In his book ‘Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration, and Get to Work’, Mason Currey documents daily rituals of some of the greatest artists, thinkers and scientists of our time from Darwin to Dickens to Picasso to Mozart and 160 others. Here is a gist of the 5 habits that were apparently common across all these stalwarts:

1. They all worked very hard and, frequently, for VERY long hours.
2. Regular, extended exercise – usually walking – was frequently an important part of their routines.
3. They were mostly early risers, with significant exceptions, and did their best work in the first several hours of the day. There were a few nightowls but not many.
4. They had a work routine that they adhered to almost fanatically.
5. Finally, implicitly, habits were key in their successes and productivity.

Everybody has their favorite cabby story and mine just happened a few weeks back. On my way from to office one morning I started chatting up with my middle-aged Indian cabby. Hearing about my company’s work, he pushed two fat books towards me. “I am learning coding and testing too” he said. It so turns out, he drives at day, learns coding at night and in between also runs a web design company. For the latter, he said, he had found inspiration from Malcolm Gladwell’s famous book ‘Outliers’ and was now looking for a “lucky break” which could take him to the other side. “Life can change in a second” he philosophized and then asked me to watch a movie that he swore would change my life too! Its apparently a German movie called ‘Run Lola run’ – an intense, fast paced action film with a rather simplistic plot and unexpectedly deeper philosophical implications about fate, chance, time, choice, and consequence. The movie is one of those underground pieces of art that only true connoisseurs are aware of and understand; to see a cabbie peddle it so fluidly and evocatively had me totally stumped. As I got down from his cab at the busy London Bridge intersection, I thanked him for a riveting conversation and hurried my steps to the office. There was a gazelle in town.

 

Question 5: “How many messages are in your inbox right now?”

Again this is more of an interview question but throwing this as a googly in your chats with your top Execs may also be a good way to understand their time management capabilities, the only trait that is crucible-level in the top echelons.

Note: Stay tuned for the remaining 1 questions that I will share tomorrow…

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…