Left/right hemisperes of the brain

I've been traveling fairly frequently in the past few weeks, and my companion in these trips has been the book "A whole new mind" by Daniel Pink. After explaining what the left and right hemispheres of the brain "do", the book argues that most people can "do" left directed activities, and that in order to get ahead and be employable in this day and age, people must now embrace the functions that the right hemisphere runs. According to Pink, we are no longer in the Age of Information, but rather the Age of Conception.

I am a typical left-directed person, and in the past few weeks I have been required more and more to exercise those left directed characteristics which make me very important to my company. Even though there is an economic squeeze and people are being made redundant all across the board, I can't see my position being outsourced, neither to someone in Israel and certainly not to someone in the Far East, with whom contact is electronic. My industry is still based firmly in the mid-20th century, where a knowledge worker such as myself needs to interact face to face with people (especially managers).

I try to work on right-directed functions in my non-work time; music and literature are good examples of this, but I notice that when I create music, I tend to do it in a left-directed manner (stylised, computerised, very structured) and not in a right-directed manner (free flowing, live playing, improvisation). I have never been comfortable playing over one never-ending chord and much prefer an interesting chord sequence to stimulate my brain. There is much connection between mathematics and music, and the structured type of music which I play is much more 'mathematical' than free jazz, for example.

Most of the non-fiction books which I have been reading in the past six months are connected with the brain, in some way or another. Examples include Martin Seligman's "Learned Optimism", Daniel Goleman's "Social Intelligence" and John Medina's "Brain Rules". Am I becoming a better human being after reading these? Unfortunately, the answer is no. I am too entrenched in my ways, and the needs placed upon me (at work) don't allow (or require) me to change. Couching my response in Darwinistic terms, there's no need for me to develop extra capabilities because I don't need them in order to survive.

I believe that the current economic crisis is going to reverse several of the advanced trends which have been occurring in the past few years (not so much so in Israel), and that workplaces are going to revert to more traditional forms. Social intelligence is always required, but I don't need it that much (although I would like to have it!), as I don't manage people and generally work alone. I would like to be more optimistic, but Seligman contends that workers in the financial and computing areas have to be more pessimistic than salespeople (who are the biggest optimists). Pessimists see things more clearly, and my job demands that I see things as clearly as possible.