The Power of Impossible Thinking: Transform the Business of Your Life and the Life of Your Business (The Wharton Press Paperback Series)

Description

"Wind and Crook have written a marvellous book that can teach you how to think more effectively in personal and business settings. Read it and learn!" Drea Zigarmi, author of The Leader Inside: Learning Enough About Yourself to Lead Others and co-author of Leadership and the One Minute Manager.

If you think impossible thoughts, you can do impossible things! That's the message of this book. But how do you do it? The Power of Impossible Thinking is about getting better at making sense of what's going on around you so you can make decisions that respond to reality, not inaccurate or obsolete models of the world. Now in paperback for the first time, this bestseller reveals how your mental models stand between you and the truth and how to transform them into your biggest advantage. You'll learn how to develop new ways of seeing, when to change to a new model, how to swap amongst a portfolio of models, how to "zoom in and out" to understand complex environments and how to do "mind R and D," improving your models through constant experimenation.

Jerry Wind and Colin Crook review why it's so hard to change mental models and offer practical strategies for dismantling the "hardened missile silos" that are your old and obsolete models. Finally they show how to access models quickly through intuition, and help you assess the effectiveness of any mental model. This paperback edition contains an all-new introduction that illuminates the stunning power of mental models in domains ranging from business and technology to geopolitics. Purchasers of this book gain access to audio summaries on a companion web site, along with a new half-hour interview with the authors.

 

Table of Contents

(An Aside) Is This Any Way to Start a Book?  xxiii

Preface  xlvii

Introduction to the Paperback Edition  lix

 

Part 1:  Recognize the Power and Limits of Mental Models  1

Chapter 1:  Our Models Define Our World  3

Chapter 2:  Running the Miracle Mile  21

 

Part 2:  Keeping Your Models Relevant  37

Chapter 3:  Should You Change Horses?  39

Chapter 4:  Paradigm Shifts Are a Two-Way Street  57

Chapter 5:  Seeing a New Way of Seeing  77

Chapter 6:  Sift for Sense from Streams of Complexity  93

Chapter 7:  Engage in R&D of the Mind  121

 

Part 3:  Transform Your World  139

Chapter 8:  Dismantle the Old Order  141

Chapter 9:  Find Common Ground to Bridge Adaptive Disconnects  157

 

Part 4:  Act Quickly and Effectively  171

Chapter 10:  Develop the Intuition to Act Quickly  173

Chapter 11:  The Power to Do the Impossible  189

Chapter 12:  Challenging Your Own Thinking: Personal, Business, and Society  209

 

Conclusion:  What You Think Is What You Do  235

Appendix:  The Neuroscience Behind Mental Models  239

 

Selected Bibliography  257

Acknowledgments  261

Index  263