A Beautiful Constraint: How To Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages, and Why It's Everyone's Business

3 ASK PROPELLING QUESTIONS

How to frame the constraint to force breakthrough

THIS CHAPTER FOCUSES ON:

1. Why is it key to frame questions in the right way to find new paths and transform our constraint?
2. How does framing these questions differ if you are responding to a constraint or imposing one on yourself?
3. Why must we be proactive in generating these kinds of questions?

PART ONE: Uncomfortable Questions

Larry Page, Google's co-founder and CEO, has little patience for the kind of incremental thinking he sees from most large corporations; it is, he believes, guaranteed to become obsolete over time. And he feels that the obsession with competition as the sole driver of innovation—with media coverage he compares to that of a sporting event—is also off the mark: “It's hard,” he says, “to find actual examples of really amazing things that happened solely due to competition.”¹

Page has a different measure of success. He's not interested in simply being “better than,” but in being “really amazing.” And with that as the goal, he sees his role as to look up from the daily contest and ask bigger questions, what he calls 10x questions: those requiring answers that have ten times the impact of previous solutions.

Now Google is the second largest company in the world, with a market cap approaching $400 billion and annual revenues in excess of $50 billion,² so one might ask what they are doing in a book about constraints at all. But despite their obvious lack of financial restrictions, what's ...