Malcolm Gladwell talks about our working future

Rebecca Dube:

If you feel like work is getting harder, it's not just your imagination, says Malcolm Gladwell.

The bestselling author of Blink and The Tipping Point says the mental demands of the workplace are steadily growing — and we're all going to have to smarten up if we want to succeed.

"I'm quite prepared for the possibility that the next revolution is not going to come from a machine," says Mr. Gladwell, 44, a staff writer for New Yorker magazine, who has carved out his own niche as a business guru. "It's going to come from creating a more thoughtful work force and giving people the opportunity to be thoughtful."

Among his recommendations: Business leaders should get more involved in education policy debates, Canada should consider other countries' models for teaching advanced mathematics, and hiring managers should stop looking for a perfect fit when scouting for employees.

When you say that the cognitive demands of the workplace will be growing, what do you mean?

We will require, from a larger and larger percentage of our work force, the ability to engage in relatively complicated analytical and cognitive tasks. So it's not that we're going to need more geniuses, but the 50th percentile is going to have to be better educated than they are now. We're going to have to graduate more people from high school who've done advanced math, is a very simple way of putting it.

Math Forum Audio / Video.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at November 9, 2007 12:10 AM
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