Management Questions

1. What can I do to make you more effective?
2. What’s keeping you from falling asleep at night?
3. What one thing should I do more? (or one thing I should do less?)
4. What roadblocks are holding you back? (or preventing your projects from moving ahead?)
5. What’s the most important issue you are dealing with right now?
6. What do our competitors do better than us?
7. If you were in my job, what’s the first thing you would you do?
8. What do we do better than anyone else?
9. How can I improve your team’s productivity?
10. What are the two key behaviors of our leadership team?
11. What one thing can we do to make our weekly meeting more effective?
12. What are your top three goals for next month?
13. What’s waking you up at 3:00 in the morning?
14. When you think about our goals, what are we forgetting?
15. If I could do just one thing for you as a result of this discussion, what would it be?

Source: 15 Great Leadership Questions by John McKee | TechRepublic

• What information are we collecting?
• Where and how are we collecting it?
• Who owns it?
• Who has access to it?
• What are we doing with it?
• What would be the impact to the organization if it got into the wrong hands?
• What controls are in place?
• Are efforts to safeguard the information commensurate with its worth?
• Are we gathering unnecessary information that represents potential risk without opportunity for reward?
• Are we maximizing the value of what we collect?
• Could information have more value if we loosened restrictions on it?

Source: Lock It Up or Set It Free? by Ted DeZabala | Deloitte Review, Issue 6

BMI begins by assessing the company’s current context, the needs of its customers, and the models of its competitors. These steps should be completed with sufficient clarity and honesty to reveal what is currently working, what is not, and what might constitute a better value proposition. To that end, we offer the following questions for executives and managers seeking to create a shared awareness of threats and opportunities.

• What compromises does our current business model force customers to make?
• Why are nonusers or defectors dissatisfied with our offering?
• Do we offer customers a better value proposition than that of the competition?
• What alternative models are gaining share at the edges of our industry?
• If we were an industry outsider, what would we do to take advantage of the gaps or weaknesses in our business model?
• Do we have a plan for identifying potential business models, implementing them, and embedding BMI capabilities within the organization?
• What do we need to change in our organization and operations to implement a new business model?
• What information would we need to make a commitment to a new business model?
• How urgent is the perceived need for change in our organization?
• How should our ideas be championed?

Source: Business Model Innovation: When the Game Gets Tough, Change the Game by Zhenya Lindgardt, Martin Reeves, George Stalk, and Michael S. Deimler | Boston Consulting Group (BCG), December 2009

• How will information technology increase transparency in the industry?
• How will transparency impact consumer behaviors, retailer strategies and producer strategies?
• How can we capture value and mitigate the challenges of transparency in terms of price, reputation and other drivers of purchase behaviors?
• How should we react to empowered stakeholders — from consumers to third parties like environmental lobbies — who can impact the reputation of the firm?

Source: The View from the Glass House by Ajit Kambil, Patrick Conroy and Ryan Alvanos | Deloitte Review, Winter 2008