What Do I Think of Edward de Bono, the King of Po? Well, the Man is a Walking, Talking, Sometimes Floating Encyclopedia of Information
A reader in India writes, “I am quite impressed by Dr. Edward de Bono’s continued presence in media reports out here. His presence with the Indian cricket team has made terms like ‘lateral thinking’ and ‘six thinking hats theory’ extremely popular here. But the only problem is that the cricket team has been consistently losing its matches.” This reader asks for my opinion of Dr. de Bono, his theories and creativity-generating techniques.
It would be easy to dump on Edward de Bono for apparently having little success at reversing the misfortunes of India’s cricket team, but I won’t do it. For all I know, India’s cricket team is beyond salvaging.
And for the record, I think Ed de Bono has been good for the planet. He’s encouraged a Merlin’s stew pot full of people over the years, many of them in very high-powered places, to think anew about how they think. He’s written about 70 books on the subject of better thinking skills, and virtually all of them are still in demand. And he has a superb gift for keeping the idea that our brains can do better in the spotlight—like showing up in India when its cricket team is in trouble.
Last fall about this time, I spent two days with Dr. de Bono on his private island a ten-minute speedboat ride from “downtown” Venice. Even shared the top billing with him and Richard Saul Wurman at a private conference. Shared the billing but not the much of the platform. It was soon clear that Wurman and I were there mostly as window dressing. It was de Bono’s island, and it was really his event.
This gave me the luxury of sitting back and watching his mind at work. And that mind really is a piece of work. When de Bono is present, a gifted example of a powerful, logic-driven human computer is in your midst. What is he now, in his late 70s? Even so, if that marvelous mind has lost any speed, it’s half a nano-second or so. Hour after hour, day after day, it can just sit there and grind and grind, crunch and crunch, associate and associate, recall and recall, spew out and spew out. It all seems so seamless, how he thinks, what he has to say, the data and the stories and applications that he divulges so effortlessly. Very impressive.
I have many of Dr. de Bono’s books in my library. From time to time, I’ll pull one out and read a little bit. I don’t think I’ve ever finished one. That relentless de Bono use of logic eventually becomes overpowering. Eventually, I get hungry for a little more levity, a little more spontaneity, some acknowledgment that there’s more to creative thinking than knowing and following de Bono’s rules for creative thinking.
As I watched the great thinker sit at his overhead projector with his supply of colored pens and his seamless transparency rolls on his private island in Venice with visitor Henry Kissinger’s pictures on the wall and listened to his seamless commentary, I realized that he’s nothing if not consistent. What you get in his books is also what you get in his personal presence.
Even when he’s telling raunchy jokes with a bunch of guys in the back of a speeding water taxi on the way to the hotel, it sounds like you are listening to an encyclopedia that happens to know how to talk. I only heard him tell one such joke, but it was so precisely on target that I got the idea that he knows a ton of them, one for just about every occasion.
And maybe that was the problem for the members of India’s cricket team. They eventually got tired of listening to an encyclopedia.
(Oh, yes. Po. That’s a de Bono invention. He says that “no” is the basic tool of the local thinking system. “Yes” is the basic tool of the belief thinking system. And “po”? Well, I’ll let Dr. de Bono explain: No, Yes and Po)
