Dan Erwin responded to my last post on the new reality of Automated and Outsourced work. Dan wrote: “There’s a thorough and masterful report that supports all your conclusions. It’s the result of a study by the research group at the Dallas Fed in 2003, entitled, The Evolution of Work.”
The table in the report clearly shows how we are moving to an economy that values emotional intelligence, imagination and creativity. These data are almost a decade old, so just imagine how much further we are into the new economy.
This should have been a wake-up call to our training and education institutions in 2003. Notice that even the requirement for analytic reasoning is declining in the workplace. As the authors note:
In today’s world, companies and workers face the challenge of ascending the hierarchy of human talents. Workers are increasingly using those traits that make us truly human. Some jobs require imagination and creativity, including the ability to design, innovate and entertain. Other jobs rely on such social skills as conflict resolution, cooperation and even humor. Work is more likely to put a premium on the ability to inspire and motivate, a capacity social scientists call emotional intelligence.
Update: via the Creative Class Blog: Creativity ranks as the number one most important leadership quality for business success, according to a new study by IBM.
The interesting and unexpected thing here is the importance of emotional intelligence and people skills.
Reading Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind – http://www.danpink.com/whole-new-mind he suggests the same shift. Daniel Goleman (he of the Emotional Intelligence fame) is cited frequently in Pink’s book. Hm, maybe a conspiracy or take-over attempt by Cerebral Daniels?
Not completely unexpected .. the rise in importance of emotional and social intelligence and creative capabilities has been under growing discussion for at least the last decade.
Update: via the Creative Class Blog: Creativity ranks as the number one most important leadership quality for business success, according to a new study by IBM.
I’m a little dubious, for all of the reasons most of your readers would know.
My guess is that the first reaction to a bit of creativity in many workplaces is still “aren’t you the strange one?” or “Do you not understand the objective(s) and project?”. Or the many variations thereof …
I think it ranks high in people’s minds, but not in many organizational decisions, Jon. Change is slow.