Book 2 Post 5

            In my fifth and final reading of A Whole New Mind written by Daniel Pink, Pink wrapped up the book with his conclusion on the six senses. He described the how a person can achieve symphony, empathy, play and meaning to enhance their ability at right-handed thinking.

            For symphony, Pink says you need to be able to put together the little pieces to make a big idea.  Pink says that one of the best ways to develop the aptitude of symphony is to learn how to draw. It allows your brain to make connections in the drawing and be creative. Pink also talked about how symphony is largely about relationships. People who hope to thrive in the conceptual age must understand the connections between diverse, and seemingly separate, disciplines. They must know how to link apparently unconnected elements to create something new.

            For empathy Pink discussed how it is feeling with someone else and that you should be imagining what it would be like to be that person. Empathy provides’ self-awareness and is an ethic for living. It’s a means of understanding other human beings, a universal language that connects us beyond country of culture.

I think empathy is a cool sense but I don’t really see how it gives you an advantage towards right-minded thinking. I wish Pink did a better job of explaining this one.

Pinks description of the final two senses I found were the most important. Both play and meaning are crucial parts to human nature and essential in every human life. The search for meaning is a drive that exists in all of us. Joyfulness makes us more productive and fulfilled. These two pieces are essential to everyone regardless of how you think and Pinks points about that were really fascinating. Overall, I liked this book and thought it provided some really good insight into how the human mind works.

Book 2 Post 4

In my fourth reading of A Whole New Mind written by Daniel Pink, Pink began his break down of the six senses. Starting off with Design, Pink is devoting a chapter to each of the six senses in which he describes how you can work towards adapting to these senses. Pink talked about how design is a way for humans to shape their environments to give meaning to our lives. Design is a classic whole-minded aptitude. It is a combination of utility and significance. A graphic designer must whip up a brochure that is easy to read. That’s utility. Her brochure must also transmit ideas that words themselves cannot convey. That’s significance.

I think this idea is very cool and something that I had not really considered until reading this chapter. People use a large variety of tools for very brief periods of time. Say 1% of the time a person is judging how well the toaster works, while 99% of the time a person is judging it purely based on its appearance.  If you want success from an idea or product, it needs to have some visual appeal to the customer.

After Design, Pink continued on with Story. To find success in storytelling, Pink really recommends listening. The best way to master story telling is to hear great storytellers. Pink is all about this idea that stories exist where high concept and high touch intersect. Story is high concept because it sharpens our understanding of one thing by showing it in the context of something else. Story is high touch because stories almost always pack an emotional punch.

It will be interesting to see how Pink continues to describe the other four senses and what tips he gives to achieve them.

Book 2 Post 3

            In my third reading of A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink, Pink transitioned from giving background on his ideas to really diving into them and showing what it takes to keep up in the right-directed thinking world. This also made the book more exciting because he is starting to get into his own analysis.

            The first thing that Pink brought up in this section was the six senses that are essential to succeed in this new era of thinking. Design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning are needed in an idea or product for it to find success in today’s world. An item not only needs to function, but also be visually appealing. Data isn’t enough anymore. You need to be able to tell the story of your product, put the pieces together to see the big picture, have empathy to understand your customer, and in the end have meaning and happiness in what you are doing. When I first read through the six senses, I was skeptical because these are not the six attributes that came to my head when thinking about trying to be successful in the business world. However, as Pink developed his analysis further, I could see why he put each of these six senses on that list. These six are really the hook moment in a deal that can make or break you. If you are missing just a single piece, it can cause a large downfall.

            I am excited to see what the rest of the book is like, as Pink will be breaking down each of the six senses into it’s own chapter. Hopefully, he will help the reader understand the points he is making about each sense and connect them back to the business world.

Book 2 Post 2

In my next reading of A Whole New Mind written by Daniel Pink, Pink continues to discuss how society’s changes affect the way we use our brains. Pink continued on his idea from the last reading that humans obsession with abundance causes a change in thinking. In this age of abundance, appealing only to rational, logical and functional needs is very inefficient.  People these days require all of their goods to not only work effectively but also be appealing to the eye.

Pink seems to make point all basically stating that left-directed thinkers are no longer key components to society. Not only are people not interested in things that focus on left-directed thinkers, but also technology seems to be replacing all of the old left-directed thinking jobs. Many of these jobs included using logic, sequence and analysis partnered with some sort of manual work, but now the computers can come up with a solution and fix the problem in less than half the time it was taking humans.  

Although Pink focused on abundance, a big part of this reading was discussing the breakdown of human history. Pink broke the last 150 years into three 50-year chunks: the industrial age, the informational age and the conceptual age. The part that I took away from this is Pink’s analysis of the conceptual age, or the last 50 years. He discussed how the main characters are the creator and the empathizer, whose distinctive ability is the mastery of right-directed thinking. Society is moving more and more towards being a right-directing thinking world and Pink is making points to prove it.

Book 2 Post 1

The book I choose for the second semester is called A Whole New Mind written by Daniel Pink. Initially, I was skeptical about this book because it wasn't my first choice and I wasn't too sure what it was going to be about, but as I dove into the book, I feel like I made the right choice after all.

Pink starts off the novel simply by breaking down the brain. He explains the differences between the right and left side of the brain and helps the reader differentiate between the two. The left side of the brain is focused more on details while the right side of the brain works to see the bigger picture. The left handles logic, sequence, literalness, and analysis. The right takes care of synthesis, emotional expression, and the big context.

I think Pink’s breakdown of the brain assures that all of his readers have the same base knowledge about the brain that you need before reading this book. I think this was a good way to start the book, especially when covering such an intellectually deep topic like the way the brain works.

After breaking down the two sides of the brain, Pink continues on to discuss abundance and how the world’s obsession with abundance has changed society. Pink talks about how abundance is the defining feature of social, economic and cultural life in much of the world. In turn, this has made Left-directed thinking much less significant. People are more focused on the broader context of their lives rather than the day-to-day text. I didn’t finish the reading on abundance during this post, but I’ll have more on it in my next post.

Book Post 5

In the final section of the book I read for the second quarter called The Wisdom of Psychopaths by Kevin Dutton, Dutton draws his final conclusions about the connections between psychopaths. Dutton has dragged on through the entire book to finally reach this point, but in the end it was worth the wait.

Dutton closes out the book with a few key points that I picked up on. Throughout the book, Dutton has keyed into psychopaths and their relationship with society. When he suggested the idea that for a society to thrive it needs psychopaths, I wasn’t as surprised as I would have been before reading this book. Dutton believes 10% is a perfect number for psychopaths and I don’t disagree with him. Psychopaths have very strong traits and characteristics that other people can learn from. They operate in unique ways and can acquire a lot of success in life if they have the right make up. Dutton then continued to explain that there are seven psychopathic traits that form the right make up that allow psychopaths to succeed. Dutton labeled them the Seven Deadly Sins. They are the seven core principles of psychopathy that when applied with due care and attention can allow us to “respond rather than react” when faced with challenges and can transform our view from “victim to victor all without turning into a villain.

1)   Ruthlessness

2)   Charm

3)   Focus

4)   Mental Toughness

5)   Fearlessness

6)   Mindfulness

7)   Action”

In the end, I thought this book made very interesting connections between psychopathic traits and finding success in life, but it didn’t create much interest for me. Although this book has some business points, I believe it is much more psychologically based. I also thought Dutton added too many stories and dragged the book out way too long.

Class Post 5

In our final full week of working on these two projects, my group worked on lot on organizing the “storefront” in preparation for our final presentations. Similar to last week, the majority of the focus during this week was directed towards the storefront project. After the New Year, calendars took a backseat to the storefront project. However, we still manage to sell a few calendars a week during our free time and are continuing to profit. We hope to keep making money all the way until the last day of second quarter, but it will not be as much as we originally imagined which is slightly disappointing. Overall, the calendar project went very well, as we broke even within the first three weeks of sales and made a profit for the athletic department with our success.

As we wrap up the calendar sales, the due date for our storefront project comes closer and closer. During this week, we focused a majority of our class time to creating the presentation. On Monday we drafted a script and PowerPoint presentation with only images representing each slide. On Tuesday we did a very dry run through of our presentation and received feedback from Ms. Stevens and Mr. Fischer. Wednesday was a confrontational day for my group as we discussed the overall work on the projects, group evaluations and participation grades. One member was very bothered by the amount of credit he was given based on the amount of the work he “did”. However, when we looked back through the projects it was clear to see that his grade equally reflected the amount of work he had done. I was absent on Thursday, but my group worked on editing our script and PowerPoint based on the feedback we received on Tuesday. Overall, I believe these two projects were a lot of fun and I hope you continue them in the future.

Book Post 4

The next reading in my book The Wisdom of Psychopaths written by Kevin Dutton was a little bit more boring than the recent ones, but Dutton did provide more connections between business and being a psychopath, which is something that continues to interest me.

My stance on the book has not been altered due to this reading. I believe that Dutton makes some really interesting points connecting psychopaths to the business world, but I believe a lot of details and stories that Dutton adds are unneeded. They do not help further Dutton’s argument and sidetrack the reader from the connections he is making. In this section, this exactly what Dutton did.

The reading started off very well. The first few pages built up a strong connection between the traits of strong business leaders with those of psychopaths. Dutton showed a chart that showed the traits of a leader compared side by side with the traits of a psychopath and the results were shocking. With different wording, most of the traits were seen on both sides of the chart.  Dutton went on to discuss the perfect mix of traits. Clearly psychopaths are psychopaths and businessmen are businessmen for a reason. They can’t easily switch from one lifestyle to another, but businessmen can be functional psychopaths according to Dutton. If you take away the poor decision-making and put a person in the right environment, having the emotionless, persuasive and impulsive abilities of a psychopath can put you in front of the pack in the business world. After Dutton explained this, he digressed into a story about how society has become less dangerous and then a story about his friend Andy and their encounter with a psychopath.

Overall, the connections that Dutton made this week were similar but he shined new light on the idea of a functional psychopath and how they could fit into society. The book continues to show times of excitement but overall doesn’t spend all its time on furthering the argument.

Class Post 4

The first week back from break is always less productive than most other weeks of school. Everyone is fresh off two weeks of relaxation and there is no real drive for productivity. Additionally, with two weeks off it takes a couple of days to get operations back to running full speed. We spent most of this week just tidying up details and getting reorganized in both the two hundred dollar and storefront project. 

For the two hundred dollar project, since it is after the New Year our prime time of higher need for calendars has expired. People have bought the calendars they plan on using for 2015, so for the most part our calendars would just be extra. Even as we approached the New Year, it was clear to see our calendars weren’t selling at the rate we expected. Coming back in 2015, we realized that we needed a price cut to make the calendars seem more appealing and to hopefully increase the rate of selling them. We broke profit before the winter break so we aren’t as concerned with making money as we are with simply selling the rest of the calendars. We are continuing to sell the calendars and have class blocks along with lunch blocks set aside to sell them in the upcoming week.

For the storefront project, we really focused on the fine-tuning and details this week during class. We had completed all of the hard work before break, and had to focus on putting it together into a nice organized packet for the bank. We wrote an overview and combined parts one through six to make up the packet. After reading it through for errors and adding flow to the packet, we sent it off to Mr. Gladstone at Citizens bank for him to review. Overall, it was a good first week back and we hope to build on it in the final two weeks of these projects.