By Martin Cohen I’ve been thinking lot about thinking a lot! This book is pretty much a summary of my thoughts over thirty years… Tip One , via Sun Tzu’s classic text, The Art of War , is don’t do things the clever way, nor even the smart way: do them the easy way. Because it doesn’t matter what you’re wondering about, or researching or doing - someone else has probably solved the problem for you already. Google it, get the book, find the answer. Tip Two is to avoid ‘black and white’ thinking, binary distinctions, ‘yes/no’ language and questions, and instead take the tip from ‘design thinking’ that approaches rooted in notions of questions and answers are themselves limiting insight and that it is sometimes better to go for narratives. Tip Three , which, yes, is connected to the previous tips, and that’s a good thing too, is to look for the pattern in the data. However, there’s a caution that has to come with advice to pattern match, because as we become attentive to some characte
The Gorilla, the Whale, the Parrot and the Baby Mac too Books as sources of ideas and inspiration T here's plenty of leadership gurus offering this or that book as essential reading for would-be entrepreneurs and CEOs. But the actual reading habits of successful people point a very different way. My recent book, ‘The Leader's Bookshelf: 25 Great Books and their Readers’ ( at R&L books or if you prefer you-know-where, at Amazon.com ) - now out in paperback too! - is really a series of 25 case studies, each one involving textual analysis of the biographies and historical place of the individual in question, along with analysis of the texts the individuals specifically cite as key influences. Perhaps the most intriguing part of all this is new links between the texts and the lives and thinking habits of the individuals: how often the one contains the seeds of the other. However, it’s not just a book about people and their life stories, rather it is a book about ideas and