A little while ago we spoke to Dan Pink, contributing editor of Wired magazine and author of A Whole New Mind about his latest project; The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need.

What made you want to write the story of Johnny Bunko?

One of the main things was that if you think about career information today, a lot of it is what you might categorize as tactical career information—keywords to put in a resume, questions to anticipate on the interview, company information and so on. People in the Net Generation who want that information today, they get it online. They simply don’t get it from books. And yet, there are still books purveying that kind of information; it’s absolutely insane.

So, as a writer trying to make a living, at least for now writing books, you look at that and say, “Okay, books shouldn’t provide tactical career information.” I mean if you think about it, it makes no sense, the information starts to go stale as soon as it’s memorialized on the page, then as it makes its way to the bookstore, it grows ever more stale and costly and so that got me thinking “Okay, so if you want to give people advice and guidance in their careers, what can a book do that these free online services cannot?” I think that actually what a book can do really nicely is provide strategic information, big picture information.

Let’s say you hate your job, you can’t Google “why do I hate my job,” or “how can I find a job that doesn’t stink?”… well, I guess you could, I wonder what would come up? Generally, that kind of stuff defies Googling, so I think that’s where books can provide value in a more elegant way than a lot of the online things. That’s why I center the book on these six-key strategic lessons about satisfying productive careers. The sorts of things that I wish I had known 25 years ago, when I was just starting out.

Why Manga?

I chose to do it in manga, because probably because my experience in Japan showed me that here in North America we have a very constipated view of what comics can do. In Japan, there are comics for everything, whether fiction, non-fiction, cooking, romance, sex, business, history. I mean, it’s just another medium in the way the television is a medium in North America.

I noticed comics becoming popular here and yet they’re still very limited in what kind of genres they covered. So I said, “Given that there’s all the tactical information is available for free online, why not do strategic information in a book and why not do it in this form that is proven around the world to be a powerful way to convey ideas and stories, and do it in a genre where it hasn’t been done before?”

The other thing—again going back to the Net Generation—is a discovery I made studying manga in Japan, which is that the essence of manga is that it is fast. It is meant to be read quickly and so my collaborator Rob Ten Pas, the illustrator and I, we architected this book in a way that one can read this book in less than an hour. If this book takes longer than an hour for somebody to read, I feel like I failed. This Net Generation doesn’t have a lot of time; they want stuff quickly; they want stuff with some amount of velocity and propulsion and I think manga is really an ideal form for that.

If you look at the book itself, we’ve incorporated some design elements to make sure it moves quickly. For instance, the book just starts; there isn’t any, what publishers call “front matter,” you know, orientation or whatever. You open up the cover, and there it is. And again, that’s because we don’t want to slow it down. You also noticed that there is no page numbers in the book because it’s meant to be read in one sitting. It would break my heart if someone put like a bookmark in the book and put it down. You know, it’s just not meant to be read that way. Even the physicality of it, the size and the weight and everything, it’s meant to also be physically passed around. There’s something about being forwarded in an email; there’s something else entirely about someone physically handing you something and saying, “Hey you got to take a look at this.”

There are some elements of how people convey and consume information that are changing, that really affect how I decided to do this book. So, it’s short, it’s fun, it’s fast, it’s a narrative, it’s strategic information, and it’s meant to be passed around.

Of course, if John buys the book and passes it to Mary, and Mary passes it to Fred, there’s three people reading the book, but I only get one royalty. That’s life. And then if Fred resells it on eBay, I don’t get any of that. But I just think that ultimately it works to my benefit because people start talking about it, it generates buzz, et cetera, et cetera.

I heard the university of Toronto was doing some special promotion with the book. Tell me about that.

The University of Toronto is doing something very cool with this. They have gotten a few hundred copies and they’re having this pass around thing at the school where the career officer is giving out a few hundred copies of the book with the instructions “Read it and pass it on.” I love the idea of people passing it around. If I can get several thousand people at the University of Toronto to read a book even if it result in sales of 200 books because they’re all sharing and passing it around; I just can’t see how that’s bad.

If you think about it, I could have said, “No way. I don’t want you passing it around. I don’t want you sharing this thing. I lose sales each time you pass it around.” I mean, that would be idiotic. That’s how many lawyers and record company executives would treat digital media; I mean, that’s basically what DRM is. DRM is saying, “Nope, you’re not allowed to pass it on.” Like if you hand it from one person to another, it physically self-destructs. I mean, how stupid would that be, if I wanted to get my idea out there and also, ultimately, hope to profit from it.

So the next step to that would have been to put a little GPS chip and map the social networks and relationships related to how the book circulates.

Yeah, that would be very interesting to see. That actually would be a pretty good social science experiment, seriously. Because it would reveal people’s social graphs and it would reveal their connections. That’s a great idea; too late but great idea.

You studied law but now you’re a writer; were you Johnny Bunko?

No, I’m not Johnny Bunko. Although in some ways, the book is a little bit of a letter to my younger self. It really is built around these things that I learned overtime that I wish I had known when I was 18. The genesis of it was when we were going to colleges mostly in the U.S., and a couple in Canada, where young people would ask me career questions and I realized that they were operating under the same false premises that I was operating under long ago. So everybody had this carefully considered rigid plan because that’s the way you’re supposed to do it, but it never works that way; or people overstated the importance of talent and understated the importance of persistence.

We’ve known for a long time that cubicle environments have problems. I mean, it’s been 10 years since the movie Office Space came out and probably almost as long since the show The Office first aired. Why do people still work in cubicles and why does it still suck to work in cubicles?

That’s a great question, I don’t know… I think that many people themselves are asking that question “why am I still working in a cubicle?” Although, I do think that the Net Generation; they’re less likely to be working for large organizations. More likely, I think they’re going to be working for smaller organizations or trying to go out on their own. Part of it is to find their own way and some of it has to do with security too. I mean, it used to be if you tie your fortune to a large organization, you’re going to be secure, but that’s not true anymore. So why put up with the nonsense if you’re not even going to get job security in return.

You mentioned the benefits of the manga format; any more manga iterations in the works?

Let’s see. I want to get this out in the bloodstream a little bit more to see whether my analysis in the market is right. We’ve done reasonably well so far, a couple of months on but I think it’s going to take time. It’s a viral kind of book, so I want to make sure that it’s a big hit before I cast my lot with being a full-fledged manga guy. I really did it as an experiment; I think it’s a good experiment, and so far it’s working pretty well. I think that you’re going to see the format used more widely, for example like what Google is doing. When Google announced its new Chrome browser, it did with a comic.

Right, and I noticed even on Amazon, the promo of your comic is a video.

Right, we’ve got a really cool video, and actually we’re launching another one in the next couple of days. This is very germane to what you’re doing—we’re doing a contest. The book has six lessons for satisfying productive careers and we’re asking readers to submit a seventh lesson, and we’ll take the best three, and then let the readers vote on the best one. The person who wins gets a fabulous prize. A really cool prize; which you’ll find about when you see the next video. I’m not saying what it is, but it’s really cool.