Read A More Beautiful Question Online
Authors: Warren Berger
A More Beautiful Question (22 page)
If you were a smart business leader, you naturally opted for the former. And in making that seemingly logical choice, you sealed your company’s fate.
After Christensen published his theory in the bestselling book
The Innovator’s Dilemma
, the idea of focusing on “disruptive innovation” at the low end of markets became standard business practice, particularly in Silicon Valley, where Christensen’s book was, for a time, a kind of innovator’s bible. While it’s a testament to Christensen’s keen questioning ability that he was able to find and pursue the Whys and What Ifs that led to his discovery, nevertheless one can’t help wondering:
Why did it take a business professor to point out what was going on in their businesses, their industries, under their own noses? Why weren’t they asking the questions Christensen was asking?
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-year
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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 top
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business consultants such as Dev Patnaik of Jump Associates “questioning is now the number one thing I spend my time on with clients.”
It’s not easy to bring questioning to companies; most of them weren’t built for it. American businesses in particular, and many major post–World War II European companies, “were designed on a military model that came out of the war, built by people who’d been through that war, and the businesses were organized around that mind-set,” Patnaik says. Central to that was the idea of a formal hierarchy and chain of command that didn’t leave much room for calling into question the accepted practices and procedures.
That old model doesn’t lend itself particularly well to a business market that favors speed, flexibility, and collaborative inquiry. But changing that established business model—specifically, to allow for more questioning—requires difficult shifts in ingrained policies and approaches. For example, Eric Ries, the pioneer of the Lean Startup movement, which teaches entrepreneurs and other companies how to adopt more agile, flexible approaches, points out that an incentive system has been built through the years to encourage answers, not questions. “The industrial economy was all about
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knowing the answer and expressing confidence,” Ries said. “If you did your homework, you were supposed to
know
. If you had unanswered questions, that meant you did a bad job and wouldn’t get rewarded.”
Another challenge is that while rapid change makes it necessary for businesses to question more, it also causes businesspeople to feel as if they don’t have time to question what they’re doing. Tony Wagner, the Harvard education expert who has studied the role of questioning in business, notes, “The pressure on short-term results tends
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to drive questioning out of the equation.”
For those inclined to question, the difficulty may be in knowing what to ask. “With all the uncertainty out there,” Patnaik says, “organizations don’t even know what they don’t know.” Figuring out the questions that are most critical for a particular company to consider, given current challenges and market conditions, may be the first order of business. While the key questions vary depending on the individual business, a good place to start is at the most fundamental level—with questions of purpose.
Why are we in business? (And by the way—what business are we
really
in?)
Almost every company would acknowledge that it is in business to make money so that it can
stay
in business. But most companies, if you trace their origins, were started for more complex reasons than that. Many of the companies featured in this book—Patagonia, W. L. Gore, Nike, Airbnb, Panera, Netflix—started out on a quest to fill an unmet need, to make some aspect of our lives a bit easier, more convenient, more enjoyable. Most good companies are born trying to answer a question and solve a problem, which provides an early sense of purpose.
But that motivating principle gets buried over time. Asking Why questions can help to unearth it. (And if, after being dug up, that sense of purpose needs to be revitalized, freshened up, and made relevant again, questioning can help with that, too.)
There are different ways of thinking about purpose. A furniture retailer might choose to think its purpose is to sell people furniture. But it could also approach the business in a very different way. Its higher purpose might be that the company brings a sense of style into the lives of those on a budget; or that it enables people to express their creativity through home furnishings. Getting this right is subtle; advertising sometimes attaches generic or artificial purposes to companies. But if the leaders of a company think hard enough, and question well enough, about where the company came from, what it does best, and whom it serves, they will often uncover a more meaningful and authentic purpose in the company’s origins.
Yamashita uses a set of questions
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when he works with companies to try to identify purpose. One of the main ones is fairly straightforward, if a bit grand:
What is our company’s purpose on this earth?
Yamashita acknowledges that this may sound high-minded for a company. But the new business environment increasingly demands that companies think in terms that go beyond mundane corporate concerns. To arrive at a powerful sense of purpose, Yamashita says, companies today need “a fundamental orientation that is outward looking”—so they can understand what people out there in the world desire and need, and what’s standing in the way. At the same time, business leaders also must look inward, to clarify their core values and larger ambitions.
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.
Casey Sheahan, the CEO of the outdoor-apparel company Patagonia, admits that even a company such as his—with a strong, well-defined mission that is tied to encouraging outdoor activity and protecting the environment—has to revisit questions about purpose and mission regularly. “There is great tension every day
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in the company between being successful in terms of growth, and what this means in terms of our environmental impact.” The bigger Patagonia gets, the more challenging this becomes. Sheahan grapples constantly with the question
How can we minimize the environmental impact of the tremendous carbon footprint of operating a $570 million business?
What helps guide the company at all times, he said, is the knowledge of how it began. “When the company was started by the founders, it was basically about protecting what they loved, nature, and trying expand the sphere of influence in order to inspire others.”
Not only is that the reason Patagonia exists—it’s also the reason people come to work there, to this day. “It’s why they’re going up the stairs two steps at a time to get to their jobs,” Sheahan says. The company has enjoyed strong financial growth in recent years, but that’s not the Why factor for most people working there. When Sheahan talks about financial results, there is mild interest; “but when I say something like, ‘By the way, we’re sending fifty people down to the Gulf to help with the cleanup efforts down there’—suddenly people are on their feet cheering.
That’s
why they’re here.”
Not every company has a clear environmental mission like Patagonia’s, but Sheahan maintains, “For any organization, it is galvanizing to have a strong purpose and values, no matter what they might be.” A good way to surface that is by looking back to when the business was founded and asking,
What was that higher purpose at the outset? And how can we rally people around that today?
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.”
Purpose questions are important because if you can answer them, that frees up company leaders to pursue all kinds of far-reaching opportunities and questions, knowing all the while that they are on firm footing. “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?
”
Knowing that answer becomes especially critical when a company finds itself in the midst of dramatic change. The digital revolution has forced many companies to rebuild and rethink, sometimes pushing them into unfamiliar territory. A company that has figured out the basic questions of identity and purpose is in a better position to handle unsettling new questions such as
What business are we in now?
Nike provides an instructive example of
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how a company can continually adapt through constant questioning of its most basic approaches. The company tends to guard its secrets closely, but a few years ago I had an opportunity to talk to a design researcher who’d done some work with Nike and got an up-close look at how it ventures out into the ball fields, courts, and running tracks with athletes (both pros and the weekend jocks) to study their movements and to detect their needs.
About a decade ago, Nike’s researchers observed a profound change that digital technology was having on athletes such as runners. The many more ways to measure, improve, and enrich the running experience also created complications. Runners were fumbling with various gadgets—stopwatches, heart monitors, music players—as they ran. Nike went into classic Why mode (
Why does this problem exist? Why hasn’t anyone addressed it?
). Then, in considering What If possibilities, the idea emerged of creating a hybrid, networked tool, somehow connected to a Nike running shoe, that could encompass many of the new needs a runner has: from measuring distances, to charting progress, to getting pumped up by music, to connecting with other runners. In effect, Nike was proposing:
