A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future Read Online Free PDF Page B

economies of the developed world. The central figure in this act was the knowledge worker, whose defining characteristic was proficiency in L-Directed Thinking.
    Now, as the forces of Abundance, Asia, and Automation deepen and intensify, the curtain is rising on Act III. Call this act the Conceptual Age. The main characters now are the creator and the empathizer, whose distinctive ability is mastery of R-Directed Thinking.
    I’ve depicted this progression in Figure 3.1, broadening the story to include the Industrial Age’s predecessor, the Agriculture Age. The horizontal axis shows time. The vertical axis shows a combination of affluence, technological progress, and globalization (what I’ve shorthanded ATG). As individuals grow richer, as technologies become more powerful, and as the world grows more connected, these three forces eventually gather enough collective momentum to nudge us into a new era. That is how, over time, we moved from the Agriculture Age to the Industrial Age to the Information Age. The latest instance of this pattern is today’s transition from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age once again fed by affluence (the abundance thatcharacterizes Western life), technological progress (the automation of several kinds of white-collar work), and globalization (certain types of knowledge work moving to Asia).
     
Figure 3.1
F ROM THE A GRICULTURE A GE TO THE C ONCEPTUAL A GE

In short, we’ve progressed from a society of farmers to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers. And now we’re progressing yet again—to a society of creators and empathizers, of pattern recognizers and meaning makers.
Figure 3.2 depicts this same evolution, but in a way that might speak more to the right side of your brain.
Figure 3.2

    And if a picture is worth a thousand words, a metaphor is worth a thousand pictures. We’ve moved from an economy built on people’s backs to an economy built on people’s left brains to what is emerging today: an economy and society built more and more on people’s right brains.
    When economies and societies depended on factories and mass production, R-Directed Thinking was mostly irrelevant. Then as we moved to knowledge work, R-Directed Thinking came to be recognized as legitimate, though still secondary, to the preferred mode of L-Directed Thinking. Now, as North America, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan evolve once again, R-Directed Thinking is beginning to achieve social and economic parity—and, in many cases, primacy. In the twenty-first century, it has become the first among equals, the key to professional achievement and personal satisfaction.
    But let me be clear: the future is not some Manichean world in which individuals are either left-brained and extinct or right-brained and ecstatic—a land in which millionaire potters drive BMWs and computer programmers scrub counters at Chick-fil-A. L-Directed Thinking remains indispensable. It’s just no longer sufficient. In the Conceptual Age, what we need instead is a whole new mind.
    High Concept and High Touch
    To survive in this age, individuals and organizations must examine what they’re doing to earn a living and ask themselves three questions:
1. Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
2. Can a computer do it faster?
3. Is what I’m offering in demand in an age of abundance?
    If your answer to question 1 or 2 is yes, or if your answer to question 3 is no, you’re in deep trouble. Mere survival today depends on being able to do something that overseas knowledge workers can’t do cheaper, that powerful computers can’t do faster, and that satisfies one of the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an abundant age.
    That is why high tech is no longer enough. We’ll need to supplement our well-developed high-tech abilities with abilities that are high concept and high touch. (As I mentioned in the Introduction, high concept involves the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns