The Power of Impossible Thinking
Act Quickly and Effectively
Challenging Your Own Thinking
- Put yourself in the shoes of these three people early in their careers.
- Would you have had the guts and conviction to do what they did?
- If you look at your own world for areas where businesses are considered
mature and products are commodities, do you have the power to break out of this
model and reinvent them the way Schultz did with coffee drinking?
- Can you use insights from your personal experiences to transform the way you approach your
work in the way that Oprah Winfrey brought her own personality into the redesign of the talk show?
- If you look to reinvent your products and services, do you have the courage—and paranoia—to
cannibalize and destroy your existing business, as Grove did, even when you control the market?
- Pick one example from each of the three areas (personal, business and society). What model do you
currently use to assess the situation?What other models could be used? How does the choice of models shape
your position on the issue and your decisions about it?
- When you read news stories, cultivate a practice of asking: Whatmental models underlie the decisions
and actions reported upon? What are some different models for looking at the same situation,
and how do they change the options available? Pay particular attention to national and international
political debates or court cases, where different models often define the battle lines.
- As you encounter situations throughout the day, identify and explicitly articulate the mental
models at work. How can you get better at recognizing the underlying models