Strategy of the Dolphin: Scoring a Win in a Chaotic World

YOUR PERPETUAL GUIDE TO THE POWERS OF LIVING SMART & THINKING SMARTER IN HIGHLY CHAOTIC TIMES

For any book to earn a lasting place in the canon of life-coaching classics, it must have a central idea that just keeps on giving. What makes Strategy of the Dolphin an enduring “read” year after year is that it contains not one but two perpetually contributing and life-changing ideas.

One game-changing insight is this: That every moment of our lives, each of us steers by a powerful "big picature" strategy—a commanding storyline that explains who we are and what we regard as life’s most important pursuits and priorities. And the other showstopper of a realization is this: That until we have activated the “strategy of the dolphin” in our life, we’ve stopped short—perhaps tragically so—of adopting the most productive and fulfilling strategy available to us.

When that happens, we are destined to live out the unfulfilling, often self-destructive strategies of the carp, the shark or the pseudo-enlightened carp. This is a fate, say these authors, that ensnares billions. And it is why so many humans are forced to deal with everyday existence using less-than-optimum thinking and problem-solving skills.

Readers in numerous business marketplaces and cultures (and in eight languages) have credited the highly serviceable insights in Strategy of the Dolphin with having dramatically changed their lives. That’s because its penetrating “do something different” instructions and highly entertaining aquatic metaphors have yet to be matched in an age when nothing is more prized than practical new wisdoms that work.

In this groundbreaking work, the authors utilize many vantage points of new paradigm research, from Ilya Prigogine’s Nobel Prize-winning discoveries on dissipative structures, to Clare W. Graves’ “biopsychosocial” change barriers, to Elliott Jaques’ studies on the brain’s “time horizons to Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractal geometries and the work of other chaologists.

Lynch and Kordis intend nothing less grand than illuminating a new way to think for the reader that is more competent, conscientious and contemporary than any totality of mind skills ever before available generally to us humans:

* Power to choose instantly, successfully, between the strategies of Take Over, Give In, Get Out, Trade Off and Breakthrough.

* Power to think tougher, dream smarter and focus beyond the limited vision of the carp, shark and pseudo-enlightened carp (PEC).

* Power to do more with less.

* Power to act flexibly, elegantly and with endurance amid the accelerating waves of change.

* Power to design tools for self-change and self-targeting in mid-wave.

* Power to fight back strategically when necessary.

* Power to focus ruthlessly on the 20 percent of your effort that delivers 80 percent of your significant results.

When it was first published in 1989, Strategy of the Dolphin helped to invent the new field of life coaching. But the book’s influence has gone far beyond the realm of helping people design and invigorate better lives.

It has spawned two additional “dolphin thinking”-themed books by Dudley Lynch: The Mother of All Minds and LEAP! How to Think Like a Dolphin & Do the Next Right, Smart Thing Come Hell or High Water.

Business professors have viewed it as an all-inclusive manual of instructions and observations for dealing with fluid, demanding marketplaces and constant organizational change. Experts on metaphors see it as one of the most infectious “memes” ever devised because so many people instantly “get it.” Almost effortlessly, readers around the globe recognize the carp and shark and pseudo-enlightened carp influences around them and within themselves. And from Denver to London to Dakar to Bombay to Johannesburg to Singapore and back, they have aspired to think like the book’s featured “mind”: the agile, versatile, observant, sometimes audacious-acting and -thinking dolphin.

Can you think like a dolphin? Now’s the time to find out.