There’s no Superman versus Iron Man face-off between questions and answers over which is the better tool for innovation. But if there were, questions would be winning.
To compile this list of provocative questions for business owners, I have reached out to entrepreneurs and management thinkers, scanned blogs, and revisited my favorite business books. (Though i tried to identify the origin of each question, some had competing claims of authorship. In those cases, i made my best call.)
- How can we become the company that would put us out of business?
- If energy were free, what would we do differently? : “This is a thought experiment to see how you would reconfigure the business if you had different resources available or knew that different resources would one day become available. Another question might be, what if storage was free? Or what if labor costs half as much or twice as much?”
- If we weren’t already in this business, would we enter it today? And if not, what are we going to do about it?
- Which customers can’t participate in our market because they lack skills, wealth, or convenient access to existing solutions?
- What do we stand for–and what are we against?
- Is our strategy driving our strategy? Or is the way in which we allocate resources driving our strategy? : “You might think you have a strategic plan, but your people may be doing things on a day-to-day basis that are undermining it. It’s essential that people believe in the strategy so they can make the daily decisions that support it.”
- How can we become high-tech but still be high touch?
- Are you taking your company in the direction of better and revenue or cheaper and cost?
- What have we done to protect our business from competitive encroachment?
- What information is critical to our organization that our executives are ignoring?
- If you could go back in time five years, what decision would you make differently? What is your best guess as to what decision you’re making today you might regret five years from now?
