Retail Price: $32.00 LS Price: $21.76 You Save: $10.24 (32%) Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours Format: Hardcover, 224pp. ISBN: 9781422118924 Publisher: Harvard Business School Press Pub. Date: December 4, 2007 Average Customer Review:

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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.

• "Complexity doesn't have to be overwhelming, if we can master our initial panic reaction and look for patterns, connections, and causal relationships." Pg. 81

Roger Martin is dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and a professor of strategic management at Rotman. Formerly, he was a director of Monitor Company, a global strategy consultancy based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has authored numerous articles for leading business publications including Harvard Business Review, Business Week, Barron's, and Fast Company.

	Acknowledgments	ix
1	Choices, Conflict, and the Creative Spark The Problem-Solving Power of Integrative Thinking	1
2	No Stomach for Second-Best How Integrative Thinkers Move Beyond Trade-Offs	25
3	Reality, Resistance and Resolution How Integrative Thinkers Keep Their Options Open	49
4	Dancing Through Complexity Shaping Resolutions by Resisting Simplification	73
5	Mapping the Mind How Thoughts Circulates	91
6	The Construction Project Imagining Reality	107
7	A Leap of Mind How Integrative Thinkers Connect the Dots	139
8	A Wealth of Experience Using the Past, Inventing the Future	169
	Notes	193
	Index	199
	About the Author	209

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