Diaminds: Decoding the Mental Habits of Successful Thinkers

What constitutes successful thinking in business? What are some of the techniques used by top business minds in order to solve problems and create value? Diaminds breaks new ground in addressing these questions.

Mihnea Moldoveanu and Roger Martin, creators of the Integrative Thinking curriculum at the Rotman School of Management, draw upon case studies and interviews - as well as theories and models from cognitive psychology, epistemology, analytic philosophy, and semiotics - to offer a new conception of successful intelligence that is immediately applicable to business situations. The 'diamind' (or dialogical mind) is characterized by bi-stability (simultaneously holding opposite plans, models, courses of action in mind while retaining the ability to act), meliorism (increasing the logical depth and informational breadth of one's thinking processes), choicefulness (retaining the ability to choose among various representations of the world, the self and others) and polyphony (thinking about the way one formulates and solves a problem while at the same time thinking about the problem itself).

End-of-chapter exercises encourage readers to examine and re-engineer their own thought and perception patterns to develop these qualities and cultivate their own 'diaminds.'

Minhea Moldoveanu is the director of the Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking and associate professor of Strategic Management at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Roger Martin is Academic Director at Martin Prosperity Institute, professor emeritus of Strategic Management, and former Dean at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.