Excerpt from "A Whole New Mind"

A WHOLE NEW MIND - Daniel Pink

MBAs and MFAs

Getting admitted to Harvard Business School is a cinch. At least that's what several hundred people must think each year after they apply to the graduate program of the UCLA Department of Art­and don't get in. While Harvard's MBA program admits about 10 percent of its applicants, UCLA's fine arts graduate school admits only 3 percent. Why? A master of fine arts, an MFA, is now one of the hottest credentials in a world where even General Motors is in the art business. Corporate recruiters have begun visiting the top arts grad schools-places such as the Rhode Island School of Design, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Michigan's Cranbrook Academy of Art-in search of talent. And this broadened approach has often come at the expense of more traditional business graduates. For instance, in 1993, 61 percent of management consultancy McKinsey's recruits had MBA degrees. Less than a decade later, it was down to 43 percent, because McKinsey says other disciplines are just as valuable in helping new hires perform well at the firm. With applications climbing and ever more arts grads occupying key corpo­rate positions, the rules have changed: the MFA is the new MBA.
The reasons for this go back to two of the forces I explained in the previous chapter. Because of Asia, many MBA graduates are becom­ing this century's blue-collar workers-people who entered a work­force full of promise, only to see their jobs move overseas. Investment banks, as we learned, are hiring MBAs in India to handle financial analysis. A. T. Kearney estimates that in the next five years, U.S. financial services companies will transfer a half-million jobs to low­cost locales such as India. As the Economist put it, the sorts of entry­level MBA tasks that "would once have been foisted on ambitious but inexperienced young recruits, working long hours to earn their spurs in Wall Street or the City of London, are, thanks to the miracle of fibre-optic cable, foisted on their lower-paid Indian counterparts."

At the same time, because of Abundance, businesses are realizing that the only way to differentiate their goods and services in today's overstocked marketplace is to make their offerings physically beauti­ful and emotionally compelling. Thus the high-concept abilities of an artist are often more valuable than the easily replicated L-Directed skills of an entry-level business graduate.

In the middle of the last century, Charlie Wilson, a GM executive who became U.S. defense secretary, famously remarked that what was good for General Motors was good for America. It's time to up­date Wilson's maxim for a new century. What is happening to General Motors is happening to America-and what is happening to America is happening in many other countries. Today we're all in the art business.

In the United States, the number of graphic designers has in­creased tenfold in a decade; graphic designers outnumber chemical engineers by four to one. Since 1970, the United States has 30 per­cent more people earning a living as writers and 50 percent more earning a living by composing or performing music. Some 240 U.S. universities have established creative writing MFA programs, up from fewer than twenty tWo decades ago.5 More Americans today work in arts, entertainment, and design than work as lawyers, accountants, and auditors.6 (A sign of these new times is a young venture in Alexandria, Virginia. When routine legal research goes overseas and basic legal information is available online, what's left for the litigious? High-concept work like that done by Animators at Law, a graphic de­sign firm staffed by law graduates that prepares exhibits, videos, and visual aids to help top trial attorneys persuade juries.)

In 2002, Carnegie Mellon University urban planner Richard Florida identified a group of 38 million Americans that he labeled the "creative class" and claimed were the key to economic development. Although Florida's definition of "creative" was bizarrely expansive­he includes accountants, insurance adjusters, and tax attorneys as "creatives"-the growth of this class's ranks is hard to ignore. Its share of the U.S. workforce has doubled since 1980 and is ten times what it was a centUry ago.7 A similar trend toward high-concept work is afoot elsewhere in the world. Using a more sensible defini­tion of "creative"-to include fifteen industries from design to per­forming arts to research and development to video games-British analyst John Howkins estimates that the creative sector in the United Kingdom is producing nearly $200 billion of goods and ser­vices each year. Howkins calculates that within fifteen years, this sec­tor will be worth aboUt $6.1 trillion internationally, making High Concept Nation one of the largest economies in the world.s Meantime, British organizations such as the London Business School and the Yorkshire Water Company have established artist-in-residence pro­grams. Unilever UK employs painters, poets, and comic book cre­ators to inspire the rest of its staff. One North London football club even has its own poet in residence.

But art in the traditional sense is neither the only, nor the most important, component of these emerging whole-minded aptitUdes. Go back to those Information Age rock stars, computer program­mers. The outsourcing of routine software work is putting a new pre­mium on software engineers with high-concept abilities. As the Lalits and Kavitas of the world take over the routine work of soft­ware fabrication, maintenance, testing, and upgrading, ConceptUal Age software types will concentrate on novelty and nuance. After all, before the Indian programmers have something to fabricate, main­tain, test, or upgrade, that something first must be imagined or in­vented. And these creations must then be explained and tailored to customers and entered into the swirl of commerce, all of which re­quire aptitUdes that can't be reduced to a set of rules on a spec sheet-ingenuity, personal rapport, and gut instinct.