Diaminds

'A sizzling foray into the habits of the minds of the best thinkers and leaders. Your own mind will not remain unscathed once you read this book: It will force you to rethink how you think!' -- Nitin Nohria, Richard P. Chapman Professor, Harvard Business School; co-author of 'In Their Time: The Greatest Business Leaders of the Twentieth Century' 'Diaminds challenges readers to ask profound questions about thinking, personal meaning and purpose, and their relationship to successful leadership. Clearly written with astonishing intellectual range and reporting on insightful research on senior organizational leaders, this book offers not a recipe or checklist for success but something much more important: a way of improving each reader's effectiveness as a problem-solver.' -- Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor, Stanford Business School; author of 'What Were They Thinking? Unconventional Wisdom About Management' 'An insightful and pragmatic treatise and guide ... the necessity and art of "thinking about thinking while thinking," from two masters of heuristics. A must-read for all students and practitioners of problem solving in business and beyond.' -- Martin Reeves, Managing Director, Boston Consulting Group; Director, BCG Strategy Institute 'Bold, provocative, and engaging. Moldoveanu and Martin challenge us to tap one of the most powerful sources of advantage in business - thinking (and thinking about thinking) - more effectively.' -- Jan Rivkin, Bruce Rauner Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

Moldoveanu and Martin draw upon case studies and interviews - as well as theories and models from cognitive psychology, epistemology, analytic philosophy, and semiotics - to offer a new conception of successful intelligence that is immediately applicable to business situations.

What constitutes successful thinking in business? What are some of the techniques used by top business minds in order to solve problems and create value? Diaminds breaks new ground in addressing these questions.

Mihnea Moldoveanu and Roger Martin, creators of the Integrative Thinking curriculum at the Rotman School of Management, draw upon case studies and interviews - as well as theories and models from cognitive psychology, epistemology, analytic philosophy, and semiotics - to offer a new conception of successful intelligence that is immediately applicable to business situations. The 'diamind' (or dialogical mind) is characterized by bi-stability (simultaneously holding opposite plans, models, courses of action in mind while retaining the ability to act), meliorism (increasing the logical depth and informational breadth of one's thinking processes), choicefulness (retaining the ability to choose among various representations of the world, the self and others) and polyphony (thinking about the way one formulates and solves a problem while at the same time thinking about the problem itself).

End-of-chapter exercises encourage readers to examine and re-engineer their own thought and perception patterns to develop these qualities and cultivate their own 'diaminds.'