A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (8 page)

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 fifteen 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.

IQ and EQ

When museum curators of the future assemble an exhibit on American schooling in the twentieth century, they’ll have many artifacts to choose from—chunky textbooks, dusty blackboards, one-piece injection-molded desks with wraparound writing surfaces. But one item deserves special consideration. I recommend that in the center of the exhibition, enclosed in a sparkling glass case, the curators display a well-sharpened No. 2 pencil.

If the global supply chain ever confronted a shortage of No. 2 pencils, the American education system might collapse. From the time children are able even to grasp one of these wooden writing sticks, they use them to take an endless battery of tests that purport to measure their current ability and future potential. In elementary school, we assess children’s IQs. Later on, we measure their skill in reading and math—then plot their scores against children from the rest of the state, the country, and the world. By the time kids arrive in high school, they’re preparing for the SAT, the desert they must cross to reach the promised land of a good job and a happy life. As I’ve noted, this SAT-ocracy has its virtues. But America’s test-happy system also has several weaknesses that are only recently being acknowledged.

For example, Daniel Goleman, author of the groundbreaking book
Emotional Intelligence,
has examined an array of academic studies that have attempted to measure how much IQ (which, like the SAT, measures pure L-Directed Thinking prowess) accounts for career success. What do you think these studies found? Grab a No. 2 pencil and take a guess.

According to the latest research, IQ accounts for what portion of career success?

a. 50 to 60 percent

b. 35 to 45 percent

c. 23 to 29 percent

d. 15 to 20 percent

The answer:
between 4 and 10 percent. (Confining oneself only to the answers presented is a symptom of excessive L-Directed Thinking.) According to Goleman, IQ can influence the profession one enters. My IQ, for instance, is way too low for a career in astrophysics. But within a profession, mastery of L-Directed Thinking matters relatively little. More important are qualities that are tougher to quantify, the very kinds of high-concept and high-touch abilities I’ve been mentioning—imagination, joyfulness, and social dexterity. For instance, research by Goleman and the Hay Group has found that within organizations, the most effective leaders were funny (that is,
funny ha-ha,
not
funny strange).
These leaders had their charges laughing three times more often than their managerial counterparts.
⁹
(And humor, as I’ll discuss in Chapter 8, depends heavily on the brain’s right hemisphere.) But where have you seen a standardized test that measures comedic aptitude?

Actually, you could find one in New Haven, Connecticut, where a Yale University psychology professor is developing an alternative SAT. Professor Robert Sternberg calls his test the Rainbow Project—and it certainly sounds like a lot more fun than the pressure-packed exam many of us endured as teenagers. In Sternberg’s test, students are given five blank
New Yorker
cartoons—and must craft humorous captions for each one. They must also write or narrate a story, using as their guide only a title supplied by the test givers (sample title: “The Octopus’s Sneakers”). And students are presented with various real-life challenges—arriving at a party where they don’t know anybody, or trying to convince friends to help move furniture—and asked how they’d respond. Although still in its experimental stages, the Rainbow Project has been twice as successful as the SAT in predicting how well students perform in college. What’s more, the persistent gap in performance between white students and racial minorities evident on the SAT narrows considerably on this test.

Sternberg’s test doesn’t aim to replace the SAT—only to augment it. (In fact, one of its funders is the College Board, which sponsors the SAT.) And the SAT itself recently has been revised to include a writing component. But the Rainbow Project’s very existence is revealing. “If you don’t do well on [the SAT],” Sternberg says, “everywhere you turn the access routes to success in our society are blocked.” But as more educators are recognizing, those roadblocks can exclude people with aptitudes that the SAT doesn’t measure.
¹⁰

This is especially true for high-touch abilities—that is, the capacity for compassion, care, and uplift—which are becoming a key component of many occupations in the Conceptual Age. The number of jobs in the “caring professions”—counseling, nursing, and hands-on health assistance—is surging. For example, while advanced nations are exporting high-tech computer programming jobs, they are importing nurses from the Philippines and other Asian countries. As a result of this shortage, nursing salaries are climbing and the number of male registered nurses has doubled since the mid-1980s.
¹¹
We’ll learn more about this in Chapter 7.

Money and Meaning

While work is going high concept and high touch, the most significant change of the Conceptual Age might be occurring outside the office—and inside our hearts and souls. Pursuits devoted to meaning and transcendence, for instance, are now as mainstream as a double tall latte. In the United States, ten million adults now engage in some form of regular meditation, double the number a decade ago. Fifteen million practice yoga, twice the number in 1999. American popular entertainment is so awash in spiritual themes that
TV Guide
heralds the rise of “transcendental television.”
¹²

The aging of U.S. baby boomers—as well as the even more notable aging of the populations of Japan and the European Union—is also accelerating this shift. “As people mature,” writes psychologist David Wolfe, “their cognitive patterns become less abstract (left-brain orientation) and more concrete (right-brain orientation) which results in a sharpened sense of reality, increased capacity for emotion, and enhancement of their sense of connectedness” (parentheses in the original).
¹³
In other words, as individuals age, they place greater emphasis in their own lives on qualities they might have neglected in the rush to build careers and raise families: purpose, intrinsic motivation, and meaning.

Indeed, two researchers have argued that this fleet of empathic, meaning-seeking boomers has already started wading ashore. In 2000, Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson identified a subculture of fifty million Americans that they dubbed “Cultural Creatives.” Cultural Creatives, they claim, account for one-fourth of U.S adults, a population roughly the size of France. And the attributes of this cohort echo many of the elements of an R-Directed approach to life. For instance, Cultural Creatives “insist on seeing the big picture,” the authors write. “They are good at synthesizing.” And they “see women’s ways of knowing as valid: feeling empathy and sympathy for others, taking the viewpoint of the one who speaks, seeing personal experiences and first-person stories as important ways of learning, and embracing an ethic of caring.”
¹⁴

Baby boomers are entering the Conceptual Age with an eye on their own chronological age. They recognize that they now have more of their lives behind them than ahead of them. And such indisputable arithmetic can concentrate the mind. After decades of pursuing riches, wealth seems less alluring. For them, and for many others in this new era, meaning is the new money.