Think Better: An Innovator’s Guide to Productive Thinking–A Book Review

Published by McGraw Hill, this is a must read for any salesperson, sales leader, president or any manager. Author Tim Hurson does a masterful job in leading the reader through the entire mental process of challenging the reader to think better.

The sub-title uses the word “Guide” and indeed it is. I folded over 23 pages with many underlined passages and marked up tools while I read this book. It is that engaging.

Tim begins the learning process by bringing the reader along with an understanding of the fundamentals of thinking by introducing The Productive Thinking Model and its potential impact on driving increased levels of performance along with increasing creativity. What I also liked is the author’s ability to keep me active with an understanding of the Monkey Brain, Gator Brain and the Elephant’s Tether and how each example teaches the reader how they think and why the model/system must be used to be that innovator or creative solution solver.

Without giving away the book-as you will want to introduce this book to your entire organization- this sentence is one of the gems: Productive thinking requires us not to rush to answers but hang back, to keep asking new questions even when the answers to the old ones seem so clear, so obvious, so right.

With an understanding of the concepts, in Chapter 6, Tim begins to then develop the process;

1. What’s going on?
2. What’s success?
3. What’s the question?
4. Generate answers
5. Forge the solution
6. Align resources

The balance of the book explores these 6 points in detail along with various tools Tim has included to show you how implement this process to improve your organization’s ability to address issues with better solutions. With an understanding of how we think and then by providing a process to follow with the examples/tools, this is the book that will change your level of professional success. HINT: He also addresses “personal” thinking as well.

In a challenging environment having better answers to tough questions separates high performance organizations from the average organizations-learn to think better-buy this book!

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