look how far behind we are.
So Pink suggested that we ought to do something of that requires “high touch” and “high concept ability”. How to determine if something is of high touch or high concept nature? Ask yourself the following questions:
1. Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
2. Can a computer do it faster?
3. Is what I’m offering in demand in an age of abundance?
If you answer yes to question 1 and 2, and no for question 3, then it is time to change! Change, however, is already taking place. Pink noted that the Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A) is getting more popular in the US compared to the MBA, as more and more Asians are having MBAs. Also, students of medicine at Yale University are visiting the Yale Center for British Arts as part of their studies. Apparently, students who study painting develops greater ability to read patient’s expression and condition more effectively, which is a right brain ability.
So the million dollar question is how can we develop the so-called high touch and high concept ability? The previously mentioned 6 essential aptitude comes in.
The Six Essential Aptitude
1. Design
This is to overcome the problem of abundance. There is a need to design products that are not just functionally capable, but also those that are emotionally engaging or aesthetically appealing. He justified this by providing several trends that seems to corroborate the importance of design, including an anecdotal example of why he bought a designer toilet brush from Target although there are cheaper ones available at the market.
The most interesting argument in proving that design can be very important, was how Al Gore lost the presidency to George W. Bush in the US Presidential Election in 2000 due to flawed design. The Gore vs Bush race was so close that ultimately, the state Florida, or rather, a place called the Palm Beach County, became the deciding factor on who will be gain the keys to the White House. Opinion polls showed that the people favoured Gore. But the result turned out that Bush won by a mere margin of 537 vote in Florida.
Here’s when bad design comes in. The people in Palm Beach County alleged that they voted wrongly for someone else when their votes were originally intended for Gore, because of the confusing design of the “butterfly ballot”, which looks something like this (taken from Wikipedia):
The modus operandi is as simple as punching the corresponding hole for the candidate of your choice. But most people thought the hole for Bush and Gore would be at the first two. So, those who wanted to vote for Gore ended up punching the second hole (when they should punch the 3rd hole), and so the votes go to Pat Buchanan of the Reform Party.
Another description by MIT Open Course Ware
And the Palm Beach Post reported that about 2,500 Gore voters did that, casting their votes for Pat Buchanan. Had it not because of this, the history of US would be very different considering the fact that Bush won the White House office by a tiny margin of 537. More about this exciting issue here and here.
2. Story
I like this one. In an age of abundance, we are bombarded with too much information. Facts are no longer appealing or valuable as they are mere clicks away once you get to the Google home page. Pink observed that there is a need to present arguments in an emotionally compelling way. Even medicine students are taking a course called “Narrative Medicine” according to the book. The aim is, I presume, to equip medical students with the ability to tell stories.
As for me, I see this as a helpful ability in my persuasive endeavor, whether in the past or in future. I think an emotionally engaging story is the key to successful persuasion. But that’s another story for some other time.
3. Symphony
This is my favorite. It is a point which I have been using in my own mental Generalist vs Specialist debate long before I read this book. Pink suggests that specialization is a thing of the past, only useful in the industrial and information age. The new Conceptual Age demands skills and capacity to see the big picture and combine different pieces of things together. That resonates powerfully with my own understanding of what entrepreneurship is all about.
4. Empathy
I like this too. Empathy is the ability to imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes and to “intuit what that person is feeling. It enables us to understand what makes someone else ticks, and forge a lasting relationship which could bring us further.
5. Play
Pink observed the need to bring humor and light-heartedness to business and products. However, I didn’t really like his explanation, although I think humor is extremely important to present yourself to be likeable, thus forging greater relationships that could help in my persuasive endeavor. Also, playfulness could also gives us a balanced and better life. Countless research has shown that playfulness and a fun working environment can benefit professionals tremendously.
6. Meaning
Pink proposed that we have to make meaning in our lives. Growing abundance has made it possible for mankind to search for meaning. Long ago, human’s main preoccupation is to continue surviving, worrying about issues like putting food on the table, making sure there is a roof above our head, etc, etc. Today, man wants to search for meaning in life. Basically he believes we should have a purpose and meaning in everything that we do.
In a nutshell…
All in all, I love this book very much. The essential aptitudes that he proposed are rather interesting considering the fact that those are aptitudes which cannot be attained by machines and by most Asians (here comes my better-than-thou attitude again), and can find a spot to compete in an age of abundance.
Interestingly, on the day I decided to blog about his book, I saw an article about right-brainers ruling the future, during my daily feed of news from the New York Times, writen by Janet Rae-Dupree .
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Let Computers Compute. It’s the Age of the Right Brain.
I’M of two minds. As a matter of fact, so are you. And until recently, corporate America wasn’t doing much to take advantage of one of them. But now that we’re hip-deep in what has been called both the “Creative Economy” and the “Conceptual Age,” no one can afford to ignore the artist within: the right hemisphere of the brain.
Although popularized in the 1980s by the artist Betty Edwards in her book “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” the right-brain-left-brain dichotomy originated with the research of the American biologist Roger W. Sperry in the 1960s. Through studying “split brain” animals and human patients, whose brain hemispheres had been disconnected (in humans, this was done to prevent severe epileptic seizures), he found that each side of the brain plays its own role in cognition. The left side, home of the human language center, is the outspoken logical, linear half of the equation. The right side, home to spatial perception and nonverbal concepts, is the nonlinear, high-concept source of the imagination and of pleasure.
The two function cheek-by-jowl, constantly sending signals back and forth through a bundle of 200 million to 300 million nerve fibers to help balance learning, analysis and communication throughout the brain.
But now that computers can emulate many of the sequential skills of the brain’s left hemisphere — the part that sees the individual trees in a forest — the author Daniel Pink argues that it’s time for our imaginative right brain, which sees the entire forest all at once, to take center stage.
“These abilities have always been part of what it means to be human,” notes Mr. Pink, who synthesized his ideas about the new role of right-brain thinking in his 2005 book “A Whole New Mind.” “It’s just that after a few generations in the Information Age, many of our high-concept, high-touch muscles have atrophied. The challenge is to work them back into shape.”
Why bother? Because much of the left-brain-centric work that the Information Age workers of America once did — computer programming, financial accounting, routing calls — is now done more cheaply in Asia or more efficiently by computers. If it can be outsourced or automated, it probably has been.
Now the master of fine arts, or M.F.A., Mr. Pink says, “is the new M.B.A.”
He’s not the only one saying it. When General Motors hired Robert A. Lutz in 2001 to whip its product development into shape, he told The New York Times about his new approach. “It’s more right brain. It’s more creative,” he said.
“I see us as being in the art business,” he said, “art, entertainment and mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also happens to provide transportation.”
When a car company like G.M. is in the art business, every company in any other industry is, too.
So it makes sense that business executives are turning to the original pop culture icon of right-brain thinking, “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” for guidance into their right minds. Ms. Edwards retired in 1998, but her son, Brian Bomeisler, teaches scores of corporate and public workshops each year.
The list of companies Mr. Bomeisler has worked with is a Who’s Who of the Fortune 500. “That corny phrase ‘thinking outside the box,’ that’s what I do for corporations,” he says. “In teaching them how to draw, I’m teaching them an entirely new way to see. They unbox their minds and absorb what’s really there, with all of the complexity and beauty. One of the common phrases that students use afterward is that the world appears to be so much richer.”
During a two-day workshop with Halliburton Energy Services, Mr. Bomeisler watched as a team’s drawings slowly revealed an obvious solution to a longstanding problem. Team members realized from drawing that they had been enjoying their special status as a task force and had become so fascinated with the problem before them that they were in no hurry to solve it. This was resolved after management set a strict deadline and promised the group equally intriguing problems in the future.
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