A Whole New Mind by Daniel H. Pink
Dan Pink endeavors to persuade readers to embrace their brain’s right hemisphere capabilities as our culture moves from the Information Age into the Conceptual Age. The six senses he discusses are: design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning.
As Asia, abundance and automation are changing the nature of our workforce, we must become more High Concept and High Touch if we are to succeed in the future.
High Concept is the capacity to detect patterns and opportunities, to create artistic and emotional beauty, to craft satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into something new.
High Touch is the ability to empathize, to understand subtleties, to find joy in self and elicit it in others, to stretch in pursuit of purpose and meaning.
The job market has shifted already and will continue to do so with the rise of Asian labor markets that can replace American backs and brains. Computers have also replaced blue collar workers and are now replacing white collar workers like engineers, who now must bring more creativity and design to the big picture while the computers (and lower-wage humans) work on the details.
The author also discussed other fields like medicine and law as professions requiring change as the Internet has allowed people to find diagnostic information and online forms to replace the need for left-brain tasks formerly performed by professionals.
When facts become so widely available and instantly accessible, they are less valuable than the ability to place the facts in context and deliver them with emotional impact. Story becomes the vehicle for marketing goods and services in a world of abundance.
Pink asserts that the MFA is the new MBA. IQ tests and SAT exams are only giving a clue to people’s left-brain capacity. The EQ tests that have been developed are twice as successful in predicting success in college as is the SAT.
I was intrigued by all the websites (for testing EQ, etc.) the author included in
this book, and I intend to give some of them a try. All in all – a very interesting book!