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06.30.2005

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HARTBEAT
12.09.2004 "Telling Stories: The Brand Connection"

12.09.2004 "Soul Logic and the Art of Keeping It Real"

07.09.2004 "5 Steps to Building a Cultural Brand"

03.25.2003 "Where Wal-Mart Can't Dance"

11.24.2003 "Fusion Culture"

07.29.2003 "The Magic of the Cultural Brand" - an interview with Harvey Hartman

NATURAL SENSIBILITY
06.06.2000 "Entering the Soul Age"

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Right-brained Economics

If you want to secure a prosperous future for your kids, tell them to drop math and science and take art and acting classes.

There's been a lot of talk in the air about outsourcing and what this means for the American economy. Thomas Friedman, in his new book, The World is Flat, makes points that should be obvious to regular readers of HartBeat. Friedman focuses mostly on what's happening outside of the United States. His tone is one of surprise as if there have been huge cataclysmic shifts in the world economy, and that since he wasn't paying attention, then probably no one else was either.

There is a note of alarm in much of what he writes - a concerned tone that the rest of the world is catching up and Americans have grown complacent and uncompetitive. Maybe, maybe not. But the value of the book lies in his summing up or providing an inventory of all the ways in which IT is changing the world's economic infrastructure, empowering the heretofore powerless, when the powerless have a modicum of ambition and access to a computer and the Internet.

A more interesting book, I think, is Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind, because he takes for granted the new IT-shaped infrastructure with its outsourcing, in-sourcing and off-shoring and proposes an idea that is very similar to themes The Hartman Group has been developing over the last five years:

In a world tossed by Abundance, Asia, and Automation, in which L[eft]-directed thinking remains necessary but no longer sufficient, we must become proficient in R[ight]-Directed Thinking and master aptitudes that are high concept and high touch. We must perform work that overseas knowledge workers don't do cheaper, that computers can't do faster, and that satisfies the aesthetic, emotional and spiritual demands of a prosperous time.

As left-brain or rational functionality is outsourced to India or wherever, right-brain or soul values become the new coin of the realm. Rather than look at the outsourcing of jobs to Asia as a loss, look at it as an opportunity to develop new businesses that gets beyond functionality and meets needs that cannot be met by well-trained technicians, who in a flat world can do what they do anywhere in cyberspace.

So the more interesting challenge is not to think of ways to compete with up-and-coming Asian companies who can use the new global IT infrastructure to perform left-brained tasks at a fraction of the cost that their American or European counterparts can - but to add right-brain, or as we have called it, "soul value." So liberal-arts majors take heart: The new economy is yours for the taking. The tougher school these days to get into is not the MBA program at Harvard, but the MFA program at UCLA. Pink writes:

A Master of Fine Arts, an MFA, is now one of the hottest credentials in a world where now even General Motors is in the art business. Corporate recruiters have started visiting the top arts grad schools...in search of talent. And this broadened approach has often come at the expense of more traditional business graduates... The MFA is the new MBA.

The people who have to worry are the ones with business degrees and technical backgrounds. Their jobs can be done in India. It's time to move to the next level - adding value by meeting the higher level needs of consumers in the more developed economies. The way to make yourself irreplaceable is to provide something that no one else can, and the more functionality your job has, and the less creativity that it requires, the more likely it can be done just as well and a lot more cheaply by well-trained technicians in Asia or elsewhere.

And so if this is where the career opportunities lie for the next generation, it follows that this is also where the business opportunities lie as well. Let Wal-Mart do its thing. No American company is likely to emerge that can compete with it, but sooner or later some colossus from the East will emerge who will knock Wal-Mart out. In your local market, you're not going to be competing on price and utility; you're going to be competing on the level of style and design - providing the X-factor that will keep your customers coming back.

Even little companies are going to be able to work with global supply chains thanks to services provided by UPS and FedEx. Hire employees abroad to do your functional stuff. But hire people locally who know how to craft a good story, and who are going to bring style, imagination and people who make connections and have a narrative sense for the human meaning in the everyday things of life. That's where the future for American companies lie; they will compete with other companies in their effectiveness to refresh their consumers in a soul-dry marketplace.

Will Code for Food

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