Read time: 4 mins
Great Entrepreneurs Ask Great Questions
The power of knowledge and information is an undeniable strength shared among the world’s top business leaders. The secret of this empowering strategy is to adopt a question-based mindset. Insights gathered from asking the right questions can help to effectively address organizational problems and identify large-scale opportunities for innovation.
Watch Hal Gregersen, Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center, discuss methods to dissolve barriers to creative thinking as part of the Inquiry-Driven Leadership online short course from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Transcript
How does someone like Jeff Bezos at Amazon get an innovative idea that led to Amazon.com initially and today, Amazon of our day. We interviewed a hundred plus leaders like Jeff Bezos at Amazon to try to figure out how do they go about asking the right questions? And what we discovered was that these innovators who created disruptive innovations and made an enormous impact on the world, they also were exceptional at asking questions other people weren’t asking.
But the common thread across these three elements of globalization, transformation and innovation, was that great leaders in any of those activities were exceptional at asking the right questions that other people had missed. Now, this was happening again in that globalization, transformation, innovation space, it was happening when those leaders were facing intense levels of uncertainty.
They did not have the answers when they landed in a new country. They did not have the answers when they initiated transformational change. And they did not have the answers when they were trying to innovate and create something that doesn’t yet exist. In those situations where uncertainty is running rampant, where it’s intense in the work or in the lives we’re living in those moments of deep, rich, high uncertainty questions really are the answer.
Because by definition, if it’s uncertain about what’s off the edge of this next thing, we’re trying to do, the answers aren’t there yet. They’re there to be created and questions become the keys by which we move into and discover the answers that unlock enormous value for our organization and hopefully far beyond.