Edward De Bono

Edward De Bono is one of the most recognized thinkers of the 20th century. He is also one of the greatest to hail from Malta. The originator of lateral thinking, first coined in 1967, De Bono obtained degrees in psychology, physiology and medicine from numerous academies of higher learning, such as Trinity College, Cambridge, Oxford (where he was a Rhodes scholar) and the University of Malta. He travelled to the United States as a research associate at Harvard Medical School in 1979, and went on to assist in the establishment of the School of Thinking in New York. He went on to write a myriad of publications concerning his theories that have been translated into multiple languages while also teaching across Europe. These include The Use of Lateral Thinking in 1967, The Mechanism of the Mind in 1969, and Six Thinking Hats in 1985. De Bono is also the founder of the World Academy of New Thinking and Peace studies that is based in Malta. A course on his theories is offered on his website, where multitudes of young minds come to broaden their minds to creative venues of thinking. He has won a variety of different awards, including the Capire Prize in 1992 (where he was the first ever recipient), the Pioneer Prize in the field of Thinking in 1994, and he was awarded the National Order of Merit in 1995 by the President of Malta. Mr. De Bono was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2005. His theories have been lauded by numerous entrepreneurs, including Richard Branson and Jack Smulowitz. Mr. De Bono has also assisted a myriad of companies execute their ideas, including NTT (Japan), British Airways, AT&T, and Siemens. De Bono’s theory of lateral thinking centres around the use of creative methods to solve problems instead of pure logic. Humans are complex creatures and De Bono presses that there is no one way to solve a problem; the brain is a muscle that incorporates numerous elements to decipher a dilemma, and not always in a way that is expected. De Bono is also the developer of the Six Thinking Hats theory (a title of one of his many publications), a concept that expresses the numerous ways one can address a thought. De Bono addresses that there are many distinct ways the brain will encounter and work to solve a problem, and he animated this metaphor by using six differently coloured hats to prove his argument. This theories have revolutionized the way people around the world encounter and discover solutions for problems, whether they be everyday grievances or philosophical matters.