Dan Erwin

The Greatest Business Value and Personal Power In Today’s Work World . . .

comes from high-powered questions.

The least used and one of the most productive tools for professional conversation is high-level questioning. But for a number of reasons, questioning has always gotten short shrift. Traditionally, asking questions is thought of as revealing your incompetence, which is then rewarded with a loss of influence. Even today, when the need for intelligent questions ought to be obvious, I meet very few who actually use questions strategically, much less effectively. Furthermore, even fewer professionals, including yesterday’s traditionalist or today’s knowledge worker, understand that questioning is a linguistic device that can make great contributions to the organization—and grant profound influence and power to the individual. In more than 20 years of consulting hundreds of high-powered executives, I have heard no one asking  or talking about questioning unless I initiated the subject.

All questions are speech actions that affect the way individuals and teams organize their thinking about people, problems, and processes. And in effective teams high-powered questions are a--and sometimes the--major element of the conversation. The better questions can often positively impact personal influence, relationships, team focus, team organization, problem solving, strategies, priorities, motivation, and decision making. In short, higher order questions can have a huge role in shaping both our thought and our behavior.

Not all questions are created equal. John Hagel has written that the greatest value and personal power in today’s environment comes from questions that no one had even thought to ask but that help to focus attention on promising but previously ignored areas. Although such questions often require more complex, critical thinking and very thoughtful formatting, let’s begin with the basics.

Soft on White Collar Crime?

One of my occasional experiences is listening to legislators, ordinary people and journalists talking and writing about what CEOs and senior executives should know about employees are doing five levels below them. Inevitably, a significant percentage go to the “lock-‘em-up” mentality. That’s nearly impossible in big companies, unless like Wells Fargo’s CEO, John Stumpf it’s a widespread criminal behavior that’s been going on for years. So I’m always watching for examples of business reality for my readers—reality, that is, that reflects my years of experience with top companies and my own philosophical orientation. All the better if that reality is supported by trustworthy research. A few years ago, the Economist dealt in superb fashion with the “lock-‘em-up” mentality for white collar crime.

But first, let’s be candid about business magazines and newspapers. All of my antennae are out when I’m reading local newspapers and  the Wall Street Journal and nearly all the American business magazines. The public sphere seems to be consumed by events that you could label ‘reaction chains.’ Reactions provoke reactions, which provoke further reactions and so on.

Last year’s Oscar’s ceremony is remembered for just such a reaction chain. When the host, Chris Rock, made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s shaved head, her husband, Will Smith, strode up on the stage and slapped Rock in the face on live television. For a week afterward numerous commentators, celebrities and social media folk tried to distinguish themselves by their reactions to the “slap.” Inevitably, those reactions provoked more reactions. And that is

The Actual Statistics on Immigration Aren’t Scary

So what’s the beef? I find it intriguing, even nonsensical, that a lot of Americans do not want immigrants—and many are downright scared of them. That’s not historically unusual. Our fears about immigrants have come and go throughout the centuries of our existence. The latest Yosemite series—1923—has an episode where one of the Dutton Ranch members is off to jail for “miscegenation.” The Anglo cowboy has married a Chinese woman and has children with her.

Historically, the US government has attempted to ship Chinese, Japanese and Blacks back to the lands of their forebears. Abraham Lincoln, for one, was keen on getting Blacks out of the country. He entered into a contract with a plantation owner to buy a small island off Haiti and settle some enslaved Blacks. But 50 years before the Civil War both John Quincey Adams and Andrew Jackson thought the answer for the “problem” was to send free Black Americans to Africa through “colonization.” Starting in 1816, the American Colonization Society sought to create a colony in Africa for this purpose. This was 50 years before the U.S. would abolish slavery. Over the next three decades, the society secured land in West Africa and shipped people to the colony, which became the nation of Liberia in 1847.

By now you may know that the Canadians are welcoming immigrants with open arms. They have a plan to bring in 1.5 immigrants  by 2025. Just last year, Canada took in 405,000 permanent immigrant residents.

To the Givers Go the Riches: The Hidden Dimension of Work—and Life Relationships

Today’s political world would often have you believe that it’s the “getters” who have success—not the “getters.” But that’s a short term bias. And admittedly a few politicos seem to have success on that basis. But what you’re seeing is the gross exception not the everyday reality. The percentage of successful “getters” is very small, even though that few get a lot of attention. American writers love to call attention to the exceptions: it makes for great reading and sells a lot of copy. 

Just common sense
The people who look at the big picture recognize that a few of the getters succeed, but they know it’s a damned few. And that a terrific percentage of “getters” are very unhappy, frustrated people down deep. It’s just common sense that the givers make the great contributions to our communities—not the getters. The problem with that statement, however, is that common sense has become a rare ingredient in most cultures. And for a number of documentable reasons common sense has become a rare commodity in today’s world. It’s that loss, too, that drives all the craziness, fake facts and conspiracy thinking we stare at or listen to nearly every day.

The major reason common sense has gone the way of the dodo bird is the unique siloing of the universe since WWII. We’ve got academic silos, business silos, industry silos, religious silos, political silos, class silos, economic silos, race silos--and most people talking to themselves. No wonder the crazies are able to stir up manure by the ton load. If you know your history and literature, you know that silos have always been around, limiting and rejecting a common worldly sense.

The example that often comes to mind is