A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger

Author:Warren Berger [Berger, Warren]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING
Published: 2014-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

Christensen has a theory on this, as well: They hadn’t been trained to question. In business school these future chief executives were armed with management theory that was perfectly serviceable and sensible—up to the point at which the world changed and the old theory failed. When that point was reached, most leaders weren’t able to step back and ask:

Why isn’t this working anymore?

What if the business market is now upside-down—and the bottom has risen to the top? And if that’s the case . . .

How should my business respond to this new reality? How do we rewrite the old theories?

Today, while market conditions and challenges have become even more complex, uncertain, and subject to radical disruption across industries, Christensen feels that business leaders, for the most part, still aren’t asking enough questions, and especially the right kinds of questions.

Keith Yamashita, a longtime consultant to top companies such as IBM and Coca-Cola, observes that in the business world at large “we’re coming off a twenty-five-year2 posteighties period of efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. I think the unintended consequence of that entire efficiency era is that people diminished their questions to very small-minded ones. In this quest for incremental improvement, it became all about asking, How can we save a little bit of money, make it a little more efficient, where can we cut costs?”

But Yamashita says the era of “small-minded questions” is ending. “Company leaders are realizing that if they’re only asking the small questions, it’s not going to advance their agenda, their position, or their brands. In order to innovate now, they have to ask more expansive questions.”

What Yamashita is talking about is an evolution in business questions themselves. The old, closed questions (How many? How much? How fast?) still matter on a practical level, but increasingly businesses must tackle more sophisticated open questions (Why? What if? How?) to thrive in an environment that demands a clearer sense of purpose, a vision for the future, and an appetite for change.

This affects new companies as much as the established ones. Start-ups have always had to ask tough questions about their reason for being (Why does the world need another company? Why should anyone care about us? How in the world are we going to break through?), and that’s truer than ever in a market now crowded with newcomers.

But established companies in old-line industries may need questioning even more. Many are dealing with new threats and volatile changes that are suddenly calling into question why they’re needed, what they do, and how they do it. Small wonder, then, that for top3 business consultants such as Dev Patnaik of Jump Associates “questioning is now the number one thing I spend my time on with clients.”

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