I Am Right You Are Wrong: From This to the New Renaissance: From Rock Logic to Water Logic

Edward de Bono is a pattern-interrupting Savant Provocateur! As a preview, here's an interruption of a pattern (of expectations) for you: de Bono - throughout the book - promises to go into some detail to explain the term "hodics" (which he conceptually previews as a shift in inquiry from "is" to "to"). As you reach the last page of the book, you finally see a paragraph long C-level section in which de Bono excuses himself from his own mandate: he explains that he - "upon reflection" - decided not to "burden" the reader with too much about "hodics." End of story. The modern-day Diogenes of Synope has left the building, with the unabashed spontaneity of a Zen master that just cut a whole cat in half (just to make a point about the dangers of dichotomous thinking)! Don't get me wrong: the book more than meets its lofty mandate (to herald a renaissance, no less!) - it's panoramic, it's thought provoking, it's original, it's "meta" in more way than one. Reading De Bono is a kind of fun you get from watching Rubick's cubing on You Tube. There's the circularity all right. There are brilliant revelations as pseudo-chaos of pattern interruptions suddenly comes into crystal clear focus. The result is a contagious desire to try out the water logic yourself, to discover this amazing thought style that allows one to maneuvre around the unnecessary rapids of the false dichotomies and the situation-independent absolutes. I love de Bono's pushy paradigm-shifting style. I enjoyed his "Lateral Thinking" and I really liked this work on "Water Logic." He is right. We are wrong. No "ifs, ands or buts" about it - just a neologistic pattern-interruption word-cue "po." In sum, the "I am right you are wrong" is a must for psychologists, comedians, marketing/advertizing folks, politicians, scientists, and poets. All these seemingly unrelated vocational and avocational "factions" stand to improve the understanding of their respective perception-manipulating skills and arts. Pavel Somov, Ph.D.

A Rhodes scholar, medical doctor, university professor, worldwide consultant and inventor of "lateral thinking," the actually precursor of what we have come to label as "out-of-the-box-thinking," renaissance man Edward de Bono, tells us in this book, how creative thinking is done and how it is to be put to good use in solving the most intractable problems facing mankind. As in most of his other books, he uses his medical training to first explain the mechanics of brain functioning -- showing how perception is the natural and simple behavior of self-organizing neural networks in the brain and how the way these networks organize affect the way we think (or fail to think), plan, organize and solve (or fail to solve) both large and small problems. What is different about this book, is that here he takes on as a challenge the problem of how to help erase a kind of mental laziness from the problem-solving context that results in an almost complete reliance on absolutes, that is in a complete reliance on black and white thinking; on binary logic, as in what can only be called the "dichotomy trap." Although he does not single out the U.S. as the Western World's most egregious practitioner of this kind of "last resort thought process," it is safe to say that anyone who observes U.S. politics and approaches to social and political problem-solving, even for a minute, cannot come away without feeling that we Americans are the world champions of "black and white thinking." Almost every aspect of our lives are sliced and diced into finely grated black and white categories: our race problem, our politics, our religion, and economics just to name the most obvious of them -- all suffer from binary thinking in absolutes of only black and whites - seldom in grays. As a nation, we seem satisfied with our utter lack of reliance on anything near creative thinking to solve the problems that face us as a nation. de Bono shows us the route to a new paradigm of thinking: as he sees that with global problems crowding in on us, failing to change and failing to begin to adopt new more creative ways of thinking and solving these deep and intractable problems, increasingly is ceasing to be a discretionary option. Sooner, rather than later we will have no option but to give up our almost total reliance on absolutes, and begin to deal in "grays." That is what this book attempts to do: teach us that the brain is more comfortable thinking in "grays," and that many of the solutions to the problems facing us as a nation and as a world, lie in this realm of creative thought. In is a somewhat vain but very sober attempt to shake us out of our comfort zone. The same thing that de Bono has been doing in the corporate boardrooms for the better part of a half century. Five stars.

This book stands out as one of the best explanations of how the mind works, and doesn't work, and how to make make the best use of your own. He destroys in a few paragraphs a lot of deeply entrenched misconceptions that western society has been operating under for centuries. I've seen a lot of other long and wordy attempts that fail to get half as far as De Bono has in this little book. It's densely packed with concepts, each touched on just long enough to give the reader the main points, without all the flowery self-indulgent nonsense that so many other writers of books for the lay person love to fill their pages with. De Bono gets to the point. And good points they are! Excellent book.

I found this book to be extremely useful to my understanding of human behavior. I have been reading extensive psychological literature in order to formulate a useful model to understand how humans in organizations react to proposed change. I want to use that model to help them create positive change. Most of the literature on organizational change is anecdotal support of an approach that once worked somewhere. (Exception: Chris Argyris) DeBono starts with the fundamental mechanism of how the brain works to understand the behavior people exhibit. This understanding has enabled me to formulate much more effective approaches to individual and organizaitonal change. You do have to think hard to understand deBono's underlying messages. It may be difficult if this is the first deBono book you read, or if you have not been digging for a solution to a specific problem. But, I give it a 5+!

If you're interested in learning what the brain does without having to memorize lists of neurotransmitters and sections of neo-cortex, this is the book for you. De Bono is a genius at making a complex subject completely accessible to the average reader. For example, he avoids involved anatomical terminology altogether by using the metaphor of an octopus in place of a neuron. Learning how the brain works by imagining a beach full of glowing, smelly octopuses is a more efficient mnemonic device than a dry, "scientific" treatment. The rest of the book addresses the problems we humans have in trying to deal with everything "logically" without real logical tools, and thinking that everything can be "solved" through language, analysis, and confrontation. My way of thinking was enriched by De Bono's introduction of paradox, humor, and intuition to provoke creative thinking. And he takes on more than a few of philosophy's sacred cows while he's at it. The idea of "catchment" as a model of our automatic compartmentalization of new data is alone worth the price of the book.