Product Description

If you want to be as successful as Jack Welch, Larry Bossidy, or Michael Dell, read their autobiographical advice books, right? Wrong, says Roger Martin in The Opposable Mind. Though following “best practice” can help in some ways, it also poses a danger: By emulating what a great leader did in a particular situation, you’ll likely be terribly disappointed with your own results. Why? Your situation is different.

Instead of focusing on what exceptional leaders do, we need to understand and emulate how they think. Successful businesspeople engage in what Martin calls integrative thinking—creatively resolving the tension in opposing models by forming entirely new and superior ones. Drawing on stories of leaders as diverse as AG Lafley of Procter & Gamble, Meg Whitman of eBay, Victoria Hale of the Institute for One World Health, and Nandan Nilekani of Infosys, Martin shows how integrative thinkers are relentlessly diagnosing and synthesizing by asking probing questions—including “What are the causal relationships at work here?” and “What are the implied trade-offs?”

Martin also presents a model for strengthening your integrative thinking skills by drawing on different kinds of knowledge—including conceptual and experiential knowledge.

Integrative thinking can be learned, and The Opposable Mind helps you master this vital skill.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2761 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-04
• Released on: 2007-12-04
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In this primer on the problem-solving power of "integrative thinking," Martin draws on more than 50 management success stories, including the masterminds behind The Four Seasons, Proctor & Gamble and eBay, to demonstrate how, like the opposable thumb, the "opposable mind"-Martin's term for the human brain's ability "to hold two conflicting ideas in constructive tension"-is an intellectually advantageous evolutionary leap through which decision-makers can synthesize "new and superior ideas." Using this strategy, Martin focuses on what leaders think, rather than what they do. Among anecdotes and examples steering readers to change their thinking about thinking, Martin gives readers specific strategies for understanding their own "personal knowledge system" (by parsing inherent qualities of "stance," "tools" and "experience"), as well as for taking advantage of the "richest source of new insight into a problem," the "opposing model." Each of the eight chapters is well organized, making for a clear and cumulative read. Part inspiration, part logic lesson, this title will provide fresh perspective for anyone prepared to dust off her thinking cap.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
Martin makes a compelling argument for a paradoxical approach to problem-solving. --BusinessWeek, November 26, 2007

Review
...compelling...the thesis that fresh thought processes are required to deal with the world s contradictions and complexities rings true. --The Financial Times, December 19, 2007

Customer Reviews

Not much added to the newspaper review
This book highlights that successful people often share the ability to hold two opposing ideas in their mind, and debate them, and then draw conclusions that are often novel. Not a new observation for sure, but interesting to explore. I bought this book after reading a review in the Financial Times (?). Unfortunately having read the book in full I concluded that there was little that was added to the review that stimulated me to buy the book in the first place. There are interesting examples of businesses described for sure, but many only marginally support the main thesis.

An absolutely needed recognition to the power of the human mind.
Before we do anything in the reality, we always think, in a way or another, about the outcomes of what we are about to do, and that outcomes give our acts a reason. This book focus in thought, and how some people have developed and strikingly different way to think about their problems, that leads them to incredible achievements. That's the 'Opposable Mind', the capacity of building better solutions integrating two seemingly opposed ideas. I clearly recommend this book, because it really changes your way of thinking, letting you build solutions that you couldn't do before.
Because of the concrete focus, execution have been preferred over thinking, and many authors have written books about 'how to get the things done'. This book it's an accolade to the power that made us prevalent in the world, and a path to continue developing this capacity, the thinking ability.

Choosing "both" instead of "either/or"...
All too often, we're faced with choices where we have to settle for the best possible alternative given the situation. But what if you could synthesize new solutions from the conflicting options? That's the premise of the book The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking by Roger Martin. He looks at successful business leaders who have the ability to hold two conflicting, or opposing, ideas at once and then formulate a new solution that blends the best of both worlds.

Contents:
Choices, Conflict, and the Creative Spark; No Stomach for Second-Best; Reality, Resistance, and Resolution; Dancing Through Complexity; Mapping the Mind; The Construction Project; A Leap of the Mind; A Wealth of Experience; Notes; Index; About The Author

Martin looks at the business world, specifically at leaders who were faced with difficult decisions with conceivably no good options. Using the concept of an opposable mind, he shows how the eventual outcome was a blend of available options, which often opened up a new reality that wasn't there on first glance. One example is Lee-Chin and his investment firm AIC Limited. He almost went broke in 1999 when his model for investment was under attack from the press and financial "experts". The typical outcome of this situation would be to fold the fund as redemptions were outpacing investments. But rather than follow the conventional wisdom for retrenching, he decided to take the exact opposite approach. He focused his investment on a single financial stock who had solid fundamentals. This decision, the "wrong" one according to the experts, ended up making AIC the largest privately held mutual fund company in Canada. The same type of situation faced Isadore Sharp and his Four Seasons hotels. Conventional wisdom said you had to be low-end or high-end, but you couldn't try to accommodate both. But through offering an entirely different level of service, he was able to establish his hotels as medium sized building with luxury offerings, and people were willing to pay the extra price for that level of service.

This is a very readable book that dives into the mindset of an opposable mind and steps that allow anyone to become an opposable thinker. By understanding the thought processes involved, you can go from an attitude of "either/or" to an attitude of "both". What I took away is the importance of not seeing the solution in the way things are, but looking for the solution in the way things could be. If you can imagine a new reality instead of conforming to the existing one, you can often find answers that weren't there before...