The Outsourced Brain
By DAVID BROOKS

The gurus seek bliss amidst mountaintop solitude and serenity in the meditative trance, but I, grasshopper, have achieved the oneness with the universe that is known as pure externalization.
I have melded my mind with the heavens, communed with the universal consciousness, and experienced the inner calm that externalization brings, and it all started because I bought a car with a G.P.S.
Like many men, I quickly established a romantic attachment to my G.P.S. I found comfort in her tranquil and slightly Anglophilic voice. I felt warm and safe following her thin blue line. More than once I experienced her mercy, for each of my transgressions would be greeted by nothing worse than a gentle, “Make a U-turn if possible.”
After a few weeks, it occurred to me that I could no longer get anywhere without her. Any trip slightly out of the ordinary had me typing the address into her system and then blissfully following her satellite-fed commands. I found that I was quickly shedding all vestiges of geographic knowledge.
It was unnerving at first, but then a relief. Since the dawn of humanity, people have had to worry about how to get from here to there. Precious brainpower has been used storing directions, and memorizing turns. I myself have been trapped at dinner parties at which conversation was devoted exclusively to the topic of commuter routes.
My G.P.S. goddess liberated me from this drudgery. She enabled me to externalize geographic information from my own brain to a satellite brain, and you know how it felt? It felt like nirvana.
Through that experience I discovered the Sacred Order of the External Mind. I realized I could outsource those mental tasks I didn’t want to perform. Life is a math problem, and I had a calculator.
Until that moment, I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.
Musical taste? I have externalized it. Now I just log on to iTunes and it tells me what I like.
I click on its recommendations, sample 30 seconds of each song, and download the ones that appeal. I look on my iPod playlist and realize I’ve never heard of most of the artists I listen to. I was once one of those people with developed opinions about the Ramones, but now I’ve shed all that knowledge and blindly submit to a mishmash of anonymous groups like the Reindeer Section — a disturbing number of which seem to have had their music featured on the soundtrack of “The O.C.”
Memory? I’ve externalized it. I am one of those baby boomers who are making this the “It’s on the Tip of My Tongue Decade.” But now I no longer need to have a memory, for I have Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia. Now if I need to know some fact about the world, I tap a few keys and reap the blessings of the external mind.
Personal information? I’ve externalized it. I’m no longer clear on where I end and my BlackBerry begins. When I want to look up my passwords or contact my friends I just hit a name on my directory. I read in a piece by Clive Thompson in Wired that a third of the people under 30 can’t remember their own phone number. Their smartphones are smart, so they don’t need to be. Today’s young people are forgoing memory before they even have a chance to lose it.
Now, you may wonder if in the process of outsourcing my thinking I am losing my individuality. Not so. My preferences are more narrow and individualistic than ever. It’s merely my autonomy that I’m losing.
I have relinquished control over my decisions to the universal mind. I have fused with the knowledge of the cybersphere, and entered the bliss of a higher metaphysic. As John Steinbeck nearly wrote, a fella ain’t got a mind of his own, just a little piece of the big mind — one mind that belongs to everybody. Then it don’t matter, Ma. I’ll be everywhere, around in the dark. Wherever there is a network, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a TiVo machine making a sitcom recommendation based on past preferences, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a Times reader selecting articles based on the most e-mailed list, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way Amazon links purchasing Dostoyevsky to purchasing garden furniture. And when memes are spreading, and humiliation videos are shared on Facebook — I’ll be there, too.
I am one with the external mind. Om.

Redefining the MBA
Facing criticism, business schools bring in new leaders to review mission, find relevance

By Robert Weisman October 14, 2007

Autumn in the Boston area means leaves turning, students returning and, this year, the leaders at business schools churning.

A new crop of educators, including a high-profile power broker and pair of Bay State natives coming home from Philadelphia and Silicon Valley, are working to re-brand their schools and reshape business education in an increasingly competitive market.

While demand for master's degrees in business administration has picked up among corporate recruiters after a lull following the Internet boom, business schools have been scrambling to rethink their missions and recast their images in response to critics questioning their ivory-tower aloofness and single-minded focus on maximizing shareholder value.

Their approaches vary, from bringing students into the workplace to customizing MBA programs to training global teams in corporate responsibility, but all struggle to remain relevant at a time of rapid economic change. "Schools are trying to redefine what business leaders need to know," said Rakesh Khurana, associate professor in organizational behavior at Harvard Business School.

Gloria C. Larson, who held top administrative jobs in the state and federal governments, has sounded at times like a candidate wooing voters with pledges of a "real world partnership" in her first weeks as president of Bentley College, a one-time accounting school that now boasts MBA and PhD degrees in its business portfolio.

"Bentley's six high-tech learning labs let you 'test drive' the concepts you learn in your classroom," Larson told 1,000 visiting high school seniors at the school's Waltham campus last month.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, David C. Schmittlein officially moves into the dean's office at the Sloan School of Management tomorrow. But in meetings with students, faculty, administrators, and alumni, Schmittlein, a Northampton native who was deputy dean at the elite Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has been stressing the need to boost "experiential learning" with businesses. "Sloan is going to be at the leading edge of a more honest approach to management education," he promised.

And newly installed dean Bruce R. Magid at Brandeis University's International Business School is championing "cross-cultural fluency" as his goal at the Waltham school, where two thirds of students come from abroad. Magid, raised in Sharon, is a former overseas Bank of America executive who founded the graduate business school at San Jose State University. He insisted he's not fazed by taking his place alongside heavyweights like Sloan and Harvard Business School in one of the nation's most crowded markets for management education.

"Having worked in global financial services, I'm used to competition," he said. "We're fortunate to be in the Boston area, but we want to be one of the world's top global-focused business schools."

Ethics also figures prominently in the plans, and the talking points, of the three business educators. Noting that its Center for Business Ethics marked its 30th anniversary this year, Larson said Bentley is moving toward a "holistic" approach to preparing its students for the business world. "You have to be thinking smarter, moving faster, and also being the best global citizen you can be," she said.

The arrival of Larson, Schmittlein, and Magid hastens a leadership turnover at Greater Boston business schools after a long period of stability. Jay O. Light took the reins at Harvard Business School last year. Andrew Boynton became dean of Boston College's Carroll School of Management in 2005, and Thomas Moore dean of Northeastern University's College of Business Administration in 2004.

Business-oriented Babson College in Wellesley, which emphasizes entrepreneurship, is expected to name a new president some time next year. Bentley, meanwhile, is interviewing candidates to be the new dean of business under Larson.

The changes at the top have been accompanied by a reassessment and, in some cases, a tweaking of what marketers call the business schools' "brands" at a time when all are vying for students, faculty members, recruiters, and relevancy. Northeastern, for example, has sought to differentiate itself with an emphasis on practical studies like supply chain management. BC has been building its business program around ethical values, while Harvard has been pushing to extend its leadership brand into emerging fields like healthcare.

But business schools are under scrutiny as never before, and some of their toughest critiques are coming from within. In a new book, "From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Education," Harvard's Khurana argues the schools have failed to define leadership in the context of the public good and enshrined maximizing shareholder value as their highest ideal.

Other critics, like Warren Bennis and James O'Toole at the University of Southern California, have warned that business schools have grown overly academic and theoretical, far removed from the actual day-to-day operations of business and management.

Such critiques have clearly struck a chord. Schmittlein, who has been involved in the debate over the mission of business schools for nearly three decades, believes schools should move away from a cookie-cutter approach. He envisions Sloan developing a broader portfolio of programs tailored toward students on different paths, from going into investment management to joining family businesses.

"Why haven't MBA programs been more honest about where students are and where they want to go?" Schmittlein asked rhetorically. "What would be really radical would be organizing MBA programs around activities that students want to pursue."

Larson, who had extensive dealings with movers and shakers in her most recent job at the Boston law firm Foley Hoag, plans to form a "kitchen cabinet" of business leaders to advise her on Bentley's curricula. "It's a crowded marketplace," she said. "There's a spotlight on this next generation. The marketplace is demanding a very different skill set than it needed even 10 years ago. They're demanding high levels of foreign language literacy, cultural literacy, and economic literacy."

And at Brandeis, educators will be focusing on a new "seamless bottom line," in Magid's words. "You want people to come out of here who are excellent managers, are engaged in their communities, and are taking a long-term perspective about our planet," he said.

Average earnings worldwide
October 7, 2007

There are 6.7 billion people on earth, and the global economy is now measured in the tens of trillions of dollars each year. Worldwide, what is the average income per person?
A. $1,700 B. $7,000 C. $18,500 D. $35,000

B. $7,000 is correct. The world's average income - total world income divided by total number of people - is about $7,000. Still, only about 19 percent of the world's population lives in countries with per capita incomes at least this high.

Countries with an average income near $7,000 include Mexico, Chile, and Latvia. They rank about 40th in the global income table.

As of 2005, people living in rich countries had an average income of about $35,000. The high incomes in these countries make the world average income four times larger than the world median income, which was $1,700 that year.

The Globalist Quiz is produced by The Globalist, a Washington- based research organization that promotes awareness of world affairs. © 2007 The Globalist, theglobalist.com.

Sal Paradise at 50
By DAVID BROOKS

A few decades ago, before TV commercials became obsessively concerned with prostate problems, Jack Kerouac wrote a book called “On the Road.” It was greeted rapturously by many as a burst of rollicking, joyous American energy. People quoted the famous lines: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn.”
In the Times review that launched the book, Gilbert Millstein raved that “On the Road” was a frenzied search for affirmation, a book that rejected the ennui, pessimism and cynicism of the Lost Generation. The heroes of the book savored everything, enjoyed everything, took pleasure in everything.
But, of course, all this was before the great geriatric pall settled over the world, before it became illegal to be cheerful.
“On the Road” turned 50 last month, and over the past few weeks a line of critics have taken another look at the book, and this time their descriptions of it, whether they like it or not, are very different.
“Above all else, the story is about loss,” George Mouratidis, one of the editors of a new edition, told The Age in Melbourne.
“It’s a book about death and the search for something meaningful to hold on to — the famous search for ‘IT,’ a truth larger than the self, which, of course, is never found,” wrote Meghan O’Rourke in Slate.
“Kerouac was this deep, lonely, melancholy man,” Hilary Holladay of the University of Massachusetts told The Philadelphia Inquirer. ”And if you read the book closely, you see that sense of loss and sorrow swelling on every page.”
“In truth, ‘On the Road’ is a book of broken dreams and failed plans,” wrote Ted Gioia in The Weekly Standard.
In Book Forum, David Ulin noted that “even the most frantic of Kerouac’s writings were really the sagas of a solitary seeker: poor, sad Jack, adrift in a world without mercy when he’d rather be ‘safe in Heaven dead.’ ”
According to these and other essays, “On the Road” is the book you want to read if you find Sylvia Plath too upbeat.
And of course they’re not wrong. There was a traditionalist, darker side to Kerouac, as John Leland emphasizes in his book “Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They’re Not What You Think).”
But reading through the anniversary commemorations, you feel the gravitational pull of the great Boomer Narcissus. All cultural artifacts have to be interpreted through whatever experiences the Baby Boomer generation is going through at that moment.
So a book formerly known for its youthful exuberance now becomes a book of gloomy middle-aged disillusion. (In 20 years, “The Cat in the Hat” will be read as a commentary on unreliable home health care workers.)
And there’s something else going on, something to do with the great taming professionalism of American culture. “On the Road” has been semi-incorporated into modern culture, but only parts have survived.
Students are taught “On the Road” in class, then must write tightly organized, double-spaced term papers on it, and if they don’t get an A, it hurts their admissions prospects. The book is still talked about, but often by professional intellectuals in panel discussions and career-building journal articles.
The effect is that some of the book comes through fine — the longing, the nostalgia for home, the darker pessimism.
But the real secret of the book was its discharge of youthful energy, the stupid, reckless energy that saves “On the Road” from being a dreadful novel. The delightful, moronic, unreflective fizz appears whenever the characters are happiest, when they are chasing girls or urinating from a swerving flatbed truck while going 70 miles an hour.
Those parts haven’t survived. They run afoul of the new gentility, the rules laid down by the health experts, childcare experts, guidance counselors, safety advisers, admissions officers, virtuecrats and employers to regulate the lives of the young. They seem dangerous, childish and embarrassing in the world of professionalized adolescence and professionalized intellect.
If Sal Paradise were alive today, he’d be a product of the new rules. He’d be a grad student with an interest in power yoga, on the road to the M.L.A. convention with a documentary about a politically engaged Manitoban dance troop that he hopes will win a MacArthur grant. He’d be driving a Prius, going a conscientious 55, wearing a seat belt and calling Mom from the Comfort Inns.
The only thing we know for sure is that this ethos won’t last. Someday some hypermanic kid will produce a moronically maxed-out adventure odyssey that will spark the overdue rebellion among all the over-pressured SAT grinds, and us grumpy midlife critics will get to witness a new Kerouac, and the greatest pent-up young-life crisis in the history of the world.