FOCUS: Great Questions

Some Thoughts on Questions
"A very powerful question may not have an answer at the moment it is asked. It will sit rattling in the mind for days or weeks as the person works on an answer. If the seed is planted, the answer will grow. Questions are alive." - Fran Peavey

"The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions." - Anthony Jay

"The answers you get depend upon the questions you ask." – Thomas Kuhn

"The first people had questions and they were free. The second people had answers and they became enslaved." - Wind Eagle, Native American Chief

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Never lose a holy curiosity." - Albert Einstein

"I'm much more interested these days in having debates about what the questions should be than I necessarily am about the solutions." - Tim Brown, IDEO CEO, The New York Times

"If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions?" - Scott Adams

Some Questions
“Customer satisfaction is best measured by one simple question, 'How likely are you to recommend ____ to a friend?' - Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company

"If you weren't already in a business, would you enter it today? And if the answer is no, what are you going to do about it?" - Peter Drucker to Jack Welch, 1981

"Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?" - Steve Jobs

"Would you want your wife to pee in this place?” - Paco Underhill, Why We Buy

“The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?'" - Douglas Adams

Scanning the Periphery
From a Masters Forum Presentation, Roch Parayre, DSI

• What have been our past blind spots?
• What is happening there now?
• Is there an instructive analogy from another industry?
• Who in your industry is skilled at picking up weak signals and acting on them ahead of competition?
• What important signals are you rationalizing away?
• What are your mavericks and authors saying?
• What are peripheral customers and competitors really thinking?
• What future surprises could hurt or help us?
• What emerging technologies could change the game?
• Is there an unthinkable scenario?
  

Questions of the Year
From TED Global 2009 by Chris Anderson

• What is an accomplished life?
• Which universe do we live in?
• Is life a mathematical equation?
• Where does motivation come from?
• Who's defining the new geopolitical map?
• How can we observe what we can't see?
• Can we design the air we breathe?
• What's the economic impact of terrorism?
• Should we fear faith?
• What makes big cities function?
• What do top-secret places look like?
• What's the true nature of modern crime?
• Can a solar-powered plane fly?
• What's the power of music?
• Can we put biodiversity in a bank?
• How does the brain create the mind?

Who Are We . . . Really?
From No Easy Victories by John Gardner

• What things are forgotten in the heat of battle?
• What values get pushed aside in the rough-and-tumble of everyday living?
• What are the goals we ought to be thinking about and never do?
• What are the facts we don’t like to face?
• What are the questions we lack the courage to ask?

Jack Welch, Q & A with Alex D'Arbeloff


From the Harvard Business School
Scanning for Threats and Opportunities by George S. Day & Paul J.H. Schoemaker

From Knowledge@Wharton
Vigilant vs. Operational Leaders (PDF)

From Bowling Green State University
A Lifetime List of Dialogue Questions by Walter Maner

ODDS & ENDS: Gifts, Country Music, Language

On Gifts
"Johnny Cash sang like he meant business. He didn't get fancy and he didn't send his voice on missions it could not complete, but there was an urgency in his best songs that pounded them home. When he sang something, it stayed sung." - Roger Ebert

On Country Music
"Country music is three chords and the truth." - Harlan Howard

"Country music has always been the best shrink that 15 bucks can buy." - Dierks Bentley

"There is a general place in your brain, I think, reserved for 'melancholy of relationships past.' It grows and prospers as life progresses, forcing you finally, against your better judgment, to listen to country music." - Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize lecture, December, 1993

"I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means put down." - Bob Newhart

"Country songs have always told the best stories and no one - really, no one - has ever done it better than Nashville. All my life I've admired guitarists like Chet Atkins and Roy Clark who touched me through their sound, but it was those Nashville songwriters who got to me through their words." - B.B. King, blues guitarist and singer-songwriter

On Language
"Language etches the grooves through which your thoughts must flow." - Noam Chomsky

"Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind." - Wade Davis, speaking at The Long Now Foundation

"I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language - and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music." - Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine

"Everything that we have so far seen to be true of language points to the fact that it is the most significant and colossal work that the human spirit has evolved. Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations." – Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech

"And one thing we have lost – the courage to make new words or combinations. Somewhere that old bravado has slipped off into a gangrened scholarship. Oh! you can make words if you enclose them in quotation marks. This indicates that it is dialect and cute." – John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

"The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others." - Alain de Botton, On Love

"Speech is the mother, not the handmaid, of thought." - Karl Kraus

"That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts." - Nietzsche

Johnny Cash, The Man in Black


From Academy of Achievement
Music's Man In Black: An Interview with Johnny Cash

From FORA.tv
A.C. Grayling & Don Watson, It's All Gone to the Dogs - Video

From FORA.tv
Roy Blount Jr., The Sounds, Roots, and History of Words - Video

From YouTube
Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature - Video

MASTERMIND: Thomas Sowell

"Much of the self-righteous nonsense that abounds on so many subjects cannot stand up to three questions: 1) Compared to what? 2) At what cost? and 3) What are the hard facts?" - Thomas Sowell

"One of the great meaningless phrases of our times is: 'I take full responsibility.' This does not mean that you are prepared to pay the consequences for what you have done. On the contrary, this statement is usually offered instead of taking the consequences." - Thomas Sowell

"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good." - Thomas Sowell

"No individual and no generation has had enough personal experience to ignore the vast experience of the human race that is called history. Yet most of our schools and colleges today pay little attention to history. And many of our current policies repeat mistakes that were made, time and again, in the past with disastrous results." - Thomas Sowell

"Not only does the passage of time produce knowledge, it also produces ignorance. As the passage of time removes people with first-hand knowledge of an earlier era, they are replaced by people ignorant of those times and therefore easy targets for demagogues." - Thomas Sowell

"Nearly two hundred years ago, the great economist David Ricardo said: 'I wish that I may never think the smiles of the great and powerful a sufficient inducement to turn aside from the straight path of honesty and the convictions of my own mind.'" - Thomas Sowell

"Some people are so busy being clever that they don't have time enough to be wise." - Thomas Sowell

"Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty." - Thomas Sowell

"Perhaps the scariest aspect of our times is how many people think in talking points, rather than in terms of real world consequences." - Thomas Sowell

"In this era of political correctness, some people seem unaware that being squeamish about words can mean being blind to realities." - Thomas Sowell

"The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling." - Thomas Sowell

"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong." - Thomas Sowell

"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing." - Thomas Sowell

"One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain." - Thomas Sowell

"There was once a time when parents pointed out bums on the streets and told their children that this was what could happen to you if you didn't bother to learn the things you needed to know, and do the things you needed to do, to make it in life. Today, children are taught to be 'non-judgmental' and the media keep saying that these drug-ridden derelicts are 'people just like us' who happened to fall on hard times." - Thomas Sowell

"What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long." - Thomas Sowell

"One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them." - Thomas Sowell

"If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win." - Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals & Society: Part One - Introduction


Intellectuals and Society: Part Two - Economics (Video)
Intellectuals and Society: Part Three - Vision (Video)
Intellectuals and Society: Part Four - War (Video)
Intellectuals and Society: Part Five - The Rest of Us (Video)

Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions


From the Jewish World Review
Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell (Column)
Intellectuals and Society: Part II by Thomas Sowell (Column)

From The Orange County Register
Thomas Sowell Dissects Intellectuals by Mark Landsbaum (Editorial)

ODDS & ENDS: Beliefs, History Lessons, Gettysburg Address, Conflict, Overcoming Disappointment

Beliefs and Credos
"I am a singer and a songwriter, but I am also a father - four times over. I am a friend to dogs. I am a sworn enemy of the saccharine, and a believer in grace over karma. I talk too much when I'm drunk and sometimes even when I'm not." - Bono, lead singer, U2

"There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?" - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

"Belief? What do I believe in? I believe in sun. In rock. In the dogma of the sun and the doctrine of the rock. I believe in blood, fire, woman, rivers, eagles, storm, drums, flutes, banjos, and broom-tailed horses." - Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto): Notes from a Secret Journal

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge,
That myth is more potent than history,
That dreams are more powerful than facts,
That hope always triumphs over experience,
That laughter is the only cure for grief,
And I believe that love is stronger than death.
- Robert Fulghum, The Storyteller's Creed

"What I'm suggesting is, stand for yourself, be for something and the hell with it. Because the hand-wringers and the editorialists and the sigh-and-pontificate crowd will be against you, whatever you do." - James Carville

“Every man gives his life for what he believes. Every woman gives her life for what she believes. Sometimes people believe in little or nothing. Nevertheless, they give up their life to that little or nothing. Our life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it and then it is gone. But to surrender what you are…and live without belief…that’s more terrible than dying…more terrible than dying young.” - Maxwell Anderson, Joan of Lorraine

History Lessons
"Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars." - Charles A. Beard, All the Lessons of History in Four Sentences

"Our generation is realistic for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who has invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who has entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or Shema Yisrael on his lips." - Victor Frankl

"History gives us a kind of chart, and we dare not surrender even a small rushlight in the darkness. The hasty reformer who does not remember the past will find himself condemned to repeat it." - John Buchan

"If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind us." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

On The Gettysburg Address
"Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?" - Robert Coles

"The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States." - Chicago Times, commenting on Lincoln's Gettysburg Address the next day

Robert Coles: Children Consider Human Conflict



From FORA.tv
Rabbi Harold Kushner, Overcoming Life's Disappointments (Video)


From Scott London
A Way of Seeing: The Work of Robert Coles (Essay)

From Google Books
The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination by Robert Coles