Book fails to improve problem solving

I'm especially interested in how engineers succeed at their challenging tasks of managing trade-offs while facing complex constraints and ways they can improve these efforts, so I had great hope for Discussion of the Method: Conducting the Engineer's Approach to Problem Solving by Billy Vaughn Koen. The author has impressive credentials, but his attempt at defining and explaining heuristic-based reasoning—which the author admittedly models after René Descartes Discours de la Méthode—left me disappointed. The writing and style is tedious and pretentious, and the idea path has many needless complexities. Even after I plowed through it, I could recall nothing useful that I had learned, other than that you can complicate and obfuscate anything if you work at it.

Despite the imprimatur of Oxford University Press or perhaps because of it, this $65 paperback (ISBN 0-19515599-8, March 2003) may suit philosophical engineers who have no real projects or deadlines, but it is counterproductive for the rest of us.

Oxford University Press, www.oup.co.uk.