Theo Todman's Book Collection (Book-Paper Abstracts)

Amazon Customer Review
How to publish two dozen books having ideas for only one:

1. The book is recommended to all researchers and professors who have run out of ideas but need (or just would like) to publish. "Parallel thinking" is a fine example of how to pick up old and well tested ideas and approaches, rename them, add logical paradoxes and clear flaws, introduce provocative terminology (e.g. calling Socrates, Plato and Aristotle "Greek Gang of Three") - and publish that!
2. "Parallel thinking" as it is explained by de Bono is essentially what now is known as a brainstorming, i.e. technique requiring to put as many ideas as possible about certain issue on the table without any critique or judgment about their validity, applicability, compatibility with common sense (whatever it is) and each other, etc. After that the author makes an amazing statement about seemingly (for him) existence of contradiction between this method and critical reasoning (which is usually a technique applied to the results of the brainstorming and thus does not contradict, but complements it). In addition to author's seeming inability to distinguish between a set of different arguments brought forward to support or refute a certain idea (they can be viewed as being "parallel" in a certain sense) and development of the same single argument (which is essentially a sequential process, ruled usually by the laws of logic), the idea to conduct solution (decision or an action plan) synthesis, called by the author "design", merging all "parallel thoughts", including mutually exclusive and contradictory ones, also definitely deserves reader's critical (not "parallel") thinking.
3. The book would most surely benefit from author's acquaintance with basic marketing courses about branding (and possibly some other). In this case de Bono could blame for "stereotype thinking" not the educational system, but general homo sapiens’ inability to use innovative approaches in everyday life due to the substantial inefficiency of such approach.
4. The same could be told about almost all other "major points of Western thinking style" printed in bold letters across the book. They lack some "final analysis touch". Readers, from my point of view, would be much more interested not in statements "that's because educational system/Socrates/sophists/etc. taught us to do - period", but from explanation of why they did so. Those explanations could also help the author to understand a lot of issues, undeservingly called "paradoxes" in the book.
5. Otherwise I really liked those "bold letters" statements. There's usually one per two pages and reading only them instead of the whole text could save the potential reader a lot of time. In addition, the book does contain some good ideas, for example, a note about great emotional satisfaction of critical reasoning: achievement, easiness, contribution, etc ....
6. Unfortunately, these ideas are not author's, but that does not make them any worse - and readers really looking for truly original and profound thoughts about man's thinking process are advised to look elsewhere.