Relationship-building, creativity, empathy key to success in today's economy
Reviewed by Sheilla Jones
Winnipeg Free Press, Books, August 8, 2015
Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know that Brilliant Machines Never Will
By Geoff Colvin
Portfolio/Penguin, 247 pages, $33
Campaigning is well underway for the fall federal election as candidates knock on doors in an effort to engage votes. Door-knocking is hard work and time-consuming -- so why do candidates put so much effort into it?
Because it provides the crucial face-to-face interaction that humans use to evaluate a candidate's trustworthiness, which cannot happen via the much more efficient methods of computerized robocalls, emails and tweets.
This is good news for politicians, according to American author Geoff Colvin in Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know that Brilliant Machines Never Will, since it means they will never be replaced by computers.
They're the lucky ones.
Colvin, a senior editor of Fortune magazine, says a great many high-skilled, well-paying jobs (lawyers, architects, engineers) are already being swept away at an alarming rate as the accelerating pace of information technology (infotech) shrinks the need for them.
He puts forward the startling premise that we are now in the midst of an economic restructuring that rivals the Industrial Revolution. Infotech is displacing more and more workers; it's happening at the high-skill level, but also hitting the less educated. The number one job for American men is truck driving, but with the advent of the autonomous vehicle -- a computer-operated car -- those jobs will soon disappear, too.
The new economy, says Colvin, is essentially a switch from left-brain analytic and systematic skills -- which has served the knowledge-based economy well for the past 100 years -- to right-brain skills of empathy, creativity and relationship-building. Engineering is out, the humanities are in, and we are utterly unprepared for it.
"For centuries," says Colvin, "people have improved their living standards by mastering new skills that a new economy rewards... Those skills, and virtually all the skills economies have rewarded in the past, are about what we know. The skills that become increasingly valuable as technology advances are about what we're like."
It's getting personal.
When Colvin shines a spotlight on an economy where jobs are rapidly being gobbled up by computers, it becomes obvious that we should have seen this coming. Computers are designed to replicate left-brain skills, and are now better at it than humans. What computers cannot do, however, is replicate the highly sophisticated, social ability of people to "read" other humans and intuitively understand them.
As more and more employers recognize the value of empathy in improving creativity and productivity, they've begun including it in their job advertisements. "Empathy is the critical 21st century skill," notes one of the software company executives cited by the author.
This shift in what is economically valued is highly favourable to women, says Colvin, since women typically have far more well-developed interpersonal skills set than male counterparts. That doesn't mean men can't learn; the American military, for instance, has been teaching soldiers empathy skills to more effectively fight insurgents and terrorist threats.
The real winners in this new economy, the author says, will be men and women who demonstrate strong skills from both the left-brain (systematic) and right-brain (empathic).
Colvin, who rattled a few cages with his 2008 book Talent is Overrated, writes with a light hand and avoids the tendency of many business authors to strangle their subject matter with strings of statistics and heavy jargon. And he does point out the irony of living in the digital age of Facebook and iPhones, which has introduced a sharp decline in empathy in Western society just when that very skill is increasingly in demand.
There are some professions that will never be replaced by computers, including medical doctors, judges and political leaders.
Humans insist that judgments on their health and well-being must come from other humans, who must then be held accountable.
We may not be doing a very good job these days at holding our politicians to account, but we can do something about that at the ballot box this fall.
Sheilla Jones is a Winnipeg author who figures her empathic skills and master's degree in theoretical physics should to put her at the forefront of the new economy.
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