A More Beautiful Question (39 page)

  
3
   
Small wonder, then, that for top . . .
From my interview with Dev Patnaik, December 2012.

  
4
   
“The industrial economy was all about . . .”
From my interviews with Eric Ries, January and May 2013.

  
5
   
“The pressure on short-term results tends . . .”
From my interview with Wagner.

  
6
   
Yamashita uses a set of questions . . .
Yamashita’s questions appeared in my post “The 5 Questions Every Company Should Ask Itself,”
Fast Company
,
February 4, 2013, http://www.fastcodesign.com/1671756/the-5-questions-every-company-should-ask-itself.

  
7
   
“There is great tension every day . . .”
From my interview with Casey Sheahan, February 12, 2013.

  
8
   
Nike provides an instructive example of . . .
The Nike+ story appears in, among other places, Mark McClusky, “The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the Power of Personal Metrics,”
Wired
, June 22, 2009.

  
9
   
Jobs initially berated Nike chief executive . . .
This anecdote appeared in Ellen McGirt’s profile of Parker, “Artist. Athlete. CEO,”
Fast Company
, September 2010.

10
   
Are we really who we say we are? . . .
Polly LaBarre, “Hit Man,”
Fast Company
, August 31, 2002.

11
   
Fast Company
pointed out that a . . .
Austin Carr, “Death to Core Competency,”
Fast Company
, February 14, 2013.

12
   
Even newer companies must make these kinds of major shifts . . .
Sheryl Sandberg’s question-driven initiative was described by Kurt Eichenwald, “Facebook Leans In,”
Vanity Fair
, May 2013.

13
   
Early in its history, the microprocessor . . .
This famous story from Intel’s early history appears in many articles and sites, but I came across it on the website for the Center for Applied Rationality, http://rationality.org/rationality/.

14
   
Jack Bergstrand of Brand Velocity thinks . . .
From my interview with Bergstrand, January 2013.

15
   
Vijay Govindarajan notes, hospitals in India . . .
Kaihan Krippendorff, “Hurricane Sandy, a Drenching Reminder That Tough Times Inspire Innovation,”
Fast Company
, November 1, 2012.

16
   
What if we were to compete against ourselves? . . .
The story of the
Atlantic
’s reinvention comes from numerous sources, including Jeremy W. Peters, “Web Focus Helps Revitalize The Atlantic,”
New York Times
, December 12, 2010; Lauren Indvik, “Inside ‘The Atlantic’: How One Magazine Got Profitable by Going ‘Digital First,’” Mashable.com, December 19, 2011, http://mashable.com/2011/12/19/the-atlantic-digital-first/; and David Carr, “Covering the World of Business, Digital Only,”
New York Times
, September 24, 2012.

17
   
“The modern worker is not the salary . . .”
From my interview with Tim Ogilvie, January 4, 2013.

18
   
Panera CEO Ron Shaich recalls that . . .
From my interview with Shaich, March 8, 2013.

19
   
How can we drive more ounces into more bodies, more often? . . .
Michael Moss, “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food,”
New York Times Magazine
, February 20, 2013 (adapted from Moss’s book, “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us.”); also, Douglas McGray, “How Carrots Became the New Junk Food,”
Fast Company
, March 22, 2011.

20
   
“What is your tennis ball? (and other entrepreneurial questions)” . . .
Drew Houston’s comments excerpted from his commencement speech at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, June 7, 2013; Brian Spaly quote from “How Entrepreneurs Come Up With Great Ideas,”
Wall Street Journal Reports
, April 29, 2013; Peter Thiel question from Trevor Gilbert, “Peter Thiel’s Pointed Questions to Ask Startups,” PandoDaily, April 19, 2012, http://pandodaily.com/2012/04/19/peter-thiels-pointed-questions-to-ask-startups/; Dave Kashen, “The Values-Driven Startup,” Gigaom.com, December 17, 2011, http://gigaom.com/2011/12/17/kashen-values-driven-startup/.

21
   
Ries believes one of the most . . .
Ries’s question also appeared in my previously cited
Fast Company
post “The 5 Questions Every Company Should Ask Itself.” See also Ries’s book
The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
(New York: Crown Business, 2011).

22
   
In the business world these days . . .
For example, see Cliff Kuang, “The Brainstorming Process Is BS, but Can We Rework It?,”
Fast Company
, January 31, 2012, http://www.fastcodesign.com/1668930/the-brainstorming-process-is-bs-but-can-we-rework-it.

23
   
“There is too much pressure and . . .”
Debra Kaye, “Why Innovation by Brainstorming Doesn’t Work,”
Fast Company
, February 28, 2013.

24
   
Hal Gregersen has been studying the . . .
From my interview with Gregersen. He also discusses the effectiveness of Q-storming, including the “stalling at twenty-five questions” part, in the online video “Question Storming Versus Brainstorming,” posted in Vimeo in September 2012, http://vimeo.com/48200106.

25
   
How might we?
It’s a simple . . .
The
How might we?
story comes from my interviews in September 2012 with Min Basadur, Charles Warren, and Tim Brown, for my
Harvard Business Review
post “The Secret Phrase Top Innovators Use,” September 17, 2012, http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/09/the_secret_phrase_top_innovato.html. Hat tip to Charles Warren, who first talked about the Basadur/
How might we?
story in this video: http://vimeo.com/21316624.

26
   
What would Neil Patrick Harris do? . . .
From my interview with Andrew Rossi of M Booth; the description of Neil Patrick Harris from Hillary Busis, “No big opening number at this year’s Emmys—and more hints from Neil Patrick Harris,” Entertainment Weekly’s Inside TV blog, September 6, 2013, http://insidetv.ew.com/2013/09/06/neil-patrick-harris-emmys-interview/.

27
   
Although the HMW has been used . . .
Prior to Basadur’s use, the phrase
How might we?
was being used as part of the Creative Problem Solving Process, developed by Sid Parnes.

28
   
Adam Bryant, who writes the
New
. . .
Adam Bryant, “Distilling the Wisdom of CEOs,”
New York Times
, April 16, 2011. See also Bryant’s book
The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed
(New York: Times Books, 2011).

29
   
Randy Komisar, a leading Silicon Valley . . .
From my interviews with Komisar, fall 2012.

30
   
Bryan Franklin has observed that effective . . .
From Franklin’s TEDxSinCity talk, “The Most Dangerous Question on Earth,” uploaded May 27, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tClHDEoje6Y.

31
   
Why can’t everyone accept credit cards? . . .
David Pogue, “Card Reader on a Phone Pays Off,”
New York Times
, September 30, 2010; Issie Lapowsky, “The Man Who Made the Cash Register Obsolete,”
Inc. Magazine
, May 2013; Dorsey’s views on simplicity taken from “6 Questions with Jack Dorsey,”
Detroit Free Press
, September 16, 2012; also, Daniel Terdiman, “Square’s Jack Dorsey to Tech Founders: Question Everything,” C/NET, September 10, 2012.

32
   
leaders need extraordinary “sensemaking” capabilities . . .
Sangeeth Varghese, “The Four Capabilities Behind Great Leadership,”
Forbes
, September 7, 2010.

33
   
The late, legendary business guru Peter Drucker . . .
From my conversation with Rick Wartzman, as well as from his post “How to Consult Like Peter Drucker,”
Forbes
, September 11, 2012.

34
   
And as author Dan Ariely noted . . .
Dan Ariely, “Why Businesses Don’t Experiment,”
Harvard Business Review
, April 2010.

35
   
When Jim Hackett, the CEO of Steelcase . . .
From my interview with Hackett, though I also relied on Hackett quotes in Adam Bryant, “Leadership Never Looks Prepackaged,”
New York Times
, August 19, 2012.

36
   
“In all affairs it’s a healthy thing . . .”
Bertrand Russell’s quote appears in many places, including “26 Fantastic Thoughts and Quotes by Bertrand Russell,” on the Vivsingh quotations site, http://www.vivsingh.com/4161/great-minds-genius-people-quotes-quotations/26-fantastic-quotes-thoughts-bertrand-russell.

37
   
Tim Brown, the chief executive at IDEO . . .
From my interview with Brown, April 21, 2013.

38
   
What if a bookstore could be like summer camp? . . .
From my interview with BookPeople’s Steve Bercu; also, Yvonne Zipp “The Novel Resurgence of Independent Bookstores,”
Christian Science Monitor
, March 17, 2013.

39
   
A different approach by IBM under . . .
As told to me by Keith Yamashita, who has consulted for IBM.

40
   
Google has maintained a wide-open . . .
Google’s TGIF sessions are well-known, but an insider’s description of them was provided to me by former Google engineer Charles Warren.

41
   
The business writer Dale Dauten has . . .
Vern Burkhardt, “Interview with Dale Dauten,”
IdeaConnection
, March 21, 2011.

42
   
As Google has grown, it has become increasingly difficult . . .
Christopher Mims, “Google’s 20% time, which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead,” Atlantic.com’s Quartz blog, August 16, 2013. (An update to the post suggested that the program was still alive, though not used as much as in the past, for various reasons.)

43
   
LinkedIn, whose designated “Hack Days” . . .
From Bob Jeffrey’s interview with LinkedIn’s Jeff Weiner, “Innovating From Within,” posted on Jeffrey’s Worldmakers blog, June 24, 2013.

44
   
In Gore’s case, the program stipulates . . .
The section on W. L. Gore comes primarily from my interview with Gore’s Debra France, February 2013; another great source of information on the company, including the story about guitar strings, was Alan Deutschman, “The Fabric of Creativity,”
Fast Company
, December 1, 2004.

45
   
The company established Google University . . .
Sarah Kessler, “Here’s a Google Perk Any Company Can Imitate: Employee-to-Employee Learning,”
Fast Company
, March 26, 2013.

46
   
This is necessary because many of . . .
The problem with playing devil’s advocate in brainstorming sessions is well described in Tom Kelley,
The Ten Faces of Innovation
(New York: Doubleday, 2005).

47
   
the pragmatic “implementers” . . .
From my interviews with Min Basadur and my visit to his company in December 2012. The term
implementers
is one of the four Basadur uses to categorize people in creative/brainstorming sessions:
generators
,
implementers
,
optimizers
, and
conceptualizers
.

Chapter 5: Questioning for Life

  
1
   
When Jacqueline Novogratz was about to . . .
From my interview with Novogratz at Acumen, March 14, 2013.