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Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life Hardcover – Illustrated, Nov. 13 2018
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2018 Nautilus Book Awards Silver Winner
What if you could unlock a better answer to your most vexing problem—in your workplace, community, or home life—just by changing the question?
Talk to creative problem-solvers and they will often tell you, the key to their success is asking a different question.
Take Debbie Sterling, the social entrepreneur who created GoldieBlox. The idea came when a friend complained about too few women in engineering and Sterling wondered aloud: "why are all the great building toys made for boys?" Or consider Nobel laureate Richard Thaler, who asked: "would it change economic theory if we stopped pretending people were rational?" Or listen to Jeff Bezos whose relentless approach to problem solving has fueled Amazon’s exponential growth: “Getting the right question is key to getting the right answer.”
Great questions like these have a catalytic quality—that is, they dissolve barriers to creative thinking and channel the pursuit of solutions into new, accelerated pathways. Often, the moment they are voiced, they have the paradoxical effect of being utterly surprising yet instantly obvious.
For innovation and leadership guru Hal Gregersen, the power of questions has always been clear—but it took some years for the follow-on question to hit him: If so much depends on fresh questions, shouldn’t we know more about how to arrive at them? That sent him on a research quest ultimately including over two hundred interviews with creative thinkers. Questions Are the Answer delivers the insights Gregersen gained about the conditions that give rise to catalytic questions—and breakthrough insights—and how anyone can create them.
- Print length336 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper Business
- Publication dateNov. 13 2018
- Dimensions15.24 x 2.51 x 22.86 cm
- ISBN-100062844768
- ISBN-13978-0062844767
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“I connected with this book’s message because I lived it. Everythingchanged for the better when I realized that I, like so many others, wasasking the wrong question. Our culture chases conventional notionsof success instead of nurturing what would really make us thrive. HalGregersen is absolutely right—the best way to get to a better answeris to start with a better question, and we can all learn to do that.” — Arianna Huffington
“It’s a great insight that, if you want to arrive at a better answer, you should start with a better question. Hal Gregersen takes that observation further, exploring how to put it into daily practice. I love this book’s emphasis on creating the conditions in which creative thinking will thrive, and I love its bighearted storytelling.” — Tony Hsieh, Zappos.com CEO
In his new book, Hal Gregersen reveals the power of cultivating a beginner’s mind, deep listening and continuous reflection in search of the right questions. Read this remarkable book and you will find a path to meaningful answers — Marc Benioff, Chairman & Co-CEO, Salesforce
Hal Gregersen is one of those rare educators who always practices what he preaches. Deliberately, he pushes himself out of his comfort zones, and consistently, he surfaces those great questions that unlock better answers. I think it’s wonderful that, with Questions Are the Answer, he is equipping so many more people to do the same. — Clayton M. Christensen, Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School
“Creating an open environment where every manager can ask questions without fear is the first step in bringing innovation to achieve the betterment of a corporation. The author brings out how asking the right questions is the responsibility of a successful leader. A “must” read for every corporate person aspiring to succeed as a leader.” — Narayana Murthy, founder of Infosys
If you want a simple answer to the question of what matters most to creativity, then look no further than the title of this book. Mastering the art of questioning is not easy, but Hal Gregersen describes a wealth of valuable approaches that will serve you well -- no matter what kinds of problems you are trying to solve. — Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO and author of Design for Change
As machines become exceedingly proficient at providing answers, it becomes more and more important for people to be asking the right questions. Hal Gregersen is exactly right that this is a skill we can learn -- and must teach. — Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab and author of Whiplash
Readers of both self-help and business books will enjoy this read as a challenge to their established perspective. — Library Journal
About the Author
HAL GREGERSEN is the Executive Director of the Leadership Center as MIT, a prolific author and motivational speaker, recognized by Thinkers50 as one of the world’s fifty most innovative minds. He has authored or coauthored ten books, and his most recent bestselling book is The Innovator’s DNA, coauthored with Jeff Dyer and Clayton Christensen.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper Business; Illustrated edition (Nov. 13 2018)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 336 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0062844768
- ISBN-13 : 978-0062844767
- Item weight : 544 g
- Dimensions : 15.24 x 2.51 x 22.86 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: #95,337 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #97 in Business Research & Development
- #126 in Business Project Management
- #134 in Project Management (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
![Hal Gregersen](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/S/amzn-author-media-prod/jiatoek5q379vvt7nuf9f3d5dt._SY600_.jpg)
Hal Gregersen is a senior lecturer in leadership and innovation at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, a former executive director of the MIT Leadership Center, a fellow at Innosight, and a co-founder of the Innovator’s DNA consulting group. He has dedicated his extensive career, including prior teaching posts at INSEAD, London Business School, and Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, to creating cultures of fearless inquiry and to helping leaders transform their organizations into innovative powerhouses. Ranked as one of the world’s 20 most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50 and winner of the 2017 Distinguished Achievement Award for leadership, Gregersen regularly delivers inspirational keynote speeches, interactive and dynamic customized workshops, and transformational advisory experiences.
In his Nautilus award-winning book, “Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life” (based on 200+ interviews with catalytic questioners like Elon Musk and Orit Gadiesh), he argues that while people are programmed to look for answers, the real catalyst for innovative, disruptive change is catalytic inquiry. Twenty years ago Gregersen created a repeatable three-step methodology, the Question Burst, by which companies can begin to build better problem solvers and enhance creative impact at all levels, from senior executives to entry-level employees. His Question Burst method, combined with four more habits of inquiry, have helped redesign company cultures around constructive questioning at Chanel, Daimler, Disney·Pixar, Ernst & Young, Fidelity, Genentech, Patagonia, Salesforce, World Economic Forum, and Zappos, among others.
Gregersen co-authored, with Clayton Christensen and Jeff Dyer, “The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators” (translated into 14 languages worldwide), a guide to cultivating the discovery skills that CEOs and entrepreneurs rely on to build and guide sustainably creative companies. Having personally interviewed 100+ ground-breaking leaders at the world’s most innovative companies, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, Gregersen draws on rigorous research and analysis (based on a database of +25,000 leaders) to successfully advise the world’s largest corporations on innovation, transformation and key leadership challenges.
Gregersen has lived and worked outside the United States for over a decade – in England, Finland, France, and the UAE. He and his wife now reside north of Boston where he pursues his lifelong avocation, photography, and she her lifelong love, sculpture.
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This book will definitely get you started in this wonderful topic and get you to want to go deeper into the subject.
Some say that it's repetitive, but it actually does a great job telling different stories of how great questioners use questions to solve problems in many industries, and their process to get to better questions.
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- Location 300: How many times did you say no today? The question helps a person to focus.
- Location 1300: What is your daughter / son good at? To what extent do you praise that?
- Location 2550: What are you grateful for?
- Location 2550: What are you excited about?
- Location 2550: How can I make it better?
- Location 2250: Where are you physically located when you get your best ideas?
- Location 3600: How can I make a positive difference in this person's life right now?
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After doing a "question burst," as suggested in Chapter 3, I arrived at a personally meaningful question: "How would my life change if, instead of seeking to be someone important, I entirely sought after doing something important?"
For me, this book is among the greats. While I don't know the full extent to which it will impact my life's path, I get the feeling it is among the likes of "When Breath Becomes Air" and "Thinking, Fast and Slow."
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