“The School of Thinking is moving in the right direction in helping our kids to become better thinkers”.
– COACH KEVIN SHEEDY, AFL Legend and 2008 Australian Thinker of the Year.
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“You have just given the best keynote address I have ever heard!”
– SIR NINIAN STEPHEN, AK who was Governor-General of Australia at the launch of the School of Thinking in Australia in 1988 in Canberra.
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“I applaud the School of Thinking for it’s teaching of scientific thinking and am very happy to receive this award. Science is very exciting. It’s not easy but it’s incredibly exciting. It really grabs you and it doesn’t let you go. It’s a detective story and it’s an adventure story and you never know what’s going to happen next.”
– PROFESSOR JENNY GRAVES is Distinguished Professor of Genetics at La Trobe University here receiving her Australian Thinker of the Year Award in 2007. In 2017 Professor Graves was awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science, for her pioneering investigations of the genetics of sex.
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“I live by the gospel of x10. Most companies would be happy to improve a product by 10 percent. Not me. I expect my employees to create products and services that are 10 times better than the competition. I’m not satisfied with discovering a couple of hidden efficiencies or tweaking code to achieve modest gains. x10 improvement requires rethinking problems entirely, exploring the edges of what’s technically possible, and having a lot more fun in the process”
“Better strategic thinking skills are a top priority for the Army and the School of Thinking’s work in teaching these skills makes a big contribution not only to Australia’s productivity but also to our security.”
– Maj General Jim Molan DSC, Best-selling author of Running the War in Iraq and 2009 Australian Thinker of the Year.
“I believe the School of Thinking’s work in teaching people how to think may be the most important thing going on in the world today!”
“When I first saw a School of Thinking lesson in action, I was amazed at how something so simple and so much fun could be so quick and effective in developing a person’s ‘thinking muscle’. We all, as individuals, need these thinking skills.”
– DR PAUL B. MACCREADY JR, Inventor of the Gossamer Albatross, father of man-powered flight.
“Michael, you are a friend of the company. I wish I had a management team that really understood the x10 algorithm. It’s the value-added role in the management process. It’s the simplest idea in the world”.
In business, Jack Welch was the most famous advocate of cvs2bvs in the US. He used cvs2bvs at GE to help him change the culture of a 100-year-old manufacturer to the most valuable company (at the time he left it) in the history of the world!
I was invited to GE soon after he became chairman and CEO. In the 1980s I spent several years, at his request, designing GE x10 and installing the cvs2bvs brain software at GE. In his book called, Jack (Warner Books 2001), he wrote, “It would make each of us wake up with the goal of “Finding a Better Way Every Day”. It was a phrase that became a slogan, put up on the walls of GE factories and offices around the world”.
Jack also used cvs2bvs in crisis management situations and on one very serious occasion involving a national crisis between GE and Reagan’s Defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, Jack asked me to meet with him urgently, in Manhattan, to apply cvs2bvs to finding a solution. The crisis was resolved within 48 hours!
He also told me that it helped him design new concepts like ‘Boundarylessness’ and ‘Work-Out’. He wrote, “Suddenly, “Finding a Better Way Every Day” wasn’t just a slogan. It was the essence of boundaryless behaviour, and it defined our expectations”. Jack was famous for the little hand-written notes he would send to people. He sent me several and the one I prized the most was, “Michael, you are a friend of our company”.
