When I was a kid - growing up in a middle-class family, in
the middle of America, in the middle of the 1970s - parents dished out a
familiar plate of advice to their children: Get good grades, go to college, and
pursue a profession that offers a decent standard of living and perhaps a dollop
of prestige. If you were good at math and science, become a doctor. If you were
better at English and history, become a lawyer. If blood grossed you out and
your verbal skills needed work, become an accountant. Later, as computers
appeared on desktops and CEOs on magazine covers, the youngsters who were
really good at math and science chose high tech, while others flocked
to business school, thinking that success was spelled MBA.
Tax attorneys. Radiologists. Financial analysts. Software engineers.
Management guru Peter Drucker gave this cadre of professionals an enduring, if
somewhat wonky, name: knowledge workers. These are, he wrote, "people who get
paid for putting to work what one learns in school rather than for their
physical strength or manual skill." What distinguished members of this group and
enabled them to reap society's greatest rewards, was their "ability to acquire
and to apply theoretical and analytic knowledge." And any of us could join their
ranks. All we had to do was study hard and play by the rules of the meritocratic
regime. That was the path to professional success and personal fulfillment.
But a funny thing happened while we were pressing our noses to the
grindstone: The world changed. The future no longer belongs to people who can
reason with computer-like logic, speed, and precision. It belongs to a different
kind of person with a different kind of mind. Today - amid the uncertainties of
an economy that has gone from boom to bust to blah - there's a metaphor that
explains what's going on. And it's right inside our heads.
Scientists have long known that a neurological Mason-Dixon line cleaves our
brains into two regions - the left and right hemispheres. But in the last 10
years, thanks in part to advances in functional magnetic resonance imaging,
researchers have begun to identify more precisely how the two sides divide
responsibilities. The left hemisphere handles sequence, literalness, and
analysis. The right hemisphere, meanwhile, takes care of context, emotional
expression, and synthesis. Of course, the human brain, with its 100 billion
cells forging 1 quadrillion connections, is breathtakingly complex. The two
hemispheres work in concert, and we enlist both sides for nearly everything we
do. But the structure of our brains can help explain the contours of our
times.
Until recently, the abilities that led to success in school, work, and
business were characteristic of the left hemisphere. They were the sorts of
linear, logical, analytical talents measured by SATs and deployed by CPAs.
Today, those capabilities are still necessary. But they're no longer sufficient.
In a world upended by outsourcing, deluged with data, and choked with choices,
the abilities that matter most are now closer in spirit to the specialties of
the right hemisphere - artistry, empathy, seeing the big picture, and pursuing
the transcendent.
Beneath the nervous clatter of our half-completed decade stirs a slow but
seismic shift. The Information Age we all prepared for is ending. Rising in its
place is what I call the Conceptual Age, an era in which mastery of abilities
that we've often overlooked and undervalued marks the fault line between who
gets ahead and who falls behind.
To some of you, this shift - from an economy built on the logical, sequential
abilities of the Information Age to an economy built on the inventive, empathic
abilities of the Conceptual Age - sounds delightful. "You had me at hello!" I
can hear the painters and nurses exulting. But to others, this sounds like a
crock. "Prove it!" I hear the programmers and lawyers demanding.
OK. To convince you, I'll explain the reasons for this shift, using the
mechanistic language of cause and effect.
The effect: the scales tilting in favor of right brain-style thinking. The
causes: Asia, automation, and abundance.
Asia
Few issues today spark more controversy than outsourcing. Those squadrons of
white-collar workers in India, the Philippines, and China are scaring the
bejesus out of software jockeys across North America and Europe. According to
Forrester Research, 1 in 9 jobs in the US information technology industry will
move overseas by 2010. And it's not just tech work. Visit India's office parks
and you'll see chartered accountants preparing American tax returns, lawyers
researching American lawsuits, and radiologists reading CAT scans for US
hospitals.
The reality behind the alarm is this: Outsourcing to Asia is overhyped in the
short term, but underhyped in the long term. We're not all going to lose our
jobs tomorrow. (The total number of jobs lost to offshoring so far represents
less than 1 percent of the US labor force.) But as the cost of communicating
with the other side of the globe falls essentially to zero, as India becomes (by
2010) the country with the most English speakers in the world, and as developing
nations continue to mint millions of extremely capable knowledge workers, the
professional lives of people in the West will change dramatically. If number
crunching, chart reading, and code writing can be done for a lot less overseas
and delivered to clients instantly via fiber-optic cable, that's where the work
will go.
But these gusts of comparative advantage are blowing away only certain kinds
of white-collar jobs - those that can be reduced to a set of rules, routines,
and instructions. That's why narrow left-brain work such as basic computer
coding, accounting, legal research, and financial analysis is migrating across
the oceans. But that's also why plenty of opportunities remain for people and
companies doing less routine work - programmers who can design entire systems,
accountants who serve as life planners, and bankers expert less in the
intricacies of Excel than in the art of the deal. Now that foreigners can do
left-brain work cheaper, we in the US must do right-brain work better.
Automation
Last century, machines proved they could replace human muscle. This century,
technologies are proving they can outperform human left brains - they can
execute sequential, reductive, computational work better, faster, and more
accurately than even those with the highest IQs. (Just ask chess grandmaster
Garry Kasparov.)
Consider jobs in financial services. Stockbrokers who merely execute
transactions are history. Online trading services and market makers do such work
far more efficiently. The brokers who survived have morphed from routine
order-takers to less easily replicated advisers, who can understand a client's
broader financial objectives and even the client's emotions and dreams.
Or take lawyers. Dozens of inexpensive information and advice services are
reshaping law practice. At CompleteCase.com, you can get an uncontested divorce
for $249, less than a 10th of the cost of a divorce lawyer. Meanwhile, the Web
is cracking the information monopoly that has long been the source of many
lawyers' high incomes and professional mystique. Go to USlegalforms.com and you
can download - for the price of two movie tickets - fill-in-the-blank wills,
contracts, and articles of incorporation that used to reside exclusively on
lawyers' hard drives. Instead of hiring a lawyer for 10 hours to craft a
contract, consumers can fill out the form themselves and hire a lawyer for one
hour to look it over. Consequently, legal abilities that can't be digitized -
convincing a jury or understanding the subtleties of a negotiation - become more
valuable.
Even computer programmers may feel the pinch. "In the old days," legendary
computer scientist Vernor Vinge has said, "anybody with even routine skills
could get a job as a programmer. That isn't true anymore. The routine functions
are increasingly being turned over to machines." The result: As the scut work
gets offloaded, engineers will have to master different aptitudes, relying more
on creativity than competence.
Any job that can be reduced to a set of rules is at risk. If a $500-a-month
accountant in India doesn't swipe your accounting job, TurboTax will. Now that
computers can emulate left-hemisphere skills, we'll have to rely ever more on
our right hemispheres.
Abundance
Our left brains have made us rich. Powered by armies of Drucker's knowledge
workers, the information economy has produced a standard of living that would
have been unfathomable in our grandparents' youth. Their lives were defined by
scarcity. Ours are shaped by abundance. Want evidence? Spend five minutes at
Best Buy. Or look in your garage. Owning a car used to be a grand American
aspiration. Today, there are more automobiles in the US than there are licensed
drivers - which means that, on average, everybody who can drive has a car of
their own. And if your garage is also piled with excess consumer goods, you're
not alone. Self-storage - a business devoted to housing our extra crap - is now
a $17 billion annual industry in the US, nearly double Hollywood's yearly box
office take.
But abundance has produced an ironic result. The Information Age has
unleashed a prosperity that in turn places a premium on less rational
sensibilities - beauty, spirituality, emotion. For companies and entrepreneurs,
it's no longer enough to create a product, a service, or an experience that's
reasonably priced and adequately functional. In an age of abundance, consumers
demand something more. Check out your bathroom. If you're like a few million
Americans, you've got a Michael Graves toilet brush or a Karim Rashid trash can
that you bought at Target. Try explaining a designer garbage pail to the left
side of your brain! Or consider illumination. Electric lighting was rare a
century ago, but now it's commonplace. Yet in the US, candles are a $2 billion a
year business - for reasons that stretch beyond the logical need for luminosity
to a prosperous country's more inchoate desire for pleasure and transcendence.
Liberated by this prosperity but not fulfilled by it, more people are
searching for meaning. From the mainstream embrace of such once-exotic practices
as yoga and meditation to the rise of spirituality in the workplace to the
influence of evangelism in pop culture and politics, the quest for meaning and
purpose has become an integral part of everyday life. And that will only
intensify as the first children of abundance, the baby boomers, realize that
they have more of their lives behind them than ahead. In both business and
personal life, now that our left-brain needs have largely been sated, our
right-brain yearnings will demand to be fed.
As the forces of Asia, automation, and abundance strengthen
and accelerate, the curtain is rising on a new era, the Conceptual Age. If the
Industrial Age was built on people's backs, and the Information Age on people's
left hemispheres, the Conceptual Age is being built on people's right
hemispheres. 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, pattern recognizers, and meaning
makers.
But let me be clear: The future is not some Manichaean landscape in which
individuals are either left-brained and extinct or right-brained and ecstatic -
a land in which millionaire yoga instructors drive BMWs and programmers scrub
counters at Chick-fil-A. Logical, linear, analytic thinking remains
indispensable. But it's no longer enough.
To flourish in this age, we'll need to supplement our well-developed high
tech abilities with aptitudes that are "high concept" and "high touch." High
concept involves the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect
patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to come up with
inventions the world didn't know it was missing. High touch involves the
capacity 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.
Developing these high concept, high touch abilities won't be easy for
everyone. For some, the prospect seems unattainable. Fear not (or at least fear
less). The sorts of abilities that now matter most are fundamentally human
attributes. After all, back on the savannah, our caveperson ancestors weren't
plugging numbers into spreadsheets or debugging code. But they were telling
stories, demonstrating empathy, and designing innovations. These abilities have
always been part of what it means to be human. 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.
Want to get ahead today? Forget what your parents told you. Instead, do
something foreigners can't do cheaper. Something computers can't do faster. And
something that fills one of the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an abundant
age. In other words, go right, young man and woman, go right.
Adapted from A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information
Age to the Conceptual Age,
copyright © by Daniel H. Pink, to be published in
March by Riverhead Books. Printed with permission of the
publisher.Contributing editor Daniel H. Pink (
[email protected])
wrote about Gross National Happiness in issue
12.12. 
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