A Whole New Dummy

One of the books I read recently was A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. I found it particularly interesting. Basically it contends that we are moving out of the information age and into the conceptual age. No longer is analytical, procedural, “left -brain thinking” key because all of this type of work can be done offshore and by computers. In the future the key skills that are going to be important are those that are managed by the right hand side of the brain. The top 6 skills that we need to develop are storytelling, playing, design, infusing meaning into things, providing symphony (basically providing clear overviews of things) and being able to empathise with others.

Empathy, an interesting one. Daniel Pink convincingly suggests that the inability to “offshore those jobs that require high levels of empathy” is the reason why we will always have doctors and nurses close at hand. Maybe then I should be reassured by the events of last night when Maxime, who never had a dummy when he was a baby himself, happily took himself off to bed with Gaston’s dummy firmly between his teeth. Rather than walking in your customer’s shoes, Maxime is obviously trying to walk in Gaston’s booties. I now obviously feel quite confident that life is going to work out just fine for him, even despite Delphine from the crèche suggesting that he’s hyperactive.