Right Brain Rising

This book has been out awhile, but I finally got around to reading Pink's "A Whole New Mind." His basic argument is an age of abundance with automation and outsourcing picking up many of the industrial-age left-brain tasks, right brain concerns (high concept, high touch) are more and more predominant. As a consequence, we need to emphasize things like design, story telling, symphony (connectedness), empathy, play, and meaning. Here's the Wikipedia summary - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Whole_New_Mind.

As a dedicated left-brain type, I found some of the argument overdone, especially as I read arguments on the other end of the spectrum about how understanding number crunching is more and more important in the modern world (see Supercrunchers, for example, www.supercrunchers.com). But there's clearly a lot of interesting material in Pink's book. For anyone doing design, to take one example, you can follow IDEO's "method card" approach (http://www.ideo.com/work/item/method-cards). The chapter on play is obviously dear to my heart, but the chapter on meaning seems particularly relevant to our JBU world. Each chapter has possible ways to improve your right brain skills. The author likes labyrinths, for example, which I've only done half a dozen times, but I'll be more conscious of in the future, as I will in a number of these right-brain areas.