Anne Truitt Zelenka

A piece I wrote for GigaOM a while ago on the Connected Age was published this weekend, with a table taken straight out of my book manuscript for Connect!: Web Worker Daily’s Guide to a New Way of Working. I do mean straight out — as Judi pointed out to me, there’s even a red squiggly “what the hell is this” line under “burstiness” from MS Word.

It’s serendipitous that just Friday, a few people got early copies of my book manuscript to read. So this weekend is feeling like a coming-out party for the book. I feel a mix of worry and excitement. It’s hard to know how it might be received. I hope it’s a good way to give these ideas wider play and keep talking about how the web really does change work.

When I was in the earliest stages of writing the book, I was moaning to Ryan about how my hippie-creative right-brained personality seemed to clash regularly with the overarching ethos of the tech and productivity blogosphere. He suggested I read Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future — and that gave me the energy and inspiration to go on.

Pink suggests that three factors — Asia, abundance, and automation — are bringing a new age into being, an age he calls the Conceptual Age:

We’ve moved from an economy built on people’s backs to an economy built on people’s left brains to what is emerging today: an economy and society built more and more on people’s right brains.

As Tim Peter points out in his review of A Whole New Mind, Pink doesn’t want to eliminate the left brain, but seeks to make our thinking whole, by incorporating right brained approaches with the left-brained ones that have been so lately and greatly praised. Business Week’s Special Report this week on design in business which profiles a designer/engineer recognizes the same need for a whole mind.

I like to think that the book I’ve written with Judi’s help represents something of a whole-brained approach. I provided much of the right-brained thinking while Judi offered left-brained balance with her editorial review. We both can do the whole-brained thing, I think, but it was good to have the dialectic of castles in the sky (Anne) with foundations in the ground (Judi).

The book is available for pre-order on Amazon now. You can see above we’ve changed the color and made the figures on the cover more hippie-creative.