It is more and more clear
each decade (even each year, in this new millennium) that your work future will
depend on your answers to three questions. In this new era each of us must look
carefully at what we do and ask ourselves:
1.
Can someone
overseas do it cheaper?
2.
Can a computer
do it faster?
3.
Am I offering
something that satisfies the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an abundant
age?
The Conceptual Age is dawning
and these three questions
mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who gets left behind. Individuals
and organizations that focus their efforts on doing what foreign knowledge
workers can't do cheaper and computers can't do faster, as well as on meeting
the aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual demands of a prosperous time, will
thrive. Those who ignore these three questions will struggle.
In this new millennium two
sets of economists have produced studies that support this claim. W. Michael Cox
and Richard Alm, of the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas, have examined ten years
of employment data and discovered that the largest gains have been in jobs that
require "people skills and emotional intelligence" (for example,
registered nurses) and "imagination and creativity" (for example,
designers).
Frank Levy, of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Richard Murnane, of Harvard
University, have published an excellent book,
The New Division of Labor: How Computers
Are
Creating
the Next Job Market,
in which they argue that
computers are in the process of obliterating routine work. The arrival of
desktop PCs and the automation of business processes, they say, have heightened
the value of two categories of human skills. The first is what they call "expert
thinking—solving new problems for which there are no routine solutions." The
other is "complex communication—persuading, explaining, and in other ways
conveying a particular interpretation of information."
It seems clear that the
Conceptual Age is dawning and that those who hope to survive in it must master
high-concept, high-touch abilities. This situation presents both promise and
peril. The promise is that Conceptual Age jobs are exceedingly democratic. You
don't need to design the next cell phone or discover a new source of renewable
energy. There will be plenty of work not just for inventors, artists, and
entrepreneurs but also for an array of imaginative, emotionally intelligent,
right-brain professionals, from counselors to massage therapists to
schoolteachers to stylists to talented salespeople. What’s more, the attributes
needed are fundamentally human attributes, in the realm of Emotional
Intelligence. They reside in all of us and need only be nurtured into being.
Our world is moving at a
furious pace. Computers and networks grow faster and more interconnected each
day. China and India are becoming economic behemoths. Material abundance in the
advanced world continues to grow. That means that the greatest rewards will go
to those who move fast. The first group of people who develop the ability to use
both sides of the brain (feminine and masculine sides), who master high-concept
and high-touch abilities will do extremely well. The rest – those who move
slowly or not at all – may miss out or, worse, suffer.
The choice is yours. This new
age fairly glitters with opportunity but it is as unkind to the slow of foot as
it is to the rigid of mind.
