The Right-Brained Explosion
Get ready for the big blast. Those fine-arts students who society has traditionally shunned as either too weird or too spacey to take seriously in business are now being recruited and given positions that rival their MBA counterparts.
The Wall Street days of the ’80s and the Total Quality Management days of the ’90s are shifting to a new Age of Creativity based on a hunger for insights and innovation. Harvard, Northwestern, Stanford and other business schools can give us left-brained managers, but those with the ability to see, feel and find the insights for propelling companies into the future are a new breed, and harder to find. Perhaps this is why pundits are now calling the MFA the new MBA—because the new creatives see possibilities faster. Artists are taught to juxtapose and try things before they decide. They are willing to experiment and wait for the “aha” moment to hit.
In a recent section in Ad Age totally devoted to “Redefining Creativity,” Dan Pink makes the case that left-brained work will increasingly become a commodity as much of the more routine aspects such as following procedure or step-by-step project work will increasingly be transmitted overseas for execution in countries such as India. As to the shift catching on, he states, “Remuneration and recognition for right-brained skills hasn’t caught up yet, but there are plenty of indications it is catching up. I don’t know if it’s true, but somebody from P&G told me they are laying off engineers but have a shortage of designers. These big companies are recruiting at art and design schools.”
The new “Creative Class” is made up of those who have been suckled on technology and grown up on the Internet. This has had a profound effect on them and is changing just about every consumer market. In his book The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida describes this group as “a fast-growing, highly educated, and well-paid segment of the workforce on whose efforts corporate profits and economic growth increasingly depend. They share a common ethos that values creativity, individuality, difference, and merit.” They are not managers in the old sense of the word, nor are they creative people who do commercial art or create what other people tell them to do. They, as Florida explains, “create meaningful new forms.” They do this in the fields of design, entertainment, technology and well-being, and they do it with a great sense of individuality because they are connected to the hub of all knowledge and “what’s new”—the internet.
Companies with an eye on the future are competing to find this new kind of creature—the internet-savvy creative type—because they know that with them comes what they need most: INSIGHTS; the insights derived from being connected to what’s happening now and, most important, to what will happen.
In a June 19 Business Week article entitled “Champions of Innovations,” Michelle Conlin said this about the driving demand for insights that lead to innovation: “When creeping commoditization of products, services and information hammers prices, innovation is the new currency of competition. It is the key to organic growth, the lever to widen profit margins, the Holy Grail of 21st-century business.”
Clearly, if innovation is the new currency of competition, the move from equity management to insight harvesting makes perfect sense. And those insights most likely will come exploding from the right side of our corporate noggins.
That’s it, from the edge of the world.
Bob
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