The 20th century economy was dominated by left-brain thinkers ?the lawyers, accountants, engineers, and software programmers whose work relies on the linear, logical parts of their minds.
The Conceptual Age Has Arrived
The 20th century economy was dominated by left-brain thinkers ? the lawyers, accountants, engineers, and software programmers whose work relies on the linear, logical parts of their minds.
The 21st century economy is rapidly unfolding as an age of right-brain thinking, dominated by creators, artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, and visionaries. These are the people who search for meaning, identify opportunities, recognize patterns, create new ideas, and empathize with other people.
The Trends editors have been tracking this trend for more than a decade and it was echoed in Harry S. Dent Jr.’s 1995 book, The Great Jobs Ahead. However, this emerging idea is most eloquently expressed by Daniel H. Pink in his new book, A Whole New Mind. He is a very insightful analyst who made a name for himself as author of the book, Free Agent Nation, and as a contributing editor for Wired magazine. Pink contends that we are moving from the current “Information Age” to what he calls the “Conceptual Age.” This transition is driven by three enormous economic forces:
- Material abundance - The emergence of Asia - Availability of automation
Let’s begin with abundance. As Pink points out, the American dream during the 20th century was to own a home and a car. Today, more than two-thirds of Americans own homes, and 13 percent of U. S. homes are purchased as second homes. Similarly, there are already more cars in the U.S. than licensed drivers
As a result of this abundance, self-storage, which is a business devoted to providing a place for people to store their extra belongings, is now a $17 billion industry, larger than the film industry. Moreover, we have become so accustomed to abundance that when we run out of room, we simply throw things away. As Fast Company reported, “The United States spends more on trash bags than 90 other countries spend on everything. In other words, the receptacles of our waste cost more than all of the goods consumed by nearly of half the world’s nations.”
This abundance has largely satisfied the demand for functional material goods, and created a demand for spiritual meaning, beauty, and elegant design. When there are dozens ? or even hundreds ? of competing brands in a product category, how can consumers decide which one to choose? Increasingly, they are opting for aesthetically pleasing products rather than merely functional ones.
Consider the mundane designer goods available at retailers like Target, such as the $6 toilet brush designed by Michael Graves or the polypropylene wastebasket created by Karim Rashid. Graves is an architecture professor at Princeton, and is considered one of the world’s most innovative product designers. By offering designer versions of everyday objects, Target is tapping into a huge demand for beautifully designed products. That’s why Target and other stores have sold nearly three million units of Rashid’s designer wastebasket.
Or consider candles: It would seem as illogical to market candles today, in a nation that has been wired for electric lighting for generations, as it would be to sell buggy whips in a car culture. And yet, Americans spend $2.4 billion on candles every year, according to American Demographics. This is proof, according to Pink, that Americans “strive for beauty and transcendence.”
And speaking of cars, even General Motors is recognizing the need to think of its business in a new way. When Bob Lutz took control of GM, he told The New York Times the biggest change he would make is this: “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.” To solidify GM’s move from the car business to the art business, Lutz hired sculptors to design new car models.
The second force that is driving the move to the Conceptual Age is Asia. Specifically, Asia is the destination for many of America’s outsourcing initiatives, which are transforming the way we live and work. More than half of all Fortune 500 companies already outsource some software jobs to India. Companies like General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, and Oracle employ thousands of computer programmers and software engineers in India, tapping into a supply of 350,000 engineering graduates each year. Similarly, China is now producing as many engineering graduates per year as the U.S.
The reason for the international outsourcing trend, as we’ve discussed previously in Trends, is the potential for huge cost savings in labor-intensive functions. While a chip designer makes an average of $7,000 a month in the U.S., a person in the same job earns $1,000 in India. The average pay for an aerospace engineer is $6,000 per month in the U.S., and 90 percent less in Russia. And an American accountant can expect to earn $5,000 a month in the U.S., while an accountant in the Philippines is grateful to take home $300 a month, according to Business Week.
By 2010, one-fourth of American IT jobs will be sent off-shore, according to the Financial Times. Similarly, at least 3.3 million white-collar jobs, representing $136 billion in wages, will move from the U.S. to India, China, and Russia by 2015, Forrester Research predicts.
Because these jobs can be performed more cheaply overseas, it’s safe to assume that they will go. This is no different than the shift of mass production work overseas in the past few decades. Now, as then, American workers will have to learn new skills in order to stay productive and maintain their tremendous standard of living.
And, once again, U.S. workers will have to find ways to add value that can’t be matched more cheaply overseas. We’ll discuss how they’ll do so later in this program.
The third major force pushing us from the Information Age into the Conceptual Age is automation. As Pink warns, “If a $500-a-month Indian chartered accountant doesn’t swipe your comfortable accounting job, TurboTax will.”
The truth is that computers are even more logical than the most left-brained human being. For example, in 1997 the world’s best chess player, Garry Kasparov, lost to IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer. Even the best human chess players are vulnerable to emotions, health problems, anxiety, second guesses, and so on. Software isn’t prone to any of those weaknesses.
What’s more, software can process information and make logical leaps at an astounding speed, compared to human limitations. Kasparov crushes human opponents with his ability to analyze one to three moves per second. Today’s fastest chess-playing computer, Israel’s “Deep Junior,” can analyze two to three million chess moves in a single second.
This means that as their work becomes automated, American workers will have to focus on excelling in areas that can’t be done faster or cheaper by software.
Based on these three forces, executives and professionals should consider their own jobs and their own business models and ask three questions:
- Can someone overseas do
the same work for
less money?
- Can software do the
same work in less time?
- Can people do without
what I’m offering in an
age of abundance?
If your answer to any of these questions is yes, you’re at serious risk of becoming obsolete. The way to survive is to develop your right-brain skills.
Pink asserts that people will need to develop six essential aptitudes to get ahead in the Conceptual Age:
Design: Instead of creating a product that is simply functional, business people will need to create something that appeals to the consumer’s emotions or desire for beauty.
Story: Instead of just putting together a logical argument based on data, the way to persuade others will increasingly rely on the ability to craft an interesting story.
Symphony: Instead of exclusively focusing on a specialized part of the whole, business people will need to increasingly bring all the pieces together.
Empathy: Because nearly everyone has the same information and analytic tools, logic alone won’t give anyone a competitive advantage; instead, winners will rise above the competition by displaying the ability to understand people and show that they care about them.
Play: Rather than always taking a serious approach to life and to work, successful people will increasingly discover the benefits of being light-hearted and humorous.
Meaning: At a time when most people can easily satisfy their material needs with an abundance of high-quality goods, it will become increasingly important to pursue higher goals that provide purpose and spiritual fulfillment.
Building these six aptitudes will become the primary concern of most people in business.
Looking ahead, we offer the following four forecasts related to the approaching Conceptual Age:
First, in recruiting new talent, corporations will shift their emphasis away from candidates with traditional MBA skills and seek graduates with a broader, more arts-oriented skill set. Pink declares that “the MFA is the new MBA” based on the fact that leading companies are already recruiting at the nation’s top art schools. For example, at McKinsey and Company, the percentage of MBAs among the new management consultants the firm has hired has dropped from 61 percent to 43 percent over the last decade. The consulting firm has found that recruits with a non-business education are just as likely to make a valuable contribution as are MBAs. According to The Economist, because of the off-shoring, much of the work that entry-level MBAs once did for the world’s top corporations is now being performed by low-paid MBAs in India. And because of our material abundance, consumers are increasingly demanding products that are beautifully designed and emotionally meaningful ? which are exactly the qualities that an artist can bring to the business world.
Second, in professions, such as medicine, accounting, and law, success will increasingly depend on developing right-brain thinking instead of the traditional reliance on the left brain. The force of automation is moving many of the tasks of these professions to Web sites and software. For example, much of a physician’s job is based on applied logic: examining patients, assessing symptoms, making diagnoses, and prescribing treatments. A certain combination of symptoms leads to the logical conclusion that a patient has a particular disease, which in turn leads to the logical selection of a treatment based on factors such as the patient’s age, health, allergies to certain medicines, potential interactions with drugs the patient is already taking, and so on. Because this entire process is based on left-brain thinking, it is susceptible to automation. In fact, according to The Wall Street Journal,8 100 million people already go on-line each year to get information from tens of thousands of medical Web sites, to find possible causes of their symptoms and to make decisions about treatments. Recognizing that physicians must become better at using their right brains, medical schools such as the one at Columbia University are now offering courses in “narrative medicine” to help doctors make better diagnoses by listening more empathetically to a patient’s story. At UCLA’s medical school, students are required to spend a night as a patient at the hospital to develop empathy for the people they will one day treat. And more than 50 medical schools now include spirituality in their curriculum.
Third, automation is a serious threat to anyone whose job in the Information Age relies on crunching numbers or following a routine process, or whose job can be broken down into a set of rules that can be replicated by software. This is true even for those who create the software itself. Appligenics, a British firm, has developed a software program that can now write code faster than human software programmers can. The software can crank out 400 lines of computer code in less than a second; that’s equivalent to an entire day’s output for an average human programmer. Fortunately, people who develop the six aptitudes of design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning can increase their value to their employers and improve their job security. As Pink says, “Skills like empathy and playfulness can’t be automated or outsourced.”
Fourth, people who can develop their ability to see the big picture will be in even greater demand in the Conceptual Age than they are today. In the Information Age, companies rewarded specialists who could focus on performing a single piece of a process, optimally. Now that fast computers and cheap off-shore talent can complete the same piece of work as well or better, American business professionals can best add value and generate profits by honing their unique ability to make the pieces fit together in innovative new ways. For example, as Daniel Goleman explained in Working with Emotional Intelligence, a study of executives at 15 large companies found that what set star performers apart from mediocre executives was a single ability: “pattern recognition, the ‘big picture’ thinking that allows leaders to pick out the meaningful trends from a welter of information around them and to think strategically far into the future.”
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