A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
by Daniel H. Pink
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Read in July, 2008
recommended to Kelly by:
Heggelrecommends it for: insecure lefties :)
Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind makes many excellent points. Unfortunately, it suffers from an awkward and unconvincing metaphorical framework.
Chapter 1: Right Brain Rising
Pink starts out explaining about the brain’s left and right hemispheres, and how each side is responsible for different cognitive activities - the left hemisphere tends to be responsible for sequential logic, analysis, and language; the right hemisphere for holistic reasoning, pattern recognition, emotions and body ...more
Chapter 1: Right Brain Rising
Pink starts out explaining about the brain’s left and right hemispheres, and how each side is responsible for different cognitive activities - the left hemisphere tends to be responsible for sequential logic, analysis, and language; the right hemisphere for holistic reasoning, pattern recognition, emotions and body ...more
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Read in April, 2008
Pink has a fundamentally decent, and possibly true, point--that in order to succeed, today's workers need to be more creative than ever before, because all of the logic-driven drone-work will be done by, well, drones--but his point gets buried in this pop-psych, new-agey rhetoric. His advice on what sorts of traits will be necessary seem obvious to me--they boil down to play nice with others, make connections between people and ideas, and have fun--but he did lose me at the end where he ...more
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Read in November, 2007
Besides having an author name seemingly borrowed from “Reservoir Dogs,” there is much to like in this popular business/pop psychology book. It posits a movement from an era when “Left-Brained” Knowledge Work was at a premium to one in which “Right-Brained High-Concept and High Touch” Work will be the demand opportunity. Computers and a global workforce have reduced the at home demand for knowledge work—computers do it massively faster and smart, English-speaking workers in West Asi...more
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Read in June, 2008
Although it goes against my principles to give 5 stars to a self-help book, I make an exception for this gem. It's fascinating and revealing, and full of hope for the future (there's a rare commodity). My book club really loved it--all of us.
Pink (yes, that's his name) outlines his vision for the next generation of world business trends in our "flat" world where automation, asia, and abundance have created new requirements for success--requirements that for the most part come out...more
Pink (yes, that's his name) outlines his vision for the next generation of world business trends in our "flat" world where automation, asia, and abundance have created new requirements for success--requirements that for the most part come out...more
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Has a copy to sell/swap
—
Read in July, 2008
recommended to Cara by:
Aunt Lisa
"The ability to encapsulate, contextualize, and emotionalize has become vastly more important in the Conceptual Age. When so much routine knowledge work can be reduced to rules and farmed out to fast computers and smart L-Directed thinkers abroad, the more elusive abilities...become more valuable. Likewise, as more people lead lives of abundance, we'll have a greater opportunity to pursue lives of meaning" (104).
Even when Pink's presentation is a little cheesy, he still succeeds in...more
Even when Pink's presentation is a little cheesy, he still succeeds in...more
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This book presents some interesting ideas. However, it would have been much better if it wasn't stretched out to the size that it was. Let me put it the way I told my brother when he asked me what I thought of it. I said that it would have been a pretty good essay or a well above average forum post, but wasn't really worthy of getting a full book. When I was reading this, I tried to get the good ideas and ignore the filler, but it's the literary equivalent of cotton candy. It was written for peo...more
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This book was recommended reading for faculty at Holton-Arms School this summer. I didn't find anything new or surprisingly insightful, but it certainly deals with important aspects of being a more complete human being.
Daniel Pink's main point is a good one: success, as well as personal fulfillment, cannot be measured by taking the SAT. While we certainly need logical and analytical skills (left-brain directed), we also need to employ many other qualities of the human mind. The author descri...more
Daniel Pink's main point is a good one: success, as well as personal fulfillment, cannot be measured by taking the SAT. While we certainly need logical and analytical skills (left-brain directed), we also need to employ many other qualities of the human mind. The author descri...more
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Read in June, 2008
Well hmmmmm... What I got the most out of in this read were a look at some of the studies quoted which I hadn't been aware of before hand... so that was good. The rest was various levels of flawed --- For the most part I really struggled with Pink's arguments for WHY the processes and value of the right brain will be more apparent as we move forward socially and economically.They seemed pretty weakly constructed. Also I noticed Pink striving to say "it should be balanced between left &...more
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I read Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind on my flight from Dallas to Chicago this morning. It turned out to be a shockingly quick read. While I was put off for several chapters by his apparent need to ingratiate himself to left-brain directed skeptics (myself included), I was gratified to find that he did have a clear line of reasoning, rich in examples of why right-brain directed folks wil...more
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Read in September, 2007
From a former speech writer for Al Gore, who loves statistics a little too much, to an educational/brain researcher, Pink examines what it takes to be whole and what skills job searchers will want in the future.
I liked the fact that right brain creative side is a learned skill that should be taught in school and that it is important that our schools try and create inviting environs. Spaces that look less like prisons and more like cheap Star Bucks.
Some of Pink's stuff and most educatio...more
I liked the fact that right brain creative side is a learned skill that should be taught in school and that it is important that our schools try and create inviting environs. Spaces that look less like prisons and more like cheap Star Bucks.
Some of Pink's stuff and most educatio...more
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Read in July, 2007
recommends it for:
my enemies, self absorbed petty bourgeois functionaries unconcerned with global poverty
I hate this book and want to set it on fire.
No, seriously. Daniel Pink takes a bunch of self-evident ideas, hammers them togethers with some feel-good rationale, and writes a pampered, whiny how-to of middle class comfort telling us to use our right brains to stay competitive and maintain our middle class relevance.
His examples are trite and his sources appalling--looking at the selections at your local suburban Target is not the way of justifying your belief in a culture of abundance...more
No, seriously. Daniel Pink takes a bunch of self-evident ideas, hammers them togethers with some feel-good rationale, and writes a pampered, whiny how-to of middle class comfort telling us to use our right brains to stay competitive and maintain our middle class relevance.
His examples are trite and his sources appalling--looking at the selections at your local suburban Target is not the way of justifying your belief in a culture of abundance...more
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Read in May, 2008
This book presents Pink's ideas about the Information Age giving way to a new "Conceptual Age" in which right-brain skills will have increasing importance. I think Pink is essentially correct, but I'm not sure he made his case in the best way he could have. I think he made too big of a deal about outsourcing, and didn't give enough attention to the ways in which new media is inherently changing the global culture. His idea that since Indians have learned programming, Americans must ...more
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Pink's proposal is a touch idealistic, but the vision he paints is promising. Basically, since automation and outsourcing to Asia can now accomplish lots of left-brain heavy jobs (computer coding, etc.) and since affordability of so many products has freed up some of our time and energy, Pink suggests that future jobs (and happiness) will depend more on those who master six critical senses managed by the right side (the creative side) of the brain: design, play, story, symphony, empathy, and mea...more
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Pink offers an alternative to the doom-and-gloom of the Thos. Friedman "We [Americans] Are Going To Die/Be Obsolete Because We Don't Have Any Engineers" school of the future, by pointing out that even if we *had* engineers, we still wouldn't be able to compete dollar-for-dollar with equivalently trained engineers from India, China, etc. So, for Pink, the future lies in content creation and integration - a point Friedman makes too in The World is Flat, only Pink makes it much more eloq...more
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Read in March, 2008
Daniel Pink was the keynote speaker at the ALA conference last June. There was so much positive feedback from the event that I put this book on my list of books to read. So glad I did. As many others have noticed, Pink offers a positive way of looking at the future in a time when things don't look so great. As always, there will be opportunity for those who adapt to the times.
Pink's way of bringing seemingly disparate things together is helpful/hopeful and decidely right brained. Pink's ana...more
Pink's way of bringing seemingly disparate things together is helpful/hopeful and decidely right brained. Pink's ana...more
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Read in January, 2005
If you are a right-brain creative type, this book will make you feel like your parents were wrong and you are highly employable, after all. "An art degree?! What are you gonna do with an art degree??!! You might as well be an English major!!" Well friends, according to Dan Pink, with an art degree you are poised to pretty much rule the world. Of course, it does require a good right brain/left brain balance and this book tells you how, and why, to find that balance. It's an interestin...more
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Read in August, 2007
Our faculty read this book over the summer and it's been really applicable to what it is that we do in our classrooms. Pink argues that the age of "left brain" dominance is over... and that the future belongs to a "different kind of person with a different kind of mind: designers, inventors, teachers, storytellers - creative and emphatic "right brain" thinkers." Pink argues that there are 6 Senses that we need to develop and draw upon:Design, Story, Symphony, Empa...more
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Fun, fascinating book and quite a relief for someone who feels lopsidedly right brained.
This is actually a good follow-up book for people who read Eckhart Tolle's "A New Earth." This is the practical side of much of what Tolle talks about -- presence, awareness, inner space -- as it applies to daily life, corporate America and even the health care industry. Pink is a journalist who cares about not losing his audience in statistics or mumbo-jumbo, and that makes the book readable and ...more
This is actually a good follow-up book for people who read Eckhart Tolle's "A New Earth." This is the practical side of much of what Tolle talks about -- presence, awareness, inner space -- as it applies to daily life, corporate America and even the health care industry. Pink is a journalist who cares about not losing his audience in statistics or mumbo-jumbo, and that makes the book readable and ...more
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Read in June, 2008
Written in a somewhat facile manner, but with many good points about the necessity of creativity, design, and empathy in both economic and social realms. The litmus test: if a computer can do it, you and your job will one day be obsolete. In other words, we need to develop and hone the skills that make us human. Pink doesn't say that outright, but a philosopher (and social scientist) would immediately recognize that his "how-to" points demonstrate that reflection, empathy, and the conc...more
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Read in October, 2007
recommends it for:
parents teachers
A complimentary read to The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman. Finally someone is saying what we all feel in education, that the drive to testing is going to create a generation of great bubblers totally turned off to learning, or is that Mark Prensky? Well what Pink does have to say is that we have to go beyond the left brain linear thinking knowledge worker jobs. Those are now being outsourced to India, China and Russia. We also have to teach students the right brain collaborative, creative...more
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