I am passionate about developing clear, logical thinking and structuring problems to lead to the right solution. The question has dominated my thinking for quiet some time now and I have been reading widely. However, most of my reading has informed me – but has not yet helped me develop a methodology and skill to help me either see the truth or come up with new ideas. I have now hit upon an idea to study the thought process of thought leaders and successful people in various fields and learn from them – rather than just reading about the application of the concept. I will compile the methodology here along with links.
The first thinker to be profiled in the series is C.K. Prahalad, the author of the famous concept of market at the ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’.
He is renowned for coming up with break through ideas that helped management develop ‘next practices’ and change the perspective on management thinking. He was voted as the most influential business thinker in 2009 by The Times. He gave a couple of interviews on his thought process to the management journal s+b which was published recently. The article sheds light on how C.K. Prahalad was able to develop the concept and ideas.
New ideas are conceptual breakthroughs which can be derived from close observation.
the most powerful ideas did not come out of multiple examples. They came out of single-industry studies and single case studies. Big impactful ideas are conceptual breakthroughs, not descriptions of common patterns.
Conceptual break throughs are found by looking for outliers and weak signals
To me, the problems of greatest interest are things that you cannot explain with the current prevailing theory.Every one of my research projects started the same way: recognizing that the established theory did not explain a certain phenomenon. We had to stay constantly focused on weak signals. Each weak signal was a contradictory phenomenon that was not happening across the board. You could very easily say, “Dismiss it, this is an outlier, so we don’t have to worry about it.” But the outliers and weak signals were the places to find a different way to think about the problem
The first step is to identify the problem and frame it appropriately without worrying about the methodology.
“In developing all of these ideas, I learned not to start with the methodology, but with the problem. A lot of times, research tends to start with the methodology. I prefer to start with a problem that’s of interest and apply whatever methodology is appropriate…..
Finding evidence to observe pattern and derive logic
..when we started looking around, we suddenly found some examples….
Demonstrating the existence of pattern
So we looked at the logic…You have to create a story out of what doesn’t exist yet… and therefore you have to make it conceptually strong. The data is only an illustration.And you use stories or companies’ work as examples and illustrations of the concept, not as proof of good practice.
Disciplined precise thinking is required to put it across in a logical fashion.. like a flow chart
With every book or major article I write, I start by looking for a logical structure. It must be as simple as Euclid: The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Once you have this logical framework, everything else, all the examples, are just illustrations….
I can take any of my books and give you a flowchart in one page on the substance of the book…
Go read the full article here.
