The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Bookshelf - Book review

The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking. By Roger Martin. Harvard Business School Press, 210 pages. $26.95.

Most major business decisions, as Roger Martin writes in this insightful book, are arrived at by some form of consensus--by picking through a series of alternatives and concluding that one seems the best, or the least harmful. But great leaders, he finds, can hold two opposing ideas in their minds simultaneously, then reach a consensus that contains elements of both but improves on each.

While this is primarily a book about CEO leadership, its precepts can certainly be applied to others in the C-suite. Martin, the dean of the Roman School of Management at the University of Toronto, takes a high-concept approach to the whole panoply of behavior associated with decision-making and examines its various facets without trying to be prescriptive: he's not creating a system, but reaching informed conclusions about the way top leaders came to decisions, and how those mattered.

For instance, in a passage about Isadore Sharp, the founder and guiding light of the Four Seasons hotel chain, Martin notes that Sharp rejected the notion of simplification and standardization that so many competitors had chosen. Simplification can be...