08h30 – Registration and Early Morning Refreshments

09h30 – Welcome Address

09:45 – Keynote Address

• Grant Pattison, Group C.E.O. – Massmart
• Essential Strategic Decisions for South African Organisations

10h15 – Pearl Maphoshe, Group Human Capital Executive, Massmart

• Developing Thinking as a core Business Competence
• How Massmart is entrenching sound thinking practices and competent decision making at all levels in the organisation.
• Peter Drucker highlights that “companies who assume decision making is only done at senior level are making a dangerous mistake. Apparently ‘low level’ decisions are extremely important in your organisation. Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level in your organisation. It needs to be taught explicitly to everyone.”

10h45 – Mid-Morning Refreshments

SESSION ONE

11H15 – Conversations with Dr Edward de Bono
“Competence is becoming a commodity. Information is becoming a commodity. State of the Art Technology is becoming a commodity. So what is going to differentiate businesses? How are these commodities to be planned to deliver value? That means DESIGN. That means CREATIVITY. That means new IDEAS. Thinking is going to become more important in business than ever before.” – Dr EDWARD DE BONO

The History of Thinking
The power of perception and how your thinking can be a catalyst to out think, out maneuver and out plan your competitors.

How Great Thinkers have Shaped the World of Business
Greatest thinkers such as Einstein, Da Vinci and Aristotle have each shaped the way we think in the world today. How have their thinking techniques influenced the business world? Find out if you have fallen into the traditional thinking traps.

The Preceived Progress of Technology
Technology has made great strides in business, but what impact has it had on our thinking? Learn how to leverage technological assets as a springboard to future progress.

12h45 – Lunch

SESSION TWO

13h45 – Conversations with Dr Edward de Bono

What’s NEXT? How do we PROGRESS?
To progress is to advance, improve and develop. In order to do all of these we need to THINK differently. In this session Dr de Bono will put forward tools that, once developed as a skill, can ensure that your business continues to progress and advance well into the future.

“If you do not design your future, someone or something else will design it for you. The past is not a sufficient blue print for the future. You can analyse the past but you have to design the future. Most corporations could double their profits with a good idea.” – Dr EDWARD DE BONO

15h15 – Afternoon Refreshments

15h45 – Closing Keynote

• Andrew Le Roux GM Finance, Risk and Customer Solutions
• Old Mutual Retail Mass Market
• How new ideas are shaping our nation and the next steps for South Africa.
• Essential business sector contributions in shaping our future: Leverage new thinking and action to achieve powerful results in your organization.

16h30 – Close of Conference & Cocktail Reception

Dr Edward de Bono Book List

• Atlas of Management Thinking
• Conflicts: A Better Way to Solve Them
• de Bono’s Thinking Course
• Five Day Thinking Course
• Future Positive
• Handbook for a Positive Revolution
• Happiness Purpose
• How to Be More Interesting
• I am Right, You are Wrong
• Lateral Thinking: A Textbook of Creativity
• Lateral Thinking for Management
• Letters to Thinkers
• The Mechanism of Mind
• New Thinking for the New Millennium
• Opportunities
• Parallel Thinking: From Socratic Thinking to de Bono Thinking
• Po: Beyond Yes and No
• Practical Thinking
• Serious Creativity
• Simplicity
• Six Action Shoes
• Six Thinking Hats
• Sur/Petition
• Teach Your Child How to Think
• Teach Yourself How to Think
• Teaching Thinking
• The Use of Lateral Thinking
• Water Logic
• Word Power

Dr Edward de Bono Testimonials

Thank you for all the wonderful feedback we have received. Here are some highlights of what you said…

“I leave this session a different person with the commitment to adapt to new ways of thinking and apply these in my personal and work life.”
Nomsa Motsegare, Chief Operating Officer, National Credit Regulator

“Food for thought. de Bono makes it simple and accessible. This is very much needed in our education system.”
Colleen McCallum, Managing Director, Cambridge University Press Excellent

“Companies can invest in their employees be sending them to one of Dr de Bono’s conferences. Changes your thinking completely. I am impressed.”
Babalwa Mgolombane, Administration Manager, Old Mutual

“Eye opening to more possibilities – gives structure to a solution driven mind.”
Michelle Connan, Procurement Manager, Old Mutual

RICARDO SEMLER – MAVERICK OR LATERAL THINKER?

by Nicola Tyler | 31 July 2013

“If we have a cardinal strategy that forms the bedrock of all these challenges, it’s “Ask Why?”.    Ask it all the time, and always ask it three times in a row.  This doesn’t come naturally.  People are conditioned to recoil from questioning too much.  First, it’s rude and dangerous.  Second, it may imply we are ignorant or uninformed.  Third, it means everything we think we know may not be correct or true.  Fourth, management is usually frightened by the prospect of employees who question continually.  But, mostly, it means putting aside all the rote or pat answers that have resulted from what I call ‘crystallized’ thinking, the state of mind where ideas have so hardened into inflexible and unquestioned concepts that they are no longer of any use.  Employees must be free to question, to analyze, to investigate, and a company must be flexible enough to listen to the answers.  Those habits are key to longevity, growth and profit. 

We don’t know if Semler ever attended a lateral thinking seminar, but what we do know is that Edward de Bono introduced us to a deliberate lateral thinking tool called Challenge.  A tool that asks the question “why?” – three times!  The challenge tool is brilliant for questioning businesses’ processes and systems, but can be applied to any traditional thinking.

Challenge is designed to question the status quo in a deliberate way but without attacking it.  The technique is simple to learn, yet despite its simplicity, we still tend to give up before the end.  In the de Bono approach, we would list our traditional thinking about a situation, what he terms a “Checklist of Current Thinking”.  Once you have that, you then ask Why in the same style that Semler does, but in a slightly more deliberate manner.

The first approach is to ask Why C?  The C stands for Cut.  Here we are questioning the necessity of something – do we really need it or could this be “cut” out so to speak.  If you consider a chair, you might challenge the legs of the chair.  Can we “cut” the legs?  In my work, I generally find that there are few things people are comfortable cutting:  often the Why C naturally leads the thinker to the next Why in the process.

Why B?  The B stands for Because and is intended to highlight the reasons why something is done in a particular way.  We do this ‘because…’.  Considering the chair example, chairs have legs because they provide support for the seat:  it’s a way of keeping the seat off the ground and creating height for comfort and style.    In the Challenge process, de Bono also encourages us to question the validity of these reasons.  Is style a valid reason?  Perhaps not.  Is a way of creating a height a valid reason?  Yes it is.  If it weren’t for the legs, the chair would be called a cushion.  It would just be a seat on the floor, and if it was a moulded seat, might even be more uncomfortable.

Which bring us to the last Why – Why A?  Here the A stands for Alternatives, and de Bono asks us to question is there another way – is there an alternative to legs, or could we seek to satisfy the reason in a new, different or better way.  The deliberate search for an alternative requires a positive mental attitude, (the basic belief that there may be a better way), as well as deliberate effort.  All too often we don’t even consider alternatives, for the same reasons that Semler states – you may be proven wrong, or perhaps even right.

João Vendramin, our 60-year old director emeritus, once asked a worker if he’d ever considered a different approach to his job.   ‘He answered that his boss told him to do it that way,’ Vendramin remembers.  ‘So I insisted.  He told me that once he had done this job differently, but his boss reprimanded him.  While trying to explain to his boss what happened he said, “I was thinking that….” To which his boss instantly replied, “Thinking?  You are not supposed to think.  I am the one who thinks here.”’

Source: The Seven-Day Weekend by Ricardo Semler

Want to know more?  Ricardo Semler, Author of The Seven-Day Weekend and Maverick and CEO of Semco, one of Brazil’s top performing, privately owned companies, will be sharing his innovative thinking.  Visit www.theprogressconference.com for more information or call Ingrid on 011 463 9898.