A Whole New Mind, Hot Degrees and Jobs, and other Sundry Stuff

Normally I would have titled this posting "What's Pinnacol Reading" and simply done a quick review of the latest offering by our company book club - "A Whole New Mind" - by Daniel Pink. The book has been interesting enough that it's got me thinking and relating what it talks about to other things associated with my role at Pinnacol. I haven't even finished reading it and here I am blogging about it which hints at how thought provoking I'm finding the book to be.

What I've gathered so far is that the traditional left-brained approaches to work (sequential, literal, functional, analytical and knowledge-based) are not necessarily the ones that will be critical to keeping America competitive in the future as these skills can be increasingly done by workers in other countries at far less cost or simply automated by computers here at home. Traditional computer programming is a prime example - folks in New Delhi can crank out computer code at a fraction of the cost of their traditional American counterparts.

So what will differentiate American programmers, and workers doing other types of work, from their Indian and Asian counterparts? According to Pink, its the ability to apply the right brain strengths - the ability to think and reason holistically (see the big picture), intuitively, and nonlinearly)  in conjunction with those of the left. For too long, he argues, America has emphasized only left-brained thinking, while undervaluing the attributes that the right side of our brain bring to the table. The LSAT/MCAT/GMAT tests may be accurate predictors of who will be good Lawyers, Doctors, and MBA's but leave a lot to be desired in terms of predicting the next Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg.

As I was driving to work this morning they were talking on the radio about one of Colorado's Universities eliminating its Journalism degree program. The advent of the web hasn't been particularly kind to traditional news media such as newspapers, magazines, television and radio. If they are to survive the next decade they will have to reinvent themselves. The smart ones are already well along in this process, and I'd hazard a guess that their ability to remake themselves is being driven by workers using their "whole minds", as Daniel Pink would put it.

The potential elimination of the Journalism program got me to wondering what are the hottest job prospects looking forward so I went to Collegeboard.com to see what they were predicting would be the occupations with the most job openings through 2018. The list surprised me; I was half expecting nanotechnologists and wind farmers to be right up there. Instead, the list had some very traditional job titles - teachers, doctors, lawyers, along with, yes, all sorts of computer-related jobs. That brought me back full-circle to Daniel Pink's "A Whole New Mind" - its not so much what our job function will be but the way in which we will do it.