ESSAY JANET RAE-DUPREE

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. - Albert Einstein
When General Motors hired Robert A. Lutz in 2001 to improve its product development, he told The New York Times about his new approach. “It’s more right brain. It’s more creative, he said.
“I see us as being in the art business, he said, “art, entertainment and mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also
happens to provide transportation.
When a car company like G.M. is in the art business, every company in any other industry is, too.
So it makes sense that business executives are seeking guidance from the original pop culture icon of rightbrain thinking, “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards . In the 1980’s that book popularized the concept, and though Ms. Edwards retired in 1998, her son, Brian Bomeisler, teaches corporate and public workshops .
The list of companies Mr. Bomeisler has worked with is a Who’s Who of the Fortune 500. “That corny phrase ‘thinking outside the box,’ that’s what I do for corporations, he says. “In teaching them how to draw, I’m teaching them an entirely new way to see. They unbox their minds and absorb what’s really there, with all of the complexity and beauty. One of the common phrases that students use afterward is that the world appears to be so much richer.
During a workshop with Halliburton Energy Services, Mr. Bomeisler watched as a team’s drawings slowly revealed a solution to a longstanding problem. Team members realized from drawing that they had been enjoying their special status as a task force and had become so fascinated with the problem that they were in no hurry to solve it. This was resolved after management set a strict deadline and promised the group equally intriguing problems in the future.
The right-brain-left-brain dichotomy originated with the research of the American biologist Roger W. Sperry in the 1960s.
Through studying “split brain’’ animals and human patients, whose brain hemispheres had been disconnected (in humans, this was something else done to prevent severe epileptic seizures), he found that each side of the brain plays its own role in cognition. The left side, home of the human language center, is the outspoken logical, linear half of the equation. The right side, home to spatial perception and nonverbal concepts, is the nonlinear, high-concept source of the imagination and of pleasure.
The two function together, constantly sending signals back and forth through a bundle of 200 million to 300 million nerve fibers to help balance learning, analysis and communication throughout the brain.
But now that computers can emulate many of the sequential skills of the brain’s left hemisphere - the part that sees the individual trees in a forest - the author Daniel Pink argues that it’s time for our imaginative right brain, which sees the entire forest all at once, to take center stage.
“These abilities have always been part of what it means to be human, notes Mr. Pink, author of the 2005 book “A Whole New Mind.“It’s just that after a few generations in the Information Age, many of our high-concept, high-touch muscles have atrophied. The challenge is to work them back into shape.
Why bother- Because much of the leftbrain- centric work that Information Age workers once did - computer programming, financial accounting, routing calls - has already been outsourced to a place where it can be done more cheaply or is being done more efficiently by computers.
Now the master of fine arts, or M.F.A., Mr. Pink says, “is the new M.B.A. ‘
This alternate way of thinking has traditionally been marginalized in the corporate world . Dr. Sperry, who had a doctorate in zoology, noted the prejudice in 1973 when he remarked: “Our educational system, as well as science in general, tends to neglect the nonverbal form of intellect. What it comes down to is that modern society discriminates against the right hemisphere.
Mr. Pink hopes his latest book, “The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need, will help set things right.
Promoted as “the first business comic book, the paperback is drawn as if it were a Japanese manga novel. In the story, the office cubicle dweller Johnny Bunko is taught the true rules of the career game - including “There is no plan and “Make excellent mistakes{- by a superhero fairy godmother who appears when he breaks open a pair of chopsticks.
The primary moral to the story, Mr. Pink says, is this: There’s power in making career choices for fundamental reasons, such as doing something you love, instead of instrumental reasons, like hoping a job will be a steppingstone something else.