2/22/07 - Right Brain Reading

Observations from this week's reading "A Whole New Mind":
Premium for High Concept Left Brainers:
Pink states that his “offshore” viewpoint doesn’t signal the end of L-Directed thinkers, it just puts a premium on high concept L-Directed thinkers.

I'm not sure I agree with that.

Going by the rules of supply and demand, from Pink's reasoning the demand for L-Directed thinkers is going to reduce, so to make it as one of the dwindling numbers, you will need to have distinguishing characteristics, like high concept thinking.

Is it a premium to have skills that are going to be requisite to be employed?

I wouldn't think so.

Humans performing repetitive factory floor jobs have been taken over by robots. The few human jobs left are for awkward tasks or stages where human observation are required (or cheaper than robots). Are the few factory workers left considered "premium" or "lucky"?

America is the Right Side and Asia is the Left Side?
There has been a lot of discussion in the last decade of outsourcing and how America will deal with it. Pink’s description seems to indicate that America will change itself to be a power-base of creative thinkers that then outsource the execution of their ideas to Asia where they will cheaply be realized.

Where does the average worker fit into that?

I realize that this globalization and outsourcing from America has happened in cycles before (from agriculture to industrial to electronic and conceptual) but can a country be predominately R-Directed thinking?

I suppose the L-Thinkers will move onto the next “Age” as they have always done.

In the “Technology Age” when Japan started to outstrip America in production of electronics, many American’s comforted themselves by saying that America is where the idea’s come from, its ok that someone else is producing them cheaper. And to a certain degree, they were right. We just moved on to the next "age".

The latest “outsourcing” could be seen as a continuation of that cycle.