De Bono was born in Malta, and has claims to many of the European royal houses (maybe this relates to how far back you can go in your ancestry).

He’s a prolific author of more than 80 books about the art, learning concepts and the science of thinking.

It was de Bono who coined the phrase “lateral thinking”, thus becoming by default the world’s first lateral thinker.

On the educational front, Edward de Bono is adamant that it is possible to treat some of these new creative ways of thinking, and he has developed a very wide range of educational materials with suitability ranging from early primary school through to adult education programs . All of his thinking tools involve the ability to direct various forms of attention and effort into studying the problem at hand in a concentrated form for a short period.

It is reported that schools in more than 20 countries have introduced some of de Bono’s thinking skills programs into their curriculums.

In his discussions of the modes of thinking, de Bono defines vertical and horizontal thinking as well.

• vertical thinking – compliance and conformity – the student knows what to do, but not why
• horizontal thinking – daydreaming, mysticism, fantasy – lots of “big picture” but no implementation
• lateral thinking – solving problems through indirect and creative jumps in logic to move beyond the  limitations of critical or logical thought constraints

In terms of your ability to think and work “outside the box”, an understanding of the processes of lateral thinking are very useful.

Tesla was born in a village in what is now Croatia to Serbian parents in the mid 1850s. He is reported to have studied electricity at the Austrian Polytechnic, but it is unclear whether or not he graduated.

He is claimed to have had a photographic memory, and in his autobiography Tesla claimed to have received regular flashes of light followed by visions that would offer solutions to problems that had been concerning him.

He moved to the United States in 1884 and started to work for Thomas Edison.

The relationship between Tesla and Edison is reported to have been somewhat rocky, with Edison strongly pushing the idea of direct current as the solution for electricity supply and distribution, whilst Nicola had a strong philosophical belief that alternating current was the way to go. [By the way almost 100% of commercial power generation and transmission today does in fact use alternating current]

It wasn’t long before this difference had reached breaking point, and Tesla had moved away from Edison and set up his own company. However, the investors in this company disagreed with Tesla about the advantages of alternating current, and he was relieved of his position in the company shortly afterwards.

Tesla invented and patented the first induction motor in 1888, a motor that was able to turn without the need of sets of brushes connecting the rotating part to the outside world. This is the type of motor used on almost all electrical appliances today.

As a result of this demonstrated invention, he began to work with George Westinghouse who could see the advantages of alternating current for transmission and distribution of electrical power over long distances.

At about this time, Nicola began to investigate the phenomenon of X-Rays (although that term hadn’t been coined at the time). As a result of developing single element vacuum tubes and his work in this field, he was able to demonstrate wireless energy transmission in New York as early as 1891.

Amongst some of the other areas in which Nicola Tesla played a very important part in terms of development include:

• wireless communication (aka radio)
• robotics
• 3 phase alternating current
• electrotherapy
• charged particle beams
• vertical take off and landing aircraft
• arc lights
• lightning protection
• and many more

However, Tesla is reported to have had a somewhat prickly personality and as a result was kept out of favor with many of the better known inventors and innovators of the time, notably Thomas Edison, Marconi, Albert Einstein to name but a few.

To quote from the ubiquitous website http://badasshistory.com ,

… Nikola Tesla was one of those super-genius badasses whose intellect placed him dangerously on the precipice between “great scientific mind” and “utter madness”

It is interesting to sit back and imagine just where we would be today without many of the influences that Steve managed to implement by means of the many projects in which he was involved.

It is definitely accurate to refer to Steve as a true visionary when it comes to the interaction between people and their environment is an information age.

An example of Job’s ability to work outside the box came to me when I recently watched a commencement speech that Jobs made to a graduation class at Stanford University. Amongst other things he discussed the fact the he dropped out of his college course, and then was able to find out more about areas that didn’t fit into the college program that had been previously  laid out . Steve learned a lot about calligraphy and became fascinated with the art and design that goes into typography.

It was only some 10 years later during the design of the first Macintosh computer that Steve found an outlet for this earlier interest. As a result, the ability to generate a variety of well designed and proportional spaced fonts found its outlet into the world of computers as a direct result of something stored up inside Steve’s head for all those years.

Another more recent example has come as a result of the launch of the iPad. Whilst tablet computers had been in the marketplace for many years, mostly in industrial applications, it took Jobs and his team to envisage a whole new world that could open up for the technology. Rather than “geek” the tablet computer was re-generated as “chic”.

I strongly suspect that the world of technology and computers wouldn’t be where it is today had Steve Jobs not been  one of the prime movers in adapting technology to meet the needs of people rather than the other way around.

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