Bill Welter
Thinking is a skill and skills only improve with practice. This book is for the "laboratory of your mind" and provides three areas to practice. Part One is used to cutomize your checklist of "good thinking" attributes. Part Two contains 30 short exercises. Do one a day for thirty days and improve you thinking skills. Part Three contains an abbreviated process for thinking about turning your business strategy (at any level) into actionable areas of change.
Bill is a consulting-educator who helps organizations succeed by helping managers excel and prepare for their tomorrows. He connects Louis Pasteur's quote of "Chance favors the prepared mind" with today's business relaities. How workshops and consulting focus on first thinking critically about business strategy and then actually making strategy operational.
He brings over 40 years of experience spanning four careers: military, engineering, consulting and education. He is the Managing Director of Adaptive Strategies, Inc., a small firm specializing in improving the strategic behavior of middle managers. He is also a Fellow in Executive Education at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota.
He is the lead co-author of The Prepared Mind of a Leader: Eight Skills Leaders Use to Innovate, Make Decisions, and Solve Problems (Jossey-Bass, 2006). This book was featured by 800CEORead, Harvard Management Update, and LeadershipNow.com. He is currently working with another consulting-educator on a book addressing the challenges of renewing a mature business.
Look around and note the problems and opportunities besetting your everyday work life. Some of them can be resolved by applying known solutions because some things (like human nature) change slowly and, therefore, we can use tried and true solutions on new problems. Need to cut costs? There are plenty of known practices to copy.
However, others parts of our life are constantly bombarded by new problems and opportunities. For example, the mapping of the human genome will raise business, moral and ethical issues we’ve never seen before.
More and more, the only asset that really counts (especially on the personal level) is our ability to think. And here is the point behind the creation of this notebook – thinking is a skill and skills only improve with practice. You can page through this little book in a few minutes; what we want you to do is take some time and actually write in this book, making learning tactile as well as visual.
PURPOSEFUL THINKING
We all think, don’t we? Well, yes and no. Yes, we all have mental activity and can respond to stimuli. However, if you consider thinking as a purposeful activity, I assert that you and I know people who don’t seem to think. Or, they don’t think very well or very much. They just let life “happen” to them. Not much fun in that!
Purposeful thinking has three major components. First, we need a goal that we consider worthy of our time. The goal could be expressed as a question (How are we going to respond to our competitor’s latest price increase and how will that impact my department?) Or, it could be expressed as a desired state (Gee, I’d really like to get a better job, but I don’t want to leave this company.) Knowing our question or desired state, we then spend time reframing and refining the description. Spend time on this. You really want to make sure you are working on the right goal.
Second, we must consider alternatives. In many cases, this is a search or creation activity that can consume considerable time. Except for a small group of finite solution problems we have to search for the multiple answers that may resolve our desired goal. For example, there is only one acceptable “alternative” to the question of “How much is 2 + 2?” However, there are many alternatives to “How can we bring more value to our customers?” or, more personally, “How can I become more valuable to my department?”
Third, we search for evidence that one alternative is better than the rest. Or, in the case of multiple good solutions, we try to understand the trade-offs that we or someone else will have to make.
Putting them all together, we use the goals as criteria for evaluating the alternatives. We also use the goals to determine which evidence is sought. And then we use the evidence to evaluate the strength of the alternatives. Finally, we infer an answer or solution.
Defining goals, finding alternatives and uncovering evidence is something we do all the time, but as the world around us has become less familiar (How much do you really know about genetics or the geopolitical impact of globalization?) we have the tendency to always resort to thinking about the known and comfortable. Routine becomes rut. And suddenly we become obsolete.
