Lateral Thinking Book Summary, by Edward De Bono

by Allen Cheng - https://www.allencheng.com - Visit for more summaries like this one.

Lateral Thinking Book Summary, by Edward De Bono

by Allen Cheng

https://www.allencheng.com/lateral-thinking-book-summary-edward-de-bono/

Want to get the main points of Lateral Thinking in 20 minutes or less? Read the world's #1 book
summary of Lateral Thinking by Edward De Bono here.

Read a quick 1-Page Summary, a Full Summary, or watch video summaries curated by our expert team.

Video Summaries of Lateral Thinking

We've scoured the Internet for the very best videos on Lateral Thinking, from high-quality videos
summaries to interviews or commentary by Edward De Bono.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gB5ve_Bqf0M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb9Oe83ruUw

1-Page Summary of Lateral Thinking

Overview

There are no shortcuts to success. However, there are ways of achieving success faster and with less effort
than you might expect. These methods are called smartcuts. They're a way of working smarter instead of
harder so that you can achieve great results more quickly than is normal.

Lateral thinking helps you advance in life by finding innovative solutions to problems. It's a way of
viewing things from different angles and questioning assumptions so that you can find new ways to do
things more efficiently.

Ben Franklin, the famous inventor from America's early days, knew how to use lateral thinking. Even
when he was young and wanted to write for a local newspaper, no one would publish his work because of
his age. He could have chosen not to try again or go back to school and do an apprenticeship before trying
again.

Ben Franklin wanted to be a writer, but he wasn't getting anywhere. So he decided to try a different
approach: He wrote under the pen name "Mrs. Silence Dogood" and left his essays at the printer's door.
When they were published in The New-England Courant, readers loved them. This encouraged Ben to
continue writing and become one of America's most prolific writers with an educational career, political
life, and creation of inventions like bifocals and electricity (among many other things).

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In the next three sections, you'll learn how to use lateral thinking when you're facing obstacles. These
techniques will help you leverage your resources and achieve success more quickly than ever before.

Shorten the Distance to Success

If you've bought into the conventional wisdom of waiting for opportunities or being patient, it's time to
discover lateral thinking. You can accelerate your success by learning how to think laterally and taking
unconventional paths. Although it doesn't replace hard work, this approach will help you find ways to
eliminate unnecessary steps along the way and make your efforts more impactful.

One of the ways to think laterally is by looking for small wins and then trading up. For example, college
students in the Midwest start with a toothpick and trade it for something valuable at every house they visit
until they meet back up with their friends. They don't always end up getting something better than what
they started out with but they do get things that are incrementally better, which is still an improvement
over having only a toothpick.

In life, you can use your small successes to help you achieve bigger ones. You just have to keep using
them as stepping stones and don't get stuck on the first ladder you find. This will shorten the distance
between where you are now and what success looks like for you in the future.

If you want to switch jobs or careers, it helps to make connections with people who can help you get
ahead. You should never underestimate the power of a friendship, mentor or chance meeting that could
benefit your career. It's important to impress someone who will take notice of your abilities and bring you
up with them on the fast track to success. If you meet those people regularly and ask for their advice
occasionally, they might even offer some help when needed.

Leverage Your Resources

Leverage is making the most of all your resources. It can be as simple as combining different tools to
invent new ones. When you look at everything in life as a resource, you'll have more than enough things
to work with and can multiply what you do and what you have so that it takes you further than it would
otherwise.

For example, if you don't know much about computer coding in the beginning, it may seem like a
repetitive process that involves hundreds of unimportant decisions. Most programmers accept this and go
along with it by making basic components of code. However, one day a programmer grew tired of that
and built an application on top of the existing code to automate many of those tasks so he could focus on
more complex aspects. This creation became known as Ruby on Rails, which is now used by businesses
to launch ideas quickly instead of spending months or years doing so.

This example shows how you can use leverage to get the most out of your time. If you're going to spend
time on something, why not do it in a way that will allow you to achieve more? Use tools and technology
so that you can focus on what's important. Think about things differently than they've been done before,
and find ways to multiply your efforts for better results.

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Another way to think about leverage is like surfing. When a surfer catches a great wave, they can ride it
all the way past their competition. Sometimes, these waves come out of nowhere and give you the chance
of a lifetime. Therefore, you should keep showing up and looking for opportunities in your environment
because no one knows when an opportunity will hit that will give you an advantage over others.

The best way to experience the power of leverage is by connecting with others and building relationships.
If you're at a party where you don't know many people, there are two options: introducing yourself to
everyone or waiting for someone else who knows them all to introduce you. The same applies in
business: instead of spending time trying to build your own network, tap into existing networks that
already exist through collaboration and partnerships.

Soar Beyond Your Expectations

Smartcuts is about how the world’s most successful people succeed, even with obstacles in their way.
They are able to achieve success because they have momentum, not just experience. The first step toward
creating momentum and avoiding inertia is realizing that small wins can contribute to a sense of progress.
This contributes to overall forward motion and helps you keep going even when you're not sure where to
go next. If you take time for small wins, there's no telling how far your potential energy will take you
once you get a big break.

Breakthrough success is not always about doing more, but rather simplifying. Sometimes customers
prefer a simpler product or service over something that's more complex and powerful. Simplifying your
products, services, or ideas can help you gain momentum to propel yourself forward.

Sometimes, we have to show up at the beach in order to catch a big wave. Other times, it's about creating
your own waves and riding them. However, this only works if you're credible enough to back it up with
substance. Lady Gaga is a good example of that: she was able to ride the hype she created by using her
outrageous costumes and striking entrances at award shows into pop superstardom because she had
catchy music as well.

The final smartcut is called “10x Thinking.” It involves thinking radically differently about what you can
do and setting high goals for yourself. By doing this, you free up your mind to think of innovative
solutions that will help you accomplish incredible things. In addition, research shows that people are less
likely to perform at their best when they're aiming for low-hanging fruit, but when they aim for the stars,
they experience exponential success.

Conclusion

You might have been told that you need to start young and do your time in order to succeed. Eventually,
you'll climb the ladder of success if you continue working hard. But what happens when this model
doesn't work? What if it's taking too long? That's when it's time to create your own path.

In this summary, you learned how to take advantage of opportunities and pursue your dreams. You can
simplify things when necessary and experiment with big-picture thinking. Remember the story about the
kids who traded toothpicks for household items? Don't forget to try out new ideas because you never

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know which will be a success.

Full Summary of Lateral Thinking

Why You Need to Innovate

Creativity and innovation can inspire an organization. It allows you to set forth a vision, build a culture of
openness and inquiry, share authority with every strata in the company, establish objectives with time
frames and metrics for tracking innovation, encourage brainstorming for coming up with numerous ideas.

Work with ideas – Mix and match them, deconstruct and reconstruct them, vet and choose the best
ones.

Test the results – Check out the new ideas. * Act innovatively – Implement strong projects based
on those ideas.

Companies that are successful don't fear change. They try to be the first ones to come up with a new idea
and pride themselves on being able to make something better than what they currently have. Although it's
wrong to fear change, it is right for companies not to confuse innovation and change because they're two
different things. Innovation creates something completely new, while changing an existing product or
service makes them better in some way.

How to Recognize the Lateral Leader

Lateral thinking is a way of approaching problems by changing the angle from which you approach them.
Lateral leaders are those who lead from beside, not in front, and they inspire rather than direct. They also
change the rules or people around them instead of relying on what's familiar. These kinds of leaders view
their staff as partners and teammates rather than chattel (property). They ask for advice, information and
opinions to solve problems better.

In order to build successful teams, you need to hire entrepreneurs instead of managers.

The Test of Innovation

The progress of innovation is measurable. It's evident when everyone in the company knows what the big
goals are and how the organization is moving toward them. Your organizational culture encourages
people to generate and test original ideas, which leads to brainstorming sessions that occur regularly.
Training emphasizes creativity, so people garner praise for being innovative. You make use of other
people's good ideas no matter where you see them, whether it's within your department or another one.
Interdepartmental teams address well-defined problems by working together on solutions through
collaboration with others from different departments.

Problem solving begins with generating lots of ideas, prototyping them, and piloting to see if
they're feasible. People facing problems can look at other departments' solutions for inspiration.

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A death squad identifies outdated products or processes and eliminates them. Innovation goals are
clear, and the company's culture is not afraid to eliminate things that have been around for a long
time.

People commonly take risks and try new things. The boss's ideas are just as good as anyone else's,
but not necessarily better.

A company's budget is a discipline, but it isn't a killer. If an idea is good, the company will find
the money to support it.

The Underpinnings of Transformation

The lateral leader is a person who provides insight into why change happens. The lateral leader explains
the reasons for change with four cardinal supports: values, reason, culture and mission. Values are
principles of an organization. A mission is its strategic objective; it defines what the organization does
and how it will do it. Culture is an organization's style or way of doing things. To create vision, leaders
must communicate their ideas by any means possible because people need to know about them in order to
understand why they're changing. Google uses an intranet while Shell has an e-mail suggestion box where
employees can submit ideas that can help improve overall organizational efficiency

The organization needs to change.

To get people to change, you should communicate the need for change and why it's important.
You can do this by using visuals that show how things will be different in the future and by tying
your message to a corporate vision statement. Communicate this as often as possible, based on
reasons such as culture, mission and values. Define innovation stretch goals with time frames so
that people know what they're working toward. Also make sure you use technology (such as e-
mail or an intranet) so both sides of the conversation have equal access to information about
changes in policy or procedure.

Realizing the Vision

To achieve your innovative vision, you need to empower the people around you. You should give them
authority and let them find their own ways of achieving goals that you both agree on. Let people focus on
major objectives instead of getting distracted by everyday obstacles and problems. Encourage creativity
by making your environment friendly to innovation. Act, speak, and appear in a way that encourages
entrepreneurship and eliminates fear from others' minds so they can think freely without worrying about
being judged for mistakes or failures. Plan to climb but prepare for failure when trying new things
because not everything will go as expected all the time.

Test the Assumptions

History is full of bad assumptions that impeded progress. For example, Copernicus challenged the belief

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that the sun and planets moved around the Earth. After World War I, France built a line of defense against
Germany called the Maginot line but Germany just went around it. It's said that Henry Ford once refused
to hire someone for a senior job because at lunch he salted his soup before tasting it. To encourage
innovation:

It's possible that you have assumptions you're not even aware of having. Question everything to
find those hidden assumptions.

You've just landed on Mars. Explain how you do things differently there than here. * Break down
problems into their smallest elements and question each element. * Re-frame your problem in
other words to view it from a different perspective.

The best way to innovate is by asking questions, even if it's counter-intuitive. The most effective
leaders ask many questions and challenge the status quo. They question what their business is
about, how they do things, why they do them that way and more. Asking questions isn't hard; you
just need two words: How and Why. If you ask why enough times, you'll eventually find answers
that will lead to innovation.

How to Generate an Innovative Idea

Bill Gates once said, "640k of RAM should be enough for anyone." In 1956, Sir Richard Wooley said that
space travel was nonsense. Don Rowe from Decca Records told the Beatles' manager that groups of
guitarists were on the way out. Each of these statements reflected what most people thought at the time.
It's important to look at things in an unusual way and try combining unrelated ideas or inventions to come
up with something new. For example, combining a wine press and coin punch resulted in the printing
press. Here are some techniques to force yourself to come up with such combinations:

List some random topics – Take your main product or service. Find a way to combine your
product with each topic on the list.

Think of the most ridiculous possible combination and then consider what it would be used for.
Examine how customers use your product and find ways to combine it with other products or
services.

The Power of the Unanticipated

Clarence Birdseye spent time in Canada and saw how people froze food. He took that idea back to the
United States and created a frozen food line for grocers. The inventor of roll-on deodorant got his idea
from the ballpoint pen, while the inventor of Velcro got his idea by removing burrs from his dog's pelt. In
order to be creative, you must take ideas from seemingly unrelated scenes or events and use them in your
business.

Innovation is critical to success, but it can be difficult in a business setting. Sometimes the biggest

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obstacle to innovation is the business itself or its culture. Businesses have rules and norms that are
accepted as truth, even though they're not always true. For example, Michael Dell started a successful
computer company when he was 18 years old by selling computers directly to customers instead of
through other channels like retail stores or distributorships. Another great innovator who broke the mold
was Al Neuharth (founder of USA Today) who changed people's perceptions about what large-circulation
newspapers could do by making them colorful and interesting rather than dull and monotonous. To
innovate successfully:

If you want to be successful in your business, make a list of rules that apply. Share the list with
several people and ask them to add some more rules. Think about how you can break each of these
rules in creative ways. Consider what would shock people most if you did it. Make a list of those
things and turn it into a plan for actionable steps towards success. Ask yourself whether Richard
Branson or Michael Dell would do something similar in your industry? If so, try doing it yourself!

Get More for Your Effort

The more ideas you have, the better. You need to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince(ss).
Picasso painted over 20,000 canvases and Bach wrote one piece of music per week. Edison conducted
9,000 experiments looking for an electric light bulb that worked. In order to get more good ideas in your
company: *

Set stretch goals for idea generation and try to go beyond the goals. Make sure all your meetings
are exciting. Emphasize the importance of new ideas; never discourage or criticize a fresh idea.
Carefully analyze all ideas. Cross-reference them; think of ways to use, improve or recombine
them. Failure is not really an ending, but a beginning. Failure is valuable in that it can help us
learn from our mistakes so we don't make those same mistakes again in the future, which will help
us succeed more often than if we didn't fail at anything.''

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