The right way forward

Daniel Pink

He's not a neurosurgeon. But Daniel Pink carries around a plastic model of the human brain wherever he goes. He uses it extensively to explain his latest obsession "" the demand for logical, linear left-brain people is shifting in favour of abilities like creativity, empathy and big-picture right-brain thinkers.

In fact, he's written a book on the subject: A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. The former political speechwriter and author (his first book, the bestselling Free Agent Nationwas on the growing ranks of people who work for themselves) was in Mumbai recently to address senior HR professionals from across industries as part of a US-India executive programme.

In an interview with Business Standard, Pink spoke on the advantages of right-brain thinking in a professional world that's still geared toward the left-side. Excerpts:

You have written about how machines replaced human muscle and technologies are outperforming human left brains. Similarly, will right-brain thinkers also be outperformed in the future?

Probably not. More right-brain thinking like artistry, empathy, big picture thinking and so on are very difficult to automate. Basic functions like face recognition are difficult for computers, leave alone recognising emotional expressions.

It's difficult for a computer to come up with a story. What it can do is help to tell a story "" that's a word processing software. But the fundamental capacity to tell a story is tough to automate. Just like empathy. I don't know how you automate empathy. That's not to say in the future someone may not be able to find out a way to automate these things. But right now it's very difficult. Right now there is no way the right brain can be threatened by machines.

Does that mean there are no threats to right-brain thinkers?

If you have only right-brain abilities and no left-brain abilities, then there's a threat. In fact, it's not even a threat: you simply have no chance. So in creative professions, if people aren't also numeric, they are in for trouble.

In a world when every benefit is measured in tangible terms, can success in "going right" be measured?

We don't have a metric for the right brain yet. In many ways the answer is very idiosyncratic because it is determined by each individual rather than by some global cultural professional standard.

Success is measured by your own personal matrix rather than by some kind of uniform metric that applies to everyone. One of the things about the free agents I interviewed is their force for self-defined success. Not defining it in terms of making more money, not defining it by taking a small enterprise and making it bigger, not defining it in terms of getting a promotion, but on whatever personal, idiosyncratic, customised measurement they have.

In some ways, that could be quite simple. "Am I happy? Do I get out of bed every morning dreading what I have to do or do I get up looking forward to what I have to do? If my life were to end soon, would I have regrets about what I'd done or do I feel satisfied with it?"

How do you create a right-brain thinking, "innovative" organisation?

Companies must allow some measure of failure, because failure is a way to achieve mastery. It involves hiring people from diverse backgrounds because individuals will be affected by their colleagues. And it means giving people the freedom to pursue working in the way they want to work "" putting people in positions that use their strengths and not thinking of management as a way to fix people's weaknesses.

If someone is very good at creative work and isn't too good at administration or management, the traditional approach has been to try to fix them, to try to make them better at that. Often, that doesn't work. It is better to find what people are good at and putting them in those kinds of jobs.

What is a good example of a left-brain thinking company that transformed itself into a right-brain thinker?

In the US, discount retail chain Target competes against Wal-Mart. Only, instead of competing on the left-brain dimension of price, Target decided to compete on the right-brain dimension of design. It got well-known designers to create low-cost merchandise for the middle class.

The chain is flourishing not by trying to beat Wal-Mart on quantitative, price measures, but more on aesthetic, emotional measures. Target stores have an array of pretty inexpensive designer clothing, designer houseware and so on.

Another American company is Whole Foods, a retail grocer. The retail grocery business in the US is a very tough, low-margin business. You have to sell huge volumes to make any money. So Whole Foods took a more holistic approach towards general well-being. It sells more organic food and charges more. Then, the shopping experience is pleasant "" experiential rather than transactional. Whole Foods today has a market capital of about $8 billion.

Similarly, a number of retail chains in the US, which compete with "regular" companies like Giant and Safeway, are now emphasising the stories behind their products or on the experience of shopping with them.

Are there any hurdles in creating right-side thinking organisations?

There are many. One is leaders who don't understand that this is a business case that needs to be tackled differently. I think a lot of people in the higher levels of organisations came up in an era when things revolved more on left-brain abilities. And it's a natural tendency to reward people for the same things for which you were rewarded. That's a hurdle.

Another possible hurdle is on a management level: managing people for left-brain abilities is a different challenge from managing for right-brain abilities. Left-brain abilities require more control whereas getting the best right-brain abilities involves giving people more freedom, leaving them alone, holding them accountable, but not the kind of breathing down the neck management that a lot of companies are very good at.

You have described abundance and automation in Asia as threats to the developed world. What are the opportunities within the threat?

Tilting the scale so that left-brain abilities are necessary but no longer sufficient and right-brain abilities are the ones that increasingly matter most. There are enormous opportunities. You have Indians designing cars, you have Indian fashion designers, Indian jewellery designers.

BusinessWeek talks about Indian car designs this time. I think there are opportunities in things like product development, not necessarily in being technicians but in coming up with a new idea for a product, in imagining something that the world didn't know was missing. There are huge opportunities in combining different things into something new.

I think there are opportunities for managers who operate in a different way, who understand human beings better, who can understand what makes a person tick and put them in a context that brings out the best in them. Managers who understand the technical side, the marketing side, the people side; managers who are multi-disciplinary.

I think there are huge opportunities for those kind of people whom I call "boundary crossers": people who can move smoothly between different worlds. I think there are also opportunities for leaders who can provide meaning along with money and purpose along with a pay-cheque, in any kind of industry.

Will "free agents" inherit the earth? Or will large corporations continue to control the future?

The correct answer would be, both. There will be more and more large enterprises and more and more small enterprises. So you will have a lot of elephants and a lot of mice and nothing mid-sized.