I've begun reading Jim Collins' latest book, How the Mighty Fall: and Why Some Companies Never Give In, bought on my recent trip to Chicago. He begins the book with a story about leading a seminar at West Point to a group that included not just leaders from the military but also from commerce and the third sector. He uses this story to set the scene for his book.
This is one of the two reasons I like Collins' writing. He is a story-teller. He contextualises the points he makes and the stats he presents as part of stories.
The second reason is that he is an excellent researcher. I once heard him say at a previous Leadership Summit that. 'all great research starts with a great question.'
The question that spawned this book is, "Why did great companies decline and what are the warning signs of decline?" (I suppose that's two questions...)
As a top-flight professor he is is used to posing great questions among seminars of students. In places like Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and Cambridge asking probing questions is a primary mode of teaching.
It seems to me that every great trainer and coach comes armed with .... no, not PowerPoint slides :) ... but great questions, questions that challenge and stretch students, to look a little deeper, to look for patterns in the data, to grow their own hypotheses, before being given some prefabricated model.Asking good questions, questions that provoke reflection and pertinent enquiry, helps a student bridge from their own experience and constructs of that experience to breakthrough insights.
Ask
an impertinent question and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.
This is an excellent resource!
Posted by: Term Papers | 15 December 2009 at 06:42 AM