An Asinine Premise Swallowed by the Sons of the Priveleged

Ugh! Amazing how these people can even begin to believe this stuff. I can practically see the waving of ruffled hands. I don't know where to begin. The premise that we can do the "higher" kinds of work and let the smokestaff stuff go abroad was articulated by our Sec of Labor Robert Reich in his ca. 1990 book. That was before India emerged as the foremost intellectual property powerhouse. It is #1 in software. You knew that, didn't you? (source Tom Peters, Pat Choate, many others)
I would like to suggest what is at the root of our problem. I dont want to be didactic, but listen up. corrupt politicians voted in on ideological, "conceptual" platforms like Republicam vs. Democrat. A majority take payments from foreign interests and go to work for them afterwords. The outsourcing of jobs, the H1B insourced workers constitutes a danger to the US: the loss of jobs is bad enough, but the loss of the technology base is fatal. Right now, 90% of the Vitamin C is made in China. Why? Because they can take production shortcuts in environments disallowed by Americans.
Daniel Pinks thoroughly naive premise has been heavily used by these interests for years now...

Great Perspective

Very readable account of some "big picture" concepts with just the right amount of "business psychology" analysis.

More detail is available in the "Portfolio" sections at the end of each chapter which identifies ways to improve our understanding of the chapters contents- such as places to visit, web sites, recommended reading, or suggested activities. Quite a novel concept that allows the book to be a reference tool and "workbook" at the same time.

Dan Pink also had a great article in "Fast Company Magazine" acouple years ago on "Luck"- that is worth looking up. I shared that article with many friends and clients, and it was universally well received, much like this book will be!

Conceptual Age?

With all the buzz lately about right-brained thinking and the growing panic over losing one's job to machines and under-paid Asian workers, I have to chuckle a bit at what I take to be the irony of messages like Pink's.

The way I see it is that we all will (in fact we currently do) have a pressing need to think with both the right and left sides of our brain. We will need to become far more creative, more intuitive and a great deal more insightful about what occurs around us.

Except this won't be because our jobs are being performed by a billion collge-educated Asians. It won't be because a machine can perform accounting duties as well as a 25-year accounting veteran. Hell, not even because machines will be fighting our wars for us.

It's because we need a whole lot of brain power to get us out of the looming global environmental catastrophe. We'll need whole-brained thinkers to figure out how create sustainable living practices even though we've exhausted the plains, the forests and the oceans. We'll need new thinkers to figure out how to ween humanity off its destructive addiction to unchecked population growth.

And we're going to need a helluva Einstein to figure out how to keep us from our slow but inexorably quickening slide into global biological/nuclear war.

More likely, 50 years from now we'll need whole-brained thinkers just to figure out how to feed their families and find clean drinking water.

So yes, I guess Pink is right; whole-brained thinkers will be invaluable to us in the near future. Being able to see the big picture is pretty useful to surviving.