Edward de Bono died on June 9th

THE LETTER was unexpected, but not undeserved. It contained an invitation to a Symposium in Athens. Over the years Edward de Bono had been to hundreds of these affairs. Some were seminars, some consultations or lecturing, all based on his much-acclaimed books. He had produced 70 of them, including “How To Be More Interesting”, “How To Have a Beautiful Mind”, “Edward de Bono’s Textbook of Wisdom” and “Think! Before It’s Too Late”. That last was the message he carried loud and clear as he jetted from city to city and boardroom to boardroom. He was teaching the world a new way of thought, the most important for 2,300 years.

A gathering in Greece was alluring. He was a man of the Mediterranean himself, born in Malta to a family boasting seven generations of doctors. On his mother’s side, he was possibly descended from Napoleon. It was at school that he was first called “Genius” and allowed to skip years. From there he sailed into both Oxford and Cambridge, to do two doctorates and several years of research into physiology and psychology. His study of self-organising systems such as the kidneys and the glands convinced him that the brain, too, could be organised differently. It could be taught to operate creatively, surprisingly and “outside the box”. His preferred term was “lateral thinking”. With that, he had made the most important discovery since the time of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the infamous Gang of Three, as he called them. It was they who had sent the invitation. They were eager, like all the rest, to consult him.