Creativity – the Fast-track to Your New Life

Recently I read three seminal books on the 21st Century, the characteristics of the new American worker, and the future of the American job market. I first gained understanding of the business forces that provide a leveling effect on world commerce by reading Thomas L. Friedman’s The World is Flat (2006). Friedman points to the growing and competing economies in China and India where engineers can design and implement technology as good as the United States, and for a cheaper price. In order to compete and to serve the consumer American corporations are forced to utilize foreign workers to lower their production costs. Of course, foreign competition is a major reason for corporation downsizing and the loss of repetitive and lower skilled jobs.

Friedman then argues that the American economy can only remain competitive by supplying jobs skills that no one else can replicate. He and Daniel Pink believe that the creative skill of synthesis, or symphony as Pink puts it, is what allows for new product development and new and better approaches to job tasking (Pink, 2006, p. 130). Both authors believe that this skill cannot be downsized or outsourced to foreign countries. Friedman states that the job market is changing so quickly that today’s undergraduates will have to prepare for jobs that don’t even yet exist.

The next book that impressed me was Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class (2002). Florida observes the changing American job market and notices the rapid increase in what he terms “creative class” jobs, and the decline of older service industry jobs. Florida also notices where the people who work in creative class industries reside, and lists communities around the country that are supporting creative individuals’ lifestyles. He believes that creative people are drawn to these areas as places to be inspired, to be engaged, and to live, and that they then search for jobs that will allow them to exercise their creativity. That’s a 180-degree change from the older idea of moving to where the job is located. Among the markers of communities that attract creative class people are: Technology, Talent, and Tolerance of diversity (Florida, 2002, p. 249).

What Daniel Pink accomplishes in A Whole New Mind (2006) is to define the skills that identify Florida’s “creative class.” These are the kinds of skills that will allow today’s undergraduates to be successful in the new job market. Truty (2006) stated: “Pink . . . posits that happiness and professional success require mastery of the "six senses" ("design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning"), all of which emerge from the right hemisphere of the brain.” In order to prepare their graduates to be leaders in the new economy some of the nation’s leading colleges, like Carleton College, in Northfield, MN, are seeking ways of infusing right-brain creativity into every class. Carleton even hired a Dean of the Arts to advise other professors how to design creativity-based curricula for their students.

What effect will right-brained “creative class” patrons and emerging technologies have on libraries? Thomas Frey (2008), Executive Director of the DaVinci Institute, a futuristic think tank, argued that for libraries to remain relevant they must adapt to the experience culture [“creative class” and right-brainers] by providing experiential opportunities. He suggested exercise rooms so that people can read or listen while staying in shape, multi-sensory mini-theaters, recording studios for creating pod and video casts, soundproof rooms for music practice, drama studios for patrons to role play stories they are reading, and art studios with one-way mirrors so that patrons can either create, or perhaps more importantly, can view and experience the act of creating.

Ah, Pink’s design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning set in motion.


Reference List

Florida, R. (2004). The rise of the creative class: . . . And how it’s transforming work, leisure, community, & everyday life. New York: Basic Books.

Frey, T. (2006). The future of libraries: Beginning the great transformation. Retrieved on October 24, 2008 from http://www.davinciinstitute.com/page.php?ID=120.

Friedman, T. L. (2006). The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Pink, D. L. (2006). A whole new mind: Why right-brainers will rule the future. New York: Penguin.

Truty, D. (2006, March 1). [Review of the book A whole new mind: Why right-brainers will rule the future]. Choice. Retrieved October 24, 2008, from Bowker’s Books in Print Database.