 easy, accessible read to introduce left-brain thinkers to the other side of their brain.
my husband brought this book home for summer required reading for his job (he is an administrator in a public school district). being so hopelessly right-brained myself, i was delighted to notice it on his side of the bed ! :) don't know if i like the angle so much, which seems to be about 'getting ahead' in the new competitive world (same old left brain movtivation), i LOVe that it encourages and values right brain activity. there's a part of me that figures whatever the motivation for developing the right brain, good (and perhaps unanticiapted) outcomes will flow, and any book that advocates art, play, empathy, story-telling and meaning- seeking, and beauty and makes it simply accessible to someone for whom these ideas are akin a foreign language, is a book i'd recommend. buy it for the left-brain thinkers in your world. for the right-brained folks, its a quick and easy, validating read.
 A whole new way of looking at the world
The Other Kind of Smart: Simple Ways to Boost Your Emotional Intelligence for Greater Personal Effectiveness and Success
It would be interesting to be able to look into the future and see how history treats this book. As we look around we can see a lot of what Daniel Pink mentions in the book happenning today. There is increasing interest in a search for meaning, spirituality, emotional intelligence and ways of tying it all together.
The author argues that society has in the past not appreciated right brain thinkers as much as left brain. However, the people who reach the highest levels in business, government and military have always been expected to have the ability to see the large picture, requiring them to tie together various diverse elements of information. This skill has been deemed to be so important that we are willing to pay corporate CEO's who posess it vast sums of money.
For me, the book is not so much a debate about the left brain/right brain and which is superior. We have both and need both. It points towards a new awareness that regardless of the technical advancements we achieve and material posessions that we are able to obtain, we will always find ourselves wanting. The new frontier will be about how well we are able to establish meaningful relationships with one another and the world around us.
A fascinating book that I think will be debated, talked about and remembered for decades in the future.
Decent discussion of what it will take to succeed in the future.
In a nutshell, this book gives a succinct set of problems and solutions for succeeding in the future
PROBLEMS:
Abundance - hundreds of options for any situation (classic example: grocery stores)
Asia - billions of people providing cheap labor
Automation - We don't need a lot of people to do build anything anymore
SOLUTIONS:
Design - make it cool (see Apple computer)
Story - a compelling narrative wins the day
Symphony - see the big picture and synthesize better solutions
Empathy - understand fellow humans to provide what they need
Play - we all need to play
Meaning - help people pursue purpose, transcendence, and spiritual fulfillment
According to the author, the requirements to succeeding in the future involve developing and engaging your RIGHT BRAIN accomplish the solutions mentioned above. Not to say using your LEFT BRAIN isn't important, but that you need to use them EQUALLY,whereas in recent decades industry has mostly emphasized use of your left brain.
I found myself skimming the book a lot. It's largely based on a handful of examples and lots of conjecture. Nothing really earth shattering IMO, but food for thought.
Potential to be helpful with a critical issue facing 21st century policing
Daniel Pink's work in "A Whole New Mind" has the potential to be helpful with a critical issue facing 21st century policing. Increasingly, officer's operating environment is transparent and open to worldwide scrutiny in real time. For good or bad, the individual officer can instantly become the epicenter of organizational influence on a worldwide scale. Besides being transparent, our communities are much more diverse and complex. The influence of universal pop culture and media constantly bear upon even the most rural areas of our country. While much work is yet to come, "A Whole New Mind" potentially opens the conversation to allow law enforcement to begin adapting to the challenges of the 21st century. If law enforcement courageously considers the implications of Pink's work and humbly sets out to build on it, I am convinced the following benefits await us:
A Whole New Mind approach has the potential to begin to fortify law enforcement with new levels of tactical acumen and social competence.
Tactical acumen: 1) More comprehensive pre-contact threat assessment by lowering the natural proclivity to be blinded by personal bias, prejudice, fear and loyalties thus allowing for a more objective assessment of total context and individual behavior. 2) Increased awareness of subtle precursors to violent or aggressive behaviors through a continuous gestalt (big picture) assessment of people and situations thus keeping the whole mind engaged to listen and observe. 3) Through these, increase the member's ability to use appropriate force at the appropriate time thus averting dangerous escalation. 4) Provide the foundation for strategies designed to devastate an adversary's willingness to resist, without devastating the adversary. Thus, build community trust and partnership with every encounter, even the most challenging ones.
Social competence allows members to: 1) Appreciate as relevant, culturally and socio-economically diverse information from others perspective. Then, convert information into useful energy or processes needed to improve safety and quality of life. 2) Develop appropriate compassion: empathy for others with a strong desire to relieve suffering, through diverse life situations. Otherwise, when emotionally charged personal judgments of others swamp officers (with, for example, a feeling of disdain or "contempt of cop"); situational awareness and social competence evaporates. 2) Improve the effectiveness of assessment (precise attention and appropriate response to what is really going on with people and our communities). 3) Develop the capacity for attention and reflection (consideration untainted by mind-blinding judgmentalness and blame). This will produce the ability to match need with provision between various community members and professional colleagues.
In a time of budget and staff cuts, law enforcement has but a few options before it:
1) Shrink back and become irrelevant observers to increasing chaos and suffering while engaging in what the military calls `force protection."
2) Increasingly resort to heavy-handed applications of force and enforcement; masked, rifle-toting SWAT teams hovering around, swooping down to decimate any perceived resistance, all the while destroying trust.
3) Take Pink's work and the work of many other progressive thinkers and learn to be responsive, reflective and relevant to what is really going on in our communities. In short, use our whole mind to continue learning new ways to unleash the power of unconditional respect.
Jack L. Colwell is co-author, along with Charles Huth, of UNLEASHING THE POWER OF UNCONDITIONAL RESPECT: TRANSFORMING LAW ENFORCEMENT AND POLICE TRAINING, CRC Press-Taylor and Francis Group.
Unleashing the Power of Unconditional Respect: Transforming Law Enforcement and Police Training
A Pink Mind
A Whole New Mind By Dan Pink (Riverhead Books, 2006). Reviewed by Steve Gladis,Ph.D.
Just as Picasso was in his "blue period," I think I'm in my "pink period"...Dan Pink that is. I just read A Whole New Mind, which I should have read years before, and which I think describes me better than my mother would have. In fact, I think Pink and I may have come from the same mother ;). Cherished for years and oft repeated in whole or part: "The truth is, a great mind must be androgynous" (Samuel Taylor Coleridge). In this book, Pink helped me understand once and for all why as a poet masquerading as an FBI agent, I always felt "weird." A right-brainer living in a world of alpha left-brainers. Perhaps that's why Dan (a lawyer by education) ended up as a speechwriter for Al Gore, and I ended up writing speeches for several directors of the FBI. Could we have been twins separated at birth?
He argues convincingly that we're moving from an Information Age to a Conceptual (creative/inventive) Age, because of: Abundance (we're living at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs), Asia (left-brained work is outsourced there because it's been commoditized, and thus cheaper), and Automation (things that are solved by a strict set of rules--heuristics--are better crunched by microchips). He argues that in the coming age those with more inventive minds will be more valued. And he argues these points well--remember Dan's a lawyer--at least, a recovering one.
In the rest of the book, Dan describes what he calls the "Six Senses ." 1) Design--making things not only functional but engaging by design; 2) Story--developing a compelling narrative from the data; 3) Symphony--seeing the big picture and gathering seemingly desperate parts into a harmonious whole; 4) Empathy--fostering caring relationships with our family, friends and colleagues at work; 5) Play--the need to have fun at whatever you do; 6) Meaning--seeking purpose and the greater good seems to define us uniquely as humans.
I'll be reviewing Dan's book in some depth on my blog: [...]. I highly recommend you buy a copy and underline the hell out of it as I did. There's a ton of useful, important information that I won't have the space to mention. Thanks to Dan for writing this classic.
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