Thought Intifada, Thought Apartheid and what to do about it...

30 Jul 2007

Hi there funksters,

This is an excerpt from my Keynote presentation at the Thought Leaders' Winter Conference on July 27th 2007 in Sydney, Australia.

Nobody’s thinking but the world is posing questions to us. We have moved into a new age, whether you call it the age of ideas, the conceptual age or the age of transcendence – the zeitgeist has changed and with it you have permission to get in tune with your raison d’etre and funky up your thinking.

Why is this important? Because trends can be your friend, or they can be your enemy depending on which side of the equation you are on. Anyone who has invested in shares during the dot.com bubble or invested in real estate during the boom bust would know this.

When I grew up in a traditional middle-class family in the middle of Sweden in the middle of the 90's, my parents, with all due respect, dished out the same familiar plate of advice to their children. Get a high paying job as a professional knowledge worker. If you were good at languages and history, as in my case, become a lawyer or a diplomat. What distinguished this group knowledge workers was their ability to apply theoretical and analytical knowledge, and with some hard work and discipline you could join their ranks, and the path to professional success and personal fulfillment was set.

While I was eagerly slugging away at university pressing my nose against the grindstone of law and international relations in the early 2000s, something funny happened – the world changed, and with it the future did not belong to the logical, linear, analytical thinker anymore.

Instead it belongs to a different kind of a person with a different kind of mind. There is a metaphor that explains what is going on, and the answer as per usual lies within your brain. The Mason-Dixon line cleaves your brain into two regions – the left and right hemisphere which have separate areas of responsibility. The left side handles sequence, analysis and numbers, and the right side handles context, emotional expression and synthesis. You know the saying that a picture says a thousand words. In the metaphor of your brain, the left brain is the 1000 words and the right brain is the picture.
While the brain is intricately complex, wired and inter-connected, its very structure helps explain the contours of our times.

Until recently, in the Information Age, abilities that led to life success were largely left brained and could be measured by UAIs, IQ tests and MBA entry scores. Today these abilities are still necessary, but they are no longer sufficient, and increasingly they are getting outsourced, automated or devalued.

So there I am at university slugging away so that I can improve my CV so that I can get on-board with a top-tier law firm, and a seismic shift of historical proportions is under way, and my world is being upended by the Rise of the Right Brain, of which I seemingly had none.

By the time I left university, the Information Age for which I had been preparing was gone, or at least the writing was on the wall.

The causes for this shift have been summarized beautifully in Daniel Pink’s book, ‘A Whole New Mind’, which if you have not read it already needs to be top of your reading list, or on ‘recently added’ as an audiobook on your Ipod tomorrow.

Suffice it to say three forces are at play which are causing this shift – Asia, Abundance and Automation. Basically, globalization and outsourcing, unprecedented economic abundance, and computerization mean that the definition of economic value and demand has shifted, and consequently, the jobs, businesses, and functions we fulfill have been completely upended, and we all need to be asking ourselves whether the thinking software that we have installed is one that is optimized for this new age, whether what we do is in demand, and whether who you have decided to define yourself as is relevant in the 21^st century.

So you have two options of how to address this thought intifada (uprising) – you can either chose to battle it or you can join it. I recommend you join, because when this tidal trend gathers even more power, you want to make sure that you are riding it, and not punching excel spread sheets as it smashes the paradigms as we know them. Companies from Ukraine to South Africa, from Argentina to Singapore are tapping the upside of the trend – will you?

The challenge if you do not is that you are totally exchangeable and will be directly competing with billions of knowledge workers from the BRIC countries. In China, when you are one in a million in terms of talent, there is 1300 people who are just like you. That is cut-throat competition. More encouraging is the fact that globalization is overhyped in the short-term – more disparaging is that it is underhyped in the long-term.

What does this thought intifada, or the rise of the right brain mean, qualitatively and quantitatively for you?

As we are entering the world of the touchy-feely and the innovator, MBAs have been replaced by MFAs, candles are a $ 2 billion dollar industry in the US alone (120 years after we invented the lightbulb), and IQ nowadays accounts for as little as 4-10% of career success.

What I know is that gauche is gauche. For all of you who are Anglo-Saxon and driving on the wrong – left –side of the road, it is time to get on the right side of the road and get on the right stuff. Make sure you make right choices, or you might get left behind.

Anders Sorman-Nilsson

Thinque

Thought Leaders

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