NONFICTION - June 7, 1992

SERIOUS CREATIVITY by Dr. Edward de Bono (Harper Collins: $23: 349 pp.) After the frenzy that was the 1980s, we’re getting back to basics. Straight-leg Levis (or perhaps the relaxed-fit model, in a nod to the passage of time) instead of designer-label blue jeans. That money-smart Lexus instead of a Mercedes. No more immortal Styrofoam at McDonald’s, and no more rigid, greed-driven thinking inside America’s businesses. De Bono and his work on creative thinking have been around for 25 years, since the last time we started to wonder if society needed an overhaul, and now he’s ready to be in the right place at the right time, teaching corporate America how to think laterally. Better solutions to our problems are just out of our reach, he believes, and all we need to do to get at them is change the way we think about them. His methods are hard to describe without sliding into either jargon or satire--you have to have a sense of humor about a man who extols the “creative pause.” We’ve just come out of a phase when people were so busy making money that they barely had time to eat or sleep, let alone pause to see where their thoughts might lead them, but the Six Thinking Hats method, among other tools, actually makes a lot of sense. You just have to suspend your disbelief and try it, and wipe that image of six Dr. Seuss animals wearing silly hats out of your mind.