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    Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life
    Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life
    Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life
    Audiobook8 hours

    Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life

    Written by Hal Gregersen

    Narrated by Rick Adamson

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    About this audiobook

    2018 Nautilus Book Awards Silver Winner

    What if you could unlock a better answer to your most vexing problem—in your workplace, community, or home life—just by changing the question?

    Talk to creative problem-solvers and they will often tell you, the key to their success is asking a different question.

    Take Debbie Sterling, the social entrepreneur who created GoldieBlox. The idea came when a friend complained about too few women in engineering and Sterling wondered aloud: ""why are all the great building toys made for boys?"" Or consider Nobel laureate Richard Thaler, who asked: ""would it change economic theory if we stopped pretending people were rational?"" Or listen to Jeff Bezos whose relentless approach to problem solving has fueled Amazon’s exponential growth: “Getting the right question is key to getting the right answer.”  

    Great questions like these have a catalytic quality—that is, they dissolve barriers to creative thinking and channel the pursuit of solutions into new, accelerated pathways. Often, the moment they are voiced, they have the paradoxical effect of being utterly surprising yet instantly obvious.

    For innovation and leadership guru Hal Gregersen, the power of questions has always been clear—but it took some years for the follow-on question to hit him: If so much depends on fresh questions, shouldn’t we know more about how to arrive at them? That sent him on a research quest ultimately including over two hundred interviews with creative thinkers. Questions Are the Answer delivers the insights Gregersen gained about the conditions that give rise to catalytic questions—and breakthrough insights—and how anyone can create them.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateNov 13, 2018
    ISBN9780062876966
    Author

    Hal Gregersen

    HAL GREGERSEN is the Executive Director of the Leadership Center as MIT, a prolific author and motivational speaker, recognized by Thinkers50 as one of the world’s fifty most innovative minds. He has authored or coauthored ten books, and his most recent bestselling book is The Innovator’s DNA, coauthored with Jeff Dyer and Clayton Christensen.

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    Reviews for Questions Are the Answer

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      I agree. Questions ARE the answer. I realize that sounds vague by itself, but this is an approach to life I've subscribed to for the past decade. This book, however, is a little thin beyond that. The author, to his credit, does give plenty of examples which are necessary to fully explore the power of questions. I just think the lesson is diluted when stretched to book length.The setup is relatively simple. Instead of focusing on the right answers, find the right question instead. This effectively reframes the question, and in doing so might lead you to a different, but better answer. Understanding it is one thing, making it work for you is much harder. That's more of a personalized, life-long pursuit.
    • 5/5
      Questions are the Answer has stuck with me, such that I find myself applying it every day. We tend to make statements. We do so because it’s human nature to share what we think. We do so because we’re expected to have answers. This book shows how asking the right question can be so much more powerful. Questions frame the problem. In a group setting, questions can also catalyze the whole team in a new and common direction. I wish I had encountered this book sooner in my role as a leader.