In your book, you claim that traditional left-brain approaches to careers are no longer sufficient. Why?
They’re necessary, but they’re not sufficient because some of those sorts of abilities that are routine can be outsourced or automated. The key phrase here is “abilities that are routine” — abilities that you can reduce to a script or formula. Those kinds of things can now be done cheaper overseas. This includes certain types of accounting, financial analysis, programming, and even certain kinds of law.
To be clear, I think the amount of outsourcing that will occur is overstated in the short run, but understated in the long run. It’s just arithmetic. You have a country like India, and let’s say 15 percent of the people there become college educated and so can compete in the global labor market. Sine India has a billion people, 15 percent is a 150 million people! That’s more than the total number of workers in this country. And next year India will be the largest English-speaking country in the world. And it’s connected to North America for free. Right now, in the midst of our phone conversation, I can fire up Skype and call somebody in India for free.
So you’ve got huge numbers of talented, often college-educated folks who speak perfect English that are connected to North America for free. And that’s just India. I haven’t said anything about Malaysia, China, the Philippines, or Vietnam. And this is all left-brain work. In the 20th century, we began outsourcing physical labor. Now we’re outsourcing intellectual labor, but intellectual labor that is rule-based, routine, algorithmic, left-brain work.
So those white-collar jobs are being commoditized?
It’s not so much that those jobs are being commoditized but that many of the functions of those jobs are being commoditized. For instance, certain functions in accounting are commoditizable. You could send a basic tax return to India, and the person could look it over, audit it, and add up the numbers very easily and for a lot less than paying someone to do it here.
So what should accountants in the U.S. do to differentiate themselves?
You have to have good big-picture skills. Be able to see the totality of the picture, not just the narrow arithmetic of a particular accounting equation. Functions within the accounting profession that are about looking at complicated family finances and figuring out the best strategy — that’s harder to outsource because it’s not routine. And part of this is you have to have a great degree of empathy to understand where somebody else is coming from. I see that trait a lot among successful financial planners.
And it’s not just the number-crunching professions. Medical schools, for example, are doing some very interesting things. Jefferson Medical College created something called the Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy, and they found that high scores on this empathy index correlate to better patient outcomes. That’s why almost every medical school in North America is teaching clinical empathy by focusing on role-playing, listening skills, reading facial expressions, and learning how to ask questions that are a little more open-ended and less directed. This is why you also have a move toward “narrative medicine,” which is about listening to a patient’s story.
So doctors should watch more episodes of 'House' then?
[Laughs] Actually, I have to admit I don’t watch House, but I hear that guy, for all of his weirdness, is a pretty right-brain guy. He’s who you go to for a diagnosis that is not routine. Of course, doctors have to have that ability to make routine diagnoses. Certain kinds of diagnoses are decision trees: yes-no questions that branch off to other yes-no questions. But the tougher kinds of diagnoses are ones that elude that kind of routinization.
How do I use these narrative skills if I’m a manager in a corporation?
If you’re in a leadership role, leadership is often about telling a compelling story and listening to other people’s stories. Really understanding the folks who are working for you and what their lives are about calls for exquisite listening skills — not just listening for the facts but for the context. Another way to apply them is in knowledge management. With consulting firms or professional-services firms, in many ways the knowledge they have is essentially the collection of stories of various projects. So you have some companies who are systematically collecting those stories into a larger knowledge-management system.
Such as?
Xerox is doing this. Each time their people go out to repair a copier, they have to quickly type up a one-paragraph story of what happened. They put this in a giant knowledge-management system and tag them, and this accumulation of stories ends up being this incredible database of knowledge. Stories are a more effective way for people to recall that knowledge than reading a manual.
Given the growing value of right-brain thinking, are there industries or jobs that people should be focusing on if they’re entering the workforce now or making a change?
I’m not sure that I would advise anybody to go into an industry for that particular reason. I would never want to say to somebody, “You should go into design,” because if they don’t have any interest in design, they’re going to be crappy designers. People should do what they love to do and what they’re good at, but also recognize that they have to be able to do stuff that’s hard to outsource and automate. Think about your set of abilities and decide if any one of these abilities is vulnerable. For instance, if one of your great abilities is doing arithmetic in your head, that’s not that useful now. It hasn’t been useful for 30 years.
You cite a very predictive test that, in part, rates one’s humor by asking people to write captions to 'New Yorker' cartoons. So should we work more on our caption writing?
Yes, you should. When you write a caption for a cartoon, there’s no right answer. That’s one of the things that makes it challenging. Whereas, if I ask you the square root of 144 plus the square root of 81, there’s only one answer. And there’s a way to do it. You can show your work. With a cartoon caption, you don’t follow a set path to an answer; there’s no algorithm. And that makes it challenging.
If you think about good colleges, it’s less about multiple-choice tests and more “Write a paper about the causes of World War I,” or “How is the newspaper industry portrayed in Dickens’ novels?” There’s no right answer to that or no single way to do it. That kind of nonalgorithmic thinking is valuable. For example, when I started my research, I found that a lot of really talented people in business had a degree in fine arts, which really surprised me.
