Think! Read Free Page A

generated 21,000 ideas in a single afternoon. It took them nine months just to sort through the ideas.
The Hungerford Guidance Centre in London works with youngsters who are deemed to be too violent to be taught in ordinary schools: they have stabbed a teacher, for example, or set a school on fire. More than 20 years ago, the principal, David Lane, started teaching my ways of thinking to these violent youngsters. He has now done a 20-year follow-up and has shown that the actual rate of criminal conviction for those taught thinking is less than one-tenth of that for those not taught thinking. This statistic is a fact.
A school in Argentina teaches my thinking very thoroughly. In the national examinations, they did so much better than all the other schools that they were investigated for cheating!
As a student, Ashok Chouhan was travelling from India to Europe. He had three dollars in his pocket. His plane was diverted to Paris. He had some time at the airport and went into the bookshop. He bought a copy of my first book (in English). At an evening lecture I was giving in Delhi, he told me he kept this book in his briefcase for 30 years. Today he has $3 billion in his pocket; he founded Amity University in India; and he was, at one time, the largest investor in East Germany. He believes that 80 per cent of his success was triggered by that book.
I was once giving a seminar in Barcelona. After the seminar a man from the island of Tenerife came up to me. He told me that when he was younger he had not been any good at school subjects. Then he read one of my books – I do not know which one. Today he owns seven companies in Holland and Spain.
The Olympic Games in Montreal in 1976 lost a great deal of money (perhaps $1 billion). After Montreal, no city in the world wanted to host the games. Eventually, Moscow agreed to host the games in 1980. After Moscow, again no city wanted the games. Finally Los Angeles agreed to host the games. Instead of a loss, they made a profit of $250 million. As a result of this, today every city wants the games and competes to get them (there have even been allegations of bribery

where cities are desperate). When Peter Ueberroth, the organiser of the LA games, was interviewed in the Washington Post, he attributed his success to his ability to generate new ideas through the use of my lateral thinking and he gave examples. I wrote and asked him where he had learned this. He reminded me that he had been my host in 1975 at a 90-minute lecture I had given to the YPO (Young Presidents Organisation) in Boca Raton, Florida. From that 90 minutes he had remembered enough to use the processes effectively nine years later.
I was on the Innovations Council of the State of Victoria in Australia. After a meeting of the council, Professor Doherty came up to me to tell me how he had read my first book. This had changed his thinking and, as a result, he won the Nobel Prize.
The Atkey organisation is an independent organisation that, for several years, has been introducing my work into schools in the United Kingdom and doing research. They have shown that teaching my thinking as a separate subject increases performance in every other subject by between 30 and 100 per cent.
A town council that had been taught my methods by Vicki Cavins reported that in the first year they had saved $84 million on a single project.
Unemployed youngsters on the New Deal scheme in the United Kingdom were taught my thinking for just five hours by the Holst Group. The employment rate among those taught increased 500 per cent. A year later, 96 per cent of those were still in employment. This was more successful than anything that had been done before.
In Australia, Jennifer O'Sullivan was in charge of two job clubs, which were made up of groups of unemployed youngsters. The normal rate of employment out of such clubs was 40 per cent. She taught them my thinking and she got 70 per cent employment out of one club and 100 per cent out of the other.