THE world wouldn’t be suffering from its economic malaise if business leaders had graduated with Master of Business Intelligence degrees as opposed to MBAs (Master of Business Administration). That’s the nub of a challenging message that Tony Buzan, who has helped an estimated 250-million people with his Mind Mapping, is disseminating around the globe.
This “guru of grey matter” and award-winning poet recently arrived in Johannesburg fresh from the International Conference on Thinking in Malaysia, for a week of furious activity that would exhaust someone half his age, talking at universities, schools, businesses and launching a new book, Age- Proof Your Brain.
We’ve lived through the Agricultural Age and Industrial Age, and are now in the Information Age, “although recently information workers have been elevated to knowledge workers,” says Buzan in his beautifully enunciated English, delivered with a twist of dry humour.
He is a dapper man, dressed in an exquisite grey suit finished off with a gentle pink tie and matching pocket handkerchief. Many of his answers are laced with a question for the interviewer.
It is quite obvious from reading business papers and magazines such as the Wall Street Journal, he says, that it was a lack of intellect that caused the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
He lays this at the feet of business leaders, who he says were primarily taught at business schools about making short-term profits, how to satisfy the short- term “needs” of their shareholders, how to make money fast and, inter alia, some marketing and basic management skills.
He charges that there was little thinking about strategic planning, long-term visioning, ethics, social intelligence, creativity and innovation.
He believes, “and so does the Wall Street Journal”, that the recession and bankruptcies are caused by one big, underlying bankruptcy — that of applied intelligence. But, it can be taught.
We can develop those muscles of intelligence, our brains, in the same way we develop the muscles of our bodies.
Mind Mapping is one way of learning how to unlock the brain’s potential, and has been described as “the whole-brain alternative to linear thinking. It reaches out in all directions, and catches thoughts from any angle,” according to Michael Michelko, author of Cracking Creativity.
To do this we need to exert our brains, push their boundaries. “Actually, there are no boundaries, and it is entrepreneurs who have discovered this,” says Buzan, who is one such, having created an empire from his Mind Mapping.
He’s written more than 90 books, now sold in more than 150 countries in 33 languages, since he created his first simple, grey lead- pencil map back in the 1960s.
Use Your Head, Buzan’s initial big BBC TV series, was launched with a book of the same name, which is now into its 52nd printing, and has become, he says, the broadcaster’s top-selling book internationally.
Today, Mind Maps can resemble works of art and Al Gore has a framed one in his Nashville home office. Bill Gates, a prominent exponent of Mind Mapping, said that “intelligence agents and Mind-Mappers are taking our information democracy to the next stage”.
But, long before them, geniuses such as Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill and Thomas Edison used the major elements of the Mind Map guidelines to make their thoughts visible and enable creative leaps forward in their disciplines.
Buzan, who has been described by The Times as “doing for the brain what Stephen Hawking did for the universe”, says that we use less than 1% of our brains, and that the number of patterns of thought possible for them is greater than the number of atoms in our galaxy and its 200-billion stars. Another staggering fact he mentions is that 95% of all the human race has ever learnt about the internal workings of its own brain has been discovered in the past 10 years.
He’s simultaneously dismayed and excited by our dismal brain usage as he rattles off the multiple intelligences we can develop.
Creativity is the top of his hit parade. “We have to train all our future leaders from business to education and politics about the nature of creative thinking, which includes imagination, and how to use it.”
Verbal intelligence: there’s always a correlation between the word power of an individual and success. If you can express yourself well, you’ll get ahead and achieve what you want to a great deal faster.
Numerical intelligence: everybody’s potential ability to use numbers is much greater than they believe it to be. “In future those who can think without computers and calculators will have a phenomenal advantage because they will have immediate answers which will make them feel confident as well as impressing others.”
Social intelligence: the more skilled we are at getting on with others the more successful we will be in every social situation we encounter.
Personal intelligence: how good are you at being your own best friend and colleague?, asks Buzan. In business you are often alone, “and the more of a leader you are the more alone you will be. If you don’t like yourself, you’ll be in deep trouble.”
Physical intelligence is having strength, flexibility, overall health and, above all, stamina — which requires a good cardiovascular system. “Politicians have finally begun to realise in the last 20 years that if you’re fit and strong you’re a far more powerful leader.”
Sensory intelligence is vital. So is ethical and spiritual intelligence, which measures compassion, concern, social responsibility and love of your team and people generally.
In the modern political arena, Barack Obama is a good example of someone who has developed his multiple intelligences. So is Vladimir Putin. “According to his friends, he’s witty, speaks well, is fit and is verbally and mathematically intelligent. So it doesn’t matter if you don’t like him.”
In business, people often make the mistake of thinking that the person with whom they are competing or negotiating is stupid or useless, “but you need to look at their multiple intelligences before you make that decision. The use of a mind map allows you to be more objective.”
Buzan says that at age 67 his mind is brighter, sharper and more alert than it was at 40. “One of the more dangerous misconceptions is the ‘brain age fad’ that has us believing that the younger the brain the better. Quite the opposite is true.”
As you age, your brain should improve because of its unique and ongoing ability to form new synapses. These are the connections between the brain’s more than 100-billion neurons that are the key to memory and mental sharpness.
“Yet most adults, even gym slaves who wouldn’t dream of missing a workout, don’t take much ‘mental exercise’.”
Most adult activity is done on “autopilot”, giving the brain little new on which to work. “Yet what it needs is practice — mental flips, whirls and intellectual skirmishes that get and keep it functioning at its peak for concentration, memory, creativity and logic.”
He chuckles as he describes the world going into an economic panic because of its ageing populations, “yet it need not be one of decrepit, Zimmer frame cretins. It’s a wonderful prospect — we’ll have a population of older, wiser geniuses because we’ll have escaped from the Industrial and Information Ages into the Age of Intelligence, where we will all live a lot more happily and therefore a lot longer.”
He’s doing his bit. He continues to lecture all over the world at an age when many others are lapsing into middle-aged muddles, forgetting where they’ve put their keys or cellphones, taking the same route (he calls it a “rut”) to work or to the shops.
He estimates that his global lecture circuit has clocked up more than 5-million kilometres — four times to the moon and back — while he worked with multinational companies, governments (China, Mexico, Malaysia, Singapore) and businesses that include Microsoft, Boeing, HSBC, Oracle and General Motors.
He’s the founder of the annual World Memory Championships, and has held memory workshops for thousands of children in football stadiums, including 2000 children in Soweto over three successive days.
He’s passionate about education: “If people can’t think, then a nation cannot compete. Children first need to learn how to learn. Once they’ve learnt how to study, to read faster, communicate better and understood the workings of their brains, then they can be let loose on physics and geography and they will take only a quarter of the time they usually do to learn.”
Buzan practises what he preaches. He rows 10km every day on The Thames in all weather, “except windy rain when I can’t scull”, does martial arts, swims long distance and goes to gym regularly.
He eats “like an athlete”, using vegetables as his base, fruit and nuts, fresh fish and fresh meat. He consumes little gluten and dairy food, and writes poetry, “the highest form of metaphorical thinking”, as well as teaching the art to business people.
Utopia for him would be for all the intelligences to be raised in everyone, everywhere, with a resultant intelligent use of resources and a more artistic, musical, healthy, sensual and energetic world, because “happiness generates energy”, he concludes.
Go to www.imindmap.com for a free video download on how to mind-map.