The Opposable Mind by Roger Martin: Chapters 5 - 8

As promised, here are my thoughts on Chapters Five through Eight of Roger Martin's The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking (click here to read all my posts on this book).

In the second half of this book, Martin mentions some of the same people from the beginning of the book and continues to write about people from a wide range of disciplines:

• Victoria Hale of the Insitute for OneWorld Health
• K V Kamath, ICICI Bank
• Meg Whitman, eBay
• Nandan Nilekani, Infosys Technologies Limited
• Ramalina Raju, Satyam Computer Services
• Bruce Mau, Bruce Mau Design
• Taddy Belcher, CIDA City Campus
• Gerry Mabin, The Mabin School

Chapter Five, Mapping the Mind, is when Martin begins to teach readers how to hone their integrative thinking skills. Martin puts forth a model of "your personal knowledge system" (which is "highly path-dependent") broken down into three parts:

• Stance: Who You Are and What You're After - further discussed in Chapter Six
• Tools: Knocking the World into Shape - further discussed in Chapter Seven
• Experiences: Where Stance and Tools Meet the World - further discussed in Chapter Eight

The example stances that Martin discusses are all varied and interesting in their own right.

Within experiences, Martin defines skills and sensitivities that are built through experience as follows:

• Sensitivities: capacity to make distinctions between conditions that are similar but not the same
• Skills: capacity to carry out an activity so as to consistently produce the destined result

Chapter Six, The Construction Project, is all about the integrative thinker's stance and the six key features they have in common:

1. Integrative thinkers believe that whatever models exist at the present moment do not represent reality; they are simply the best or only constructions yet made.
2. Integrative thinkers believe that conflicting models, styles, and approaches to problems are to be leveraged, not feared.
3. Integrative thinkers believe that better models exist that are not yet seen.
4. Integrative thinkers believe that not only does a better model exist, but that they are capable of bringing that better model from abstract hypothesis to concrete reality.
5. Integrative thinkers are comfortable wading into complexity to ferret out a new and better model, confident they will emerge on the other side with the resolution they seek.
6. Integrative thinkers give themselves the time to create a better model.

In my opinion, these six key features could really be condensed into fewer points but it's still useful as it is.

Martin goes on to describe three stances about the world (first three) and three about the self (last three) that he believes are the foundation of a personal knowledge system that will lead to integrative thinking:

1. Existing models do not represent reality, they are our constructions.
2. Opposing models are to be leveraged, not forced.
3. Existing models are not perfect; better models exist that are not yet seen.
4. I am capable of finding a better model.
5. I can wade into and get through the necessary complexity.
6. I give myself the time to create a better model.

Strangely, Martin uses the movie Crash to illustrate a need for integrative thinking. But what I found most interesting from this chapter was that Bruce Mau, one of Martin's integrative thinkers, meditates when faced with complex problems -- it's not everyday that a business book advocates meditation!

Chapter Seven, A Leap of the Mind, breaks down the tools required for integrative thinking as generative or modal reasoning (as opposed to declarative reasoning), causal modeling, and assertive inquiry. The aspects of "multidirectional feedback loops" are also discussed. And Martin's use of Taddy Belcher's successful creation of CIDA City Campus as a model of integrative thinking is both educational and inspirational.

Finally Chapter Eight, A Wealth of Experience, concludes the book by detailing A G Lafley's experiences starting from the Navy Exchange to Harvard Business School and finally to Procter and Gamble. The key experiences an integrative thinker strives for are ones that deepen mastery and nurture originality.

You know, having written my thoughts on each of these chapters, I feel like I've learned more from this book than I initially realized. I love when that happens!

Click here to view an excerpt of this book.

If you'd like to learn more, click here to listen to a podcast by Roger Martin about this book, courtesy of businessweek.com or click here to view the whole January 2008 Special Report on the book.

Enjoy!

The Opposable Mind by Roger Martin

I've finally gotten through yet another one of my library books -- The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking by Roger Martin (click here to read all my posts on this book).

Will write more in detail about Chapters Five through Eight (just as I did for Chapters One through Four) but just wanted to write down a few of my thoughts now.

While I enjoyed this book and the stories and examples of integrative thinking, I didn't feel like it was substantive enough.

Call me a scientist, but I much prefer business books like Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t by Jim Collins for the hard data and proofs.

Still, I would recommend this book as it does provide insights to becoming a better thinker and thus a better decision maker.

The Opposable Mind by Roger Martin: Chapters 1 - 4

So far I've read the first half of Roger Martin's The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking (Chapters One through Four) which focus on examples of CEOs succeeding through integrative thinking (defined as the ability to hold two opposing ideas in your mind at once, and then reaching a synthesis with elements of both while improving on both). Some of the people featured were quite varied:

• Michael Lee-Chin, AIC Limited
• Isadore "Issy" Sharp, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts
• A G Lafley, Procter & Gamble
• Bob Young, Red Hat (and now Lulu.com)
• Tim Brown, IDEO
• Piers Handling, Toronto International Film Festival
• Marta Graham, Denishawn School dance company
• Moses Znaimer, CityTV

In Chapter Two, No Stomach for Second-Best, Martin discusses the process of thinking and deciding and isolates four key parts to this process: salience, causality, architecture and resolution. He further defines the differences between integrative and conventional thinkers:

1. Integrative thinkers take a broader view of what is salient.
2. Integrative thinkers don't flinch from considering multidirectional and non-linear causal relationships.
3. Integrative thinkers don't break a problem into independent pieces and work on each piece separately. They keep the entire problem firmly in mind while working on individual parts.
4. Integrative thinkers search for creative resolution of tensions, rather than accept unpleasant trade-offs.

Chapter Three, Reality, Resistance, and Resolution, focuses on the concept that how each of us filters the world around us (which we do to protect our brain from being overloaded) determines how we see the world; that none of us experiences reality as it is but simply a model of reality.

Chapter Four, Dancing Through Complexity, condemns simplifications and specialization in clear terms:

Truly creative resolutions . . . spring from complexity.

Simplification makes us favor linear, unidirectional causal relationships, even if reality is more complex and multidirectional.

...

Simplification also encourages us to construct a limited model of the problem before us, whatever it might be. The alternatives we perceive are meager and unattractive, closing any remaining avenue to an integrative resolution. The simplifying mind has no choice but to settle for trade-offs, also known as the best bad choice available.

...

Specialization is a variant of simplification. . . the specialist attempts to preserve depth and thoroughness by masking out all but a few square inches of a vast canvas.

Hmm, seems a little harsh to me but Martin does show some convincing examples of integrative thinking at work.

Slowly getting through these library books -- must keep plugging away!

The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking by Roger Martin

These past few weeks I've been so slow at getting through my library books.

I did start reading The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking by Roger Martin (published by the Harvard Business School Press).

Roger Martin has been dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto since 1998 and is also professor of strategic management at the Rotman School focusing his research in the areas of global competitiveness, integrative thinking, business design and corporate citizenship. During his 13 years with Monitor Company (a global strategy consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts), Martin founded and chaired Monitor University, the firm's educational arm, served as co-head of the firm for two years, and founded the Canadian office.

Martin starts off his book with this appropriate F. Scott Fitzgerald quote:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

Interestingly, Martin mentions three top selling business books in the first chapter, Choices Conflict, and the Creative Spark:

• Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Honeywell CEO Larry Bossidy and consultant Ram Charan
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t by professor-turned-guru Jim Collins.
• Jack: Straight from the Gut by Jack Welch, the former super-CEO of GE General Electric Company

Martin appears to mock the ineffectiveness of these books, though he does state:

I don't wish to denigrate any of th books mentioned. They were best sellers for a reason: businesspeople want to know what makes a great leader because they themselves would like to be better leaders. Each book offers a particular perspective, and each perspective is valuable. But to approach every business problem with the question, "What should I do?" is to foreclose options before they can even be explored.

Sounds to me like he's just covering himself.

More Library Books

I went to the library today to return a few books and as usual I left with six more.

• The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring by Richard Preston
• The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking by Roger Martin
• If at First You Don't Succeed . . . The Eight Patterns of Highly Effective Entrepreneurs by Brent Bowers
• Founders at Work: Stories of Startup's Early Days by Jessica Livingston
• The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun
• Persuasive Business Proposals: Writing to Win More Customers, Clients, and Contracts by Tom Sant

Yup, after a three month hiatus, I've gotten back into reading business books.

I plan on skimming the last two books -- they seem more like how-to / reference books than like books worth reading for their literary value (click here to read the table of contents for The Art of Project Management and click here to read the table of contents for Persuasive Business Proposals and you'll see what I mean). Though Persuasive Business Proposals does seem like it'll have some practical advice.

The first book, The Wild Trees, is by the author of The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story (click here to read an excerpt of this dramatic true story of an Ebola virus outbreak in a Northern Virginia laboratory), one of my favorite books growing up. The Wild Trees is about the California Redwood Forest (with trees taller than 350 feet and some of them thousands of years old) and the primeval kingdom of plants and animals that only a handful of people have ever seen. Click here to read an excerpt or check out the author's website for more.



As for the remaining middle three, The Opposable Mind was published by the Harvard Business School Press (for what that's worth), the author of If at First You Don't Succeed (click here to read an excerpt) was the New York Times small business editor, and Founders at Work tells the story of startups like Firefox, TiVo, WebTV, Craigslist, Hotmail, Adobe, and others.

Of those, The Opposable Mind seems the most interesting -- with research from psychologists and profiles of several companies that have been successful in utilizing integrative thinking -- including Four Season Hotels, Procter & Gamble, and Red Hat.