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Click here to download from iTunes
This was a fascinating book, and I believe is making a profound case for the right brain in today’s society. I’m a left-brained geek with serious right-brained leanings. I guess I’m a “wanna be” musician, artist or designer. In fact, this book really backed up what I find so intriguing about the CPA industry; we have such opportunity to be so creative and innovative in our industry, but often hide behind our left brains punching numbers into computers thinking we are changing the world.
No matter what your field of study, clients and customers want solutions to their problems. They may need you to be a geek, but they ultimately want you to make their lives better. And that means you must be creative enough to dive into their minds, feel what they are feeling and offer tangible comfort for their daily problems.
A Whole New Mind, by Daniel H. Pink, offers some guidance on how to do just that.
To prove his point of the subtitle of the book, “why right-brainers will rule the future,” he offers three alliterative current world issues that will make you want to enroll in the next Masters of Fine Art program at your local university:
-Abundance,
-Asia, and
-Automation
Abundance speaks to the amazing amount of things available to us in such amazing different ways. Like in no other time, the defining feature of our country is Abundance. We have too much and don’t use half of what we do have. Right-brain thinkers have brought about our desire for design in the untold swath of American consumerism. In fact, design is all we have to distinguish among the huge available bounty in these great United States. Where left-brainers are offering technical problem solutions, right-brainers are telling us why we even need it.
Asia is another force pushing the West into a right-brain focus. That’s because the left-brain work is headed East. The new young engineers of India, Philippines and China are now able to perform some of the most high-tech American jobs for the same wages earned by a Taco Bell counter employee in America. Outsourcing, though controversial, is here to stay. Huge conglomerate companies such as GE now have 48% of their computer programming outsourced to Asian engineers (as cited in the book). This changes how we view life as our jobs are going away. What will we do? We will change, just like we have at every major shift in our country’s history. And we will use more of our right brains in the process.
Automation is the third huge phenomenon mentioned by Pink in describing our nation’s shift towards right-brained thinking. Computers and the rise of technology are driving our routines into the hands of computers. According to Pink, any job that is ultimately based upon routines and is performed with a sequence of steps is at risk for automation. Innovative companies are actually creating programs that can write their own code, further jeopardizing the thought processes of the left-brain.
To survive these changes, we will ultimately be forced to change along with our society’s push towards outsourced left-brain activities. Pink goes on to state the six aptitudes that we must master to survive in this move towards a right-brained era:
1. Not just function, but Design, or creating products and services that offer amazing design allowing your product to stand out among the great swaths of abundance,
2. Not just argument, but Story, or fashioning a compelling narrative allowing our brains to retain meaning longer and with greater impact,
3. Not just focus, but Symphony, or putting pieces together to create the larger reality,
4. Not just logic, but Empathy, or those that can develop the relationship and caring behind our world’s view of information processing,
5. Not just seriousness, but Play, or the underlying need for all of us to enjoy our work and life,
6. Not just accumulation, but Meaning, or obtaining what we need not for the sole reason to obtain, but to understand and properly use what we have to further develop the meaning behind our lives.
The rest of Pink’s book dives into how to understand these six senses, along with portfolio sections of the book focused on practical ways to help you develop your new six senses.
If you’ve read the book, let me know what you thought about it, whether good or bad.
