A More Beautiful Question Quotes

“It’s also critical for company leaders to be on the lookout for ways in which questioning gets punished—though the punishment may not be obvious or intentional. The operative question is If an employee asks questions at our company, is he or she asking for trouble”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Ries points out that at most companies “the resources flow to the person with the most confident, best plan. Or the person with no failures on their record.” The solution, Ries says, is that companies must direct more budgetary resources to those who are exploring unanswered questions, conducting promising experiments, and taking intelligent risks. It’s a radical notion for most businesses, but “failed experiments” (which often pave the way for subsequent innovations) should be rewarded alongside proven successes, particularly if the experiment or the questioning provides valuable learning.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Having a leader serve as the “questioner in chief” is fine, but it’s not enough. Today’s companies are often tackling complex challenges that require collaborative, multidisciplinary problem solving. Creative thinking must come from all parts of the company (and from outside the company, too). When a business culture is inquisitive, the questioning, learning, and sharing of information becomes contagious—and gives people permission to explore new ideas across boundaries and silos.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“If employees in a company are given more leeway to question, it means policies may be challenged. Established methods and practices might suddenly be looked at in a new light: Why are we doing it this way? Not everyone wants to have to continually defend proven methods.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“How might we create a culture of inquiry? This is a critical question for business leaders to address, but first they might well ask, Do we really want a culture of inquiry”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“(replacing, for example, We make the world a better place through robotics! with How might we make the world a better place through robotics?). By articulating the company mission as a question, it tells the outside world, “This is what we’re striving for—we know we’re not there yet, but we’re on the journey.” It acknowledges room for possibility, change, and adaptability.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Drucker “understood that his job wasn’t to serve up answers,” according to Wartzman. Drucker once remarked that his greatest strength was “to be ignorant and ask a few questions.” Often those questions were deceptively simple, as in Who is your customer? What business are you in? The clients who hired Drucker may have started out expecting the great consultant to offer brilliant solutions to all their problems. But as he told one client, “The answers have to be yours.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“The elegant simplicity of Square (and that of Dorsey’s earlier creation, Twitter) is a product of rigorous inquiry: Dorsey maintains that good design is about removing unnecessary features by continually asking, Do we really need this? and What can we take away?”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“The most important thing business leaders must do today is to be the ‘chief question-asker’ for their organization,” says the consultant Dev Patnaik of Jump Associates. However, Patnaik adds a cautionary note: “The first thing most leaders need to realize is, they’re really bad at asking questions.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Tim Brown, the chief executive of IDEO, says that when his firm takes on a design challenge of almost any type, it invariably starts by asking How might we? Brown observes that within the phrase, each of those three words plays a role in spurring creative problem solving: “The how part assumes there are solutions out there—it provides creative confidence. Might says we can put ideas out there that might work or might not—either way, it’s okay. And the we part says we’re going to do it together and build on each other’s ideas.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“As I was examining the ways some of today’s cutting-edge companies are trying to reinvent brainstorming, an interesting trend surfaced: a specific form of questioning using three words—How might we?”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“one of the big problems with brainstorming in general: Many ideas are tossed out, but the groups often don’t know how to winnow down to the best ideas. It can be easier to winnow down questions because the best questions are magnetic—they intrigue people, make them want to work more on those. RQI recommends coming out of a session with three great questions that you want to explore further.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“After observing about a hundred Q-storm sessions around the world, Gregersen has noted some patterns. “At around twenty-five questions, the group may stall briefly and say, ‘That’s enough questions.’ But if you push on beyond that point, some of the best questions come as you get to fifty or even seventy-five.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“It’s somewhat counterintuitive for most managers—who tend to think in terms of “making products,” not “making experiments.” But as Ries points out, anytime you’re doing something new “it’s an experiment whether you admit it or not. Because it is not a fact that it’s going to work.” So how do companies get better at experimenting? Ries says you start with the acknowledgment that “we are operating amid all this uncertainty—and that the purpose of building a product or doing any other activity is to create an experiment to reduce that uncertainty.” This means that instead of asking What will we do? or What will we build? the emphasis should be on What will we learn?”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“As Peer Insight’s Tim Ogilvie observes, being true to a cause often requires making tough decisions and sacrificing at times. “When you come to the point where you can’t serve both the bottom line and the cause, one or the other must suffer,” says Ogilvie, pointing to the Whole Foods supermarket chain, which stopped selling live lobsters for an extended time until it found a supplier that did humane harvesting. “Those are hard choices, but when you opt for the cause over the bottom line, employees can see that, and then they believe in the company and the cause even more.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“But there’s a difference between donating to charity (something many companies do, almost by rote), and fully committing to a cause. “We started asking ourselves, What more can we do?” Shaich says. “I felt like, I want to put our bodies on the line.” What gradually became clear was that Panera could provide not just bread giveaways, but a more complete dining experience for those going hungry. That extra level of involvement—“putting bodies on the line,” to use Shaich’s words—made the effort bigger and more distinctive than a standard corporate charity program.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“What does the world need most . . . that we are uniquely able to provide? Shaich says he wrestled with that question for a while, then worked his way to an answer with the launch of Panera Cares—an initiative to open a number of pay-what-you-can cafés that are identical to the chain’s other restaurants, except customers pay what they wish or can afford (based on suggested donation amounts).”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Keith Yamashita says companies can try to find their cause by asking, What does the world hunger for?”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“You could ask, as Grove and Moore did, What if different leaders were brought in?, but Clay Christensen suggests a bolder version of this question: What if the company didn’t exist? That question allows you to take a clean-slate approach in thinking about the industry and your place in it. Christensen points out that thinking about your company as if there were no history enables leaders to stop focusing on preexisting beliefs and structures—“the stuff they’ve already invested in”—and consider new possibilities. That’s particularly useful “if, at any point in the future, you see the possibility that the core business might slow down,” Christensen says. (While contemplating a world in which your company did not exist, another question worth considering is Who would miss us? The answer to that can help clarify who your most important customers are and what your real purpose is.)”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“When companies are facing disruptive change (and these days, what company isn’t?), old habits and traditions can sometimes get in the way of progress. One of the things hypothetical What If questioning can do is remove those constraints, if only briefly, to allow for more fresh thinking.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Then Grove posed an interesting question to his partner: If we were kicked out of the company, what do you think the new CEO would do? Grove and Moore reasoned that a new leader would feel no emotional attachment to the declining memory-chip business and would probably leave it behind. So they did likewise, shifting Intel’s focus to microprocessors—which set the stage for remarkable growth in the years to follow.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“A recent article in Fast Company pointed out that a11 number of today’s leading companies—Nike, Apple, Netflix—have increasingly been finding success by moving outside their primary area of expertise. The article, with the provocative headline “Death to Core Competency,” suggests that whatever a company’s specialty product or service might be—whatever got you to where you are today—might not be the thing that gets you to the next level.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“Products come and go, leaders come and go, trends come and go,” says Yamashita, “but through all of that, you need to know the answer to the question What is true about us, at our core?”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“At the same time, as Yamashita points out, it’s just as important to look forward when asking big questions about purpose. He urges clients to work on Whom must we fearlessly become? That can be a difficult challenge, he says, because it requires “envisioning a version of the company that does not exist yet.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“To figure out the internal values, Yamashita urges company leaders to look back in time and consider this question: Who have we (as a company) historically been when we’ve been at our best? At the finest moments in a company’s history, Yamashita holds, its core values usually came shining through. But from time to time it may be necessary to revisit that past to reaffirm the company’s higher purpose.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“As for the answer, it belongs to whoever gets to it first. Holding back ideas—hoarding your beautiful questions—is usually pointless because it’s hard to make headway on something hidden in a drawer. Better to bring a question out into the light of day and trust that, with help from others, you’ll get something out of it—a solution, a learning experience, an insight, a fresh perspective, a sense of purpose—that will be yours.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“In sharing early versions of an idea with the world at large, one is likely to receive negative feedback—which some people interpret as evidence of a failure. But that’s not necessarily true, says Harvard’s Paul Bottino, who points out that when it comes to feedback, “dissonance can actually be more valuable than resonance.” As people push back on your idea, it can be a good indication that you’re entering uncharted, potentially important territory—because you’re more likely to get negative feedback (“That could never work!”) on ideas that challenge common assumptions. “Dissonance is the most misunderstood kind of feedback,” Bottino says. “We really should welcome it and learn to make the most of it.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“In analyzing a series of setbacks, a key question to ask is Am I failing differently each time? “If you keep making the same68 mistakes again and again,” the IDEO founder David Kelley has observed, “you aren’t learning anything. If you keep making new and different mistakes, that means you are doing new things and learning new things.”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“in addition to asking what went wrong, you should also ask, In this failure, what went right? (Conversely, when you try out something and it seems to have succeeded, look for what went wrong or could have been better,”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

“The answer is, through questioning. Rather than run from a failure or try to forget it ever happened, hold it to the light and inquire, Why did the idea or effort fail? What if I could take what I’ve learned from this failure and try a revised approach? How might I do that?”
― Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas