Thinking for a Change: 11 Ways Highly Successful People Approach Life and Work

Citation

Bensiali, A.K. (2005), "Thinking for a Change: 11 Ways Highly Successful People Approach Life and Work", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 26 No. 2, pp. 164-166. https://doi.org/10.1108/01437730510582590

The book is about success and how to achieve it and achieve the author's key objective of helping people to grow personally and to develop as leaders. It describes the relationship between success and the way people think and that to be successful people need to change the way they think. Success is an outcome achieved only if it is preceded with the right thinking approach. The author brings to the fore the importance of thinking for human development, for fulfilment, sense of existence and sense of progress. In an easy to read and easy flowing style, he explains how to engage in deliberate thinking, how to organise it, plan it and how to glean it. He describes the nature of thinking, its importance and guides the reader through the process of making good use of thinking through intentionally and deliberately engaging in the activity of thinking. The book contains a rich variety of examples and lessons aiming at reinforcing the author's key theory that successful people think differently from unsuccessful people and at giving the reader a step‐by‐step recipe of 11 elements of how to change one's thinking and as prerequisite to success.

The book is divided into two main parts. The first part consists of three chapters and introduces the importance of good thinking and its relation with and impact on success. The third chapter guides the reader through the process of thinking and how to cultivate, nurture and develop good and great thoughts.

Right from the outset, the author clearly highlights the link between success and the way people think which eventually shapes their attitudes, motivations and approach and hence their behaviour and their actions which should lead them to success. He argues his thesis that it is the way people think that determines how successful they are and that successful people think differently from unsuccessful ones.

Thinking is abstract and is manifested in concrete activities whose qualities depend on how well people set their goals, use their resources and work to attain their targets. Maxwell introduces a formula in which he defines success as being the right result and to which thinking is fundamental. In the formula, success is a combination of key elements and depends on the right thought, right people, in the right environment, at the right time and for the right reason. The process of thinking concerns the right thought and each and every component and although the author defines some areas to think about, the book concentrates on how to think about issues rather than concentrating on the issues themselves.

The second part consists of 11 chapters of practical cognitive activities on how to develop one's thinking and thinking skills. In each chapter, John Maxwell presents a skill that people need for success and illustrates, with examples and in a variety of ways, approaches successful people use in life and in their work. Each requisite skill is introduced with its background and real life examples illustrate the importance of thinking. At the end of each of the 11 chapters on the requisite skill for success, there are questions for the reader meant as an exercise of thinking skill acquisition. The exercise gives a flavour of the sort of thinking process a person may engage in, requirements and objectives of a thinking activity.

This part of the book presents many kinds of thinking and is rich with examples, anecdotes and quotes. It concentrates on success, how it is viewed and how it can be achieved. To be successful people may need to potentially change their thinking and lives. The author illustrates the requisite of successful thinking namely broad horizons, in a focused, realistic, strategic ways and the importance of being conscious of one's possibilities and reviewing one's approaches. He points out to the limitations of popular common thinking, recognises the power and usefulness of shared thinking and team effort and ends his 11 skills with the importance of bench marking or bottom‐line thinking.

The book is an excellent read on success, the thinking processes of successful people and how a potential change can be achieved. It addresses basic fundamental issues that a person needs to engage in to develop their thinking process, and how thinking contributes to overall development that should eventually lead to success. Such issues are how to break one's thinking silos, getting out of one's boxes, being aware of the contradictions, and the relations between thinking, ideas, objectives, change and success.