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I thoroughly disagree with the premise. First, the idea of right-brain
/ left-brain has been thoroughly discounted. Second, the author is
creating a false dichotomy. Most technical people are creative and
artistic. Both my brother (Ph.D., chemical engineering) and my son
(mechanical engineering) play jazz guitar. <br>
Lynn<br>
<br>
Premise Checker wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="midPine.NEB.4.62.0504241610540.24745@panix1.panix.com">Revenge
of the Right Brain
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/brain_pr.html">http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/brain_pr.html</a>
<br>
<br>
Logical and precise, left-brain thinking gave us the Information
Age.
<br>
Now comes the Conceptual Age - ruled by artistry, empathy, and
<br>
emotion.
<br>
By Daniel H. Pink
<br>
<br>
When I was a kid - growing up in a middle-class family, in the
middle
<br>
of America, in the middle of the 1970s - parents dished out a
familiar
<br>
plate of advice to their children: Get good grades, go to college,
and
<br>
pursue a profession that offers a decent standard of living and
<br>
perhaps a dollop of prestige. If you were good at math and science,
<br>
become a doctor. If you were better at English and history, become a
<br>
lawyer. If blood grossed you out and your verbal skills needed work,
<br>
become an accountant. Later, as computers appeared on desktops and
<br>
CEOs on magazine covers, the youngsters who were really good at math
<br>
and science chose high tech, while others flocked to business
school,
<br>
thinking that success was spelled MBA.
<br>
<br>
Tax attorneys. Radiologists. Financial analysts. Software engineers.
<br>
Management guru Peter Drucker gave this cadre of professionals an
<br>
enduring, if somewhat wonky, name: knowledge workers. These are, he
<br>
wrote, "people who get paid for putting to work what one learns in
<br>
school rather than for their physical strength or manual skill."
What
<br>
distinguished members of this group and enabled them to reap
society's
<br>
greatest rewards, was their "ability to acquire and to apply
<br>
theoretical and analytic knowledge." And any of us could join their
<br>
ranks. All we had to do was study hard and play by the rules of the
<br>
meritocratic regime. That was the path to professional success and
<br>
personal fulfillment.
<br>
<br>
But a funny thing happened while we were pressing our noses to the
<br>
grindstone: The world changed. The future no longer belongs to
people
<br>
who can reason with computer-like logic, speed, and precision. It
<br>
belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind.
<br>
Today - amid the uncertainties of an economy that has gone from boom
<br>
to bust to blah - there's a metaphor that explains what's going on.
<br>
And it's right inside our heads.
<br>
<br>
Scientists have long known that a neurological Mason-Dixon line
<br>
cleaves our brains into two regions - the left and right
hemispheres.
<br>
But in the last 10 years, thanks in part to advances in functional
<br>
magnetic resonance imaging, researchers have begun to identify more
<br>
precisely how the two sides divide responsibilities. The left
<br>
hemisphere handles sequence, literalness, and analysis. The right
<br>
hemisphere, meanwhile, takes care of context, emotional expression,
<br>
and synthesis. Of course, the human brain, with its 100 billion
cells
<br>
forging 1 quadrillion connections, is breathtakingly complex. The
two
<br>
hemispheres work in concert, and we enlist both sides for nearly
<br>
everything we do. But the structure of our brains can help explain
the
<br>
contours of our times.
<br>
<br>
Until recently, the abilities that led to success in school, work,
and
<br>
business were characteristic of the left hemisphere. They were the
<br>
sorts of linear, logical, analytical talents measured by SATs and
<br>
deployed by CPAs. Today, those capabilities are still necessary. But
<br>
they're no longer sufficient. In a world upended by outsourcing,
<br>
deluged with data, and choked with choices, the abilities that
matter
<br>
most are now closer in spirit to the specialties of the right
<br>
hemisphere - artistry, empathy, seeing the big picture, and pursuing
<br>
the transcendent.
<br>
<br>
Beneath the nervous clatter of our half-completed decade stirs a
slow
<br>
but seismic shift. The Information Age we all prepared for is
ending.
<br>
Rising in its place is what I call the Conceptual Age, an era in
which
<br>
mastery of abilities that we've often overlooked and undervalued
marks
<br>
the fault line between who gets ahead and who falls behind.
<br>
<br>
To some of you, this shift - from an economy built on the logical,
<br>
sequential abilities of the Information Age to an economy built on
the
<br>
inventive, empathic abilities of the Conceptual Age - sounds
<br>
delightful. "You had me at hello!" I can hear the painters and
nurses
<br>
exulting. But to others, this sounds like a crock. "Prove it!" I
hear
<br>
the programmers and lawyers demanding.
<br>
<br>
OK. To convince you, I'll explain the reasons for this shift, using
<br>
the mechanistic language of cause and effect.
<br>
<br>
The effect: the scales tilting in favor of right brain-style
thinking.
<br>
The causes: Asia, automation, and abundance.
<br>
<br>
Asia
<br>
<br>
Few issues today spark more controversy than outsourcing. Those
<br>
squadrons of white-collar workers in India, the Philippines, and
China
<br>
are scaring the bejesus out of software jockeys across North America
<br>
and Europe. According to Forrester Research, 1 in 9 jobs in the US
<br>
information technology industry will move overseas by 2010. And it's
<br>
not just tech work. Visit India's office parks and you'll see
<br>
chartered accountants preparing American tax returns, lawyers
<br>
researching American lawsuits, and radiologists reading CAT scans
for
<br>
US hospitals.
<br>
<br>
The reality behind the alarm is this: Outsourcing to Asia is
overhyped
<br>
in the short term, but underhyped in the long term. We're not all
<br>
going to lose our jobs tomorrow. (The total number of jobs lost to
<br>
offshoring so far represents less than 1 percent of the US labor
<br>
force.) But as the cost of communicating with the other side of the
<br>
globe falls essentially to zero, as India becomes (by 2010) the
<br>
country with the most English speakers in the world, and as
developing
<br>
nations continue to mint millions of extremely capable knowledge
<br>
workers, the professional lives of people in the West will change
<br>
dramatically. If number crunching, chart reading, and code writing
can
<br>
be done for a lot less overseas and delivered to clients instantly
via
<br>
fiber-optic cable, that's where the work will go.
<br>
<br>
But these gusts of comparative advantage are blowing away only
certain
<br>
kinds of white-collar jobs - those that can be reduced to a set of
<br>
rules, routines, and instructions. That's why narrow left-brain work
<br>
such as basic computer coding, accounting, legal research, and
<br>
financial analysis is migrating across the oceans. But that's also
why
<br>
plenty of opportunities remain for people and companies doing less
<br>
routine work - programmers who can design entire systems,
accountants
<br>
who serve as life planners, and bankers expert less in the
intricacies
<br>
of Excel than in the art of the deal. Now that foreigners can do
<br>
left-brain work cheaper, we in the US must do right-brain work
better.
<br>
<br>
Automation
<br>
<br>
Last century, machines proved they could replace human muscle. This
<br>
century, technologies are proving they can outperform human left
<br>
brains - they can execute sequential, reductive, computational work
<br>
better, faster, and more accurately than even those with the highest
<br>
IQs. (Just ask chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.)
<br>
<br>
Consider jobs in financial services. Stockbrokers who merely execute
<br>
transactions are history. Online trading services and market makers
do
<br>
such work far more efficiently. The brokers who survived have
morphed
<br>
from routine order-takers to less easily replicated advisers, who
can
<br>
understand a client's broader financial objectives and even the
<br>
client's emotions and dreams.
<br>
<br>
Or take lawyers. Dozens of inexpensive information and advice
services
<br>
are reshaping law practice. At CompleteCase.com, you can get an
<br>
uncontested divorce for $249, less than a 10th of the cost of a
<br>
divorce lawyer. Meanwhile, the Web is cracking the information
<br>
monopoly that has long been the source of many lawyers' high incomes
<br>
and professional mystique. Go to USlegalforms.com and you can
download
<br>
- for the price of two movie tickets - fill-in-the-blank wills,
<br>
contracts, and articles of incorporation that used to reside
<br>
exclusively on lawyers' hard drives. Instead of hiring a lawyer for
10
<br>
hours to craft a contract, consumers can fill out the form
themselves
<br>
and hire a lawyer for one hour to look it over. Consequently, legal
<br>
abilities that can't be digitized - convincing a jury or
understanding
<br>
the subtleties of a negotiation - become more valuable.
<br>
<br>
Even computer programmers may feel the pinch. "In the old days,"
<br>
legendary computer scientist Vernor Vinge has said, "anybody with
even
<br>
routine skills could get a job as a programmer. That isn't true
<br>
anymore. The routine functions are increasingly being turned over to
<br>
machines." The result: As the scut work gets offloaded, engineers
will
<br>
have to master different aptitudes, relying more on creativity than
<br>
competence.
<br>
<br>
Any job that can be reduced to a set of rules is at risk. If a
<br>
$500-a-month accountant in India doesn't swipe your accounting job,
<br>
TurboTax will. Now that computers can emulate left-hemisphere
skills,
<br>
we'll have to rely ever more on our right hemispheres.
<br>
<br>
Abundance
<br>
<br>
Our left brains have made us rich. Powered by armies of Drucker's
<br>
knowledge workers, the information economy has produced a standard
of
<br>
living that would have been unfathomable in our grandparents' youth.
<br>
Their lives were defined by scarcity. Ours are shaped by abundance.
<br>
Want evidence? Spend five minutes at Best Buy. Or look in your
garage.
<br>
Owning a car used to be a grand American aspiration. Today, there
are
<br>
more automobiles in the US than there are licensed drivers - which
<br>
means that, on average, everybody who can drive has a car of their
<br>
own. And if your garage is also piled with excess consumer goods,
<br>
you're not alone. Self-storage - a business devoted to housing our
<br>
extra crap - is now a $17 billion annual industry in the US, nearly
<br>
double Hollywood's yearly box office take.
<br>
<br>
But abundance has produced an ironic result. The Information Age has
<br>
unleashed a prosperity that in turn places a premium on less
rational
<br>
sensibilities - beauty, spirituality, emotion. For companies and
<br>
entrepreneurs, it's no longer enough to create a product, a service,
<br>
or an experience that's reasonably priced and adequately functional.
<br>
In an age of abundance, consumers demand something more. Check out
<br>
your bathroom. If you're like a few million Americans, you've got a
<br>
Michael Graves toilet brush or a Karim Rashid trash can that you
<br>
bought at Target. Try explaining a designer garbage pail to the left
<br>
side of your brain! Or consider illumination. Electric lighting was
<br>
rare a century ago, but now it's commonplace. Yet in the US, candles
<br>
are a $2 billion a year business - for reasons that stretch beyond
the
<br>
logical need for luminosity to a prosperous country's more inchoate
<br>
desire for pleasure and transcendence.
<br>
<br>
Liberated by this prosperity but not fulfilled by it, more people
are
<br>
searching for meaning. From the mainstream embrace of such
once-exotic
<br>
practices as yoga and meditation to the rise of spirituality in the
<br>
workplace to the influence of evangelism in pop culture and
politics,
<br>
the quest for meaning and purpose has become an integral part of
<br>
everyday life. And that will only intensify as the first children of
<br>
abundance, the baby boomers, realize that they have more of their
<br>
lives behind them than ahead. In both business and personal life,
now
<br>
that our left-brain needs have largely been sated, our right-brain
<br>
yearnings will demand to be fed.
<br>
<br>
As the forces of Asia, automation, and abundance strengthen and
<br>
accelerate, the curtain is rising on a new era, the Conceptual Age.
If
<br>
the Industrial Age was built on people's backs, and the Information
<br>
Age on people's left hemispheres, the Conceptual Age is being built
on
<br>
people's right hemispheres. We've progressed from a society of
farmers
<br>
to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers.
And
<br>
now we're progressing yet again - to a society of creators and
<br>
empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers.
<br>
<br>
But let me be clear: The future is not some Manichaean landscape in
<br>
which individuals are either left-brained and extinct or
right-brained
<br>
and ecstatic - a land in which millionaire yoga instructors drive
BMWs
<br>
and programmers scrub counters at Chick-fil-A. Logical, linear,
<br>
analytic thinking remains indispensable. But it's no longer enough.
<br>
<br>
To flourish in this age, we'll need to supplement our well-developed
<br>
high tech abilities with aptitudes that are "high concept" and "high
<br>
touch." High concept involves the ability to create artistic and
<br>
emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a
<br>
satisfying narrative, and to come up with inventions the world
didn't
<br>
know it was missing. High touch involves the capacity to empathize,
to
<br>
understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one's
<br>
self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian
<br>
in pursuit of purpose and meaning.
<br>
<br>
Developing these high concept, high touch abilities won't be easy
for
<br>
everyone. For some, the prospect seems unattainable. Fear not (or at
<br>
least fear less). The sorts of abilities that now matter most are
<br>
fundamentally human attributes. After all, back on the savannah, our
<br>
caveperson ancestors weren't plugging numbers into spreadsheets or
<br>
debugging code. But they were telling stories, demonstrating
empathy,
<br>
and designing innovations. These abilities have always been part of
<br>
what it means to be human. It's just that after a few generations in
<br>
the Information Age, many of our high concept, high touch muscles
have
<br>
atrophied. The challenge is to work them back into shape.
<br>
<br>
Want to get ahead today? Forget what your parents told you. Instead,
<br>
do something foreigners can't do cheaper. Something computers can't
do
<br>
faster. And something that fills one of the nonmaterial,
transcendent
<br>
desires of an abundant age. In other words, go right, young man and
<br>
woman, go right.
<br>
<br>
Adapted from A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to
the
<br>
Conceptual Age, copyright © by Daniel H. Pink, to be published in
<br>
March by Riverhead Books. Printed with permission of the publisher.
<br>
Contributing editor Daniel H. Pink (<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:dp@danpink.com">dp@danpink.com</a>) wrote about
Gross
<br>
National Happiness in issue 12.1<br>
2.<br>
<pre wrap="">
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</blockquote>
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