de Bono's Thinking Course: Revised Edition

When you are growing up, your mind groups things in certain ways in order to help you process tons of information that innundates your every day life. It learns to recognize patterns and helps you quickly form opinions about something. In nature, animals may learn to recognize a predator if its parent runs away from it each time it sees it. As the youngling grows up, it too runs from the predator. Some would say that this is stereotyping and thus is wrong, but it most likely would save this animal's life one day. My long winded story just points out the usefulness of teaching your brain how to think and not just react. Debono does a good job in this book as it gets you to think about thinking. Just as in any book you read, you walk away with some thing useful, you walk away with something you would not find useful, just as you would find something you would agree with and something you don't. For me, it was a good investment in time because I now have in my arsenal methods to think analytically in situations that come about. If for nothing else, this book saves you time in your job and in your life. As a plus, you will be able to understand more of what is going on around you.

Edward de Bono presents simple, entry-level techniques for logic and problem-solving, such as Plus-Minus-Interesting (PMI) and alternatives-possibilities-choices (APC). Undergraduate logic courses, sciene labs training students in inductive reasoning and problem-solving, law schools and the Socratic method they use to teach, Dale Carnegie's thinking techniques (How To Stop Worrying and Start Living), and the Universal Traveler: the soft-systems guide to: creativity, problem-solving and the process of reaching goals by architecture school professor Jim Bagnall, as well as a study of the Bible, all will serve you well and in much more depth, complexity and thoroughness to make you actually able to think things through and make good choices and decisions. Make Prof. de Bono's book your first step of many in learning how to think critically and thoroughly.

As a tenured law-professor in a school dedicated to teaching lawyers to solve problems creatively, I consider de Bono's book the most startlingly original and comprehensive book I've encountered on the subject. Moreover, it convincingly reveals how unaware teachers, academics, journalists, politicians, and other professionals are of the mental shackles we wear as our legacy from the Western Tradition of "thinking." For the price, it's just-under-200 pages can't be beat!

DeBono's genius sometimes gets in his own way, but his work is probably the finest in this area. This specific book is powerful in that can actually help you think with more clarity and orginality. Mr. DeBono is the real deal and this book is worth every penny.

The Thinking Course by Edward DeBono is a terrific work for anyone who strives for creativity, innovation, or new ideas. Not only does he help one grasp how we think, he provides specific ways to think differently and bring structure to the process of thinking. This book is a hidden treasure that I will recommend to many of my professional colleagues and friends.