Book Reviews

The Six Value Medals

by Edward De Bono

"There is no natural tendency towards simplicity. We have to make a deliberate effort to find a simpler way of doing things."

Summary

Easily finished on a three hour train journey, De Bono offers a systematic way of covering all the angles of the potential impact of a decision. It's a neat approach to impact analysis, providing a framework within which to consider questions like "What do you want to achieve?" and "What's important here?".

The Best Bits

Giving a name to something enables us to deal with it more effectively: De Bono's Value Medals provide a useful and (perhaps) memorable checklist of decision criteria. He is also a master at simplifying the complex and turning it into the obvious, for example, "Design means putting known things together to create new value."

The Worst Bits

Use of the word 'values' is stretched to breaking point, encompassing a huge array of ideas, and it didn't work for me. Some sections also seemed confusingly disconnected from the rest of the book; and De Bono puts forward as truth some arguable assertions with no convincing evidence to support them.

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