Thinking Strategically: Power Tools for Personal and Professional Advancement

By Craig Loehle and Loehle Craig

Book Overview

Professionals today, whether scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs or managers, need to maximise their effectiveness. Hard work and motivation are not enough. Strategic thinking is needed to be able to choose the right problem to solve, to solve it in a cost-effective way, to use resources efficiently and to be innovative and productive. The combination of skill, motivation and the strategic use of effort can lead to astonishing levels of productivity. Real-world problems are complex and must be tackled with adequate conceptual tools. These tools are based on an understanding of the power of bottlenecks, paradox, scale and perspective constraints, and feedback as leverage points for getting to grips with the problem. Thinking Strategically provides the necessary power tools for dissecting complex problems and for creating innovative solutions.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521568412
• ISBN13: 9780521568418
• Release Date: August 1996
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

An Outstanding Professional Guide

This is a must-have guide for anyone in, or preparing to work in, a professional field involving scientific discovery, creating things, or solving complex real-world problems.

What are the three pillars of professional productivity?

Knowing how to increase my productivity has benefited me in several ways: monetarily, satisfaction, competitive advantages for myself and clients, etc. Leohle explains why skill, motivation, and strategic use of time and effort results in professional success. Worthy library addition for any thinker.

Interesting ideas on how we can be our own guru

Politicians have trusted advisers and strategists who guide them in their every move. There are, however, many professions that require innovative thinking and decision making, and whose practitioners have to be their own strategists. Of course, people in such occupations could do what most people do, which is to use a trusted colleague as a sounding board for their ideas. However, many times a colleague is not available, and even if one were, there is no guarantee that he or she will have the level of discernment needed for a particular problem. It is possible to circumvent the lack of a guru, a spin doctor or a discerning friend, by verifying our own ideas before implementing them. Loehle's book Thinking Strategically: Power Tools for Personal and Professional Advancement, teaches us how to condition our intellect to think ahead so that we can plan a strategy to attain that which is important to us. Naturally, this includes choosing the best path whilst avoiding pitfalls, side-tracking and even derailment from the path. For that, we must learn how to study the particular, while keeping an eye on the whole, and to keep in perspective several logical and causal connections simultaneously. Then, when we master how to think by ourselves, we must learn how to be our own sounding board, that is, how to check our results against all possible errors that can occur during the thinking process and compare them objectively against a known standard. This aspect of strategic thinking is referred to as reality check. The author distinguishes two types: internal and external. The former is important because many of the patterns we perceive are not real but artefacts of our imagination or, may have resulted from an array of potential errors of thinking such as faulty generalization, bad use of logic, incoherence and bad risk checking. The external reality check is like scientific hypothesis testing or the test drive of a new car, and it requires us to submit our result to an array of tests to discredit it, and finally to peer review. One does not need to be a book worm to fully appreciate this book but being reasonably well-read in scientific and technological matters will help to fully appreciate the examples taken from the great innovators. Thinking Strategically is a cornucopia of rich pickings of allegories, common sense and wisdom tempered by the amusing illustrations of Richard Loehle. I recommend this book for anyone challenged to provide novel ideas or solutions to problems still untackled by routine manuals. pires.obrien@netmatters.co.uk

Good content, bad writing

This book was higly recommended to me by a colleague, and after reading it I realize that the content is indeed very good. But the aridity in the author's writing style sometimes jeopardize the content. The text should be more pleasant to read, with more passion and more fun, but instead, it reads like a scientific thesis, with almost no emotion. The few times the author tries to throw a little humor into the text, it looks like it's out of context. But, again, it is worth reading for the very well structured message about strategic thinking tools and techniques, even if ater a while you become a little bored.