The following chapters outline necessary steps involved with managing and watering the acceleration pool as the candidates grow or die. Briefly, these steps (order is important) involve

• Identifying High Potentials
• Understanding Organizational Talent
• Strategies for Accelerating Development
• Ensuring Acceleration Pool Success

Within each unit resides a formula that would impress Steven Covey. Each chapter begins with a nice inspirational quote that is usually attributed to a CEO of a fortune 500 company. Bullet points abound between vocabulary and anecdotes. Tables and figures cast buzzwords wide and far asunder. Between each segment are some lean paragraphs that attempt to fill in the details. Again, think of the speech accompanying a power point.

To be clear, the methods described in the book are not for traditional business models that rely on replacement-planning systems. In fact this book wouldn’t really be useful for anyone who is not a higher up. Specifically, CEOs and other executive stakeholders are the only people that would be able to find meaningful passages. If you are reading this book and you do not belong to this echelon you are most likely a candidate for one of the acceleration pools that is described in the very pages you are reading (because who else would read this). However, this will only serve to frustrate you as you are in no position to implement any of the action plans that are outlined; which again would most likely be beneficial to you. The one exception would be for an HR practitioner who may want to propose or adapt certain methods as they apply to their individual situations.

The book really reads like a textbook. Perhaps if I had the teachers’ edition I could sort through the information with more efficiency. It’s really as if the book was adopted from a power point presentation. Every other page contains at least 5 bullet points. Therefore, one could easily skip through to chapters if they knew what they were looking for. Otherwise, one has to sift through the dialogue as if searching for a nugget of gold in 1849. The end result is worth it, but it’s a lengthy, lonely process.

Pink proposes a rather radical hypothesis and if it comes to fruition it will considerably alter the landscape of the business world at every level. I understand that this sounds dramatic. And to accomplish such an outcome would require significant mitigating factors. In anticipating his readers’ reluctance to his theory, Pink does a concise job of providing his factors in the second chapter. Specifically, he discusses how our abundance of resources, a massive outsourcing of left-brain workers to Asia, and the increasing automation of work will drive us from the Information Age to what he calls the ‘Conceptual Age’. As a result, the once highly-prized white collar, analytical thinkers will be made redundant. Pink summarized this argument succinctly: If a $500.00 a month outsourced Indian accountant doesn’t swipe your comfortable accounting job, a nicely marketed Turbo Tax will.

If Part I detailed the problem, Part II of A Whole New Mind provides the solution – and it comes in a 6-pack. The 6 senses Pink provides are not meant to replace analytical and L-directed thinking (as Pink describes it), but rather to supplement those capabilities as they are no longer sufficient. This is an important distinction that Pink duly recognizes. The 6 senses are as follows:

1. Design (a product must be whimsical or emotionally engaging)
2. Story (it is no longer enough to find an argument in the data and support it. One must present the argument in a compelling narrative using effective communication
3. Symphony (the ability to put together concepts no one else thought to pair up)
4. Empathy (the ability to understand what makes their fellow man tick and to forge relationships and care for others
5. Play (just as it sounds; Pink believes successful individuals will be able to make their work more enjoyable and thus engaging)
6. Meaning (the abundance of resources, ample time off and march of technology will allow us to find meaning in our lives and work)

These 6 senses belong to the right-brained individual and therefore gives rise to Pink’s title Why the right-brainers will rule the future. These abilities cannot be outsourced or automated. Each chapter goes into detail as to how these competencies will enrich the performance of the individual. What I particularly like is that Pink provides methods of how to develop and improve these competencies at the end of each chapter. These range from writing short novellas to benefit your communication skills, to tactfully eavesdropping to develop your empathy towards others.

One flaw worth mentioning is in theme with most business books written before the summer of 2008. Pink references Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan as companies that are ahead of the curve and beginning to stress the importance of this new style of thinking. Analytically speaking, 50% of those companies listed have failed completely. Ironically, while Pink offers very though provoking problems and anecdotes, I found there to be a lack of empirical evidence to back up his main argument. As such, his attack on left-brained thinking is somewhat undone by a lack of statistics.

The audience for this book is anyone who wants to stay ahead of this curve; be it dissatisfied workers, entrepreneurs, established business leaders, or even parents looking to help their children. Furthermore, Pink goes beyond the usual settings for a book of this nature. It reaches out of corporate boardrooms and into club scenes, inner-city schools, laboratories. At times the book reads like a novel: Have you ever read a business book that describes the ‘light May rain falling outside the gargantuan government building’ whilst the author is subjected to a brain scan? Frequently, the chapters are peppered with little anecdotes that you can’t wait to use at some cocktail party when the topic of conversation is oh so carefully steered to the importance of the corpus callosum. What you are left with is an excellent mix of allegory, science, history, narrative, humor and analysis to support his main argument. He even throws in a few well-conceived buzzwords. Not surprisingly, the ubiquitous ‘fox-knows-many-things versus the-hedgehog-knows-one-big-thing’ analogy rears its head at some point (where is that thing not applicable?). Overall, the book is well organized and extremely provocative. There are a few minor passages where one can make an argument, but any book without conflict is probably just stating the obvious.

For more on Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind, check out the author’s recent interview with Oprah (http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/worklife/05/07/o.Oprah.Interviews.Daniel.Pink/index.html) as well as a recent article from the Wall Street Journal that takes an opposing view to Pink’s main thesis: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124269038041932531.html.