Harvard Business Publishing

I think you missed the significance of the "whole" in the title. Dan's point is the same as yours; we need to develop both right and left brain attributes.

I think you might want to go back and read Pink's book again. Not once did he say we Americans should "give up" left brain work. In fact, he says those left brain qualities are essential. What he argues is that they are not enough, which is why we need to do a much better job of developing design, systems thinking, empathy, etc, if we are going to compete. That's what I am trying to do in my company - thanks in part to books like Pink's, Friedman's World is Flat, and others.

There is no job on the earth left to one half of the brain.Just as left and right foot are necessary for walking, both the halves of the brain are necessary for a healthy living.

Both sides of the brain are very essential. With respect to work environment , if we can bring in our aesthetic approach the whole process gets improved in terms of effeciency, productivity, satisfaction etc. I used to put the entire work environment into a wide canvas and try to bring the whole big picture into it.

I also believe that both sides of the brain, i.e. balance, are required to address today's ever present complexities.
Coincidently, this past week, I blogged about the balance provided by a focus on the arts at LeadQuietly.com In my case, this right-brain focus was inspired by a Nancy Adler article in the Academy of Management Learning and Education entitled, The Arts & Leadership: Now That We Can Do Anything, What Will We Do? I personally believe that whole-brain balance is a key element of leadership 21st century leadership.

Thanks for the though-provoking post and the reference to the Rae-Dupree article.

Don Frederiksen
LeadQuietly.Com

There's a fair amount of research to counter Tom's anecdotes. Take his first point: Yes, people in China and India are creative, of course; their talent pool is incredibly deep and odds are there are a great many very talented creative people in it. But, companies there have a huge cost advantage over firms in the US and Europe, and it is very difficult for companies to focus away from their obvious structural advantages and develop a very different orientation. To compete on creativity, companies in cost advantaged regions will have to be very, very disciplined about not sacrificing creative direction at the altar of cost savings. This will be no easier for them than it was for IBM in the early 90s to cannibalize sales of their historically lucrative mainframe market in order to enter the Internet era.

Hi second point, especially the Will Smith example, is even easier to counter. The best research on movies returns is done by Arthur DeVany, now retired, formerly of UC Irvine (see his book, Hollywood Economics, if you want to really understand this business). His research, based on hard headed left brain analysis (non-Gaussian distribution with infinite variance, etc.) shows that the movie industry, in which audiences discover what they like only after they experience it, is so very chaotic that Will Smith's analyses could only be correct by accident. Read DeVany at all and you'll see immediately that there is no way Mr. Smith's left brain analysis could yield valuable conclusions; DeVany shows that event he best prognosticators in the movie business are using hopelessly flawed assumptions and are hugely overconfident in their projections. DeVany concludes, from all his left brain analysis, that the only real approach to success in the movie business is to rely on right brain talents.

Of course it's impossible to argue against the point that both kinds of brains are necessary. No one has argued that, including Mr. Pink, I think.

Hi Tom

This is an interesting perspective - and perhaps one designed to illicit feedback?

As a recovering engineer with nearly 15 years specifically in IT I had little time for left brain strengths. I found the artistic interesting but the emotional hard to take.

However I have learned by working with a specialist - Dick McHugh PhD - in NLP that ignoring the right brain causes a plethora of information to be missed when making judgements and decisions.

Often the left brain intercepts information going to and from the right brain and if you do not work on both to get them in synch you can miss quite a lot of the knowledge you need to make choices.

Change is tough as is relearning the way you process information but it doesn't make sense to ignore something because it doesn't seem to fit in a theorem.

As the old entrepeneur is supposed to have said on his deathbed - I wish I had learned to trust my intuition earlier in life ..."

Aidan Higgins
www.aidanhiggins.com

Of course people have to use both their right and left brain. But if we consider organizations instead of the people, we have to assume most companies, considered as entities by themselves, are left-brained only.

I'm convinced the point is not about right brain but about connecting both hemispheres, not at an individual scale, but at the company's scale. It's the only way to become agile and innovative without the risk of being out of control.

Right hemisphere is the next step, not the next big thing. And once organization will have ensured their "right brain readiness" they'll be able to connect it to the left hemisphere, which (may) be the next big thing.