Oon Yeoh

The first time I met Jason Lo, several years ago, he was a musician and I was a journalist. Today, somehow, we've ended up in the telco industry. He's the CEO of Tune Talk and I'm a senior research scientist at Telenor.

When I met up with him for lunch recently, we exchanged business cards. He took one look at mine and asked sceptically, "You're a scientist?" I shot back, "You're a CEO?" We both had a good laugh.

The purpose of this anecdote is not to illustrate that you can be whoever you want to be but to reinforce the notion – first articulated by author Daniel Pink – that to succeed in business, you need more right-brain thinkers.

One of the biggest mistakes I've ever made in my life happened when I decided to enter the science stream during my Junior College years in Singapore. I did this partly because of parental expectations and also because of peer pressure. After all, everyone knows that smart people did science.

Bad move. I did so poorly in my GCE "A" levels that it's a wonder I even made it to university. But once there, I chose to pursue an Arts degree, majoring in Economics and minoring in Government. I had come to terms with the fact that I was a right-brain thinker and it was this acceptance that allowed my subsequent career to flourish.

Today, I make my living conceptualizing new ideas for the telco industry. One would think that in ICT, the conceptualizers should be the techies, the geeks who like to tinker with code, the left-brainers. But the future belongs to a different kind of person, says bestselling author Pink. "Designers, inventors, teachers, storytellers — creative and empathetic right-brain thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn't."

In his provocative book "A Whole New Mind", Pink defines six essential aptitudes to excel in the conceptual age:

1.      Design - Moving beyond function to engage the sense.

2.      Story - Narrative added to products and services - not just argument.

3.      Symphony - Adding invention and big picture thinking.

4.      Empathy - Going beyond logic and engaging emotion and intuition.

5.      Play - Bringing humor and light-heartedness to business and products.

6.      Meaning - Immaterial feelings and values of products.

My retelling of the six aptitudes will be in the context of what I do in my daily work, which is to conceptualize and present my ideas.  

Design
"It is easy to dismiss design — to relegate it to mere ornament, the prettifying of places and objects to disguise their banality," says Pink. "But that is a serious misunderstanding of what design is and why it matters." Actually, to understand why design matters, just look at Apple products and services. Why do many people crave the iPod and the iPhone? Why is iTunes music store so popular? Enough said.

Story
We live in an era of information overload. As such, says Pink: "What begins to matter more (than mere data) is the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact." Whenever I make a presentation, my slides are always quite skimpy, featuring some high-level concepts and presented in bullet points. I elaborate my points verbally, in a narrative, story-telling kind of way and relying on the question and answer session to convince my audience. Data alone can never make an impact.

Symphony
To conceptualize a new product or service, it requires the ability to take seemingly unrelated pieces and put them together in some coherent form to create something Pink calls this aptitude "Symphony", which he describes as "the capacity to synthesize rather than to analyze; to detect broad patterns rather than to deliver specific answers; and to invent something new by combining elements nobody else thought to pair."

Empathy
Why is empathy important? Because in order to design a good product or service, you need to be able to understand the attitude and mindset of your target market. One of the reasons why so many ICT products and services are so intimidating to everyday users is that they are designed by techies for techies. The ability to empathize is a key differentiator for companies like Apple and Google, which understand that most consumers are not geeks.

Play
Pink quotes University of Pennsylvania Professor Brian Sutton-Smith who says, "The opposite of play isn't work. It's depression. To play is to act out and be wilful, exultant and committed as if one is assured of one's prospects." To me it's simple, if you design a consumer product or service that's not fun to use, it's bound to fail. How joyful your concept is, is determined by the joy you take in designing it. You must enjoy what you do or it will show in the end product.

Meaning
For many people, work has little meaning and is just a means of income. However, if you are lucky enough to have a job that you are passionate about, you want to share your joy with others, connecting with them and exposing them to new things you've discovered. Writing this column is and teaching in local colleges are ways I've done this. And even what I do today, which is to conceptualize new ideas and to eventually bring them to market, is a form of sharing which gives great meaning to my work and life.

It's worth pointing out that Pink is not saying left-brain workers are unimportant. We will always need the programmers, the technologists and the people to do the hard number crunching. "Logical reasoning is a necessary condition," he says, "However, it's increasingly clear that logic alone is not a sufficient condition for success for individuals and for organizations." What's needed is more "right-brain reasoning."