A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future

by Daniel H. Pink

  Automation is also changing the work of many doctors. Much of medical diagnosis amounts to following a series of decision trees—Is it a dry cough or a productive one? Is the T-cell count above or below a certain level?—and honing in on the answer. Computers can process the binary logic of decision trees with a swiftness and accuracy humans can’t begin to approach. So an array of software and online programs has emerged that allow patients to answer a series of questions on their computer screens and arrive at a preliminary diagnosis without the assistance of a physician. Health care consumers have begun to use such tools both to “figure out their risk of serious diseases—such as heart failure, coronary artery disease and some of the most common cancers—[and] to make life-and-death treatment decisions once they are diagnosed,” reports the Wall Street Journal.29 At the same time, there’s been an explosion of electronic databases of medical and health information. In a typical year, about 100 million people worldwide go online for health and medical information and visit more than 23,000 medical Web sites.30 As patients self-diagnose and tap the same reservoir of information available to physicians, these tools are transforming the doctor’s role from omniscient purveyor of solutions to empathic advisor on options. Of course, the day-to-day work of physicians often involves challenges too complex for software alone—and we’ll still rely on experienced doctors to diagnose unusual diseases. But, as I’ll show later in this book, these developments are changing the emphasis of many medical practices—away from routine, analytical, and information-based work and toward empathy, narrative medicine, and holistic care.

  A similar pattern is unfolding in the legal profession. Dozens of inexpensive information and advice services are reshaping law practice. For example, CompleteCase.com, which calls itself “the premier online uncontested divorce service center,” will handle your divorce for a mere $249. At the same time, the Web is cracking the information monopoly that has long been the source of many lawyers’ high incomes and professional mystique. Attorneys charge an average of $180 per hour. But many Web sites—for instance, Lawvantage.com and USLegalforms.com—now offer basic legal forms and other documents for as little as $14.95. As The New York Times reports, “Instead of asking lawyers to draft contracts at a cost of several thousand dollars,” clients now find the proper forms online—and then take “the generic documents to lawyers, who customize them at a cost of several hundred dollars apiece.” The result, says the Times, is that the legal industry “may be on the verge of fundamental changes . . . [that] could reduce the demand for traditional services and force lawyers to lower fees.”31 The attorneys who remain will be those who can tackle far more complex problems and those who can provide something that databases and software cannot—counseling, mediation, courtroom storytelling, and other services that depend on R-Directed Thinking.

  TO RECAP, three forces are tilting the scales in favor of R-Directed Thinking. Abundance has satisfied, and even oversatisfied, the material needs of millions—boosting the significance of beauty and emotion and accelerating individuals’ search for meaning. Asia is now performing large amounts of routine, white-collar, L-Directed work at significantly lower costs, thereby forcing knowledge workers in the advanced world to master abilities that can’t be shipped overseas. And automation has begun to affect this generation’s white-collar workers in much the same way it did last generation’s blue-collar workers, requiring L-Directed professionals to develop aptitudes that computers can’t do better, faster, or cheaper.

  So what happens next? What happens to us as our lives get clipped by automation and Asia—and reconfigured by abundance? I’ll examine that in the next chapter.

  Three

  HIGH CONCEPT,

  HIGH TOUCH

  Think of the last 150 years as a three-act drama.

  In Act I, the Industrial Age, massive factories and efficient assembly lines powered the economy. The lead character in this act was the mass production worker, whose cardinal traits were physical strength and personal fortitude.

  In Act II, the Information Age, the United States and other nations began to evolve. Mass production faded into the background, while information and knowledge fueled the economies of the developed world. The central figure in this act was the knowledge worker, whose defining characteristic was proficiency in L-Directed Thinking.

  Now, as the forces of Abundance, Asia, and Automation deepen and intensify, the curtain is rising on Act III. Call this act the Conceptual Age. The main characters now are the creator and the empathizer, whose distinctive ability is mastery of R-Directed Thinking.

  I’ve depicted this progression in Figure 3.1, broadening the story to include the Industrial Age’s predecessor, the Agriculture Age. The horizontal axis shows time. The vertical axis shows a combination of affluence, technological progress, and globalization (what I’ve shorthanded ATG). As individuals grow richer, as technologies become more powerful, and as the world grows more connected, these three forces eventually gather enough collective momentum to nudge us into a new era. That is how, over time, we moved from the Agriculture Age to the Industrial Age to the Information Age. The latest instance of this pattern is today’s transition from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age once again fed by affluence (the abundance thatcharacterizes Western life), technological progress (the automation of several kinds of white-collar work), and globalization (certain types of knowledge work moving to Asia).

  Figure 3.1

  FROM THE AGRICULTURE AGE TO THE CONCEPTUAL AGE

  In short, we’ve progressed from a society of farmers to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers. And now we’re progressing yet again—to a society of creators and empathizers, of pattern recognizers and meaning makers.

  Figure 3.2 depicts this same evolution, but in a way that might speak more to the right side of your brain.

  Figure 3.2

  And if a picture is worth a thousand words, a metaphor is worth a thousand pictures. We’ve moved from an economy built on people’s backs to an economy built on people’s left brains to what is emerging today: an economy and society built more and more on people’s right brains.

  When economies and societies depended on factories and mass production, R-Directed Thinking was mostly irrelevant. Then as we moved to knowledge work, R-Directed Thinking came to be recognized as legitimate, though still secondary, to the preferred mode of L-Directed Thinking. Now, as North America, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan evolve once again, R-Directed Thinking is beginning to achieve social and economic parity—and, in many cases, primacy. In the twenty-first century, it has become the first among equals, the key to professional achievement and personal satisfaction.

  But let me be clear: the future is not some Manichean world in which individuals are either left-brained and extinct or right-brained and ecstatic—a land in which millionaire potters drive BMWs and computer programmers scrub counters at Chick-fil-A. L-Directed Thinking remains indispensable. It’s just no longer sufficient. In the Conceptual Age, what we need instead is a whole new mind.

  High Concept and High Touch

  To survive in this age, individuals and organizations must examine what they’re doing to earn a living and ask themselves three 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 your answer to question 1 or 2 is yes, or if your answer to question 3 is no, you’re in deep trouble. Mere survival today depends on being able to do something that overseas knowledge workers can’t do cheaper, that powerful computers can’t do faster, and that satisfies one of the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an abundant age.

  That is why high tech is no longer enough. We’ll need to supplement our well-developed high-tech abilities with abilities that are high concept and high touch. (As I mentioned in the Introduction, high concept involves the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect p
atterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into a novel invention. High touch involves the ability to empathize, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one’s self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian, in pursuit of purpose and meaning.)1

  High concept and high touch are on the rise throughout the world economy and society. But for the most persuasive evidence, it helps to look in the most unlikely places. Take medical schools, long a bastion for those with the best grades, highest test scores, and the keenest powers of analytical thinking. Today, the curriculum at American medical schools is undergoing its greatest change in a generation. Students at Columbia University Medical School and elsewhere are being trained in “narrative medicine,” because research has revealed that despite the power of computer diagnostics, an important part of a diagnosis is contained in a patient’s story. At the Yale School of Medicine, students are honing their powers of observation at the Yale Center for British Art, because students who study paintings excel at noticing subtle details about a patient’s condition. Meantime, more than fifty medical schools across the United States have incorporated spirituality into their coursework. UCLA Medical School has established a Hospital Overnight Program, in which second-year students are admitted to the hospital overnight with fictitious ailments. The purpose of this playacting? “To develop medical students’ empathy for patients,” says the school. Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia has even developed a new measure of physician effectiveness—an empathy index.2

  Or leave American teaching hospitals and head for the world’s second largest economy. Japan, which rose from the ashes of World War II thanks to its intense emphasis on L-Directed Thinking, is now reconsidering the source of its national strength. Although Japanese students lead the world in math and science scores, many in Japan suspect that the nation’s unrelenting focus on schoolbook academics might be an outdated approach. So the country is remaking its vaunted education system to foster greater creativity, artistry, and play. Little wonder. Japan’s most lucrative export these days isn’t autos or electronics. It’s pop culture.3Meanwhile, in response to the mind-melting academic pressures on Japanese youth, the Education Ministry has been pushing students to reflect on the meaning and mission of their lives, encouraging what it calls “education of the heart.”

  Then, when you’ve returned from Japan, check out a third unlikely setting—the mammoth multinational General Motors. A few years ago, GM hired a man named Robert Lutz to help turn around the ailing automaker. Bob Lutz is not exactly a touchy-feely, artsyfartsy kind of guy. He’s a craggy, white-haired white man in his seventies. During his career, he’s been an executive at each of the big three American automakers. He looks and acts like a marine, which he once was. He smokes cigars. He flies his own plane. He believes global warming is a myth peddled by the environmental movement. But when Lutz took over his post at beleaguered GM, and The New York Times asked him how his approach would differ from that of his predecessors, here’s how he responded: “It’s more right brain. . . . I see us being in the art business. Art, entertainment and mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also happens to provide transportation.”4

  Let that comment settle in for a moment. General Motors—an exemplar not even of the Information Age but of the Industrial Age—says it’s in the art business. The art business. And the person leading GM into this right-brain world isn’t some beret-topped artiste but a seventy-something piss-and-vinegar former marine. To paraphrase Buffalo Springfield, there’s something happening here—and what it is is becoming more clear. High-concept and high-touch aptitudes are moving from the periphery of our lives to the center.

  MBAs and MFAs

  Getting admitted to Harvard Business School is a cinch. At least that’s what several hundred people must think each year after they apply to the graduate program of the UCLA Department of Art—and don’t get in. While Harvard’s MBA program admits about 10 percent of its applicants, UCLA’s fine arts graduate school admits only 3 percent. Why? A master of fine arts, an MFA, is now one of the hottest credentials in a world where even General Motors is in the art business. Corporate recruiters have begun visiting the top arts grad schools—places such as the Rhode Island School of Design, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Michigan’s Cranbrook Academy of Art—in search of talent. And this broadened approach has often come at the expense of more traditional business graduates. For instance, in 1993, 61 percent of management consultancy McKinsey’s recruits had MBA degrees. Less than a decade later, it was down to 43 percent, because McKinsey says other disciplines are just as valuable in helping new hires perform well at the firm. With applications climbing and ever more arts grads occupying key corporate positions, the rules have changed: the MFA is the new MBA.

  The reasons for this go back to two of the forces I explained in the previous chapter. Because of Asia, many MBA graduates are becoming this century’s blue-collar workers—people who entered a workforce full of promise, only to see their jobs move overseas. Investment banks, as we learned, are hiring MBAs in India to handle financial analysis. A. T. Kearney estimates that in the next five years, U.S. financial services companies will transfer a half-million jobs to low-cost locales such as India. As the Economist put it, the sorts of entry-level MBA tasks that “would once have been foisted on ambitious but inexperienced young recruits, working long hours to earn their spurs in Wall Street or the City of London, are, thanks to the miracle of fibre-optic cable, foisted on their lower-paid Indian counterparts.” At the same time, because of Abundance, businesses are realizing that the only way to differentiate their goods and services in today’s overstocked marketplace is to make their offerings physically beautiful and emotionally compelling. Thus the high-concept abilities of an artist are often more valuable than the easily replicated L-Directed skills of an entry-level business graduate.

  In the middle of the last century, Charlie Wilson, a GM executive who became U.S. defense secretary, famously remarked that what was good for General Motors was good for America. It’s time to update Wilson’s maxim for a new century. What is happening to General Motors is happening to America—and what is happening to America is happening in many other countries. Today we’re all in the art business.

  In the United States, the number of graphic designers has increased tenfold in a decade; graphic designers outnumber chemical engineers by four to one. Since 1970, the United States has 30 percent more people earning a living as writers and 50 percent more earning a living by composing or performing music. Some 240 U.S. universities have established creative writing MFA programs, up from fewer than twenty two decades ago.5 More Americans today work in arts, entertainment, and design than work as lawyers, accountants, and auditors.6 (A sign of these new times is a young venture in Alexandria, Virginia. When routine legal research goes overseas and basic legal information is available online, what’s left for the litigious? High-concept work like that done by Animators at Law, a graphic design firm staffed by law graduates that prepares exhibits, videos, and visual aids to help top trial attorneys persuade juries.)

  In 2002, Carnegie Mellon University urban planner Richard Florida identified a group of 38 million Americans that he labeled the “creative class” and claimed were the key to economic development. Although Florida’s definition of “creative” was bizarrely expansive—he includes accountants, insurance adjusters, and tax attorneys as “creatives”—the growth of this class’s ranks is hard to ignore. Its share of the U.S. workforce has doubled since 1980 and is ten times what it was a century ago.7 A similar trend toward high-concept work is afoot elsewhere in the world. Using a more sensible definition of “creative”—to include fifteen industries from design to performing arts to research and development to video games—British analyst John Howkins estimates that the creative sector in the United Kingdom is producing nearly $200 billion of goods and services each year. Howkins calculates that within f
ifteen years, this sector will be worth about $6.1 trillion internationally, making High Concept Nation one of the largest economies in the world.8 Meantime, British organizations such as the London Business School and the Yorkshire Water Company have established artist-in-residence programs. Unilever UK employs painters, poets, and comic book creators to inspire the rest of its staff. One North London football club even has its own poet in residence.

  But art in the traditional sense is neither the only, nor the most important, component of these emerging whole-minded aptitudes. Go back to those Information Age rock stars, computer programmers. The outsourcing of routine software work is putting a new premium on software engineers with high-concept abilities. As the Lalits and Kavitas of the world take over the routine work of software fabrication, maintenance, testing, and upgrading, Conceptual Age software types will concentrate on novelty and nuance. After all, before the Indian programmers have something to fabricate, maintain, test, or upgrade, that something first must be imagined or invented. And these creations must then be explained and tailored to customers and entered into the swirl of commerce, all of which require aptitudes that can’t be reduced to a set of rules on a spec sheet—ingenuity, personal rapport, and gut instinct.