I’ve just heard. To be truthful, I thought he died a long time ago. The man who is credited with inventing ‘lateral thinking’ has finally flatlined his brainwaves. He made a very good living out of thinking. Hats off to him for that. However, he never underestimated his own talent, referring to himself as a genius even when he was still a child.
I always thought of him and one of his committee meetings whenever I heard Steely Dan’s The Fez. Any excuse.
Am I alone in regarding him as a fraud? That’s a kind of talent, I suppose.
You’re not. He’s up there with the Myers-Briggs Foundation in capturing a ton of attention and a ton of cash for popularising absolute pseudoscience. But RIP and all that.
My dad’s just called him “Uri Geller without the spoons”
Ha!
Though to be fair to the old boy, “popularising absolute pseudoscience” doesn’t distinguish him in the slightest from any other purveyor of Exciting New Ideas In Education.
His brother wrote I Got You Babe
And his nephew is a little Irish fella who pays his taxes in Holland.
No idea if he was a quack or not & don’t really care.
A favourite book at home as a kid was De Bono’s ‘The Dog Exercising Machine’ – ( early 70s I’m guessing) it was a collection of drawings by children from 4 to 14 who’d been invited to submit their designs – as simple or as elaborate as they liked – they were mostly charming & some were so hilarious I can picture them to this day.
There was a bit of commentary about what the designs said about the kid’s approach (encouraging, punitive, ridiculous etc.) that was quite illuminating as a junior school kid, & probably my first introduction to the idea of subtext or the subconscious. Heady stuff.
One of a dynasty of Maltese De Bono’s, his nephew is a cardiologist in Brum.
I read some of his management books which I found useful and still use some of his approaches even now. Oddly they lend themselves to song writing too.