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|CHAPTER 9|

Questions: How to Ask the Best—and Answer the Worst

“My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.”

—PETER DRUCKER,management consultant, author of 39 books

“Management teams aren’t good at asking questions. In business school, we train them to be good at giving answers.”

—CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN,professor, Harvard Business School

Find Your Balance between Making Assertions and Asking Questions

When Kevin Sharer became CEO of Amgen, a $14 billion biotech company, he spent 150 hours asking questions.

150 hours. He interviewed 150 Amgen leaders, one hour each.

Would you have done that?

Smart people ask smart questions, although this isn’t always easy. I remember preparing a roomful of executives at a Fortune ...