Editorial Review:
If you want to be as successful as Jack Welch, Larry Bossidy, or Michael Dell, read their autobiographical advice books, right? Wrong, says Roger Martin in The Opposable Mind. Though following “best practice” can help in some ways, it also poses a danger: By emulating what a great leader did in a particular situation, you’ll likely be terribly disappointed with your own results. Why? Your situation is different.
Instead of focusing on what exceptional leaders do, we need to understand and emulate how they think. Successful businesspeople engage in what Martin calls integrative thinking—creatively resolving the tension in opposing models by forming entirely new and superior ones. Drawing on stories of leaders as diverse as AG Lafley of Procter & Gamble, Meg Whitman of eBay, Victoria Hale of the Institute for One World Health, and Nandan Nilekani of Infosys, Martin shows how integrative thinkers are relentlessly diagnosing and synthesizing by asking probing questions—including “What are the causal relationships at work here?” and “What are the implied trade-offs?”
Martin also presents a model for strengthening your integrative thinking skills by drawing on different kinds of knowledge—including conceptual and experiential knowledge.
Integrative thinking can be learned, and The Opposable Mind helps you master this vital skill.
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Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 
Opposable Thought  2008-06-16
In other words, playing all sides until a leader gets the result they are looking for. A fantastic book. Very enjoyable and mind bending.
Poor Model of Thought With No Justification  2008-05-27
This books starts off by presenting the concept of the "integrative thinker", which is a person who has "the predisposition and capacity to hold two diametrically opposing ideas in their heads. And then without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they're able to produce a synthesis that is superior to either opposing idea"
If you look closely at this and read the examples in the book of the "opposable mind" in action, you'll begin to notice an assumption that we have no reason to believe is true.
The Main Assumption:
Focusing on the two (or more) alternatives leads to the third alternative chosen.
There is no reason to believe that the managers in the situations in this book developed further possibilities and alternatives from the apparent existing possibilities and alternatives. In most of the situations given as examples in the book, the managers appeared to be developing new possibilities out of a more fundamental knowledge of the situation at hand, rather than "integrating" and focusing on a few possible reactions to a situation.
I think that this book mainly serves as a red herring to those looking to develop creative thinking. Creative thinking is not linear as this book suggests. You typically don't develop the third alternative by focusing on the first two any more than you develop the second alternative by focusing on the first.
Not much added to the newspaper review  2008-04-20
This book highlights that successful people often share the ability to hold two opposing ideas in their mind, and debate them, and then draw conclusions that are often novel. Not a new observation for sure, but interesting to explore. I bought this book after reading a review in the Financial Times (?). Unfortunately having read the book in full I concluded that there was little that was added to the review that stimulated me to buy the book in the first place. There are interesting examples of businesses described for sure, but many only marginally support the main thesis.
An absolutely needed recognition to the power of the human mind. 2008-03-30
Before we do anything in the reality, we always think, in a way or another, about the outcomes of what we are about to do, and that outcomes give our acts a reason. This book focus in thought, and how some people have developed and strikingly different way to think about their problems, that leads them to incredible achievements. That's the 'Opposable Mind', the capacity of building better solutions integrating two seemingly opposed ideas. I clearly recommend this book, because it really changes your way of thinking, letting you build solutions that you couldn't do before.
Because of the concrete focus, execution have been preferred over thinking, and many authors have written books about 'how to get the things done'. This book it's an accolade to the power that made us prevalent in the world, and a path to continue developing this capacity, the thinking ability.
Choosing "both" instead of "either/or"... 2008-02-17
All too often, we're faced with choices where we have to settle for the best possible alternative given the situation. But what if you could synthesize new solutions from the conflicting options? That's the premise of the book The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking by Roger Martin. He looks at successful business leaders who have the ability to hold two conflicting, or opposing, ideas at once and then formulate a new solution that blends the best of both worlds.
Contents:
Choices, Conflict, and the Creative Spark; No Stomach for Second-Best; Reality, Resistance, and Resolution; Dancing Through Complexity; Mapping the Mind; The Construction Project; A Leap of the Mind; A Wealth of Experience; Notes; Index; About The Author
Martin looks at the business world, specifically at leaders who were faced with difficult decisions with conceivably no good options. Using the concept of an opposable mind, he shows how the eventual outcome was a blend of available options, which often opened up a new reality that wasn't there on first glance. One example is Lee-Chin and his investment firm AIC Limited. He almost went broke in 1999 when his model for investment was under attack from the press and financial "experts". The typical outcome of this situation would be to fold the fund as redemptions were outpacing investments. But rather than follow the conventional wisdom for retrenching, he decided to take the exact opposite approach. He focused his investment on a single financial stock who had solid fundamentals. This decision, the "wrong" one according to the experts, ended up making AIC the largest privately held mutual fund company in Canada. The same type of situation faced Isadore Sharp and his Four Seasons hotels. Conventional wisdom said you had to be low-end or high-end, but you couldn't try to accommodate both. But through offering an entirely different level of service, he was able to establish his hotels as medium sized building with luxury offerings, and people were willing to pay the extra price for that level of service.
This is a very readable book that dives into the mindset of an opposable mind and steps that allow anyone to become an opposable thinker. By understanding the thought processes involved, you can go from an attitude of "either/or" to an attitude of "both". What I took away is the importance of not seeing the solution in the way things are, but looking for the solution in the way things could be. If you can imagine a new reality instead of conforming to the existing one, you can often find answers that weren't there before...
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