Smart Thinking: How to Think Big, Innovate and Outperform Your Rivals

Smart Thinking: How to Think Big, Innovate and Outperform Your Rivals by Art Markman 



Publisher: Piatkus Books

Year: 2012
Format: Paperback
Pages: 259
Genres: Business, self-help, education, and teaching

Books Review: 

Smart thinking: How to think big, innovate and outperform your rival is a book written by Art Markman who is the Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas, Austin.   This is a book about improving thinking skills in solving problems smartly by forming good habits. 

Important notes: 
What is smart thinking? 
  • Smart thinking is the ability to solve new problems by using your current knowledge. For example, playing chess game, we can observe and practice in order to solve every level of chess game. Therefore, smart thinking can be improved and practiced by people. 


Create smart habits for changing behavior: 
  • In order to create smart habits, you have to map between an action and the environment consistently and perform that action repeatedly. For example, collating items in the warehouse, in order to complete the process smartly, a configuration of rack structure and a computer should be implemented by you so that you can save time and cost in data recording and arrangement of items. 


Suggestion for good presentation: 
  1. Start all of your presentation with an advance organizer.
  2. During a presentation, stay focused primarily on your three main points. The more digressions and other interesting facts you add, the more likely it is that people will remember something other than the essential message you are hoping to convey
  3. At the end of every presentation, summarize your three existing points.


Causal Knowledge:
  • Causal knowledge, the knowledge you use to answer the question why is crucial for solving new problem.
  • A key aspect of causal knowledge is that it is nested. A good explanation is one that is free of gaps (complete) and is also understandable.
  • Teaching yourself (help you find gaps in your causal knowledge)
  • You should demand this level of explanation from the people around you as well. 




Smart solving problem skills: 
  1. Write out a statement of the problem
  2. Ensure your problem statement is specific enough to be solved.
  3. Broaden the description by considering more of the situation
  4. Find one or more ways to classify the essence of the problem (jokes, proverb, story titles, and joke punch lines) 


My thoughts: 


After reading this book, to develop smart thinking skills in our daily life, I think forming smart habits should be the starting point to improve our thinking so that it can create actions to deliver good results in our works. Meanwhile, smart thinking should be formed based on your actual works in solving problems and referring books can make your works become better rather than the main solution to create smart thinking.  



Recommendation: 

I think this book is suitable for everyone interested in developing business, studying, lecturing, and seek to improve communication between people. Especially for people like to collect healthy lifestyle books, this book can be the collection series in book shelves! 


If you are interested in this book, you can check this link: 





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