The Forgotten Half of Change: Achieving Greater Creativity Through Changes in Perception.

The Forgotten Half of Change: Achieving Greater Creativity Through Changes in Perception. By Luc de Brabandere. Dearborn Trade Publishing, 172 pages. $20.

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For a relatively slim volume, The Forgotten Half of Change packs in a lot of challenging ideas. Author de Brabandere, a partner with the Boston Consulting Group, takes both a historical and philosophical view of the nature of change and how it can be effected, referring to such esteemed figures in philosophy as Heraclites and Francis Bacon, and weaving in a host of ruminations about the nature of learning.

There is too much focus, he believes, on how younger managers, in particular, execute and work to hike productivity. But those who would be leaders, he writes, also need to teach themselves how to change perceptions, their own as well as others. While he doesn't state it in so many words, he argues that they need to "think outside the box."

At this other level of management, de Brabandere writes, "the manager invents the future, imagines change, seeks out new ideas. This is where the manager thinks for the benefit of the company.... In the end, successful companies evolve up a steady slope and up a stepped staircase, both at the same time."

In an ideal world, perhaps, this might happen with some regularity. But the author's view seems almost impossibly idealistic in a business environment preoccupied with compliance and competition, where fanciful and speculative thinking rarely seems like a good use of time, in fact, it seems like the epitome of ivory-towerism.

Written lucidly but in a kind of hyper-intellectual style, The Forgotten Half of Change is more than a little demanding At times, when de Brabandere uses simple diagrams as Rorshach-like visualization tests to open the reader's eyes to his arguments about perception, this seems like anything but a business book.