Question 4: “Are your clients Pepsi or Coke drinkers?”

For a B2C company this question can reveal how deeply you have researched your consumers. I’m in a B2B company and I think this is a good question we can also ask the Client Partners or Sales guys who are managing accounts and it would reveal just how often they’ve had informal chats with their customers and how closely they know them.

Note: Stay tuned for the remaining 2 questions that I will share in the next 3 days…

This question is really asking, where in a company is it most safe to experiment and ask radical questions. You can’t do it everywhere. “As an established business,” says Tim Ogilvie, author and entrepreneur, “you’ve got all these promises you’re keeping to your current customers—you have to stay focused on that. But that may not have a future.” So the question becomes, “Where, within the company, can you explore heretical questions that could threaten the business as it is—without contaminating what you’re doing now?”

P.S. Petri-dish is a small, clear, round dish used for scientific tests in a Laboratory.

Note: Stay tuned for the remaining 3 questions that I will share in the next 3 days…

Successful leaders excel at the art of asking goodquestions and sometimes these 100-200 words odd-ballers can unlock so many hidden layers of a person’s characters and even his leadership potential.

My next 6 posts are going to be on such odd-ball/off-beat questions which you can use to assess your potential or existing leaders.

Question 1: “If we weren’t already in this business, would we enter it today? And if not, what are we going to do about it?” -Peter Drucker, management expert and author

The late Drucker posed a variation on this question to Jack Welch in the 1980s. It inspired General Electric’s “fix, sell, or close” strategy for exiting or restructuring unprofitable businesses.

Note: Stay tuned for the rest of the 5 questions that I will share in the next 5 days…

While at Davos this year, I heard a journalist friend recall a chat she had with IMF Chief Christian Lagarde where she said she was so tired of business leaders telling her that they wanted women execs on Boards but weren’t finding the right candidates that she started keeping a small piece of paper in her purse with names and numbers of 20 bright and accomplished women leaders she knew; and so the next time a man gave her that “excuse”, out came the paper!

Maybe everyone should have a secret chit in their bags after all. The “excuse” mafia needs to be brought down don’t you think?!

I was reading this old article that biographed (is this even a word?!) N Chandrasekaran’s career and found this rather riveting anecdote:

“In the early stages of his career at TCS, Chandra learnt vital management lessons from customers. Around 1993, he was working on a very large US federal government programme. In the first phase of the project, TCS did a spectacular job. On the day the second phase was about to go live, the client manager came up to Chandra and asked him out to lunch. Chandra was alarmed. The system was going live and he felt he had to stay in the office. But the client manager was persistent. “I was very restless in the car. There were no mobile phones those days – no one could have reached me,” he says. “The client manager then said he needed to find out who could step into my shoes. Somebody needed to handle the job when I wasn’t around.” That was a lesson in delegating, trusting people and risk taking.”

 

While we are on the subject of Adam Grant, I loved his tip on how to become a voracious “Giver”. He propounds for what are called “5-minute favors”: things that bring high value to other people’s lives, but at a relatively low cost. In his words, the thought behind the 5-minute-favors is that “I’m going to microloan my time and my skills to help others without sacrificing myself,” Grant explains.