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A Whole New Mind Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future specifications:

A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future Audiobook Description:

A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future Audiobook Reviews:

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162 of 162 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of five stars
A whole new way to see the world,
December 7, 2009

By&nbsp,Makayla Dickerson See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future Paperback

A Whole New Mind is written for those who need a whole new way to see the world and engage their brain. The book starts with a historical narrative outlining four big “ages”:

1. Farming Age farmers

2. Industrial Age factory workers

3. Info Age knowledge workers

4. Conceptual Age creators and empathizers

The 4th stage is where Pink concentrates on how people and businesses may be successful. Pink references three current trends pointing towards the future of business and the economy: Abundance consumers have too many choices, nothing is scarce, Asia everything that may be outsourced, is and Automation computerization, robots, technology, processes.

This brings up three crucial questions for the success of any business:

1. Can a computer do it faster?

2. Is what I am offering in demand in an age of abundance?

3. Can someone abroad do it cheaper?

When these questions are present, creativity becomes the competitive difference that can differentiate goods and you’re a commodity, too. Pink outlines six essential senses:

1. Design Moving beyond function to engage the sense.

2. Story Narrative added to merchandise and services not just argument. Best of the six senses.

3. Symphony Adding invention and big picture thinking not just detail focus.

4. Empathy Going beyond logic and engaging feeling and intuition.

5. Play Bringing humor and light heartedness to business and merchandise.

6. Meaning Immaterial feelings and values of merchandise.

Pink makes the argument that we all have to integrate more empathy and play into our lives because it enables one to relax, enjoy life more and engage the unused capacity of one’s intellect. He makes a strong argument that our society pigeon holes us into thinking some way and approaching life without the tools we really have to enjoy it and get the most out of it. The book is full of useful info and strategies also to a call to action in your life.

Emotional Intelligence 2.0 is another great book that I just finished and think you will like.

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94 of 104 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of five stars
In three words? Terrible. Terrible. Terrible.,
August 4, 2009

By&nbsp,Brian Bex Huff “bex” Minneapolis, MN, USA See all my reviews

This review is from: A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future Paperback

The central premise of this book is that people with somewhat more right brain expertise will dominate the work force in the 21st century. Or at least be more vital than the past 20 years. I bought this book because that’s a premise I agree with, so I was inquisitive to see how he demonstrated his point, or any advice he could offer.

What I got was page after page of uninformed conjecture, hyperbole, cliches, and self important blather. His premise? Left brained work dominated the industrial age, and the next “phase” of human development is what he decided to label the “conceptual age,” where right directed people will dominate.

Really? You really think that? That is a hell of a declaration. I hope you may be able to back it up with many hard data. Statistics, job growth numbers, etc? Anything?

Nope.

He claims the drivers towards the “Conceptual Age” are Abundance, Asia, and Automation. That is it. No more evidence. Let us take these one at a time:

Firstly, because of “Abundance”, people need better designs, for common household tools. Designers become vital. And seemingly this is a new idea??? He believes that the words from the new CEO of GM who said his job is to produce works of art that people drive as being somehow monumental. Oh my god! GM designs cars! They now care about “form” also as “function!”

Really??? You really think that is a new thing? So I guess then those fins on a 1956 Chevy are there for aerodynamic reasons. And the mountains of chrome were there to make it more observable at night. Seemingly the author is equally ignorant of the real drivers of the “left brained” industrial revolution in the 19th century: the production of cheap textiles for clothing. YEP! The industrial revolution existed for the benefit of fashion designers and other “right brained” people who were tired of the common abundance of the tunic. And how most of the computer revolution existed because people wanted a more “personalized” computer experience for their home or business? Ever hear of the iMac???

The author should attempt to do many research once in a while.

Secondly, because of “Asia,” many of left brian jobs computer programming, accounting, and legal are moving to Asia. Whereas right brian jobs that require artistic design, communication, empathy, play, and meaning stay right in the USA. Since these jobs are “high touch” jobs, they can not be outsourced.

Really??? You really think right brain jobs cant be outsourced? I got a graphic designer in the Philippines who says differently. I got a dozen “empathy hotlines” you may be able to call if you are feeling like killing yourself, and they will do a hell of many better talking you down from the ledge than your friends or family. I also know of many really good buyer support centers in India who are greatly trained in empathic communication. Ever hear of teleconferencing or telepresence? Right brained jobs are just as easily outsourced with the right technology.

Jobs are moving to Asia for one basic reason: SUPPLY AND DEMAND. Nothing more. Most American businesses favor American workers, simply because culture differences, currency exchange rates, and time zones are a ache to deal with. But Asian workers are so much cheaper that they’re worth the extra ache. But, these wages are only low in Asia because Asian industries aren’t large enough to demand local software developers, lawyers, and accountants. Once Asia becomes more industrialized, local businesses will be calling for up the local skill. Which decreases their supply. Which drives Asian wages up. Which makes American skill more nice to American businesses again.

This is just cyclical unemployment on a world scale: no more. Again. Many research by the author could have been nice.

Thirdly, because of “Automation,” those who just follow a defined procedure will be easily replaced by robots, computers, or Asians apparently. In other words. Technology removes low skill jobs. SHOCKER! But of course, this is not really true. As any economics professor will tell you, technology is disruptive, but it does not eliminate jobs in the long run. The simple fact is that workers who learn how to use the new technology become more productive, so more valuable to their employers! Yes, job responsibilities shift around a bit, but in general productivity increases, which creates more jobs in the medium term.

Then the author goes on to the second section of the book, which holds anecdotes about what expertise will be vital in the 21st century: design agree, story maybe, “symphony” give me a break., empathy big agreement there, play agree, and meaning agree. The stories are good reading, but they’re never supported by any hard data. There’s evidence of a fad, but no evidence of a trend.

The single saving grace of this book are the right brain exercises. They’re pretty fun ways for a left brain leaning person to step out of their comfort zone and flex the right brain a little. If you find this book in the bargain bin for $5, then its worth it just for the exercises.

Otherwise, you will most likely want to avoid it.

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615 of 726 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of five stars
Excellent diagnosis, but inadequate & incomplete solutions,
April 7, 2005

By&nbsp,John H. Hwung Fair Oaks, CA USA See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Whole New Mind: Moving from the info Age to the Conceptual Age Hardcover

The title of the book is proper. For the age that we’re in, we need a whole new mind. But, the book promised a mansion, but ended up giving us an apartment. It begins like a Porsche, but ended like a VW Beetle. The author properly identified the illness of Abundance, Asia, and Automation, but prescribed the wrong medicine of six right brain directed R Directed aptitudes.

To the author’s credit, he’s the 1st that succinctly identified the big problems the Western countries are facing: Abundance, Asia, and Automation. Majority of people, as well as intellectuals and high government officials are in the coma state of not sensing the deadly effects of offshore outsourcing of high tech jobs and R&D to the basic wellbeing of U.S. And other Western countries, nor the result of automating white band jobs by the ever more powerful computer hardware and software. This is the 1st book that I know of that sounded the alarm to the great masses of the coming sea change. For this, the author ought to be congratulated.

The author has a vision that we’re moving from info Age to Conceptual Age. He said that if we have a whole new mind, we can have an economy and society that are constructed on the inventive, empathic and big picture potential. He stresses that the major characters now are the creator and the empathizer. He argues that we have to move from high tech to high idea and high touch. They are all great ideas. But, the strategies that the author prescribed through the six R Directed aptitudes, which comprise most of the book, while adequate to fight Abundance and Automation, is hardly enough to overcome Asia. There are some number of big shortcomings to the book:

First and primary, these six R Directed aptitudes aren’t the lone possessions of the Western countries. Asian countries have them, too, and can most likely master them just also. The author seemed to forget to constantly validate his assumptions against the three questions he has to answer. One of them was: Can someone abroad do it cheaper? This author has a dangerous underestimation of foreigners: “Sure. They can do low level programming and accountancy but we still create the novelty and creativity.” He didn’t notice that R&D are moving abroad to the foreign countries. For this, see businessweek.Com/magazine/content/05_12/b3925611.Htm for more detail.

Secondly, how does the author know that these six R Directed aptitudes are the most essential of all possible right brain aptitudes? He never showed research evidences for these aptitudes are indeed the most vital.

Thirdly, the six R Directed aptitudes are greatly subjective, social dependent and culture dependent. As an example, design is greatly culture dependent. What is deemed elegant and tasteful design in a culture can be offensive to another. A beautiful design to you can be an average one to me. Take another aptitude, story, as another example: the contents of stories are greatly culture dependent. A story that seems right in one culture may not seem right to another.

Fourthly, the result of developing these aptitudes, if developed to the full extent, is the more fragmentation of our world, for we have divide ourselves into smaller and smaller subjective realms. A side result is the fragmentation of the market for products and services.

Above all, the solution proposed by the author isn’t going to be able to crack the problem of “Can someone abroad do it cheaper?”

In summary, the author deserves three stars for properly identified the problems, but gave the incomplete solutions. But, I could support the author to continue to search for the solutions for Abundance, Asia, and Automation.

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21 Responses to “a whole new”

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The Black Swan The Impact of the Highly Improbable specifications:

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Import Description:

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Import Reviews:

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1,099 of 1,183 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of five stars
Lost in Extremistan with nothing but a Bell Curve,
April 18, 2007

By&nbsp,The Dilettante “Dilly!” See all my reviews
TOP 1000 REVIEWER
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This review is from: The Black Swan: The affect of the greatly Improbable Hardcover

If, as Socrates could have it, the only true knowledge is knowledge of one’s own ignorance, then Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the world’s greatest living teacher. In The Black Swan, Taleb’s second book for laypeople, he gives a full treatment to notions shortly explored in his 1st book “Fooled by Randomness.” The Black Swan is just a sequel to that book, but more focused, in depth and scholarly. This is a book of serious philosophy that reads like a stand up comedy routine. Think Larry David.

The Black Swan is most likely the strongest declaration of enlightened empiricism since Ernst Mach refused to acknowledge the existence of the atom. Of course, in hypothesis, everyone today is supposed to be an empiricist all right thinking intellectuals assert to base their views Exclusively on positive scientific observation. But not many sincerely confront the implications of rigorous empiricism. Exactly, not many confront “the problem of induction,” illustrated here by the story of the black swan.

Briefly: observing an event once doesn’t predict it’ll happen again at some point. This remains true despite of the number of observations one adds to the pile. Or, as Taleb, recapitulating David Hume, has it: the observation of a million white swans doesn’t justify the declaration “all swans are white.” there’s no way to know that someplace out there a black swan isn’t hiding, refuting the rule and nullifying our “knowledge” of swans. The problem of induction tells us that we can not really learn from our experiences. It makes knowledge problematic, if not impossible. And still, humans do behave almost without exception as though they believe that experience teaches us lessons. This is forgivable, there’s no better path to knowledge. But before proceeding, one must account for the limitations that the problem of induction places on our claims to knowledge. And humans seem, at every turn, to lack this important self awareness.

In one of the many funny anecdotes that seem to comprise this complete book, Taleb recounts how he learned his extreme doubt from his 1st boss, a French gentleman trader who insisted that he shouldn’t worry about the fluctuating values of economic indicators. Indeed, Taleb proudly declares that, to this day, he remains blissfully ignorant of supposedly crucial “indicators” like housing starts and buyer spending. This is a shocking declaration from a man whose day job is managing a hedge fund. If these “common knowledge” indicators are predictive of anything dubious see above, they’re useless to you because everyone else is already accounting for them. They’re “white swans,” or common sense. Despite of their magnitude, white swans are just irrelevant to the trader they have already been impounded into the market. In this environment, one can only profitably concern oneself with those bets which others are systematically ignoring bets on those greatly not likely, but greatly consequential events that utterly defy the regular wisdom. What Taleb ought to worry about, the Frenchman warned, wasn’t the prospect of a quarter percent rise in interest rates, but a plane hitting the World Trade Center!

Yep, the exact facts of 9 11 were really presaged by this French gentlemen, as a rogue wave that just may be lurking over the horizon. And, to the modern American mind, this is THE quintessential Black Swan. Of course, the Frenchman’s insight was just a coincidence the thing with Black Swans is that they can not be foreseen.

Taleb explains that regular social scientists use induction to gather data, which is then plotted on the good old Gaussian bellcurve. With feature silliness, Taleb dubs the land of the bellcurve “Mediocristan” and informs us that it’s the natural habitat of the white swan. He contrasts Mediocristan with “Extremistan” where chaos reigns, the wholly unexpected happens, power laws and fractal geometry apply and the bellcurve doesn’t. Taleb’s fictional/metaphorical ’stans’ share something with the ’stans’ of the real world: ill defined borders. Indeed, one can never tell if one is in the comparatively safe territory of Mediocristan or if one wandered into the lawless tribal regions of Extremistan. The bellcurve can only assist you in Mediocristan, but you dont have way of knowing if you strayed into Extremistan beyond the bellcurve’s authority. That means that bellcurves are of no dependable use, anywhere. The full implications of this take a while to sink in, and are sure to produce big controversy. In July, Taleb will debate Charles Murray author of what else? The Bell Curve. I will let you know who wins.

Taleb frames his whole argument more entertainingly than I could here, and he bolsters it with an astounding command of both cutting edge social science and the complete history of philosophy. This is an astounding work of serious philosophy, and it reads like pulp fiction. Readers who enjoyed FBR will find here the same dry wit, the same literary erudition, and deep sense of the absurd that made that book so much fun. But this is better, by an order of magnitude easily the best book I have read in five years. I smell a timely pop science bestseller here to rival Gladwell or Surowiecki, but this is a classic that will be read for decades to come.

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560 of 603 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of five stars
Chapters 15 17 are excellent. The remainder is OK.,
July 30, 2007

By&nbsp,Gaetan Lion See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Black Swan: The affect of the greatly Improbable Hardcover

Starting with the good chapters 15 17, inside chapter 15 Taleb explains where the Bell curve works and where it doesn’t. The Bell curve captures well variables that do not deviate much from the mean. Otherwise, it doesn’t work. Taleb suggests we frequently fool ourselves in believing that correlation, regression coefficients, or standard deviation convey much info. This is because those coefficients are unstable and can flip sign when possible based on the time selected. This is because the fundamental variables are frequently not stationary enough for these coefficients to be stable.

Chapter 16 is excellent as an introduction to Mandelbrot’s fractal geometry as an alternative to Gaussian established investment hypothesis. He supports well that these mathematical tools do catch randomness of non stationary variables far better than the Normal distribution. But, he acknowledges that Mandelbrotian models aren’t predictive. When looking at the same data set, he and many colleagues each came up with different fundamental parameters to build fractal like models. And a small difference in such parameters makes a big difference in result. That is why you won’t hear most of fractal geometry inside the quantitative financial community. Still, this is a fascinating subject that deserves more exploration. For this function, I recommend Mandelbrot’s The Misbehavior of Markets

Within Chapter 17, Taleb more elaborates on the faults of the Normal distribution. He underlines that half of the return of the stock market over the past 50 years was related with just ten days with the greatest daily change. This is an example where stock returns have outliers of such magnitude that using the Normal distribution isn’t proper. Taleb describes the run ins he experienced with the living legends of modern finance as well as Myron Scholes and Robert Merton caused by his rejection of the Normal distribution assumption that underlies all their models.

The remainder of the book isn’t almost as good. Hundreds of pages may be summed up in just stating that we can not predict rare events. Taleb goes way overboard in attributing everything to luck. He thinks MicroSoft beat out Apple just caused by luck. Taleb doesn’t think about that MicroSoft open system allowed it to mushroom while Apple locked itself into a proprietary corner. As well, as indicated by Taleb both the rise and fall of Rome were due completely to luck. But, Rome was best at developing military approach and transportation networks. But, it sooner or later suffered from imperial overstretch. Explanations aren’t generally narrative fallacies as Taleb believes. They frequently beat out ignorance.

When it comes to advice, Taleb’s recommendation is interesting. It consists in an asset allocation of 85 risk free investments T bill and the 15 remainder into purchasing way out of the money Calls and Puts. By doing he positions his portfolio to catch the sporadic mispriced Black Swans.

This book is somewhat uneven in quality and isn’t almost as good as his 1st book: Fooled by Randomness alteration Not Available in US: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and Life that became a classic on Wall Street. Otherwise, it still is an interesting reading.

If you find the subject of this book intriguing, let me propose some other books that are more rewarding. Scott Plous’sThe Psychology of Judgment and choice Making explores the faults in human judgments far more completely and obviously than Taleb in The Black Swan.’ Perry Mehrling’s Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance is an excellent book. Ideally, that can be who Taleb could liked to become. Fischer Black was smart and as cynical as Taleb about most of the body of economics and finance. Still, he left a great legacy of elegant models that people still use greatly as well as the famous Black Scholes choice model. Yes those models were frequently depending on Taleb’s dreaded Normal distribution. But, with minor mods those models have stayed valuable. Another recommendation is William Poundstone’s Fortune’s Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street that describes the career of a bright MIT mathematician, Ed Thorp. The latter showed how to effectively deal with doubt in gambling and investing. Taleb recognized Thorp’s distinctive specialty inside Black Swan.’

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773 of 858 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of five stars
Many vital ideas, many faults that detract from the message,
April 25, 2007

By&nbsp,Eo Gilbert, AZ United States See all my reviews

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