We know from the research that pay is not a primary factor driving job satisfaction. Meaningful work and the opportunity to develop and use one’s skills (among other things) emerge as more powerful employee motivators, but companies often underestimate the importance of pay in attracting and keeping top talent.

A 2006 Wall Street Journal study found that:

1. 45% of employers thought pay was a key factor in losing top talent
2. 71 %percent of top performers indicated it was a top reason for leaving

Soon, senior managers will be forced to start making strategic decisions regarding the pay structures needed to retain their key players and attract talent to their organizations. A fundamental question for organizations to ask themselves is “are we going to lead, match, or lag behind the market in pay?” Forward thinking organizations are already preparing for the economic upturn and are asking themselves:

1. Is our pay structure appropriate for retaining our best employee?
2. Can we get a head start on attracting the best talent from our competitors now?
3. What other initiatives can we put in place to retain and attract top talent (flexible benefits, recognition programs, sign-on bonuses, etc.)?

So here is today’s Daily HR Tip: Start planning to retain and attract top talent now—don’t wait until your competitor steals your key people from under your nose as they fire their first shots in the upcoming “Talent Wars”.

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.