Aldous Huxley once remarked that man made the automobile in his own image. But if humans ever created a machine in celebration of themselves, it was the computer.
The culture of market economies has always treasured the ability to analyze and process information. The second most popular books in the sixteenth century, after Bibles, were math textbooks that taught how to exchange currencies and extrapolate prices. A short generation ago, our economy's "best and brightest" were numbers crunchers: they were the "whiz kids" who first pioneered financial engineering and high-powered capital market theory, or brought modern management to Robert MacNamara’s Ford and Pentagon.
But today, thanks to technology, everybody's a whiz kid. Today, if you know one thing, you can talk to most of the population of the Earth: that thing is their phone number. And now, armed with one other thing, you can learn any fact, see any image, or gather any data – an internet address. There is now almost nothing that the computer on your desk cannot tell you.
This evolution in information technology is about to change our culture. As computers get cheap and the internet flourishes, we are becoming overloaded with data – data from markets, websites, spreadsheets, desktop publishing, powerpoint presentations. Anyone can now be a numbers cruncher, an analyst, a data producer. The people who prosper in this world won’t be those who add to – or are distracted by – the clutter. The Information Revolution is automating the left side of our brains – the side that analyzes and manipulates data. And as a result, a new and different set of skills and abilities is becoming more important –– judgment, intuition, creativity, and insight. In short, the Information Revolution is creating a new, right-brained economy.
The advent of this right-brained economy is challenging all of our institutions. How will business schools develop these traits in their charges, or recognize them in their applicants? How will companies identify and reward managers who demonstrate these skills, or build their organizations around them? How will the obsolete data-crunchers perilously positioned in the path of this technology adapt?
It was no less a seer than the late Timothy Leary who said, "Computers...will replace you only to the extent you think like a bureaucrat, a functionary, a manager... or a chess player.” Not long after Leary’s departure from the scene, IBM's chess program, Big Blue, beat international chess wizard Gary Kasparov, making Leary’s point.
And so, the ultimate paradox: the machines that compute and analyze will ultimately reward the artists, poets, and philosophers who know what to do once the machines are done computing and analyzing. They will be tomorrow's CEOs.
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