Book Review: How to have a beautiful mind

This is a long overdue post of my second book review. So I will get straight to the point. I will start by saying that this is the first De Bono book I’ve read and I found it pretty average. It started off with a promising premise that by the end of the book the reader’s conversational abilities will have substantially increased. However, I found this not to be the case.

The book is easy to read with short, some times too short, chapters that describe various conversation techniques. The idea of having a beautiful mind, based on De Bono’s perspective, is to be able to share your knowledge and let other people admire you for your ability to be open and interesting at the same time. Chapters on ‘How to argue’, ‘how to agree’, ‘how to express you disapproval’ etc, are all presented in a nice, concise way. However, I quickly lost interest in the book and by the end it was an uphill struggle to finish it off. There are some really good ideas which are worth mentioning, like the fact that our instilled conversation model is inherently wrong and that it is not a case of us-against –them. Instead, the idea is to find common ground and develop as a human being through the power of the mind, by being open to other people and their ideas. Another interesting idea was the practical implementation of the “six thinking hats”, but this is just a sum up of common practice. I believe that common practice and common sense can be used instead to accomplish the same results.

All in all, it was a good and easy read but an average one at the same time. I don’t think I gained much reading this book but for some people certain conversation techniques may be useful and enhance their ability to interact with other people.