I hope this is OK to share here; Dan Pink didn’t say it wasn’t.  Pink, certainly a prominent figure in my pantheon of influential thinkers, offered this morning a New Year “teleseminar” with his 2010 recommended reading, trend predictions, and personal actions; this was provided for a lucky 500 who sent in a receipt for his new book, Drive.   To quote him, “This is stuff I haven’t talked about, and for the most part, will not be talking about again.”

  • 10 publications I will be reading.
  • 5 Trends I will be watching.

The below is just sharing directly what I heard from Pink, but before I do, some quick comments.  I appreciate his enthusiam for the intersection of art and science, and the ways in which they reinforce each other.  His endorsement of Artsjournal is partly on the basis of how well that publication relates art and science, making the bridge and seeing the interconnections, and it is no coincidence that Artsjournal is on his list immediately adjacent to the New Scientist.  As we all work so vigorously to educate students to become creative scientists and deeply knowledgeable artists, the thinkers who will best flourish in the new era, we need to follow Pink’s lead and look for these intersections.

A second quick comment: Pink recommended with many of these sites that we subscribe to the e-newsletters, and I did, but I also chose to follow them on Twitter, and I think that will be more effective for me.  I haven’t written much about this topic here on the blog, but Twitter is fast becoming, hugely, my best tool for staying informed and aware of what is being discussed and written about on the topic that interest me.

Again, everything below is in Dan Pink’s own words… his teleseminar for 2010.

10 publications:

  1. Springwise.com.  A website and fabulous electronic newsletter. Thousands of people out there, looking for new business ideas, from all over the world.  Every time the weekly email newsletter comes, it is full of great stuff.
  2. The Week: A collection of digest and articles/columns from all over North America, and is unbelievably useful.
  3. The National Bureau of Economic Research Digest. Email newsletter. Economists submit working papers, short, shorter than journal articles, and this offers great summaries.
  4. Arts Journal. Outstanding email newsletter; daily and weekly.  Summarizes a whole array of information in the arts, and the broader world of ideas and the intersection of arts and sciences.   The intersection of arts and sciences is among the most interesting thing happening in the world today.
  5. The New Scientist. Fabulous—stuff on the website is excellent, user friendly, making science understandable and relevant.
  6. Popurl. A massive agglomeration of what is happening on the web right now, an MRI of the global web brain.
  7. Seth Godin’s Blog. Outstanding.  He really irritates me—8 times out of 9 it is really interesting, really insightful, really useful.  His ability to crank out something every single day is really amazing.
  8. Employee First, Customer Second. A new business book coming out next summer, with a crazy, radical, counterintuitive notion.   Coming from a CEO of an Indian technology company.  The result is that customers love us, because when employees are happy, customers happy.    Very interesting new management ideas coming out of India.
  9. Different: Escaping the Competitive Heard. Purple Cow meets Blue Ocean.  A book for people who don’t read business books. Very smart, very strategic book against conformity.
  10. The Thing.  I don’t even know how to describe the Thing—it is an object based quarterly magazine.  But instead of getting a magazine in your mailbox, you get a “thing.” A mix of art, a subscription, ideas.

Five Trends Watching this Year:

Category: Tech

Trend Number 1: Apps for Everyone!   It is astonishing how many apps come out every day, and I don’t see why we will not each have our own app.   Mobile Roadie has a very small elegant way to have people create their own app. This is really just a beginning; five years from now, most people will have their own app.

Category : Health

Trend Number 2.  Socrates Meets Statistics: Know thyself and track your personal, bodily data.     It is amazing the amount of data each body creates every day, and there are ways to capture that and track that.  Ten years from now we will be amazed that we didn’t use to track our every single step we take for our health.  Total Recall is a book that speaks to this really well.

Category: Culture

Trend number 3: This may not be the American or Chinese century, but the English century- the English language century.  We now have a worldwide first language.   There will be soon a “Starbucks” of English instruction, a branded shop to teach English all over the world.

Category: Arts Science

Trend number 4:  Dysfunction is High Function.   Quite a list of gamechanging dyslexics—it is really weird, but somehow very compelling.  “Orchid Children,” an Atlantic article that is really fascinating, speaks to this.   The Hypomanic edge is another book that speaks powerfully to this, that in the US we have genetically selected for hypomania and that has created our US global competitive advantage.

Category: Politics

Trend Number 5. Obama is Reagan.   Not politically, but the parallels are astonishing, in the way the President is an outsider, the economy is in terrible shape, the ideology is out of control, the FedReserve is significantly involved. Their approval rating curve is very, very similar.   I guarantee you: by 2012, it will be morning in America, and Obama’s reelection is certain.