A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (17 page)

THE BOUNDARY CROSSER

What’s the most prevalent, and perhaps most important, prefix of our times?
Multi.
Our jobs require multitasking. Our communities are multicultural. Our entertainment is multimedia. While detailed knowledge of a single area once guaranteed success, today the top rewards go to those who can operate with equal aplomb in starkly different realms. I call these people “boundary crossers.” They develop expertise in multiple spheres, they speak different languages, and they find joy in the rich variety of human experience. They live
multi
lives—because that’s more interesting and, nowadays, more effective.

Boundary crossers are people like Andy Tuck, a philosophy professor and pianist who applies the skills he honed in those fields to run his own management consulting firm. They include people such as Gloria White-Hammond, a pastor and pediatrician in Boston; Todd Machover, who composes operas and builds high-tech music equipment; and Jhane Barnes, whose expertise in mathematics informs her intricate clothing designs.
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Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, the University of Chicago psychologist who wrote the classic book
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
as well as
Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention,
has studied the lives of creative people and found that “creativity generally involves crossing the boundaries of domains.”
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The most creative among us see relationships the rest of us never notice. Such ability is at a premium in a world where specialized knowledge work can quickly become routinized work—and therefore be automated or outsourced away. Designer Clement Mok says, “The next 10 years will require people to think and work across boundaries into new zones that are totally different from their areas of expertise. They will not only have to cross those boundaries, but they will also have to identify opportunities and make connections between them.”
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“What I do is pattern recognition. I try to recognize the pattern before anyone else does.”

—CAYCE POLLARD,

protagonist of William

Gibson’s novel
Pattern

Recognition

For example, the offshoring of computer jobs to India will create new demand for people who can manage the relationship between the coders in the East and the clients in the West. These whole-minded professionals must be literate in two cultures, comfortable in both the hard science of computing and the soft science of sales and marketing, and able to move between different, and sometimes antagonistic, groups with the ease of a diplomat. Such multifaceted people can often solve problems that flummox the experts. “Many engineering deadlocks have been broken by people who are not engineers at all,” says Nicholas Negroponte of MIT. “This is because perspective is more important than IQ. The ability to make big leaps of thought is a common denominator among the originators of breakthrough ideas. Usually this ability resides in people with very wide backgrounds, multidisciplinary minds, and a broad spectrum of experiences.”
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Boundary crossers reject either/or choices and seek multiple options and blended solutions. They lead hyphenated lives filled with hyphenated jobs and enlivened by hyphenated identities. (Example: Omar Wasow, a Nairobi-born, African-American-Jewish entrepreneur– policy wonk–television analyst.) They help explain the growing ranks of college students with double majors—and the proliferation of academic departments that dub themselves “interdisciplinary.”

Csikszentmihalyi has also uncovered a related dimension of the boundary crosser’s talent: those who possess it often elude traditional gender role stereotyping. In his research, he found that “when tests of masculinity/femininity are given to young people, over and over one finds that creative and talented girls are more dominant and tough than other girls, and creative boys are more sensitive and less aggressive than their male peers.” This bestows unique advantages, according to Csikszentmihalyi. “A psychologically androgynous person in effect doubles his or her repertoire of responses and can interact with the world in terms of a much richer and varied spectrum of opportunities.”
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In other words, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge said two hundred years ago and as boundary crossers remind us today, great minds are androgynous.

THE INVENTOR

In the 1970s, Hershey Food Corp. ran a series of goofy television commercials that inadvertently contained a crucial lesson in R-Directed Thinking. In the ads, a person walks along dreamily while munching a chocolate bar. Someone else, equally oblivious, strolls about while eating peanut butter. The two collide.

“Hey, you got peanut butter on my chocolate,” the first person complains.

“And you got chocolate on my peanut butter,” the other replies.

Each then samples the results. To their surprise, they discover they’ve created a masterpiece. “Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups,” the announcer intones. “Two great tastes that taste great together.”

R-Directed thinkers understand the logic of this confectionary fender-bender. They have an intuitive sense of what I call the “Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Theory of Innovation”: sometimes the most powerful ideas come from simply combining two existing ideas nobody else ever thought to unite. Take John Fabel, an avid cross-country skier. He loved the sport, but his backpack straps always bruised his shoulders. One day on a trip to New York, he passed by the Brooklyn Bridge—and saw the solution to his problem. In an act of what cognitive scientists Gilles Fouconnier and Mark Turner call “conceptual blending,” Fabel combined the structure of a suspension bridge with the components of a traditional backpack—and invented a new, easier-to-tote, and now popular pack called the Ecotrek.

“The key to success is to risk thinking unconventional thoughts. Convention is the enemy of progress. As long as you’ve got slightly more perception than the average wrapped loaf, you could invent something.”

—
TREVOR BAYLIS,
inventor

The ability to forge these kinds of inspired, inventive relationships is a function of the right side of our brains. Cognitive neuroscientists at Drexel and Northwestern universities have found that the flashes of insight that precede “Aha!” moments are accompanied by a large burst of neural activity in the brain’s right hemisphere. However, when we work out problems in a more methodical L-Directed way, this “eureka center” remains quiet.
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Our ability to activate this right hemisphere capacity has become more urgent as we transition out of the Information Age. In business today, the journey from innovation to commodity is so swift that successful individuals and organizations must be relentless. They must focus maniacally on invention—while outsourcing or automating much of the execution. This requires those with the ability and fortitude to experiment with novel combinations and to make the many mistakes that inevitably come with an inspiration-centered approach. Fortunately, despite what some might believe, all of us harbor this capacity to invent. Listen to Trevor Baylis, the British stuntman-turned-inventor who invented a windup radio that can be used without batteries or electricity: “Invention isn’t some impenetrable branch of magic: anyone can have a go.” Most inventions and breakthroughs come from reassembling existing ideas in new ways. Those willing to have a go at developing this symphonic ability will flourish in the Conceptual Age.

THE METAPHOR MAKER

Suppose you’re at the office one day and your boss says, “Lend me your ears.” As we learned in Chapter 1, because the literal meaning of those four words computes only in a gruesome way, the left hemisphere will get a bit panicky and look beseechingly across the corpus callosum for assistance. The right hemisphere will then calm its partner, put the phrase in context, and explain that “lend me your ears” is a metaphor. The boss doesn’t really want you to pull a Van Gogh. He just wants you to listen to what he’s about to say.

Metaphor—that is, understanding one thing in terms of something else—is another important element of Symphony. But like so many aspects of R-Directed Thinking, it struggles against an undeserved reputation. “The Western tradition . . . has excluded metaphor from the domain of reason,” writes the prominent linguist George Lakoff. Metaphor is often considered ornamentation—the stuff of poets and other frilly sorts, flowery words designed to perfume the ordinary or unpleasant. In fact, metaphor is central to reason—because, as Lakoff writes, “Human thought processes are largely metaphorical.”
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In a complex world, mastery of metaphor—a whole-minded ability that some cognitive scientists have called “imaginative rationality”—has become ever more valuable. Each morning, when we rise from our slumber and flick on the lights, we know we’ll spend much of the day paddling through a torrent of data and information. Certain kinds of software can sort these bits and offer glimpses into patterns. But only the human mind can think metaphorically and see relationships that computers could never detect.

Likewise, in a time of abundance, when the largest rewards go to those who can devise novel and compelling creations, metaphor-making is vital. For instance, Georges de Mestral noticed how burrs stuck to his dog’s fur and, reasoning metaphorically, came up with the idea for Velcro.
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A computer couldn’t have done that. “Everything you create is a representation of something else; in this sense, everything you create is enriched by metaphor,” writes choreographer Twyla Tharp. She encourages people to boost their metaphor quotient, or MQ, because “in the creative process, MQ is as valuable as IQ.”
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“Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art.”

—
TWYLA THARP

Metaphorical thinking is also important because it helps us understand others. That’s one reason that marketers are supplementing their quantitative research with qualitative investigations into the metaphorical minds of their customers.
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For instance, a method developed by Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman supplements polls and focus groups by asking subjects to bring in pictures that describe their feelings toward particular goods and services—and then to fashion those pictures into a collage. Through this technique, Zaltman elicits the metaphors customers use to think of products—coffee as an “engine,” a security gizmo as a “companionable watchdog,” and so on.

But the benefits go well beyond the commercial realm. Today, thanks to astonishing improvements in telecommunications, wider access to travel, and increasing life spans, we come into contact with a larger and more diverse set of people than any humans in history. Metaphorical imagination is essential in forging empathic connections and communicating experiences that others do not share. Finally—and perhaps most important—is metaphor’s role in slaking the thirst for meaning. The material comforts brought forth by abundance ultimately matter much less than the metaphors you live by—whether, say, you think of your life as a “journey” or as a “treadmill.” “A large part of self-understanding,” says Lakoff, “is the search for appropriate personal metaphors that make sense of our lives.”
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The more we understand metaphor, the more we understand ourselves.

Seeing the Big Picture

In any symphony, the composer and the conductor have a variety of responsibilities. They must make sure that the brass horns work in synch with the woodwinds, that the percussion instruments don’t drown out the violas. But perfecting those relationships—important though it is—is not the ultimate goal of their efforts. What conductors and composers desire—what separates the long remembered from the quickly forgotten—is the ability to marshal these relationships into a whole whose magnificence exceeds the sum of its parts. So it is with the high-concept aptitude of Symphony. The boundary crosser, the inventor, and the metaphor maker all understand the importance of relationships. But the Conceptual Age also demands the ability to grasp the
relationships between relationships.
This meta-ability goes by many names—systems thinking, gestalt thinking, holistic thinking. I prefer to think of it simply as seeing the big picture.

Seeing the big picture is fast becoming a killer app in business. While knowledge workers of the past typically performed piecemeal assignments and spent their days tending their own patch of a larger garden, such work is now moving overseas or being reduced to instructions in powerful software. As a result, what has become more valuable is what fast computers and low-paid overseas specialists cannot do nearly as well: integrating and imagining how the pieces fit together. This has become increasingly evident among entrepreneurs and other successful businesspeople.

For instance, one remarkable recent study found that self-made millionaires are four times more likely than the rest of the population to be dyslexic.
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Why? Dyslexics struggle with L-Directed Thinking and the linear, sequential, alphabetic reasoning at its core. But as with a blind person who develops a more acute sense of hearing, a dyslexic’s difficulties in one area lead him to acquire outsized ability in others. As Sally Shaywitz, a Yale neuroscientist and specialist in dyslexia, writes, “Dyslexics think differently. They are intuitive and excel at problem-solving, seeing the big picture, and simplifying. . . . They are poor rote reciters, but inspired visionaries.”
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Game-changers such as Charles Schwab, who invented the discount brokerage, and Richard Branson, who has shaken up the retail music and airline industries, both cite their dyslexia as a secret to their success. It forced them to see the big picture. Because of their difficulty analyzing the particulars, they became adept at recognizing the patterns. Michael Gerber, who has studied entrepreneurs of all sorts, has reached similar conclusions: “All great entrepreneurs are Systems Thinkers. All who wish to become great entrepreneurs need to learn how to become a Systems Thinker . . . to develop their innate passion for seeing things whole.”
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