The 21st Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy
|
Concert Hall
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington, DC
Featuring Daniel Pink, Author of A Whole New Mind
Sponsored by:
- The Rosenthal Family Foundation
- The Robert Sterling Clark Foundation
- The Ralph and Betty R. Sheffer Foundation
Agenda
- Opening Remarks by
Robert L. Lynch - Introduction by
Jonathan Spector - Daniel Pink
- Concluding Remarks by
Steven D. Spiess
Opening Remarks by
Robert L. Lynch
Good evening all and welcome to the Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy—21 years and going strong. I’m Bob Lynch, President and CEO of Americans for the Arts, and on behalf of our organization I am so pleased to have you here with us tonight. There are nearly 1,500 of us gathered here at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to learn more about how the arts can and will play a central role in the new global workforce.
As baby boomers look toward retirement and our day-to-day work lives incorporate technology at a faster and faster pace, innovation in workforce preparedness becomes a key issue for the continued prosperity and growth of our nation. Here in our own metropolitan region, workforce development is such a hot topic that this year’s Nancy Hanks Lecture has generated more buzz than ever before. I can’t imagine a roomful of people more dedicated and integral to advancing the arts in America. Tonight, we are joined by a number of different constituencies including state arts leaders, national arts organizations, local arts leaders from every state, students, government officials, advocates for the arts, and emerging leaders in the arts. And tomorrow, each of you who will be participating in Arts Advocacy Day will be gathering on Capitol Hill with your Congressional Arts Handbook. Listed on the handbook cover are the 87 national arts and arts education organizations—representing every single art form—that are co-sponsoring tomorrow’s event. I would like to ask the leadership from those organizations to please stand so that they can be recognized for bringing the arts together here tonight and across our country.
I’d like to recognize a number of special guests who are here with us. Two former chairs of the National Endowment for the Arts, Frank Hodsoll and Bill Ivey, are here with us this evening. National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia called me just before this event to tell me that he was under the weather tonight and couldn’t make it, but I just want to say a word as the current administration comes to an end, that under Dana Gioia’s leadership the National Endowment for the Arts’ budget went from $116 million to $145 million. I also want to recognize in the audience our great friend, artist, and musician Peter Yarrow—of Peter, Paul and Mary—who will join us at the Congressional Arts Breakfast tomorrow. At Americans for the Arts, we are honored to have such a good partner and friend in the Democratic Chair of the Congressional Arts Caucus, Congresswoman Louise Slaughter.
Also in the audience are two gifted artists and friends of Americans for the Arts, as well as members of our Artists Committee, musician John Legend and actress Kerry Washington. They have generously joined us this evening and are also extending their time and talents to help us advocate for the arts on Capitol Hill tomorrow. Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann also joins us both tonight and tomorrow. Mayor Hannemann serves as the Chair of the Tourism, Arts, Parks, Entertainment, and Sports Committee of the United States Conference of Mayors, who are great friends.
There are a number of other key partners in attendance this evening, including our great friend Mary Luehrsen from the NAMM Foundation, which is the foundation of the International Music Products Association, and the organization that is sponsoring our The Arts. Ask for More. PSA campaign for the next three years.
We are also joined by Jonathan Spector, CEO of The Conference Board, who will be introducing Mr. Pink tonight, and we also welcome Sarah Jerome, President of the American Association of School Administrators, representing all of our nation’s superintendents, a very powerful group.
Finally, I would like to thank three sponsors whose generosity has played a key role. We couldn’t make the Nancy Hanks Lecture possible without them: the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, the Rosenthal Family Foundation, and the Ralph and Betty R. Sheffer Foundation. And with us tonight, we have a number of representatives from these marvelous institutions including Nancy Stephens Rosenthal, president of the Rosenthal Family Foundation, and Ann Sheffer, secretary/treasurer of the Ralph and Betty R. Sheffer Foundation. Thank you very much for being here.
Americans for the Arts is a national network of more than 100,000 members and organizations advancing and advocating for the arts in people’s lives and communities. Soon in 2010, we’ll be celebrating our 50th anniversary. Our organization is working harder than ever to affect positive change in the lives of youth, families, and communities across the country through the arts.
And as our nation looks toward the presidential election this year, so does our Americans for the Arts Action Fund. In just a few years, the Arts Action Fund has grown to be a strong force in American politics, advocating for the arts on the local, state, and national level. The Arts Action Fund’s ArtsVote2008 initiative began even before the first presidential primary, working in communities across the country to ensure that presidential hopefuls expressed their support for the arts. We began with all the national arts service organizations coming together with a united 10-point plan. Our efforts led to arts issue statements from six presidential primary candidates in the primaries, which had never been done before. And as the election process continues, ArtsVote2008 will release arts support report cards for the presidential nominees and for every congressional seat in the country.
ArtsVote2008 is just the start. We hope to grow our advocacy efforts beyond a presidential race every four years and a congressional race every two years. Our end goal is for every citizen running for public office to make his or her support for the arts known at every level. The Arts Action Fund helps make ArtsVote2008 possible, while also empowering everyday citizens to contact elected officials about arts-related issues.
Here’s a number: 482,633. A big number, certainly, but consider that it is the total number of e-mails to elected officials through our online arts advocacy services in just the past four years. That number is hugely impressive. The technology that we have is what makes this contact possible. But it is people like you, behind that technology, that actually make it happen. Many of you in this room are already a part of this advocacy effort, but just think, if everyone here tonight were to join the Arts Action Fund, we might have a thousand new members. That means a thousand new voices for the arts in America to get us closer to our goal of a million voices raised for the arts.
We are so proud of the work everyone in this room is doing to advance the arts in America and many of you are wearing our advocacy buttons tonight. They say, “Art Fuels Creativity, Powers Innovation.” Nothing could be truer. Last year, Americans for the Arts released our Arts & Economic Prosperity III study, which showed that the arts have a $166 billion impact on our country’s economy each year. That staggering number also includes 5.7 million fulltime equivalent jobs and nearly $30 billion in local, state, and federal taxes returning to communities because of our industry. We may live in a world of uncertainty, but art has proven time and time again to be a powerful investment for our economy and for our communities.
As you and I spend almost $4 a gallon filling up our cars this summer, and as our country buys barrels of overseas oil for prices of up to $100 a barrel, it’s our
responsibility to remember that far too often we take things for granted. Our country and our world are too precious for this to happen. Lately, people are calling for conservation: reducing energy consumption and relying on our country’s own resources— home resources, like the arts. Important advice for all of us. But what do fuel and energy have to do with art? It’s really simple. Art is fuel; art is energy; art is power—for us, for our children, for our communities, for our nation.
Art is a precious resource and one that none of us want to live without. We don’t want to live in a country where art becomes inaccessible due to rising costs. We should never be in short supply of the arts in the United States. Art does more than fuel innovation in our workforce and power creativity. Art, music, dance, and theater are powerful generators of the human spirit, as we all know and have experienced. Art can be the fuel that drives us to reach forward into new possibilities, that drives us to imagine and even to dream.
Tomorrow, more than 500 people will converge on Capitol Hill for our Arts Advocacy Day. We’ll be meeting with our legislators and explaining just how important the arts are in our daily lives and communities, how the arts help our local economies grow, and how they are a crucial part of our education system. Last year, your efforts on this day contributed to a $20 million increase for the National Endowment for the Arts, the biggest increase in 14 years. And for the second time in as many years, there will be testimony before Congress on how the arts affect our lives, neighborhoods, and cities. Mayor Hannemann, Kerry Washington, John Legend, Jonathan Spector, and I will be testifying before the House Appropriations Interior Subcommittee, and we will be joined in our testimony by renowned actor Robert Redford.
Mr. Redford has been a great friend to Americans for the Arts. Just this past October, the Sundance Preserve hosted our organization’s second meeting of the National Arts Policy Roundtable, a gathering of more than 30 distinguished individuals who serve at the very highest levels of business, government, philanthropy, education, and the arts. They met to focus on the topic of workforce development and how the arts are key to innovation. In conjunction with the Roundtable, Americans for the Arts teamed with The Conference Board and the Association of American School Administrators to conduct a new study of business executives, school principals, and school superintendents. The study will measure the role that the arts play in our educational system as students work toward joining our country’s workforce.
Late last year, our organization also released six new The Arts. Ask for More. ads. The continuation of this public service announcement campaign was possible
through a partnership with the Ad Council and the NAMM Foundation. One of these latest ads features famed American musician Duke Ellington. This Ellington ad is fitting because, to continue tonight’s program, it’s my great pleasure to introduce you to the Duke Ellington School of the Arts Show Choir. With a history stretching back as far as the late 1960s, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts now represents a partnership between the public school system of the District of Columbia and a private, nonprofit organization working to ensure the highest level of academic and artistic training for its students. The Show Choir has gained international status following successful performances around the United States and in Jamaica, Germany, Antigua, and most recently China. Much like the great Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, the members of this performing group are true ambassadors for the arts in the nation and in our world. The Show Choir is directed by its founder, Samuel L.E. Bonds, and will be accompanied by musicians John McCaskill, John Poindexter, and Vince Evans. Performing a piece called “Caravan,” ladies and gentlemen, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts Show Choir.
[Whereupon, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts
Show Choir performed.]
I'd like to thank the Show Choir so much for inspiring us tonight. The Conference Board is a global research and business membership group that connects more than 2,000 enterprises in 60 nations and is the most widely cited private source of business intelligence. Publishing the Consumer Confidence Index, leading economic indicators, and other reports on economic trends and best practices, The Conference Board convenes some 20,000 executives annually through meetings and programs. It's great to have them as a partner. Jonathan invited me to come to a meeting at West Point this year comprised of 30 people. There were 10 corporate leaders, 10 nonprofit leaders, and 10 three- or four-star generals. And they loved the arts, every one of them. So that kind of connectivity, that kind of partner, that kind of friend is really important to the arts in America.
As I mentioned, Americans for the Arts, the Association of American School Administrators, and The Conference Board collaborated on a new study that shows the value of arts education in training our workforce. And this connects directly with Daniel Pink's lecture this evening. Jonathan Spector, the CEO of The Conference Board, will discuss the study and introduce tonight's lecturer. Mr. Spector joined The Conference Board after serving as Vice Dean of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a former senior partner at McKinsey and Company, and Chief Executive of two start-up technology companies. He is a trustee at Wesleyan University and a board member of the March of Dimes. Jonathan is also co-author of the 2007 book We Are Smarter Than Me, which highlights the way businesses can harness the power of collective intelligence.
A few months ago, we learned that Daniel Pink could only do this speech if it was later in the evening, hence the time change that we did here, because he was flying in from Florida to land early this evening. I said, “Creativity, let's do that. Let's give that a try.” And about 2:00 p.m. today, I was looking out the window at the fog and I started thinking, “Hmm, what crazy person authorized this particular event tonight?” But the good news is that Jonathan Spector was ready to give the entire speech in case Daniel Pink couldn’t make it. But Daniel has landed, as I understand, and so ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Jonathan Spector.
Introduction of Daniel Pink
by Jonathan Spector
Thank you, Bob, for that kind introduction. I think we’re all happy that Dan is here tonight. Perhaps no one more than me. We appreciate the opportunity to be part of this very special evening and the Nancy Hanks Lecture. Bob mentioned a few facts about The Conference Board. I apologize if I repeat some of them. We’re an independent, nonprofit, and nonpartisan membership organization. We listen to, respond to, and communicate the concerns of about 2,000 of the world’s largest companies, 70 percent of those in the United States, and about 80 percent of the Fortune 500. Our mission, as defined by our founders in 1916, is to help businesses perform better, but also to help them better serve society. We achieve these objectives by a variety of means. We produce, as Bob mentioned, the Consumer Confidence Index, which in the past few months has not made us a particularly popular organization. We also conduct in-depth research on other management issues in economics and issues of the intersection of business and society, issues like sustainability, diversity, and workforce readiness.
A major concern of the business community is whether the United States has the skilled and ready workforce that’s needed to compete in the global marketplace. I’d like to very briefly highlight the findings of several major studies we’ve recently conducted that shed some light on this challenge, and in particular, describe the important role that the arts, creativity, and innovation have in ensuring that as a country we have the workforce we need to be successful.
U.S. companies are very concerned about finding the skilled workers they need to compete. In our most recent survey of CEOs, chief executives told us that the challenge of stimulating creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship are among their top 10 concerns. In a similar survey, 400 U.S. employers said that new hires today need creativity and innovation, as well as the applied skills that support innovation—skills like critical thinking, communications, and problem-solving— and they need these skills more than they need the “three Rs” to succeed in the workplace. These employers believe the need for creativity and innovation will only increase in the future. The results of that work led us to partner with tonight’s host, Americans for the Arts, and with the American Association of School Administrators to further explore the areas of creativity, innovation, and workforce development.
This new study is titled Ready to Innovate: Are Educators and Executives Aligned on the Creative Readiness of the U.S. Workforce? We may need some creative help in titling our studies in the future, but that’s what it’s named. This study surveyed both business executives involved in hiring decisions and also public school superintendents to understand how creativity is identified and developed. The key findings from this study were released earlier today and they’re available on our
website. Just Google “The Conference Board.”
And in light of the relevance of these findings to tonight’s topic and tonight’s speaker, I wanted to share with you some of the highlights from the study. First, 99 percent of the superintendents who educate our future workers and 97 percent of the employers who hire them agree that creativity is increasingly important in the U.S. workplace. Second, 72 percent of employers say creativity is of primary concern when they’re hiring new employees, and problematically, 85 percent of these employers say they can’t find enough of the creative applicants that they seek. Third, educators and employers both feel they have a responsibility for instilling creativity in the U.S. workforce. That’s good. However, our findings indicate that most high schools and employers provide such training and studies only on an elective or “as needed” basis. It’s typically not required of either students or employees. And fourth, school superintendents rank arts study and experience in performing arts and entertainment as the two most important indicators of future creativity. And employers rank arts study very near the top of their list as well. Clearly, these studies offer a lot of food for thought and continued investigation.
In particular, we believe it’s time for employers to evaluate how well their corporate support of education and the arts and their own employee training programs stack up against the strategic value they themselves place on innovation and on its creative underpinnings. It’s also time for greater dialogue within and across all sectors to better understand and align efforts to foster creativity in current and future U.S. employees. The results of our studies offer, I think, an excellent segue into the introduction of tonight’s speaker, Daniel Pink. I think the best place to start is with the first 35 words of his most recent best seller, A Whole New Mind. He writes: “The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain\ kind of mind—computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, M.B.A.s who could crunch numbers.”
Now for those of you who are, like me, an M.B.A. who can hopefully crunch numbers, or perhaps you are a computer programmer, again, like me, or a lawyer who crafts contracts—well, Daniel’s words are comforting, and we can look back on the past 20 or 30 years with some satisfaction. Now, some of you who are very careful listeners may have noticed that the sentence I just read was only 34 words long. And I promised you 35. And the 35th word really says everything about the
topic: “But.” And to go on to finish that sentence, “But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future,” Daniel Pink writes, “belongs to a very different type of person with a very different type of mind—people like artists, inventors, storytellers, caregivers.” As Daniel Pink will tell you soon, these right-brained people are the next business elite.
And therefore I’m here tonight not only to introduce Daniel Pink, but also on behalf of all of us M.B.A.s, computer programmers, and lawyers, to reluctantly hand over the keys to the kingdom to him—and to ask him to speak to us tonight to help unlock the future, that he describes so graphically in his new book.
Now you have all hopefully seen Daniel’s bio, which I think is included in your Playbill, so I encourage you to read through it. I’ll give you some very brief highlights. His latest book, as I said, A Whole New Mind, has become a best seller. It’s been translated into 15 languages and then I found out today I have to change it, it’s 16 languages. His first book, Free Agent Nation, also achieved best-seller status. His articles appear regularly in The New York Times, the Harvard Business Review, and many other publications. He’s appeared on CNN, ABC, NPR, and many other networks in the United States and abroad to provide commentary on business issues. He has held many interesting jobs, including building latrines, but in his own words, Dan held his “last real job” in the White House where he served from 1995–1997 as Chief Speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore.
So ladies and gentlemen, it is my great pleasure to introduce to you Daniel Pink.
Daniel Pink
Thanks a lot. Thank you very much. All right, good evening. I am delighted to be here. I really am. I am truly honored to be part of this lecture series, and I’m actually humbled to follow in the footsteps of so many extraordinary people who have been privileged to do the Nancy Hanks Lecture over the past 20 years. As Jonathan mentioned, in a former life, before I chose the oh-so-very-noble calling of writing business books, I worked in the equally noble calling of writing speeches for politicians. And because of that experience as a political speechwriter, people often ask me, “Dan, what makes a good speech?” And I have thought about that quite a bit over the years, and I have determined that good speeches in general and good speeches after 8:30 p.m. in particular always have three key ingredients, three key elements to any good speech anywhere, any time.
They are brevity, levity, and repetition. Let me say that again. Brevity, levity, and repetition. So you know what, there’s just no way on God’s green earth I’m going to be able to stand behind this podium. So I’m going to try to be brief. I’m going to try not to be too, too severe and serious about it all. I don’t know if I’ll honor those two, but the third promise I will honor, because I will repeat the important stuff over and over and over and over and over and over again until you want to scream.
Now here’s what I want to do during our short time together this evening. I want to make to you a hard-headed case for the arts. Not a case about arts as a nicety. Not a case for arts or particularly arts education as ornamental, as a nice supplement. Not a case for arts or arts education as an avenue to something else, but a fundamental, hard-headed case for arts education. And I want to begin that argument with a confession. In fact, I want to pick up on something Jonathan said, or actually something Jonathan didn’t say. There was in Jonathan’s otherwise very generous introduction, there was kind of a dog that didn’t bark, and I feel obliged to
kind of confess to this. I want to tell you, I want to begin our conversation here by telling you about this horrific mistake I made long ago, that occurred roughly 20 years ago when in a moment of youthful indiscretion, I decided to go to law school. Now, what’s curious here actually is you notice there was not a mention of that in Jonathan’s otherwise generous introduction. In fact, in the program here, there is not a word or a syllable of that anywhere in the program. I think the reason is that Bob and Americans for the Arts discovered something that I wish they hadn’t, that I wish you would never know, but that I feel obliged to tell you about at the
outset, which is that I didn’t do especially well in law school, to put it mildly. I, in fact, graduated in the part of my law school class that made the top 90 percent possible.
Now it turned out happily enough for me, and actually ironically enough, as someone who ended up spending some portion of his professional life looking at the link between educational attainment and performance in labor markets. It turned out ironically enough for me, happily, that law school, really more than anything I’ve done in my life, dramatically, profoundly, I would argue permanently, permanently, increased my earning power. Because in law school, I met my wife, who’s here today. Because otherwise, it was a total loss. It was a total loss. I graduated massively in debt. I didn’t enjoy it. I never practiced law a day in my life. If I could press the rewind button and live that part of my life over again, I would in a flash. All of which raises a question, which I think I’ll actually roll the dice here a little bit and toss out to you, which is this: If it was such a colossal error, such a big mistake, if I’m standing before you this evening and saying, “This was a terrible mistake that I made,” what do you think the forces were impelling me to do that in the first place? What do you think caused me to do that in the first place? Just shout out an answer. That’s enough shouting. Everybody said it’s my parents’ fault, and as tempted as I am to blame my parents, I just can’t because I now spend my time studying individuals in organizations and one of the things you realize when you study individuals and how they behave, organizations and how they function, is the incredible importance of context. We don’t make decisions, we don’t carry out behaviors in a vacuum—we do it in a context. The context of, in some ways, our personal history; the context of the country we live in; the context of the organization in which we work; the context, in some ways, of the historical moment that we inhabit. And when I was a kid, there was a certain context that shaped parental advice. And I grew up, and I had the most kind of ordinary childhood around. I grew up in a middle-class family. I grew up in the middle of America. I grew up in Columbus, OH. I’m delighted that you have that zeal for Ohio’s capital city, because when I was growing up, Columbus, OH, was just an absolute, ferocious hotbed of social rest. It was the most kind of quintessentially middle-class, middle-brow place that you could imagine. But growing up in that kind of a setting and that kind of a context gives you a certain perspective. And when I was a kid, parents like mine, middle-class parents, dished out the same basic plate of advice to their children. And the advice went like this: get good grades, go to college if you could, then pursue a profession that’s going to give you some amount of economic security.
Now, when I was a kid growing up in Ohio while the Rust Belt was rusting, it became clear that you couldn’t leave high school, go to a factory, and have any measure of economic security. What you had to do instead was go to college, community college or a four-year college, and then try to enter a profession that would give you that security. So if you were good at math and science, maybe you could go to medical school, maybe you could become an engineer, maybe you could become an accountant. If you’re better, as I was, at social sciences and English, maybe you could go to law school. Because back then, and I’m talking basically the final third of the 20th century in this country, if you made it into one of those professions—lawyers, engineers, accountants— as Jonathan was saying, you were fine; you were golden. You had a very solid foothold in the middle class in this country. And if you weren’t in the middle class, that was actually the very clear pathway into it. And even more important for our purposes here, for this hard-headed case about arts education, which I’m about to deploy, no matter what profession you were in, no matter what industry you were in, it was those kinds of abilities that mattered most, those lawyer abilities, those accountant abilities, those engineer abilities. Those were the abilities that mattered most. Those were the abilities employers wanted. Those were the abilities, therefore, individuals were incentivized to develop.
Therefore, we have this whole apparatus to help try to inculcate those abilities, beginning in kindergarten, going all the way through elementary and secondary school, into colleges and universities, into professional schools, into companies themselves, because if we had those abilities, at an individual level people could flourish, and at an organizational level organizations could perform. Even at a macroeconomic level, and I promise that’s the last time I’ll use that word, that was what made the whole economy go around. Well, my argument here today, and why I think that arts education is not a nicety but an urgency, is that those kinds of abilities—those lawyer, accountant, engineer abilities—still matter, but they matter less, and a different set of abilities matters more, and it is a set of abilities that are embodied in this room. But outside of this room, particularly up the road here to Capitol Hill, are not taken seriously enough in this country. Here’s how I want to explain what I mean. Here’s how I want to explain this, because I want it to be as clear and direct as possible. This is where it is helpful to be a writer. I am a writer, and people love to annoy writers; they’re easily annoyed. But one way that people love to annoy writers is to tell them that a picture is worth a thousand words. I mean, it’s not wrong; it’s just irritating. But I think that good writers, and I would argue good artists, I would argue good business people, understand that yes, a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes a metaphor is worth a thousand pictures. Metaphors have this capacity to clarify, illuminate, and explain complicated circumstances. I think there is a metaphor that explains a heck of a lot of what’s going on in the economy today. That metaphor is this. This is a brain. Not a real brain, a model of a brain, but it is the same size and weight of a typical brain. You see it fits really nicely right there. Now as tempted as I am to give a thousand people a quick lecture in neuroanatomy, I will resist and instead point you to the distinguishing feature of this brain—of your brain, of my brain, of all brains. Running down the center of this brain is a Mason-Dixon Line of sorts, cleaving the brain into two equal halves: left hemisphere, right hemisphere. Everybody in this room has heard about the left brain and right brain over the years, and much of what you’ve heard unfortunately is garbage. It really is. This is one of those ideas where the popularization of the idea has gotten far ahead of the science. But in the last several years, the science has begun to catch up, thanks to functional magnetic resonance imaging: brain scans. And we now know a lot more about how our brains organize functions. But actually, to make sure that I got the science right in this underlying metaphor, in my book, A Whole New Mind, I actually went to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, to get my own brain scanned, to see my own brain in action, which was a profoundly disappointing experience, but we’ll talk about that later.
But what we know about our brains is that they’re very complicated, very complex. We use both sides for everything we do. But at a broad level, our brains are also very elegant and very efficient. Over time, they’ve done this remarkable job of dividing up tasks. They have different specialties. The left side specializes in one set of tasks, tasks that are logical, linear, sequential, analytical. The right side specializes in a different set of tasks, not better, not worse, just a different department, different set of specialties—tasks that are about processing things all at once, rather than in sequence. Tasks that are about understanding the context of a situation, rather than the text. And tasks that are about synthesis rather than analysis. Thirty years of neuroscience in 30 seconds. But more important for our purposes is that it yields, I think, a very powerful metaphor, and here’s how the metaphor works. It used to be that the abilities that mattered most in any kind of profession, in any kind of industry, in the economy itself, were characteristic (remember, it’s a metaphor), characteristic of the left hemisphere— the logical, linear, sequential, analytical, SAT, spreadsheet, dare I say NCLB kind of abilities. And today, and I want to underscore this, I really want to underscore this, these abilities—the logical, linear, SAT, spreadsheet abilities—are absolutely 100 percent necessary. Absolutely 100 percent necessary. But they’re no longer sufficient. And it is now abilities characteristic of the right hemisphere of the brain, artistry, empathy, inventiveness, big picture thinking—these are now the abilities that matter most, in any kind of a profession, any kind of an industry. That’s the punch line.
Now, what I want you to understand about this is that what I’m saying here is not wishful thinking, not “I would love for this to be true,” not some kind of fantasy. The truth of the matter is is that this is very bad news for me. I myself am a very, very, veryleft-brained guy. I’m very analytical. I love numbers. I love data. I’m the most sequential person you’ve ever met if your life. I can’t multitask to save myself. In my hierarchy of loves, my greatest loves in life are my wife and our three children. My second greatest love in life, and I wish I were joking about this, but I’m not, my second greatest love in life are charts and graphs. I love charts and graphs. If you have a conversation with me, I’m going to probably draw a chart, some kind of graph. If I’m feeling especially giddy, I might do a two-by-two matrix. This is how I see the world. I was laughing with Jonathan because he and I are basically part of the same tribe. Not your tribe. We’re part of this tribe, the two-by-two matrix tribe. Because that’s what they do at McKinsey, if any of you didn’t know that. This is how I see the world—in this logical, linear, analytical way. But if you do what I’ve done over the last couple of years and have taken a very hard-headed look at the facts, at the evidence, at the data of what’s really going on in the economy, I don’t even think it’s close that the scales are tilting, that these abilities still matter, but they matter less, and these abilities are the first among equals. And if this is right, and I’m convinced it is, or I’m convinced that it is much more right than it is wrong, than this actually raises some very intriguing questions about arts education. And it raises some very interesting questions about how we argue for the arts in this country, and I think in some ways we need to reframe the conversation.
One argument you hear for the arts is that arts ennoble the human spirit, that arts are part of helping people achieve self-realization, that arts are part of people understanding their connection to humanity. I agree with that. I think that’s right. I think everybody in this room agrees with that, but for those of you who are going to Capitol Hill tomorrow to advocate for the arts, I’d do an ixnay on the ennoble the human spirit argument, all right? We’ll just stipulate that it’s true and never speak of it again. There’s also another argument out there that I actually want to push aside a little bit, especially when it comes to arts education. The argument for arts education in some fashion is that it helps build academic skills. That’s okay and that’s mostly right, if you look at the research. And that is: we should have arts education because if you teach a kid to play a musical instrument, she’ll get better at algebra. If you teach a kid to sculpt, he’ll get better at geometry. Well, I think that’s a very dangerous argument. It’s a very dangerous argument, because in my view, if you want a kid to learn math, teach him math. I really believe that.
But I think there’s a third argument. I think there’s a third argument, a better argument, a more muscular argument, a more powerful argument, a winning argument that you can take to Capitol Hill, those of you who are going up there to deploy. And that argument is that the fundamental cognitive abilities, the fundamental abilities of the workforce today and into the future, the fundamental abilities that our kids are going to be deploying at work are at their core artistic abilities, that arts are neither an avenue to something else, nor are they a nicety, but they are fundamental to how the economy functions. And unless our kids have this broad, robust suite of artistic capabilities, they are going to be in a world of hurt, yes, as human beings, but also as productive members of the economy.
So I want to lay out this argument to you right now. As a left-brain guy, I’m going to make it as logical and linear as I can in the hope of equipping you with some of the language to make this case. So this is a logical, linear argument. It’s a cause-andeffect argument. The effect is that the scales are tilting. These left-brain abilities still matter, but they matter less. These right-brain abilities are the first among equals. And there are three causes here: Abundance, Asia, Automation. Abundance, Asia, Automation—you’re laughing at that. Please don’t laugh at that. You know why? It took me four months to get them to all start with “A.” All right?
Cut me some slack here.
Let’s start with Abundance. Remember, I’m making an argument for the shift from these left-brain abilities to these right-brain abilities. If the right-brain kinds of abilities are at the center of the economy, then arts education—which is fundamentally about these kinds of abilities—becomes central to economic performance. Let’s take the first one: Abundance. This is actually in some ways the most important, the most counterintuitive, and the least heralded. Here’s what I mean by Abundance. By Abundance I mean the United States of America is doing very well. Despite the economic jitters right now, despite a couple of banks going under, a sort of colossal uproar in financial markets, the United States of America is doing very well. Deep into the middle class, there’s a standard of living in this country that is breathtaking by historic standards and international standards. Breathtaking.
If you were to take the median family in the United States, the Garcias who live in St. Louis, MO, and think about their lives. And then contrast that with my grandparents’ lives when they were my age, when they were in their 40s. So my grandparents were born in the first few years of the last century. Itwould have been like 1945. If my grandparents from 1945 were to be transported through time to the Garcias’ house in St. Louis, MO, the median family in America, they would think that they were in the home of colossally rich people. Chances are, that family owns its own home because 69 percent of Americans own their own home today. That family also has automobiles. That family probably has a chance to send their kids to college. That family has probably been on an airplane. Look in that family’s medicine cabinet. You have medicines that weren’t even contemplated back when my grandparents were my age. The Garcias probably have a cell phone, because we have 87 percent cell phone penetration in this country. Remember, we have 12 percent of our country living in poverty. That’s a moral disgrace when you look at how well off the rest of the country is—it’s a moral disgrace on its face, in my mind. It’s actually a double disgrace when you look at how well off the rest of America is doing. I think it’s actually a potentially historically damning disgrace when you’re willing to sit by when you have this clutch of people living in poverty when everybody else is living this life of incredible bounty. But think about the Garcias, 87 percent of American homes have mobile phones. And that mobile phone that that family has has more computing power than basically existed when my grandparents were my age. This is really important. I want to drive it home in a couple of ways. Now before I came up, my wife was with me in the dressing room and she said, she gave me some advice beforehand. She said, “Dan, now listen. Listen. You’ve got arts people here. You cannot”—her words—“wonk out on them. Please, I beg you, do not use any of your room-emptying charts.” What do you mean by that? I would never do that to an audience of arts people. I would only show you things of beauty like this.
Seriously, I could spend the next half hour on this chart. I’m going to walk you through this very, very simply because it is a thing of beauty. On this axis is percentage of U.S. households. On this axis is time. Got it? And these little veins are stuff, and what it shows is a trajectory over time where you have something like a telephone in 1915 is in only 30 percent of homes, by the time you get to basically the 70s it’s in more than 90 percent of homes. You look at something like a refrigerator: 1930, only 10 percent of American homes had refrigerators. You get to the 1960s, and it’s basically 100 percent. But look at how everything is ending up at that upper right-hand corner. Everything is ending up over here. You look at cell phones. Cell phones didn’t exist basically in the late 1980s. Now you have 87 percent of homes, as I mentioned before, with cell phones. Look at something like computers. Personal computers basically didn’t exist until the early 1980s. Now they’re in over 70 percent of American homes. Over and over and over you see this. All this stuff bunched up here above 90 percent of American homes. It is extraordinary, extraordinary the amount of abundance there. I love this chart.
That’s what I mean by Abundance. Let me give you another example of Abundance. I think about my grandparents and when my grandparents were my age, when they were in their mid-40s; they didn’t have an automobile. My grandparents were not poor. I had one grandfather who was a telephone repairman, the other one was a candy salesman— not poor people. They didn’t have an automobile. An automobile then was a rich person’s toy. You see it’s in less than half of American households. My two grandmothers, middle-class women, never learned how to drive. Now why didn’t they ever learn how to drive? Were they derelict? No, they didn’t learn how to drive for approximately the same reason that I’ve never learned how to pilot a yacht. It doesn’t come up all that often. Not high on the list of skills I feel like I need to master. But think about that. I don’t mean that as a joke. Think about a middle-class woman in America today simply not learning how to drive. It’s almost unthinkable. Why? Because cars were a luxury item in the mid-1940s, 1950s. Today, in America, you have more automobiles than you have licensed drivers. There’s a greater than one to one ratio between cars and people eligible to drive them. That’s what I mean by Abundance. Let me give you one more, just sort of one more nail to hammer in on this point of Abundance, which I will concede to those of you out there who believe that a picture is worth a thousand words and show you another indicator of Abundance. What’s that, class? [pointing to image of a storage unit on screen] Storage, very good. But that’s not just any storage. If you see up there, 3196, is my self-storage unit in Bethesda, MD. Now I’ll show you what’s inside in a moment, but let’s think about it the way that left-brainers like Jonathan and me think about it. Businesses exist not for irrational reasons. Businesses exist to solve unmet needs, to solve problems that need solving, and they can make money off that. So what’s the unmet need that self-storage is trying to solve? Too much stuff. That’s not a problem that vexed our grandparents, right? Now is that because we have a problem in this country with too much stuff because over the last 30 years American homes have gotten smaller and smaller and smaller? No. American homes have gotten bigger. American households have gotten smaller. So we’ve got bigger houses, fewer people
living in them. I’ll show you what’s inside, because I obviously have no shame. We have got a whole industry devoted to remainder copies of my first book; an air bed; infant backpack; and of course, a large collection of plastic pumpkins. How large is the self-storage industry? Huge. Okay, that’s a right-brain answer. The self-storage industry is a $22.6 billion a year business. The self-storage industry in America is larger than the motion picture business. This is what I mean—these are what speechwriters call startling factoids. And I’m going to resist doing that, because I have a problem with startling factoids in that I’m both a junkie and a pusher, so I don’t want to, like, give you any more. Resist here. What’s my point? Abundance. Okay, remember, I’m making an argument. I’m making an argument for the tilt. If the tilt towards these abilities, favors these kinds of abilities, then arts education becomes fundamental, not ornamental, not an avenue to something else, but fundamental. Let me show you what happens in business, in economic terms, in a world of Abundance. You basically have two business strategies. Here’s the first. What’s that? An iPod. How many of you have an iPod? How many of you knew eight years ago that you were missing an iPod? That’s actually a very serious question. I mean, I’m not joking about that question because in a world of Abundance, in economic terms, there’s a premium on giving the world something it didn’t know it was missing. Making big, bold, conceptual leaps. Giving the world something it didn’t know it was missing. To my mind, that is not a tinkering capacity. That is an artistic capacity. That’s what John Legend does. John Legend gives the world things we didn’t know we knew were missing until we listened to one of his songs. This is what painters do. This is what sculptors do. This is what artists do. They see things that the rest of us don’t see. They iterate something new and unexpected. They give the world something we didn’t know we were missing. There’s a massive economic premium on that. That’s one way that Abundance tilts the scales. There’s a second way, because unless you’re some, it’s very difficult in a workaday world, to show up to work every day and
say, “I thought of something else the world didn’t know it was missing.” Every single day. It’s very difficult to do.
So there’s a second strategy. Okay, we’ll call this the iPod strategy and there’s a second strategy, this strategy. What’s that, class? [pointing to image on screen]
A toilet brush. Possibly a Kennedy Center first that a toilet brush is being displayed on the screen, but that’s no ordinary toilet brush, is it, class? What kind of toilet brush is it? A designer toilet brush. It’s a toilet brush designed by Michael Graves, one of the great product designers and architects of our time. Designer toilet brush. Now, I think about my late grandparents. They would find this peculiar. I have one grandparent who would find this the sign of the Apocalypse. But I don’t find it peculiar, nor do I find it apocalyptic, because I’m a left-brained guy. It makes perfect business sense. Suppose you’re in the toilet brush business. I decide to leave the noble world of writing business books to go into the toilet brush business. Straight out of the box, I face a threshold challenge if I go into the toilet brush business. The threshold challenge is that we’ve pretty much cracked the engineering side of the toilet brush problem, right? I mean that seriously. We can make a toilet brush that scrubs the bowl more or less well. So, if you want to, in economic terms, if you want to sell more toilet brushes, if you want to distinguish yourself in a crowded market place, your option number one, the iPod option, is to make a dramatic leap in toilet brush technology. To make a bold, conceptual leap, come up with the iPhone of toilet brushes or even better, even better, even better eliminate that need for a toilet brush in the first place by inventing a self-cleaning toilet. Big, bold conceptual leaps.
Now, there is this methodology about math and science that it is this kind of a routine, unartistic ability, but the best mathematicians, the best scientists, the best technologists, the best inventors make these bold, artistic leaps of imagination. That’s the best strategy, but if you can’t do that, as a business strategy, as a mundane, workaday world business strategy, more and more you see companies distinguishing their offerings, getting the functionality right, but distinguishing the offerings through design, through look and feel, through artistry, through the narrative, through the meaning. That is, through these right-brained things. I would argue that these two strategies are being deployed in a world of Abundance, are fundamentally artistic strategies. This is why you have M.B.A. programs calling up art and design colleges whom they didn’t even know existed 10 years ago, and saying, “Hey, do you want to do a joint program? Because we’re in big trouble.” Because these companies are trolling these art and design colleges for people who have these kinds of design and artistic capabilities. So this is how Abundance tilts the scales. It yields basically two strategies: the iPod strategy or the designer toilet brush strategy, both of which, to my mind, have at their heart artistic, conceptual thinking.
Let’s go to the next one. Abundance, Asia, Automation. By Asia, I mean people like this: six people I met in Mumbai, India, not too long ago. They all do work for North American companies and one German company as well. They all do work that here in the DC area you would get paid maybe $60,000 a year for. But nobody sitting around this table, all of whom have degrees in computer science and engineering, make more than $15,000 a year for work you get paid $60,000 for here in the DC area. You’ve all heard about offshoring and outsourcing? I’ll give you the punch line: offshoring, massively overhyped in the short run. The number of white-collar jobs lost to offshoring in the last four years is less than the typical turnover of jobs in this country in a month. It hasn’t had a big effect in the short term. It really hasn’t. However, if offshoring is overhyped in the short run, I think it is underhyped in the long run. It is underhyped in the long run. Why do I say that? Because I can do math.
Let me lay out some numbers for you here. Suppose that 15 percent of India’s population hits that status, 15 percent. Now, India has a certain advantage in these kinds of discussions, because India has a billion people—a billion people. Now, a billion for those of you with a very, very hardcore arts background, I just want to point out a billion’s a very large number. I just want to get that clear. I noticed some puzzled looks there. “Oh my God, he said a number.” Big number. There’s a principle of statistics called the Law of Large Numbers that says if you take a small percentage of a large number, you get another large number. So 15 percent,
which is a small percentage, of a billion, 15 percent of a billion is 150 million people. Okay, wow is exactly right. Wow is exactly right, because I’m anumbers guy. I look at the data. I look at 150 million people and I say, “Whoa, that is bigger than the population of Japan, the world’s second-largest economy.” Whoa, I go to bls.gov [Bureau of Labor Statistics] and I say, “Hmm, how many people were at work last month in the American economy, by far the planet’s largest economy?” So I add them up: all the people in the private sector; all the people in the nonprofit sector; all the people in the government sector; police, school teachers, military. Add it all up and do you know what number I get to: 146 million.
Now think about that. If 15 percent of India’s population makes it to that status—in other words, 85 percent get left behind—if 85 percent of India gets left behind, you’ve got more talented, ambitious, upper-middle-class, college-educated Indians than you have citizens of the world’s second largest economy and workers in the world’s largest economy. Let’s add another data point to it. India will be the largest English-speaking country in the world in two years, 2010. Law of Large Numbers, baby. I sound like Dick Vitale. Sorry about that. Law of Large Numbers. All right? You’ve got—India actually has about 1.2 billion people—you’ve got 1.2 billion people, you are going to have 800 million citizens of your country who don’t speak a word of English, and you still get the gold medal. Plus the cost of communication between North America and India is essentially zero. So stack that up. One hundred fifty million middle-class people who speak perfect English connected to North America for free. That’s a big deal. And here’s what it means. This has made one word essentially a death sentence in the economy today. One word is obliterating careers and will continue to obliterate careers, this word right here: routine. Any work that is routine is disappearing from this country. What do I mean by routine work? Routine work is work you can reduce to a script, to a spec sheet, to a formula, to a series of steps that has a right answer. If you can write down the steps and it has a right answer, it’s a goner.
Now here’s the thing, certain kinds of work our moms and dads told us to do is routine. It’s brain work, but it’s routine. Certain kinds of accounting are routine. Certain kinds of financial analysis are routine. Certain kinds of law are routine. If you can write down the steps and it has a right answer, that kind of work is a goner. This is what happened to routine mass production of work. We followed a set of rules with the body. That kind of work has left this country. The same thing is happening with routine white-collar work, and if we go back to our metaphor for a second, we realize that the left side is the routine side. This side is being offshored. This side is just racing to the cheapest cost provider. And you think these folks, the Indian folks up there, want to do routine work for the next 50 years? No way. Why? It’s boring. Why else? Malaysia will do it for less. Philippines might do it for less than that. Vietnam might do it for even less than that. The left-brain routine work is just racing to the cheapest cost provider.
Routine: now think about that word, think about that word. I would argue that the antonym of that word of routine is in some fashion, art—that the arts are the antithesis of routine. The arts are the antithesis of routine. And what concerns me is that we have a world where routine work doesn’t matter, where we have economies built more and more on novelty and nuance and customization; but we have an education system, particularly at the elementary and secondary level, that is being geared toward routines, right answers, and standardization at precisely the moment that routine work basically spells demise. I mean, if we had an enemy bent on our mortal destruction infiltrate our country, they would say emphasize routine work at the expense of artistic work. That’s Asia.
Let’s go to the next one: Abundance, Asia, Automation, our three “A”s. Abundance, Asia, Automation. Let’s go to Automation. It’s a very simple, straightforward story. Last century, machines replaced our back, our muscle. This century, software is replacing our brains. But what part of the brain can software replace? The left. Exactly right. Exactly correct. Right now at least, it can only replace the left side: the logical, linear, rule-based side. So you now see certain kinds of white-collar professions getting nibbled by automation, and I think soon gobbled by automation. Let me give you a delicious example from the field of law. Suppose that you’re here in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area and you want to get an uncontested divorce. You go to a lawyer for an uncontested divorce, and it will cost you $2,500. But an uncontested divorce isn’t very complicated, right? It’s uncontested. What does a lawyer in an uncontested divorce do? Actually, it’s kind of a stupid question. Because I actually do have some legal training, and I know that it’s a stupid question, forgive me. Obviously, the first thing a lawyer in an uncontested divorce does is try to make it contested. Sorry, stupid question. But assuming he can’t do that, it’s exactly as many of you are saying: doing paperwork, following a set of rules, filling out forms. So what happens to routine work? It’s routine work. We send it offshore, or we reduce it to lines of code in computers.
So now in this great country, you have a choice. You can go to that lawyer for $2,500, or you can go to CompleteCase.com for affordable divorce solutions, where you fill out the form yourself; they send it to a lawyer; the lawyer looks it over. They pay the lawyer $50 to do that. They send if off to the courthouse and you’ve got yourself a divorce, not for $2,500, but for $249. Check it out. I’m with you, whoever applauded, unless it was my wife. I’m with you. It is worthy of applause. It’s a great deal unless you’re the lawyer doing routine work because you’ve got a competitor doing it for 10 percent of your price. Now for the person who was comparison shopping, you can also check out this site here, 123DivorceMe.com where it costs $239. You see it with wills. Buy a piece of software for $14, answer a series of questions; you type in the answers to the questions; it writes your will, does a first draft of your will. You still go to a lawyer; you go for two hours rather than 10 hours, 80 percent cut in the take.
Think about accounting, not at the corporate level, but at the individual level. Last year, there were one million U.S. tax returns done in India because an Indian-chartered accountant, an Indian CPA, makes $500 a month. Exactly. You can’t compete with that. And people went nuts over that. One million U.S. tax returns done in India. It’s the sort of thing that Lou Dobbs goes into faux coronary arrest over every night. CNN isn’t here, are they? No one, no one says a word about the real accountant job killer which is this: TurboTax. Twenty-one million Americans did their taxes on TurboTax because certain kinds of accounting are routine. So if you stack this all up—Abundance, Asia, and Automation—it’s tilting the scales. These left-brain kinds of abilities are necessary, but no longer sufficient; and these right-brain kinds of abilities, the abilities that kids learn through early, sustained, robust, engaging exposure to the arts, are the abilities that matter most.
What this means is that you have to be able to do things in this kind of economy that are hard to outsource, hard to automate, and that deliver on the growing demands of an abundant economy. And what that means is that, again, the conversation is a little distorted. We tend to still obsess over high tech, high tech, high tech, high tech; and high tech still matters. But the abilities that now matter most are these hard to outsource, hard to automate, delivering on the new demands of an abundant age abilities, abilities that are high concept and high touch. Those are artistic abilities.
Now let me say—I’m going to spend about five minutes talking to you about the particular abilities that matter most, but what I want to do is say one word about math and science when it comes to arts education. Because one of the things, again, what I’m trying to do here is equip you with the language and the arguments to make this case out there because I think what you’re doing is so terrifically important to the future of this country, and one of the things that you will encounter is the math and science trump card. Here’s what happens. You’ll say, “You know what, we need to fund the arts, we need to get these kids with these highconcept, high-touch abilities,” and someone will reach into his back pocket, throw down the trump card and say, “What about math and science?” and then sort of stand up and do an end zone victory dance as if the conversation is over. I think that is a dangerous, and dare I say constipated, view of math and science, a fundamentally misguided view of math and science. And if you look, math and science are about two things. They’re about bold, conceptual leaps. They’re about imagination. They’re about seeing something that’s not there. And if you look at what’s happening in professional education in this country, it is extraordinary. Take Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech, one of the best engineering schools in America, half of Georgia Tech’s incoming freshman play a musical instrument. Isn’t that interesting? Because Georgia Tech is using that as a proxy for whole-mindedness, as a proxy for people who have a broad suite of skills rather than a narrower set of skills.
Take a look at this. I’ll show you a photograph. Here’s a graduate school set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The woman in white is a curator. The other people there are medical students. What? Mount Sinai Medical College students. Huh? Mount Sinai Medical College, one of the best medical schools in America, is taking its students to art museums. Why? To make them better diagnosticians. Why? Here are two reasons. One: certain kinds of diagnosis are routine. It’s about following decision trees: yes/no questions that bracket to yes/no questions. Software does that very well. There’s plenty of medical diagnosis software out there right now. But the harder diagnoses elude decision trees. Two: there’s so much medical information out there that a physician can’t be a vending machine for right answers. She has to be able to ask the right questions. And what that calls for are extraordinary observation skills—the observation skills of a painter, the observation skills of a sculptor. What it requires is the ability to toggle, the ability to reason algorithmically. All doctors need to do that, but if you can reason only algorithmically, you’re going to be a sub-par doctor today. You also have to be able to reason, as they say, aesthetically; to be able to look at a patient the way a painter would look at somebody; to look at a patient the way a sculptor would look at somebody. And here’s the thing a left-brainer like me loves about medical
schools: they measure everything. And here’s what they found out. Students who had been through this kind of training are better diagnosticians than those who haven’t because they can toggle. They can reason algorithmically. They can reason aesthetically. When you think about that, medical schools are typically these bastions of left-brain muscle flexing. When they’re taking students to art museums, you have to wonder what the heck is going on in elementary and secondary education if medical schools have seen the light.
Now there are six abilities that matter most. I’m going to spend just a very few minutes talking about them just to give you a flavor of them. The first one is design, not just function, but also design. Design has become a fundamental business literacy today. To be in business today, you must be literate in design, period. Design has become like a spreadsheet. You don’t have to be a great financial wizard, but you have to be able in business to kind of, sort of know how a spreadsheet works. Same thing is true with design. You see it over and over and over again. One example: take a company like General Motors, having some very tough times lately. General Motors began ever so slowly turning itself around thanks to one executive who is really in charge of that turnaround effort, a fellow by the name of Robert Lutz. Let me say just a quick few psychographic words about Mr. Lutz: a 73-year-old white man with white hair, former U.S. Marine, in the auto industry his whole life, takes a helicopter to work, last month said global warming is a crock. Point: not a touchyfeely dude. You’ll see why this matters. He gets up before some General Motors shareholders who have lost a lot of money and says something quite remarkable about General Motors. Here’s what he says: “We are in the arts and entertainment business.” What? How did GFM, General Friggin’Motors, get in the arts and entertainment business? Because you’ve got more cars than you have drivers. So Mr. Lutz, not me, is saying cars today have become mobile sculpture. So he’s out there hiring sculptors along with engineers. When GM is in the arts and entertainment business, we’re all in the arts and entertainment business.
Let me give you another example. Here’s what the CEO, the president and chairman, the CEO of Proctor and Gamble says. Now Proctor and Gamble makes soap, shampoo, toothpaste. Here’s what he says about his soap, shampoo, and toothpaste company. “It’s all design” at my toothpaste company. “It’s all design” at my detergent company. If he had said this as the CEO of Proctor and Gamble, if he had said this 15 years ago, it’s all design at Proctor and Gamble, you know what would have happened? Well, somebody said he would have gotten fired. Actually, they would have issued a press release late on a Friday afternoon saying that the CEO has decided to spend more time with his family, but you know how it goes. Because it’s all design, it’s all design. The materials that were sent out for this mentioned that I’ve written that the M.F.A. is the new M.B.A. The M.F.A. is the new M.B.A. I know everybody likes that here. All right. But I actually want to make a slight refinement to that, especially for you with the strong arts background. I want to make a refinement to that. I want to do it in a wonky way, unfortunately, here. So I’m going to render that as the M.F.A. equals the M.B.A., but what I want to do is edit that a little bit with what I’m calling the Kennedy Center Corollary. It’s a new equation and those of you who are strong in the arts, I want you to remember this. I want you to remember this, and I say this any time I talk to arts and design students, develop your left side too. If you have only these right-side kind of abilities and none on the left side, you’re going to be in a world of hurt. That’s why I think that the killer act, the way this economy is going is the Kennedy Center Corollary, which is not that the M.F.A. is the new M.B.A., it’s this: it’s the M.F.A. plus the M.B.A. equals that. [pointing to an image on screen that reads B.F.D.—big friggin’ deal] This is why I’m never getting invited back to the Kennedy Center again.
That is what it’s all about—that whole-mindedness, that ability to toggle algorithmically, aesthetically, algorithmically, aesthetically. And here’s the other thing though; here’s the dirty little secret which I hope you’ll keep in this room. It’s a lot easier to teach right-brain people these left-brain things than it is left-brain people these right-brain things. Not just argument, but also story. Story matters because we live in a world of ubiquitous facts. Facts are everywhere and they’re free. Something that is free doesn’t have much value. What matters more is putting facts in context, delivering them with emotional impact. That’s what a story does. So you see story and narrative moving to a whole range of business functions—leadership, sales, knowledge management, marketing—in some very, very exciting ways. Narrative has become an extremely important part of a whole range of businesses. Not just logic, but also empathy. Empathy is the ability to stand in someone’s shoes, feel with their heart, see with their eyes. It’s a fundamentally human ability, but it’s hard to outsource and hard to automate. So it’s more valuable now. Theatrical training teaches empathy. To some extent, musical training teaches empathy, imagining what it’s like to listen to something, imagining what it’s like to be another character. Empathy has become so important. Talk to any businessperson today and they will say that empathy is so hard to automate, so hard to outsource that it’s becoming central in its value. And to my mind, the arts actually help us develop a sense of empathy, help us stand in someone’s shoes, and see the world through their eyes. Not just seriousness, but also play. By play I mean laughter, humor, and games, and we know this for kids. The way kids create is through playing. Play is how they learn to navigate the world. Play is how they learn to take risks. And so play, increasingly, is moving to the center of a whole range of businesses.
Not just accumulation, but also meaning. This world of Abundance has increased prosperity substantially, but it hasn’t really increased our level of satisfaction. We’ve been liberated by prosperity, but not fulfilled by it. So what you have now in this country is this widespread search for meaning and purpose and transcendence, again and again and again that’s something that people discover through the arts. That’s something that people contribute to solving through the arts.
And finally, last but not least, is an ability called symphony. Symphony is the ability to see the big picture, connect the dots, combine disparate things into something new. It is what artists do. It is what artists do, and in many ways it is the signature ability of this age.
If you look at it, there’s a whole raft of data that shows where they try to figure out what makes somebody a star at work. What makes a person a high performer at work? And what they’ve done on some of these studies is they find the highest performers, the real stars in the workplace; they take them offsite, give them a whole range of cognitive tests to try to crack the code: math, vocabulary, analytic reasoning, spatial reasoning, rotating objects in space. And when they crunch the numbers, they realize there are no correlations. Some of these stars are great at math, some aren’t. Some have good vocabularies, some don’t. The one cognitive
ability that predicts star performance, the only cognitive ability that predicts star performance, is this: the ability to look at a welter of information and detect the meaningful patterns, and to my mind this is very much an artistic sensibility. It is not a narrow-minded, routine ability. It’s the ability to see things in their totality. This is why I think arts education is so important, because arts education—again starting early, sustained, done robustly, done with a sense of joy—will begin to develop these symphonic thinkers.
Let me leave you with two quick things. I want to leave you the best example of this ability of symphony that I’ve ever heard. The best example, in some ways sort of some of the best advice for this economy, that I’ve ever heard, comes from that legendary management theorist Sid Caesar. Again, you need an actor. You need a comedian to break through and explain what things are about. Sid Caesar said these words and I mean this very seriously. It’s great business advice. Here’s what he said. He said, “The guy who invented the wheel, he was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was a genius.” And that’s what the arts help our kids learn how to do, take a step back, see what’s missing. Imagine something the world didn’t know was going on.
One final point, as I mentioned I’m a left-brain guy. I’m a very, very left-brain guy, so when I look at the facts, and I look at the data, and I look at the evidence, and I see where this world is going…First of all, I want my kids to have a very robust arts education, but I’m trying to play catch-up myself. And so I decided to try to get better at this by taking a drawing class, having studied—now don’t boo me for this yet—having taken no fine arts classes in high school, no fine arts classes in college, no fine arts classes as an adult, being a product of my context, being a left-brain weanie that I am. But I said I saw the light, and I said I want to get better at this, so I took a five-day drawing course in New York City called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, based on a famous book by that name, taught by the author of that book’s son, Brian Bomeisler, a painter in New York City.
On day one, Brian said, “Dan, draw your self-portrait.” And here it is. Now that’s not very good, right? I don’t want to do a full critique session here, but let’s talk about why it’s not very good. What do you think of those eyebrows? Oops, there are none. What about that neck? Oops, there’s no neck. I’m not a very exciting guy, but I’m not literally twodimensional. I have some depth. Take a look, if you can bear it, at those lips. Nobody’s lips look like that. It’s a symbol of lips. I might as well have just written L-I-P-S there and done the same thing. You see what I mean. My eyes, which usually reside somewhere in the middle of my face, are up in my forehead because my nostrils have declared eminent domain on the central region of my face. So Brian, my very generous and kind art teacher said, “Dan, the reason you can’t draw is because you can’t see. You’re not seeing things. You’re seeing like a lawyer. You’re not seeing like an artist. You’re basically drawing symbols. You’re essentially writing a legal brief about your face. You need to see. You need to see the way an artist sees.” So over the next few days he taught me how to see. Light and shadow. Honestly, I feel like an idiot. Never thought about it before. Proportions, relationships. I never thought about that either. Negative space, the space between space. There’s space between space? How cool is that? No one ever told me. The scales are falling off my eyes. And on day five, Brian says, “Draw your self-portrait,” and here it is. That’s not great. I’ve got this sort of odd and inadvertent cubist touch going here. But let’s pretend we’re at the ophthalmologist’s. Better one or two? Better one or two?
Now what’s my point to you, my friends. If I can make that kind of progress in such a short time, a hard-core, nerdy, left-brain guy like me can make that kind of progress in such a short period of time, just imagine, imagine how much unleashed symphonic capacity there is out there, how much unleashed symphonic capacity there is out there in the world and in our kids. And so for all of you for what you do; for unleashing that ability in yourselves, in your communities, in your kids; for fighting the good fight that you do for arts education, for the NEA, for the NEH; for waking up every morning and trying to give the world something that it didn’t know it was missing; for pushing the boulder up the mountain to try to get arts funded in this country; for doing what you do every day to make this world a better place, I thank you very much.
Concluding Remarks
by Steven D. Spiess
All right, one more round of applause, please, for Daniel Pink. Good evening, I'm Steve Spiess; I'm the Chairman of the Board of Americans for the Arts. I am, unfortunately, also a trained tax CPA who runs one of the country's largest law firms, and I stand before you a broken man. But seriously, I wanted to just briefly thank you all again for being here at the 21st Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy. And we hope you'll keep an eye for the announcement about next year and that you'll be joining us again. I wanted to also take a moment, please, to thank our good friends and partners here at The John F. Kennedy Center for allowing us into their beautiful theater once again. Thank you.
And it is now my honor to close this evening, to reintroduce for one last number, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts Show Choir. Thank you very much for being here and good night.
[Whereupon, the Duke Ellington School of the
Arts Show Choir performed.]