Five Minds for the Future |  | Author: Howard Gardner
Publisher: Harvard Business School Press
Category: Book
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Pages: 224
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Product Description
We live in a time of relentless change. The only thing that?s certain is that new challenges and opportunities will emerge that are virtually unimaginable today. How can we know which skills will be required to succeed?
In Five Minds for the Future, bestselling author Howard Gardner shows how we will each need to master "five minds" that the fast-paced future will demand:
-The disciplined mind, to learn at least one profession, as well as the major thinking (science, math, history, etc.) behind it
-The synthesizing mind, to organize the massive amounts of information and communicate effectively to others
-The creating mind, to revel in unasked questions - and uncover new phenomena and insightful apt answers
-The respectful mind, to appreciate the differences between human beings - and understand and work with all persons
-The ethical mind, to fulfill one's responsibilities as both a worker and a citizen
Without these "minds," we risk being overwhelmed by information, unable to succeed in the workplace, and incapable of the judgment needed to thrive both personally and professionally.
Complete with a substantial new introduction, Five Minds for the Future provides valuable tools for those looking ahead to the next generation of leaders - and for all of us striving to excel in a complex world.
Howard Gardner - cited by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the one hundred most influential public intellectuals in the world, and a MacArthur Fellowship recipient - is the Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 33
 On nurturing "potentials that are distinctly human" April 19, 2007
Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas)
155 out of 160 found this review helpful
I have read and reviewed all of Howard Gardner's previous books and consider this, his latest, to be the most valuable thus far. In it, he identifies and explains five separate but related combinations of cognitive abilities that are needed to "thrive in the world during eras to come...[cognitive abilities] which we should develop in the future." Gardner refers to them as "minds" but they are really mindsets. Mastery of each enables a person:
1. to know how to work steadily over time to improve skill and understanding;
2. to take information from disparate sources and make sense of it by understanding and evaluating that information objectively;
3. by building on discipline and synthesis, to break new ground;
4. by "recognizing that nowadays one can no longer remain within one's shell or one's home territory," to note and welcome differences between human individuals and between human groups so as to understand them and work effectively with them;
5. and finally, "proceeding on a level more abstract than the respectful mind," to reflect on the nature of one's work and the needs and desires of the society in which one lives.
Gardner notes that the five "minds" he examines in this book are different from the eight or nine human intelligences that he examines in his earlier works. "Rather than being distinct computational capabilities, they are better thought of as broad uses of the mind that we can cultivate at school, in professions, or at the workplace."
The "future" to which the title of this book refers is the future that awaits each of us. That is, Gardner is not a futurist in the sense that others such as Ossip K. Flechteim, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Dennis Gabor, Alvin Toffler, and Peter Schwartz are. If I understand Gardner's ultimate objective (and I may not), his hope is to help as many people as possible -- regardless of their age, gender, and circumstances -- to cultivate their minds by taking full advantage of any and every opportunity available to them; moreover, to do all they can to enrich and then sustain the same process of cultivation initiated by others.
He concludes his book as follows: "Perhaps members of the human species will not be prescient enough to survive, or perhaps it will take far more immediate threats to our survival before we can make common with our fellow human beings. In any event the survival and thriving of our species will depend on our nurturing of potentials that are distinctly human." Some may view these comments as being naïve but I do not. On the contrary, I view them as an eloquent assertion of what is imperative, yes, but also as a sincere affirmation of what is possible.
A Map for Educating the New Philosopher Kings July 17, 2007
Professor Donald Mitchell (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 96,000 Helpful Votes Globally)
17 out of 20 found this review helpful
The learned ancient Greeks were fascinated by what an ideal education would involve. Why? They hoped to apply that education to the kings of the era and to create a better society through the leadership of the kings. That ambition came closest to being fulfilled through Alexander the Great, who became a highly effective conqueror and spreader of Greek ideas and values.
Professor Gardner takes up this challenge once again in perceiving new challenges for modern people that will be more difficult to meet in the future. I suspect that his vision is, in part, aimed at the same goal as the ancient Greeks except as executed through the leaders and most prominent citizens of a republic employing democratic principles.
In a break from his prior focus on multiple intelligences, Five Minds for the Future emphasizes five methods of thinking that he hopes to see integrated into individuals. These methods of thinking are based on:
1. Mastering an important subject matter (such as history, math, or science) and staying up to date through application of the discipline's method of thinking. This is quite different from knowing the facts of the discipline.
2. Being able to integrate large quantities multidisciplinary facts and apply them into one's work.
3. Posing new questions, developing new solutions to existing questions, stretching disciplines and genres in new directions, or building new disciplines.
4. Being open to understanding and appreciating the perspectives and experiences of those who are different from the individual.
5. Doing one's work in an ethical way that reflects responsibilities to others and society.
What does this boil down to as a problem? Basically, most people never get as far as mastering one important discipline. They just memorize whatever is needed to pass tests. Professor Gardner's own work documents this problem. As a result, we face a hollowing out of our civilization as most people lack the ability, education, or interest to do more than function in an everyday living fashion. Beyond that, some of those who can perform a discipline are tempted by treasure or fame to stretch the rules and not honestly perform.
If we step back another few feet, there's an implicit vision of a future that's led by a smaller and smaller number of people as a percentage of the world's population. It will be easier for rot to set in at the top. In addition, the rewards for those people will grow exponentially . . . tempting those of limited ethics to falter.
I think the risk is a genuine one, and I applaud Professor Gardner for penning this book. I hope he will follow it with more books that spell out more about how to educate others and ourselves (after we leave school as students) so that these goals are achieved.
I have a few quibbles that I mention only in the spirit of sparking an awareness of what's needed. Peter Drucker taught me that the educated person should learn enough about a new subject each year to appreciate and be able the discipline involved. I found that suggestion missing from this book. Without that bridging method, I suspect we'll just end up compartmentalized from one another.
In addition, I think that some areas of public responsibility lend themselves to combined perspectives that encompass these minds more efficiently than by keeping them separate. For example, the advanced leader who is good at accomplishing continuing business model innovation will be able to cross these five boundaries and many others . . . simply by knowing one discipline. I suspect that other fields also lend themselves to such new integrating disciplines.
I also found that Professor Gardner mischaracterized the meanings of many of the business examples he cited. He does, however, do a fine job of summarizing what academics have written about business. I suggest that he have someone who is more familiar with business than he is help with checking such examples in future books. I realize that this book is published by Harvard Business School Press, but editors of books don't necessary have mastery of the facts within the subjects they edit.
Bravo, Professor Gardner!
VITAL. "Ref A" for the Future. A Nobel-Level Contribution November 24, 2007
Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States)
12 out of 14 found this review helpful
I am deeply impressed by this book, not least because it is presented in a very clean and easy to read and absorb form. My first note on this book says "Ref A: VITAL to the 'long war.' He NAILS it. THIS is the future if we can simply absorb his wisdom."
I especially appreciate the author's early emphasis on how this book, his work, is a "values enterprise." He pays dues regard to E. O. Wilson, whose book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge answered the question "why do the sciences need the humanities," and whose later work, The Future of Life helped me conceptualize the need for an Earth Intelligence Network, a non-profit that will create both the EarthGame (trademarked by Medard Gabel) and the World Brain online.
This book focuses on five different uses of the mind, not different minds. It is an interdisciplinary work, bridging across the sciences and the humanities--indeed, multidisciplinary might be a better term
The five minds, with a few notes (there is NO substitute for reading the book in full) are:
1. Disciplined Mind. Incremental mastery over time, at least ten years, of a proven process for discovery and analysis.
2. Synethsizing Mind. Handles information overload. No standards yet, a DNA spiral of multi-disciplinary perspectives whose diversity is accepted and then integrated. Includes narratives, taxonomies, complex concepts, rules & aphorisms (I had to look the later up: distinctions concisely stated), metaphores, images, and themes, as well as embodiment without words, theories, and metatheories.
3. Creating Mind. Breaks new ground ahead of the artificial intelligence of automation. Influences both individuals and groups, stems from both individuals and groups.
4. Respectful Mind. Brokers differences, applies primarily to the arts and group interaction. This is best manifest in the Native American tradition of passing the talking stick and not ending a dialogue until *everyone* agreed with the outcome.
5. Ethical Mind. Beyond the self, understands the value to the group of ethical behavior (a Nobel Prize was awarded in the 1990's for a person who demonstrated that trust lowers the cost of doing business; now we are finding that ethical revelation of the "true cost" of goods and services against the Earth will allow us to create infinite wealth and sustainable peace by eliminating the fraud, waste, and abuse characteristic of many governments and corporations.
The author offers across the book a clear link between these five uses of the mind, and the need to revisit education in the large (see also online, Derek Bok on "Reinventing Education" and Robert Steele on "Reinventing Intelligence," in Forbes ASAP. He states that we MUST revitalize education because:
01 What we are doing now is not working.
02 World conditions are changing fast (I forget which book, but was most impressed to learn that changes to the Earth that uses to take ten thousand years now take three--we need real-time science IMMEDIATELY, because the UN now says we have only seven years in which to stop the growth of emissions).
03 Science converted into tecehnology without values is dangerous.
04 Desperate need for continuing education. I totally agree, and go further; we need to end competitive rote education, teach team learning, and test all professions at least every two years, with continuing education being mandatory.
The author, although he presented the five minds in a different order, concludes that they should be taught from infancy in this order:
01 Respectful Mind.
02 Disciplined Mind.
03 Synthesizing Mind.
04 Ethical Mind.
I am inclined to believe that Ethical Mind needs to be second. If people can see the value of team learning and the greater value of the commons when shared, then their displined mind will take a different path.
I like this book so much I am adding it to my CEO reading list (on Amazon, the list is called Collective and Commercial Intelligence).
None of us can read all books, but this is one book that I am also inclined to add to my "Top Ten Books of All Time." This book is the roadmap for saving the planet by recognizing, as Thomas Jefferson did, that "A Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry," and that in this day of extremism and fundamentalism, we have our work cut out for us. It will be easier if our next President has adopted this book as part of our roadmap back to civilization, morality, and sanity.
Some other books I noted in relation to this one:
Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
If you want your Child's Mind Left Behind do not read this. August 17, 2007
Marvin Bartel (Goshen College, IN USA)
11 out of 13 found this review helpful
The ideas in this book deserve the broadest possible scrutiny and review. As we now know, our brains are able to significantly change themselves depending on how they are used and not used.
Dictators, slave owners, and totalitarian regimes have always suspected this. They carefully restrict the arts and depend on rote drill in education. They require competency testing that penalizes teachers that teach good questioning methods and foster disciplined minds that can synthesize, create, and empathize.
Teachers in the USA today are increasingly being overwhelmed by the requirements to teach facts and specific skills. School facts are often dated, while updates are instantly available via an Internet search. Thinking abilities (other than rote memorization) are not being taught because our tests are not well designed to assess Gardner's categories. The ability to synthesize (transfer and apply what we know from an array of experiences and sources), create (the ability to think divergently and imaginatively to produce better scenarios), and/or empathically (Gardner's terms are `respectful' and `ethical') are not as simple to assess. Consequently, facts are taught without time to learn how to question the viability of what is learned.
Assessment tools could be vastly improved if we had the creativity and the will to see what Gardner tries to tell us. I believe that computer programs could be developed that would assess education for Gardner's mind categories rather than simply for the rote accumulation of information that is often unconnected to what we need in life.
Any parent who does not care if their child's mind is left behind should not read this book. I pity children in schools that are under pressure to focus on learning without thinking. They are being brain damaged. If we want to see more capable and caring people in the future, this book is a starting place. Any leader of company, political entity, or other organization should not read this book if they are content with staying behind and coming in last.
Five Minds for the Technology Professional April 22, 2008
Bruce Pharr (SF Bay Area, California USA)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is a psychologist and author known for his theory of multiple intelligences. Application of his theory, especially for education, has been controversial. But I think his latest book, Five Minds for the Future, is a must read for technology professionals.
His thesis is that, "...vast changes that include accelerating globalization, mounting quantities of information, the growing hegemony of science and technology, and the clash of civilizations," requires, "capabilities that, until now, have been mere options." He describes "Five Minds," or cognitive abilities that will command a premium in the years ahead:
1. The Disciplinary Mind -- the mastery of major schools of thought (including science, mathematics, and history) and of at least one professional craft.
2. The Synthesizing Mind -- the ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines or spheres into a coherent whole and to communicate that integration to others.
3. The Creating Mind -- the capacity to uncover and clarify new problems, questions and phenomena.
4. The Respectful Mind -- awareness of and appreciation for differences among human beings and human groups.
5. The Ethical Mind -- fulfillment of one's responsibilities as a worker and as a citizen.
While the book is not directed specifically at technology professionals, I found much of what he said echoed characteristics of the most effective people I know: deep domain expertise, intellectual curiosity, creativity, global perspective, knowledge of and respect for diverse cultures, and teamwork. It is and will continue to be possible for anyone with a few of these characteristics to succeed in technology, but I believe those who excel and assume positions of leadership will exhibit all of these abilities.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 33
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