Edward de Bono has had faculty appointments at the universities of Oxford, London, Cambridge and Harvard. He is widely regarded as the leading authority in the direct teaching of thinking as a skill. He originated the concept of lateral thinking and developed formal techniques for deliberate creative thinking. He has written fifty-seven books, which have been translated into thirty-four languages, has made two television series and there are over 4,000,000 references to his work on the Internet.

Dr de Bono has been invited to lecture in fifty-two countries and to address major international conferences. In 1989 he was asked to chair a special meeting of Nobel Prize laureates. His instruction in thinking has been sought by some of the leading business corporations in the world such as IBM, Du Pont, Shell, Eriksson, McKinseys, Ciba-Geigy, Ford and many others. He has had a planet named after him by the International Astronomic Union and was named by a group of university professors in South Africa as one of the 250 people in all of history who have contributed most to humanity.

Dr de Bono runs the most widely used programme for the direct teaching of thinking in schools. This is now in use in many countries around the world.

Dr de Bono's key contribution has been his understanding of the brain as a self-organizing system. From this solid base he set out to design practical tools for thinking. His work is in use equally in the boardrooms of some of the world's largest corporations and with four-year-olds in school. His design of the Six Hats method provides, for the first time, Western thinking with a constructive idiom instead of adversarial argument. His work is in use in élite gifted schools, rural schools in South Africa and Khmer villages in Cambodia. The appeal of Dr de Bono's work is its simplicity and practicality.