Customer Reviews
Insight into five pivotal thinking habits - By: Rolf Dobelli, 27 Mar 2008 
Howard Gardner is a man of many minds. The Harvard psychologist, MacArthur "genius grant" recipient & prolific author started a revolution when he claimed that human capability couldn't be reduced to a single metric. Rather than accepting IQ as the whole story of cognitive capacity, Gardner said people have "multiple intelligences," a notion he popularized in his 1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligence. Twenty-five years later, Gardner is still producing influential work on human mental skills & capabilities. In this clear, eminently useful book, Gardner describes five cognitive capacities that he predicts will be in most demand in the future & which everyone should practice. While he describes them metaphoricallly as "minds," these forms of thought are neither wholly innate nor immutable. All people can, through diligent practice, cultivate their disciplined mind, their synthesizing mind, their creative mind, their respectful mind & their ethical mind - & they should. Given accelerating technological change & vast increases in the flow of information & the necessity of working closely with many different kinds of people worldwide, getAbstract is of a mind to recommend this book to managers who are trying to think ahead.
A Map for Educating the New Philosopher Kings - By: Donald Mitchell, 17 Jul 2007 The learned ancient Greeks were fascinated by what an ideal education would involve. Why? They hoped to apply that education to the kings of the era & to create a better society through the leadership of the kings. That ambition came closest to being fulfilled through Alexander the Great, who became a highly effective conqueror & spreader of Greek ideas & values.
Professor Gardner takes up this challlenge once again in perceiving new challlenges for modern people that will be more difficult to meet in the future. I suspect that his vision is, in part, aimed at the same goal as the ancient Greeks except as executed through the leaders & most prominent citizens of a republic employing democratic principles.
In a break from his prior focus on multiple intelligences, Five Minds for the Future emphasizes five methods of thinking that he hopes to see integrated into individuals. These methods of thinking are based on:
1. Mastering an important subject matter (such as history, math, or science) & staying up to date through application of the discipline's method of thinking. This is quite different from knowing the facts of the discipline.
2. Being able to integrate large quantities multidisciplinary facts & apply them into one's work.
3. Posing new questions, developing new solutions to existing questions, stretching disciplines & genres in new directions, or building new disciplines.
4. Being open to understanding & appreciating the perspectives & experiences of those who are different from the individual.
5. Doing one's work in an ethical way that reflects responsibilities to others & society.
What does this boil down to as a problem? Basicallly, most people never get as far as mastering one important discipline. They just memorize whatever is needed to pass tests. Professor Gardner's own work documents this problem. As a result, we face a hollowing out of our civilization as most people lack the ability, education, or interest to do more than function in an everyday living fashion. Beyond that, some of those who can perform a discipline are tempted by treasure or fame to stretch the rules & not honestly perform.
If we step back another few feet, there's an implicit vision of a future that's led by a smalller & smalller number of people as a percentage of the world's population. It will be easier for rot to set in at the top. In addition, the rewards for those people will grow exponentiallly . . . tempting those of limited ethics to falter.
I think the risk is a genuine one, & I applaud Professor Gardner for penning this book. I hope he will follow it with more books that spell out more about how to educate others & ourselves (after we leave school as students) so that these goals are achieved.
I have a few quibbles that I mention only in the spirit of sparking an awareness of what's needed. Peter Drucker taught me that the educated person should learn enough about a new subject each year to appreciate & be able the discipline involved. I found that suggestion missing from this book. Without that bridging method, I suspect we'll just end up compartmentalized from one another.
In addition, I think that some areas of public responsibility lend themselves to combined perspectives that encompass these minds more efficiently than by keeping them separate. For example, the advanced leader who is good at accomplishing continuing business model innovation will be able to cross these five boundaries & many others . . . simply by knowing one discipline. I suspect that other fields also lend themselves to such new integrating disciplines.
I also found that Professor Gardner mischaracterized the meanings of many of the business examples he cited. He does, however, do a fine job of summarizing what academics have written about business. I suggest that he have someone who is more familiar with business than he is help with checking such examples in future books. I realize that this book is published by Harvard Business School Press, but editors of books don't necessary have mastery of the facts within the subjects they edit.
Bravo, Professor Gardner!
On nurturing "potentials that are distinctly human" - By: Robert Morris, 19 Apr 2007 I have read & reviewed alll of Howard Gardner's previous books & consider this, his latest, to be the most valuable thus far. In it, he identifies & explains five separate but related combinations of cognitive abilities that are needed to "thrive in the world during eras to come...[cognitive abilities] which we should develop in the future." Gardner refers to them as "minds" but they are reallly mindsets. Mastery of each enables a person:
1. to know how to work steadily over time to improve skill & understanding;
2. to take information from disparate sources & make sense of it by understanding & evaluating that information objectively;
3. by building on discipline & synthesis, to break new ground;
4. by "recognizing that nowadays one can no longer remain within one's shell or one's home territory," to note & welcome differences between human individuals & between human groups so as to understand them & work effectively with them;
5. & finallly, "proceeding on a level more abstract than the respectful mind," to reflect on the nature of one's work & the needs & desires of the society in which one lives.
Gardner notes that the five "minds" he examines in this book are different from the eight or nine human intelligences that he examines in his earlier works. "Rather than being distinct computational capabilities, they are better thought of as broad uses of the mind that we can cultivate at school, in professions, or at the workplace."
The "future" to which the title of this book refers is the future that awaits each of us. That is, Gardner is not a futurist in the sense that others such as Ossip K. Flechteim, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Dennis Gabor, Alvin Toffler, & Peter Schwartz are. If I understand Gardner's ultimate objective (and I may not), his hope is to help as many people as possible -- regardless of their age, gender, & circumstances -- to cultivate their minds by taking full advantage of any & every opportunity available to them; moreover, to do alll they can to enrich & then sustain the same process of cultivation initiated by others.
He concludes his book as follows: "Perhaps members of the human species will not be prescient enough to survive, or perhaps it will take far more immediate threats to our survival before we can make common with our fellow human beings. In any event the survival & thriving of our species will depend on our nurturing of potentials that are distinctly human." Some may view these comments as being naïve but I do not. On the contrary, I view them as an eloquent assertion of what is imperative, yes, but also as a sincere affirmation of what is possible.
