Think!: Before It’s Too Late

One of the most perfect examples of lateral thinking, a phrase Edward de Bono first introduced to the world way back in 1967, is the common or garden variety joke: a stated premise turned on its head to comic effect by the punchline, e.g. ‘A man walked into a bar … Ouch, you think he would have ducked’. More often than we realise, we think the way we’ve been taught to think and so, in some ways, are fated to make the same mistakes over and over again. Punchlines of jokes catch us by surprise because we so easily fall into the trap of thinking conventionally. In “Think!”, Edward de Bono argues that the way our minds function is a bit like trying to drive a car using only one wheel. There’s nothing wrong with that one wheel – conventional thinking – but we could all get a lot further if we used all four … By examining why we think the way we do from an historical perspective (Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, plus the Church, have a lot to answer for), how we think and, most importantly, how we can think better, he offers us the possibility of a solution to problems as big as how to halt global warming and bring peace to the Middle East to how to chat up the opposite sex and get ahead at work. As books such as Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” and “The Tipping Point” and James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds” have shown, big ‘concept’ books have an ever increasing market and a new book by the person who essentially invented the genre is a major publishing event. This is the man who is credited by their coach with inspiring the Australian cricket team to their biggest ever win over the English and who the world’s leading consultancy company, Accenture, chose as one of the fifty most influential business thinkers today. De Bono has an almost quasi-religious following among his devotees and is internationally renowned – this book brings his ideas into the 21st century and is sure to cause a splash