Edward De Bono's Smart Thinking

Rating:
Summary: Excellent intro into the world of creative thinking.
Review: Read by De Bono himself, makes it all more interesting. Dr. De Bono puts the tools for creative thinking in a nutshell. If you have never been exposed to De bono before, this is a must. If you are a fan of De Bono it acts as a refresher course in the Six Hats and Lateral Thinking tools. I am using this as the 1st step in introducing De Bono's techniques to my top managers.If you like De Bono you will more than enjoy this audio-cassette. This is my preference of all the De Bono audio-cassettes so far.

Rating:
Summary: I like DeBono, but I don't like this
Review: This has its pluses-- a broad survey of DeBono's ideas and tips for improving your thinking methods. DeBono's ideas are excellent and clear, and the 32 page booklet covers them well. So far so good.

What's so irritating about the cassette is that DeBono spends a large percentage of the time tooting his own horn, and making insinuations about other people stealing his ideas. He suggests that the invention of automatic suspension in cars may have been ripped off from an example in an older DeBono book. He spends 5 minutes implying that he deserves partial credit for making the Olympics profitable, because the guy who did, once saw a DeBono presentation. And he whines that random word techniques are suggested by many other authors on creativity, often without giving proper DeBono credit. (And this last isn't exactly a novel idea; the Dadaists probably did it.)

While any of these accusations may be true, who cares? This kind of stuff just shouldn't be on a 1 hour survey course. It is distracting, it is not useful for learning the concepts, and it wastes a large percentage of the hour. I got this as a refresher (I read many of DeBono's books about 12 years ago), but I keep popping it out of the player because I can't stand the attitude.

In short, DeBono's ideas and methods are very much worth learning, and have been a great help to me. But I hope there's a better introduction to them than this cassette.