Collaborating effectively requires helping others. And helping others requires compassion, which in turn means learning about who they are and what they want. So in order to help my clients, at the start of each relationship, I devote two or three hours to asking the following questions:

• What are your proudest accomplishments and biggest disappointments?
• Which activities energize you and which drain you?
• How do other people

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Author: Susan Cramm
Source: What’s Love Got to Do with Business?
Subject: Organization Questions

1. Is my manager a listener or a reader? Listeners want to hear information first and read about it later. Readers prefer to see a written report before discussing it with you.
2. Does she prefer detailed facts and figures or just an overview? If she thrives on details, focus primarily on accuracy and completeness; if she prefers an overview, emphasize the clarity and crispness of

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Source: Figure Out Your Manager’s Communication Style
Subject: Personal and Career Development

The entire history of management ideas can be seen as a series of answers to a few pragmatic queries.

1. How do we win?
2. How do we prepare for uncertainty?
3. What will help us make smarter decisions?
4. What do we know about change?
5. What’s the best way to do the work?
6. How can I possibly get everything done?
7. What systems should we use to track how we’re doing?
8. What’s our ideal organizational

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Authors: Art Kleiner, Nancy A. Nichols
Source: 20 Questions for Business Leaders
Subject: Leadership Questions

1. What does not fit? Ask yourself, of the various activities and businesses that you have moved into, do they make sense together? Individually, each of them may seem attractive, but can you explain why they would work well together; why the sum is greater than the parts?
2. What would an outsider do? Firms often suffer from legacy products, projects, or beliefs. Things they do

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Author: Freek Vermeulen
Source: 5 Strategy Questions Every Leader Should Make Time For
Subject: Strategy Questions

During a typical customer research process, we will interview customers and might ask them questions like these:

1. How did you hear about the product? We’re looking to understand what customer acquisition mechanisms are working for the company, and if they are consistent with the company’s perceptions.
2. What process did you use to pick this product over the competition? This question sheds light into the sales

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Author: Tomasz Tunguz
Source: 8 Customer Discovery Questions to Validate Product Market Fit for Your Startup
Subject: Entrepreneurship Questions

For marketing, metrics should tie in some way to the ability to acquire, keep and grow the value of customers. For example, how well is marketing:

1. Driving share of preference in order to positively affect consideration and consumption, to grow market share?
2. Influencing share of wallet in order to positively affect customer lifetime value?
3. Accelerating the adoption of a new product or service to impact market

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Author: Laura Patterson
Source: Improve Marketing Performance: How to Choose the Metrics That Matter
Subject: Marketing Questions

To anticipate the future, it helps to use a predictive risk model and then to develop an explicit risk-mitigation plan. Fifteen specific risks, such as poor sponsorship and change overload, threaten to disrupt change efforts. These risks tend to occur in predictable patterns over the life cycle of a change, but only a handful of risks determine success or failure at each stage. A risk … [ Read more ]

Authors: Kevin Murphy, Patrick Litre
Source: Results Delivery: Managing the Highs and Lows of Change
Subject: Change Management Questions

The fundamental task of organization design is, as it always has been, helping a leader move from defining strategy to putting in place an organization that enables the strategy to be executed predictably. An effective organization design model guides a manager in answering five fundamental questions in a thoughtful and well-integrated way.

1. What is the business’s value proposition and it sources of competitive advantage?
2. Which organizational

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Author: John Beeson
Source: Five Questions Every Leader Should Ask About Organizational Design
Subject: Organization Questions

1. What is our risk taxonomy? Just listing risks in an ever-expanding inventory is not enough. An effective risk management foundation requires structuring the forces that have an impact on a company’s worth and survival. Risks need to be categorized in a systematic way and into components that together are exhaustive (all possible risks are covered) and exclusive (no risk is included more than

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Authors: Eric Krell, Henry Essert
Source: Risk Test: 7 Answers You Need to Know
Subjects: Corporate Governance Questions, Risk Management Questions

Though statistical analysis will be left to quantitative analysts, managers have a critical role to play in the beginning and end of the process, framing the question and analyzing the results. In the 2013 article “Keep Up with Your Quants,” Thomas Davenport lists six questions that managers should ask to push back on their analysts’ conclusions:

1. What was the source

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Authors: Thomas Davenport, Walter Frick
Source: An Introduction to Data-Driven Decisions for Managers Who Don’t Like Math
Subject: IT Questions