Republished by Australian ANTHILL. Original interview July 1, 2004 | By Paul Ryan:

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: There are two strands of thought that I’ve written about in the past (Software for the Brain and Newsell) and these are brought together in The X10 Memeplex: Multiply Your Business By Ten.

Software for the Brain talks about the brain as a necktop computer. It’s less of a metaphor and more of a reality, since the brain is a deeply digital environment. The software we’re using is 2,500 years old – including programming from the church, the Middle Ages, the Greek software of Aristotle, Socrates and Plato, the concept of absolute truth and logic, which was distributed around the world with missionary zeal. Just as we need to upgrade our desktop computers, we also need to upgrade our necktop computer. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last 25 years with the School of Thinking that I founded with Edward De Bono, and our lessons have reached over 70 million people worldwide.

That’s one strand – the thinking strand. The other strand, which I explored in Newsell, is the selling/leadership strand. Selling and leadership have to do with behavior and particularly influencing the behavior of other people. You can use coercion and force, which is an inefficient method. The other way to influence a person’s behavior is to influence their thinking. If you want people to change their behavior, whether it is in a leadership/social context or a commercial/selling context, you need to influence the way they see things. So that’s why there’s such a strong link between thinking and selling.

My subversive agenda is to get people thinking far and wide. If I can show a link between developing the thinking skills of employees and increasing the revenues of a company, it will help me teach people to think and grow.

••• Click through to the original article …

••• Take SOT’s course here and raise your own darwinian intelligence: Think Darwin! The ten lessons in this course are chapters from Michael’s book The X10 Memeplex, Multiply Your Business By Ten.

The X10 Memeplex: Multiply Your Business By Ten!

(Prentice Hall 2000).

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