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Warren Berger
September 11, 2015
When asked recently to name the one attribute CEOs will need most to succeed in
the turbulent times ahead, Michael Dell, the chief executive of Dell, Inc.,
replied, I would place my bet on curiosity.
Dell was responding to a 2015 PwC survey of more than a thousand CEOs, a number
of whom cited curiosity and open-mindedness as leadership traits that are
becoming increasingly critical in challenging times. Another of the
respondents, McCormick & Company CEO Alan D. Wilson, noted that business
leaders who are always expanding their perspective and what they know and have
that natural curiosity are the people that are going to be successful.
Welcome to the era of the curious leader, where success may be less about
having all the answers and more about wondering and questioning. As Dell noted,
curiosity can inspire leaders to continually seek out the fresh ideas and
approaches needed to keep pace with change and stay ahead of competitors.
A curious, inquisitive leader also can set an example that inspires creative
thinking throughout the company, according to Hollywood producer Brian Grazer.
If you re the boss, and you manage by asking questions, you re laying the
foundation for the culture of your company or your group, Grazer writes in his
book, A Curious Mind. Grazer and others maintain that leading-by-curiosity can
help generate more ideas from all areas of an organization, while also helping
to raise employee engagement levels.
The notion that curiosity can be good for business is not entirely new, of
course. Decades ago, Walt Disney declared that his company managed to keep
innovating because we re curious, and curiosity keeps leading us down new
paths. But having that desire to keep exploring new paths becomes even more
important in today s fast-changing, innovation-driven marketplace.
In my own research for my book, A More Beautiful Question, I found numerous
examples of current-day entrepreneurs and innovators including Netflix s Reed
Hastings, Square s Jack Dorsey, and the team behind Airbnb who relied on
curious inquiry as a starting point to reinventing entire industries. Dorsey,
for example, was puzzled when an artist friend lost a big sale to a potential
customer simply because the artist couldn t accept a credit card. Dorsey
wondered why only established businesses, and not smaller entrepreneurs, were
able to conduct credit card transactions; his search for an answer resulted in
Square, a more accessible credit card reader.
While curiosity has ignited numerous startup ventures, it also plays an
important role at more established companies, where leaders are having to
contend with disruptive change in the marketplace. These days, a leader s
primary occupation must be to discover the future, Panera Bread CEO Ron Shaich
told me. It s a continual search, Shaich says, requiring that today s leader
keep exploring new ideas including ideas from other industries or even from
outside the business world.
Advising business leaders to be more curious sounds simple enough, but it may
require a change in leadership style. In many cases, managers and top
executives have risen through the ranks by providing fixes and solutions, not
by asking questions. And once they ve attained a position of leadership, they
may feel the need to project confident expertise.
To acknowledge uncertainty by wondering aloud and asking deep questions carries
a risk: the leader may be perceived as lacking knowledge. In their book The
Innovator s DNA, authors Clayton Christensen, Hal Gregersen and Jeff Dyer
observed that the curious, questioning leaders they studied seemed to overcome
this risk because they had a rare blend of humility and confidence: They were
humble enough to acknowledge to themselves that they didn t have all the
answers, and confident enough to be able to admit that in front of everyone
else.
While we may tend to think of curiosity as a hardwired personality trait
meaning, one either is blessed with a curious mind or not according to Ian
Leslie, author of the book Curious, curiosity is actually more of a state than
a trait. We all have the potential to be curious, given the right conditions.
Leslie notes that curiosity seems to bubble up when we are exposed to new
information and then find ourselves wanting to know more. Hence, the would-be
curious leader should endeavor to get out of the bubble when possible; to
seek out new influences, ideas, and experiences that may fire up the desire to
learn more and dig deeper.
Even when operating within familiar confines, curious leaders tend to try to
see things from a fresh perspective. The ones I studied in my research seemed
to have a penchant for bringing a beginner s mind approach to old problems
and stubborn challenges. They continually examined and re-examined their own
assumptions and practices, asking deep, penetrating Why questions, as well as
speculative What if and How questions.
Such leaders sometimes also evangelize about curiosity, urging people in their
organizations to Question Everything. This can serve to model the behavior
for others, though leaders may have to go much further providing sufficient
freedom and incentives in order to actually create the conditions for curiosity
to flourish company-wide.
In the end, it isn t necessarily easy for a leader to foster curiosity on an
individual or organizational level but it may be well worth the effort. With
curiosity comes learning and new ideas, says Dell. If you re not doing that,
you re going to have a real problem.
Warren Berger (@GlimmerGuy) is author of the new book A More Beautiful
Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas (Bloomsbury).