Business consultant, lecturer, and author,Daniel Pink has written about theglobal economy and its effects on peopleworldwide in two well-received books,A Whole New Mind and Free AgentNation. His essays on people who haveopted out of the corporate world to workfor themselves, outsourcing, and the searchfor meaning through work have appeared in the New YorkTimes, Harvard Business Review, and Fast Companymagazine. A contributing editor with Wired magazine,Pink also writes a column for Yahoo! Finance. Pink wasinterviewed by U.S. State Department staff writer PaulMalamud.

 

Q: What is globalization, in your view?

 

Pink: Globalization is the broad movement amongeconomies and societies and technology that is knittingthe world closer together and affecting capital markets,technology, and the exchange of information.

 

Q: What is making this happen?

 

Pink: I think it’s a number of things. Oneof them is certainly the advent of newtechnology like the Internet, which allowsa child in Zambia to find informationalmost as fast as the head librarian atCambridge University. It allows people tostay in touch with their native countriesmore easily; it allows capital to move across the world tothe place where it can be used most advantageously. Itconfers a greater amount of transparency on governmentsand political institutions than ever before. It erodes tradebarriers. When I think of globalization, I think of it beingbasically about flows: whether the flows of ideas, flows ofcapital, flows of goods and services, flows of people—allof which have been made easier and have been acceleratedbecause of globalization.

 

Q: Are we better or worse off as a result?Pink: We’re better off. In my view, globalization is good,not perfect. And we can’t let perfect be the enemy ofgood. Globalization in general has lifted living standards throughout the world. Now there havebeen obviously some dislocations fromthat. If you are an American worker andyour manufacturing job goes to a countryin the developing world where someone isgoing to get paid one-fifth of what you’reearning, then you have been in somefashion harmed by globalization.

 

At the same time, that manufacturingworker and his or her family benefit fromthe lower cost of goods and services because of fallingtrade barriers. And they benefit obviously from all thetechnology that helps enable globalization. So my viewis that globalization is mostly a plus. And the challengeof public policy, the challenge of political leadershipnationally and trans-nationally, is to make sure that peopleget the benefits of globalization, and that for the downsideof globalization, governments and political institutionsstep in to mitigate its negative effects.

 

Q: Are there statistics showing that globalization lifts allboats?

 

Pink: It depends on whose standard of living. CertainlyU.S. per capita GDP over the last 50 years has tripled.I am certain living standards in much of the rest of theworld have also improved. That said, you’ve still got morethan a billion people on this planet living on less thana dollar a day. So it’s not like everybody is living in aland of milk and honey by any long shot, but in generalglobalization has made things better rather than worse,and in general the present is better than the past. Ingeneral, I am almost certain, not because I am a woollyeyedoptimist but because I’m a realist, that the future willbe better than the present.

 

Watching real-time video taken from inside a sewer line, technician Jeremy Vanrite maneuvers a Sewer Access Module (SAM) robot through an Albuquerque, New Mexico, sewer via interactive computer controls.
 

Q: In your book A Whole New Mind, you predict thatmore routine white-collar jobs will flow out of developednations and into developing ones, and you say that theywill be made up for by more creative jobs in Americaand other developed nations. Yet, this assumes that mostpeople are capable of being highly creative. Suppose mostof us are not?

 

Pink: I disagree with the premise that most peopledon’t have these kinds of abilities. My argument is thateconomies are automating and off-shoring routinewhite-collar work—basic accounting, basic financialanalysis, even basic legal services—and this is the samesort of pattern that we saw with routinemanufacturing work. Today anything thatis routine—that is, anything that can bereduced to a script, to a spec sheet, to a setof rules—this kind of work increasingly isgoing to disappear from the United States,Canada, Western Europe, and Japan,because that kind of work can get donemore cheaply by computers and by peopleoverseas.

 

Now, what that means is that in order to survive inthe economy, you have to do something that isn’t routine.That tends to be work that is artistic, creative, empathic,about the big picture. And I think that the idea thathuman beings in general and Americans in particular can’tbe creative, empathic, big-picture-oriented is flatly wrong.For example, consider the time when America wasmoving from an agricultural economy to a manufacturingeconomy, and people said, “Well, everybody can’t goto high school, everybody can’t learn to read and write.A good education is only reserved for a certain elitepopulation.” 

 

What I’m talking about here is not thateveryone becomes Salvador Dali, but that everybodybecomes adept at these sorts of high-concept, high-touchabilities. And I think that is eminently doable.No one would say, “The masses of men cannotbecome literate.” Not everybody can become ToniMorrison. But nearly everyone can become literate. “Themasses of men can’t become numerate.” Well, I don’tagree with that. I don’t think that everyone can be AlbertEinstein, but they can certainly be numerate. And theycan go beyond that. 

 

Q: What happens to people in developed nations whenpeople in developing nations of the world become equallywell educated and find their own creativity?

 

Pink: I think that’s an excellent point. Tom Friedmandeals with this issue in his writing. There are two differentschools of thought. One is that China and India are racingus to the bottom. The other one is that they are racing usto the top. Friedman believes—and I agree—that they areracing us to the top, again not because I’m an optimist,but because that’s always been the pattern, that’s alwaysbeen the trajectory. Now that doesn’t mean that it is 100percent certain to be the trajectory again, but that’s what Iwould bet on.And so I agree that Americans have absolutely nomonopoly on these kinds of creative abilities, and what weAmericans have to do is shake off our complacency andbecome a lot better at this stuff because, as Tom Friedmansays, these other countries are racing us to the top.

 

Q: The nature of work is changing in other ways.Computers are becoming more complex and capable.How soon would you expect computers to compete withhumans for professional-grade work?

 

Pink: I think in some ways that they are doing certainkinds of professional work. Look at TurboTax [a softwareprogram that helps people prepare their taxes]. We haveall this concern about off-shoring and outsourcing. Therewere 3 million U.S. tax returns done in India last yearby Indian tax-preparers, but there were 21 million taxreturns done by TurboTax. So in some fashion, softwarealready can do certain elements of professional work, andincreasingly it’s going to do more and more.What that means is that the accountants who wantto survive can’t make a living off of doing the same sortof thing that a piece of $39.95 software can do. Theyhave to do things that are harder to reduce to computercode, which is a more sophisticated type of advising—understanding what peoples’ financial needs are andgiving higher-level financial advice.It’s the same thing to some extent with stockbrokersand investment as well. 

 

Nowadays many Americans dotheir investing on line. Information is widely available,Internet brokerage transactions are cheap because you canexecute them on your own computer, and you no longerneed a stockbroker on the phone to perform the routinetransactions.At some point that stockbroker is going to try tobecome a financial adviser, to understand your situation ina more detailed way and offer you kinds of advice that acomputer program can never do.

 

Q: What about robots? How do you expect them to affectavailable work?

 

Pink: If you go to a manufacturing floor today, what yousee is not the manufacturing floor of the 1920s or evenof the 1950s, where you had a bunch of guys in greasyoveralls turning wrenches on an assembly line. Whatyou see are people, often with associate’s degrees, whoare basically running these robots. The robots have noautonomy or will of their own. They answer to softwarecode. So someone has to write the code, someone has tomonitor those robots. So this is increasingly what a lot ofmanufacturing work is. This calls on obviously a muchhigher level of skill.

 

Q: Do most of the world’s workers have the intelligence,the IQ, to adapt to all of this?

 

Pink: Let me disagree with the premise of that question,that IQ is a measure of aptitude. IQ is a measure of oneparticular kind of reasoning, but that is hardly the onlyform of reasoning, and the evidence is overwhelmingthat the correlation between IQ and career success isessentially zero. What IQ correlates to is what professionyou enter. Also, IQ as measured by standard tests has goneup over time too—the median IQ has increased. IQ ispart of what it is to be smart, but it’s only a small aspectof it. Look at the work of Dan Goleman in emotionalintelligence; look at the work of Howard Gardner atHarvard and his multiple intelligences. I don’t put muchstake in IQ as a measure of human ability. 

 

Q: Do you feel human dignity is threatened by some ofthe by-products of globalization? Some argue that bondsof family, clan, community, hierarchy are loosening—thateven the dignity of individual achievement based on thedevelopment of individual skills means less because rolesshift so frequently in a globalized economy.

 

Pink: That’s an interesting question. If you considerthe Western world a harbinger of the future, the familyconnections here are much more diffuse than in otherparts of the world. You have much greater mobility, wherepeople don’t live necessarily where their parents live orwhere their brothers and sisters live. There is an array ofdifferent family forms now that call into question thenuclear family. The point about identity coming from alifetime of skills is interesting. I think there is a changethere, because the half-life of every sort of ability todayis shrinking and shrinking. You cannot make a living byplying one trade for 40 years because it doesn’t work thatway. The lifespan of a particular set of skills is literallya couple of years. So there’s a premium now obviouslyon learning and learning how to learn and constantlyupgrading.Now I don’t know whether that erodes humandignity. One could argue that it might enhance it. Itallows people to constantly do better, to not fall intostagnation, to have more chance to flower. But, obviously,individual stories differ and the question is a valid one.

 

Two Omani participants in the U.S. Business Internship Program at Duke University speak with Sally Morton(back to camera), international vice president of statistics and epidemiology at the Research Triangle Institute inDurham, North Carolina, in December 2005.
 

Q: In A Whole New Mind, you tend to refer to peopleas “she.” Do you feel that globalization highlights therole of women? Do you also mean to imply that theandrogynous side of the human spirit has some sort ofadvantage in the new economy?

 

Pink: There is lots of evidence that people with moreandrogynous minds that can reason both in a typically“left-brain,” masculine way and a typically “right-brain,”feminine way have a comparative advantage in themodern economy. I think that a lot of the abilities thatare often dismissed as “feminine” or “soft”—things likeempathy, to some extenteven creativity itself—aremore valuable nowadays,and that might confer aslight advantage on women.But I think that the futuredoes belong to people withandrogynous minds, peoplewho have that analyticalcapability but people who alsohave that artistic, empathicability.

 

Q: Is that really true? Aren’tmost people comfortable withtraditional gender attitudes?

 

Pink: Well, look at the U.S.military, in many ways amacho profession. You havea lot of women serving in themilitary, and the tasks thattoday’s soldiers are called on to perform sometimes involvea more sophisticated set of skills. They have to understandlocal culture; there are peacekeeping missions—keepingthe peace is quite different from going directly intocombat. In my view, all men have some capability tothink androgynously, and those who aren’t willing todevelop it might be in trouble.

 

Q: One of the changes somehow linked to globalizationis the widespread use of cell phones, the Internet, evencomputer games. Are these phenomena, in their playfulform, really linked to a globalized economy? 

 

Pink: It’s hard to say. But even videogames, like any entertainment form, canbecome a lingua franca that can crosscultures. Even the constant connectednessof cell phones may be related toglobalization, though as a somewhatdistant cousin.

 

Q: In your book, you say that globalizationseems to have led to an increased searchfor spirituality in the United States. Whyis this?

 

Pink: There’s a huge amount of evidencethat above a certain relatively modest level, moremoney doesn’t create all that much more satisfactionand happiness in one’s life, and that what ultimatelyconfers satisfaction and happiness are nonmonetarythings: satisfying work, close relationships, living a life ofmeaning. I think that as more people are liberated fromthe struggle for survival, you’re going to have more peoplewho have the luxury of seeking meaning, seeking a senseof purpose, a sense of transcendence.Look at the work of the Nobel-prize economistRobert William Fogel, talking about “the fourth greatawakening.” He talks about how the quest for selfrealizationhas expanded from a tight fraction of theplanet to much more of it, especially in the developedworld. Others call it “meaning-want”—parts of the planethave gone from “material-want” to “meaning-want.”Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan calls it amove from materialist values to post-materialist values.I think there’s a certain luxury that comes from beingmaterially well off that liberates people to seek somethingmore.

 

Q: In your earlier book, Free AgentNation, you said that a globalizedworkforce will consist more and more ofpeople in business for themselves. Whatdid you mean by that?

 

Pink: I define a free agent as someonewho works untethered from a largeorganization—a free-lancer, a soleproprietor, the operator of a very smallbusiness. That form of working isbecoming more common because oftechnology, because of the radicallychanged social contract betweenindividuals and organizations, because of structuralchange within organizations themselves, in part because ofthe search for meaning we were talking about.Those are the forces that are causing a lot of peopleto jump the corporate ship and go out on their own, andother people to be pushed. As for the connection of allthis to globalization, it’s connected to the extent that itgives people more mobility. There are people who do workfor North American companies who might live in Europeor in other places overseas. 

 

The buyers of talent nowhave access to a labor market that isn’t just local, that ispotentially worldwide, even though this is just beginningto develop. As economies evolve, I think you are goingto see more and more people around the world seekingto invent their own ways of working rather than latchthemselves permanently on to one organization. «±