Upon reading the first chapter of this book I wanted to jump with joy — here was someone articulating my ideas about the kind of skills, mindsets and thinking that is needed in a newly competitive, flat world — where anything that can be digitized will be outsourced.

This new kind of thinking – what he calls “right-brain” thinking has six key aptitudes as described in the Introduction:

1. Design – “to create artistic and emotional beauty”
2. Story – “to craft a satisfying narrative”
3. Symphony – “to combine unrelated ideas into a novel invention” & “to detect patterns and opportunities”
4. Empathy – “ability to understand the subtleties of human interaction”
5. Play – “find joy in one’s self and elicit joy in others”
6. Meaning – “to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning”

Part of this book is focused on describing, defining and supporting each of these definitions. Half of each chapter on aptitudes is devoted to describing the skills to practice in order to become this kind of person – how to create a Portfolio to become more of a right-brain thinker.

What’s important to understand is that Pink does not advocate that we lose our analytical, left-brain thinking in order to become completely creative, right-brain thinkers — but rather we must be both and find an equilibrium between the two.

In the argument for right-brain thinking, there were a couple of  research/studies that I found of interest:

• (25) UCSF Professor Paul Ekman, famous for creating the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) – tested facial expressions all over the world, and these expressions were interpreted similarly by a majority of the people in a group, whether that was in New Guinea or amongst Bay Area college students.
• (52) students who study painting excel at noticing subtle details about a patients condition (from the Yale School of Medicine). So yes, a student has to know their medical stuff, but studying painting makes them better doctors.

What was also insightful was his description of design – that good design is a combination of utility and significance (76). The iPhone designers, of course, got this right. They realized that the cellphone had changed from being a logical device about speed and specialized functions, to being an emotional device — about being able to be expressive and customize, fanciful (81).

Stories help us make sense of the world — and in a world full of facts, what matters is putting these facts in context with emotional impact (101). A wonderful quote from this section is from Alan Kay (famous interface designer) – “scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just caveman with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories” (107).

Being able to blend concepts to put together two existing ideas non one else thought to create, being a systems thinker, a pattern recognizer is the essence of the symphony aptitude. Techniques to enhance this skill include keeping a metaphor log (what metaphors do you hear daily) or trying to create a 5-line self-portrait.

On the importance of Empathy I’ve written about before in this blog. Research of interest – one study of aphasics (those with damage to the left-side or analytical side of the brain) are exceptionally good lie-detectors, getting about 70% of the lies. In the Porfolio section, he directs us to a website to practice our EQ = empathy quotient.

When writing about Play and Meaning, Pink’s writing seems to become shallower as nothing he writes really grabbed me in these two sections other than we should play and have meaning in our lives. Perhaps I became tired of the writing, or perhaps I’d read too many book on play and meaningful work that nothing seemed new here.

My main criticism of the book is that it peters out toward the end. And the organization of the book breaks the narrative of the reading (he really is a good writer). The Portfolio or skill-building reference sections are disruptive to the reading. Overall though, I find this a good book, quick read and useful. The Portfolio sections contain many good techniques to jump start your creativity. For this alone, I think the book is worth reading. And without a doubt, what Pink gets right is that anything that can be outsourced cheaper and more efficiently will — what stays will be those who can be imaginative and unique  in the world.

Whether the world will reward the skill sets of creative wonks remains to be seen. I think we are still very much in transition from the Information Age of knowledge workers, to what he calls the Conceptual Age of creators and empathizers. All I can do is keep true to my path of trying to create works of beauty, empathy, utility and significance and hope that others are also moving in the same direction.

Second definitions of aptitudes (65-66):

1. Not just function but also DESIGN
2. Not just argument but also a STORY
3. Not just focus but also SYMPHONY
4. Not just logic but also EMPATHY
5. Not just seriousness but also PLAY
6. Not just accumulation but also MEANING

Frans de Waal studies empathy in monkeys — thus this book is biased towards the positive aspects of empathy. He tells stories and anecdotes about animal studies and he also tells, most of which are based on his research or related research. He generalizes some things to humans. He challenges the notion that human society is ONLY competitive, war-like and selfish.

There are 3 key things I got from this book:

• A definition and description of empathy
  • state-matching emotional contagion – innermost/foundational is matching the state of the other – this is done by emotional contagions. It is thought that mirror neurons, mimicry and body mapping/reading all play roles in state-matching (my interpretation)
  • concern for others consolation behavior - 2nd layer is ability to express concern and try to console the other — such as a young child or monkey trying to console a mother who is crying
  • perspective taking targeted helping – this last layer is about the ability to understand what the other needs. Being able to help the other in a specific, targeted way implies the ability to understand their need from their point of view.
• Animal research into fairness and how it links to communal survival
  • The main reason humans seek fairness is to prevent negative reactions upon rejoining the group (think about the CEOs who flew in private jet planes to receive bailouts). We may however, relax our rules about fairness when it comes to a close relation.
  • If you don’t act in a fair manner, others will take note and repay you in kind when you are in need (yes, monkeys do this too!)
  • however, there are way to kill prosocial behavior:
    • pair the monkey with a stranger
    • put the partner who you should be acting fairly towards, out of sight, and selfish behavior emerges
    • others must see the outcome.
• Change in empathetic behavior depends on kinship or group ties
  • As noted in examples above
  • This is not fully explored — I would like to know more about how we promote identification and/or kinship between groups. This dehumanization is the cause of many wars, no?

Though a bit long-winded at times (needs a good edit IMHO!) – this book is worth the effort to read. It’s not scannable, you actually have to read the stories and anecdotes to get the most out of it. Frans de Waal does extrapolate somewhat freely to human behavior, either explicitly or implicitly. The underlying assumption is that we are very similar in base behavior to monkeys, apes, dolphins and elephants — and that might be hard for some people to take.

Some additional quotes I liked:

• Security is the first and foremost reason for social life (20)
• Is war an aggressive drive or driven by power and profit? (25)
• Discussion of body mapping within species and between species (53)
• Plutarch – “if you live with a cripple, you will learn to limp.”
• Mirror neurons – the firing of brain cells when doing and action, and to a similar extent when *watching* another do an action (79)
• lack of distinction between monkey see and monkey do, erasing the line between self and other
• Oscar the cat – who would stay with a dying person at an old folks home — and he always knew when someone was going to die, even before the nurses did!
• Self-protective altruism – helping another shields self from adverse reactions (75)
• petting relieves stress in the monkey/human that is petting or being petted
• identification is a basic pre-condition for empathy (80)
• Do emotions arise from the body (body first theory – “i run, therefore I am scared”) (81)
• Or do emotions in others raise awareness in ourselves (emotions first theory) – leads to emotional contagion concept (monkeys run from those that have experienced a negative emotion like fear from rattlesnake)
• body posture wins out over facial expression in judging emotional states
• but faces still matter – people can’t relate to those with immobilized faces
• self-absorption kills empathy – you have to distangle yourself from the other to pinpoint actual source of feelings –> leads to perspective taking and targeted helping
• VEN cells – go deep in to the brain (are like neurons) and are thought to connect disparate parts of brain (138)
• true cradle of cooperation is the community (182)
• thus human fairness goes hand in hand with communal survival (187)
• inequity aversion (187)
• empathy is understanding another; sympathy is taking action
• Theory of the mind – understanding the state of the other (98)
• 3 ideals of the French Revolution – liberty (US has this bias); equality (Europe has this bias); fraternity (forgotten?)
• the tendency towards social hierarchy/competitiveness undercuts empathy/cooperation – as emphasized in institutions such as in the military and church (political bias)
• cruelty also rests on perspective taking (knowing what will hurt the other the most)
• we often operated in enlightened self-interest
• one cannot expect trust in a society with huge income disparities, insecurities, disenfranchised underclass