Meet the MasterMinds: Daniel
Pink on a Whole New Mind
 In
his first book, Free
Agent Nation, Daniel Pink chronicled the
rise and impact of the new world of work. His recent book,
A
Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual
Age, takes us a step further to describe
how to thrive in an outsourced, automated, and upside down
world.
Pink is a contributing editor at Wired
magazine. His articles on business and technology
have appeared in The New York Times,
Harvard Business Review, and Fast
Company. He is popular speaker, and has provided
analysis on television and radio broadcasts, including CNBC's
Power Lunch, ABC's World News Tonight, and NPR's Morning
Edition.
MCNews talked to Pink about why consultants should embrace
a whole new mind.
MCNews: You say we are in transition from the information
age to the conceptual age. What does that mean, and how
is the change manifesting itself?
Pink: Well, the scales are tipping away
from what it used to take for people to get ahead—logical,
linear, left-brain, and spreadsheet-type abilities—in
favor of abilities like artistry, empathy, and big-picture
thinking, which are becoming more valuable.
Left-brain skills are still absolutely necessary in
our complex world. They’re just not sufficient
anymore. |
Left-brain skills are still absolutely necessary in our
complex world. They’re just not sufficient anymore.
MCNews: Aren’t some industries, like advertising,
built around conceptual, right-brain thinking?
Pink: Sure. Besides advertising, another
example is the motion picture industry, which is about narrative,
or story-telling. Increasingly, consumer products companies
are also tapping into right-brain skills.
Procter & Gamble, for instance, is relying more and
more on design. And Target is competing successfully against
Wal-Mart, not on the left-brain dimension of price, but
on the right-brain dimension of design. I’m surprised
that more companies haven’t followed that lead.
MCNews: Are there companies that have made the
transition to the conceptual age?
Pink: The grocery chain, Whole
Foods, is an interesting example. The retail grocery
industry is a low-margin, cutthroat business. And yet, Whole
Foods exacts premium prices by appealing to customers using
the right-brain sensibility of wholeness and the back stories
of products as a differentiator.
The success of Whole Foods is phenomenal. The figures are
impressive on every dimension—number of stores opened,
revenue, profits, and stock price. In a business where the
typical strategy is to go for economies of scale, cut costs,
and eke out a tiny bit more of a margin, Whole Foods has
taken a different tack.
The focus of Whole Foods is on the customer’s grocery
shopping for the family as a holistic experience. It’s
about wellness, and doing something good for the world on
a small scale. That approach may seem touchy-feely, but
Whole Foods is outperforming every other grocery chain in
America.
MCNews: Is this trend finding its way into traditional,
left-brained businesses?
Pink: Yes. At a recent shareholders’ meeting,
GM Vice Chairman Bob
Lutz said, “What we've got at GM now is a general
comprehension that you can't run this business by the left,
intellectual, analytical side of the brain. You have to
have a lot of right side, creative input. We are in the
arts and entertainment business, and we're putting a huge
emphasis on world-class design."
That’s a 70-year-old former Marine saying we tried
running the company in a left-brain way and it didn’t
work. We have to start running it in a right-brain way.
Lutz is a serious figure in the automotive industry. When
GM is in the arts business, we’re all in the arts
business.
MCNews: What’s the impact of the conceptual
age on the workplace, particularly as it relates to the
people you hire?
Pink: You want to hire people who have the kind
of right-brain abilities that can’t be outsourced
or automated, and that satisfy some of the nonmaterial needs
of this abundant age.
If you peel that back, what you want is people who are
intrinsically motivated. That is, they are doing what they
love. And it tends to be right-brain activities that generate
that kind of motivation.
For instance, people don’t become designers because
they want to make a gazillion dollars, but because they
love it. They’re almost compelled to do it. Same thing
is true with story-telling and even empathy. These abilities
are part of our nature—the things that we’re
motivated to do, not for the extrinsic rewards, but for
internal fulfillment, joy, and challenge.
Now it turns out happily enough that these abilities increasingly
confer an economic advantage. So hire people who are intrinsically
motivated. They will end up doing great work, and they display
abilities that have enormous value in a world where so many
other skills can be outsourced or digitized.
MCNews: But many companies fail to tap that part
of their employees’ capabilities.
Pink: That’s right. Every weekend,
I’m sure there are accountants in their garages painting
water colors, or lawyers writing screenplays. But I doubt
there is anybody with a day job as a sculptor who, for fun
on the weekends, does other people’s taxes.
Many people went into the professions out of a sense of
economic need, which made perfect sense. But maybe they
weren’t naturally motivated in that direction. I see
an increasing congruence between the talents that confer
an advantage in labor markets and what people are intrinsically
motivated to do.
MCNews: In the past, people “dropped out”
of the corporate rat race to do what they really loved.
Are you’re saying that doing what you love is the
best way to reach your professional goals?
Pink: The counsel to do what you love
is actually very hardheaded advice right now. It’s
not just an idealistic notion. I think it’s the best
way to get ahead today. And that was not necessarily true
in 1950.
There’s a study—I think by Gartner—that
shows fewer and fewer young people want to become computer
programmers. Partly that’s a reaction to what they
perceive to be labor market signals because they see so
many stories about programming jobs going overseas.
But the other thing people are saying is that a lot of
computer programming is fairly routine, or rote. People
are, in some cases, willing to do routine work. If it generates
a high income, people are willing to make that trade off.
But work that is routine has the potential for offshoring
or automation. And so, people may be saying, it’s
not that fun or creative to begin with, but it also doesn’t
confer reliable rewards. What confers the greatest rewards
and what we want to do anyway is the stuff that taps greater
artistry, empathy, creativity, and big-picture thinking.
MCNews: Coming back to the workplace, if you’re
operating a business in a conceptual age, what’s the
best working environment to create for people so they stay
with you?
Pink: You need to allow people a certain
measure of autonomy to do great work but also hold them
accountable. You’ve got to have deadlines and measures
of accountability. You can’t just have a free-for-all
where everyone sits around and paints all day and no one
actually serves customers.
So, in general, promote autonomy and relinquish a measure
of control. And to the extent it’s possible, create
a context that allows people’s intrinsic motivation
to flourish and that makes the work part of something larger
than the individual.
Organizations that provide a sense of purpose, that connect
individuals’ talents and aspirations to a larger goal
are the ones that are going to succeed. You already see
that in a remarkable way with a lot of companies. Google,
for example, talks about wanting to do great things for
the world even if it means sacrificing some short-term profits.
Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE, speaks about meaning and purpose.
He says that the reason people want to work for GE is that
they want to be about something larger than themselves.
MCNews: Has the shift to the conceptual changed
how companies are organized?
Pink: Yes. I think we’re seeing
the emergence of companies that you might call not-only-for-profit.
They’re profit driven, but that’s not their
only driving force. They want to be about something beyond
making their quarterly numbers and returning wealth to shareholders.
This is different from the Ben & Jerry’s socially
responsible kind of company. GE is making a monumental investment
in green technologies in part because it’s a good
thing, in part because it’s a lucrative thing. It’s
the same with Google. Google’s mission is to democratize
information and to put facts and knowledge at people’s
fingertips. But that’s good business too.
Creating not-only-for-profit companies that plug people’s
individual talents into a larger purpose becomes very important,
particularly for baby boomers.
MCNews: The professional services business has
traditionally been left-brained. What advice would you give
professional services providers so their practices thrive
in the conceptual age?
Pink: Well, they need to think through the same
imperatives: Are you doing something that someone overseas
can’t do cheaper, or that a computer can’t do
faster? Does what you do satisfy some of the spiritual,
emotional, or esthetic needs of our society?
|
I think that design has become a fundamental literacy
in business, particularly for consultants. |
Accountants, for example, may become this generation’s
blue-collar workers. They are imperiled by cheaper workers
overseas, and by the ability to put many accounting measures
into a system of rules in a piece of software. Sarbanes
Oxley is keeping accountants busy today. But once compliance
with Sarbanes Oxley becomes automated, look out. Some consulting
work, particularly research and entry-level, analytical
tasks, could be outsourced. So success is not only about
raw analytical abilities, having a high math SAT score,
and going to a good business school.
Your ability to draw on right-brain skills has become much
more important. For instance, I think that design has become
a fundamental literacy in business, particularly for consultants.
Whether it’s industrial design, graphic design, environmental
design, or even fashion design, a good consultant must be
literate in that now to go into an organization and offer
useful advice.
And, again, I really do think that more companies, partly
out of enlightened self-interest, are going to morph into
not-only-for-profits. And they’re going to need guidance
to change from left-brained companies in the pursuit of
making those quarterly numbers to companies that are more
right-brained—companies that can attract talented,
intrinsically motivated people. That’s a tough transition
for companies to make, and I think consultants could help
with that.
MCNews: Have any consulting firms shifted their
services to help clients succeed in the conceptual age?
Pink: Some of the big consultancies are
branching into architectural consulting because the physical
design of the workplace has productivity-enhancing potential.
You can reengineer business processes and that can boost
productivity, but the physical layout and design of office
space turns out to have value as well. That requires a very
different sensibility than streamlining the supply chain
or decreasing the number of steps in the procurement process.
Workplace design is very hard to automate because it involves
a physical presence, intuition, looking around, and getting
a feel for things. That’s right-brain work.
MCNews: One last question: if you were going to
give somebody just one piece of advice about how to be successful
in this new age, what would it be?
Pink: The best career move is to find
what you love to do, what you’re great at, and pursue
that. I think you will be more valuable in the workforce.
If you love accounting and you’re great at it, you’re
going to be okay.
I worry about the folks who pursue careers because their
parents, teachers, or spouses give them outdated advice
and they’re dutifully marching into careers they don’t
really care about because they think it’s the way
to make money. Not only is that bad for their individual
self-actualization but I think it’s a bad career move,
too.
MCNews: Thanks. I really appreciate your time.
You can find out more about Daniel
Pink, his books, and services at www.danpink.com.
| 
send
feedback
download
PDF