Out of college, I built a company from a desk beside the bed in my little apartment to multi-millions in sales and almost eighty employees.
Every step in that seven-year journey was a problem to solve. Especially people problems. How can we help people thrive, inside and outside our business? How do we persuade new people to become customers? How do we coordinate staff to best serve our customers? How do we release creativity and innovation to make our products and services better than the competition? How do we get everyone to get along and go along?
A friend referred a local company offering thinking skills training to corporations and non-profit organizations. They told me, “The better your people think, the better they’ll work.” I liked that idea and had them in, where they spent two days with the staff. This was 1996, if I remember right. It was valuable for the company and the employees.
But not as valuable as it could be. First, there was the sustainability problem. How can we make the principles take root? How can we embed better thinking skills and problem-solving skills into the culture of our company? We didn’t figure it out, and the training guys didn’t either. Then I found problems with the curriculum. It wasn’t a complete solution, and occasionally drifted into pseudoscience. It dated back to the 1960’s, missing a half-century of new finds in cognitive science.
So, there was value. But problems too.
I’m a problem-solver at heart, so I dug around for answers. Over the next ten years in corporate settings I tackled the sustainability problem. I developed a method that creates ten times the knowledge and application over normal lecture-learning models.
And I dug into the curriculum itself. In the past fifteen years, I studied everything I could get my hands on about the science of problem-solving, better thinking, and better performance. I’ve been reading twenty fat books on the subject a year for at least fifteen years.
In the process, I discovered the fundamental idea of this book, what I am calling The Code: an elegant explanation of thought and behavior; the secret of practical intelligence; a comprehensive problem-solving tool to get us unstuck and accelerate our progress in every area of life.