Dr. Edward de Bono

Edward de Bono is regarded by many as the leading authority in the field of creative thinking, innovation and the direct teaching of thinking as a skill. He is equally reknowned for his development of the Six Thinking Hats™ technique and the Direct Attention Thinking Tools™. He is the originator of the concept of Lateral Thinking® which is now part of language. Dr. de Bono was born in Malta. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, holds an M.A. in psychology and physiology from Oxford, a D. Phil. in Medicine and also a Ph.D. from Cambridge. He has held faculty appointments at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, London and Harvard. Dr. de Bono background in self-organising systems led him to derive an understanding which he then applied to the neural networks of the brain (see The Mechanism of Mind 1969 - Penguin books).

His instruction in thinking has been sought by many organisations: IBM, Prudential, GM, BT (UK), NTT (Japan), Nokia (Finland), Mondadori (Italy), Total (France), Siemens (Germany), Bosch (Germany), Ericsson (Sweden) and many others.

His methods are now mandatory on the school curriculum in many countries and widely used in others.

He has written 63 books with translations into 37 languages and has been invited to lecture in 57 countries.

The appeal of Dr. de Bono's work is its simplicity and practicality. It can be used by four year olds and by senior executives; by Down syndrome youngsters and Nobel laureates.

Dr. de Bono is currently the chairman of the Council of Young Enterprise Europe which has a membership of 1,500,000 youngsters across Europe, Israel and Russia who set up mini-businesses while at school.

In 1996 The European Creativity Association surveyed their members across Europe to ask who had most influenced them. Dr de Bono's name came so far ahead that they requested the official naming committee of the International Astronomical Union (in Massachusetts) to name a planet after him. So DE73 became E.de Bono.