“Fuzzy, how did you find the golf course this morning?”
“Well, I walked out of the Clubhouse and there it was!”
– An exchange between a sports reporter and Fuzzy Zoeller some years ago
Regrettably, the questions most sports reporters ask haven’t evolved or improved much, either.
It’s maddening, really. I mean questions are the lifeblood of any business, but — and maybe this got drummed in to me too much as a fledgling journalism major 35 years ago — c’mon! You’re a reporter, for cryin’ out loud! Ask better questions.
Over the years, though, it’s been consistently amazing how infrequently key people have known the answer to key questions. In the sales process. In the customer care process. In the legal process. In any aspect of business, too often, we simply don’t know.
Usually, because we didn’t ask.
Or, if we did ask, we asked poorly, or incompletely. Or, as my friend and mentor Dennis Kuester once said, “I keep asking your man for information, Steve, and he keeps giving me data instead!”
A good question is one that seeks to understand. A good question is one that probes, that goes beyond the data point and gets to the cause or the root of the matter at hand. A good question deals with feelings and facts, insight and information.
Think of the best question you’ve ever heard in a business setting. Post it here in the “Speak Your Mind” section below, please. I’ll consolidate them and publish them back in a future post.
Oh. One more thing. The worst question is the one we don’t ask…
todd says
20 years ago, in first year of opening trading on the floor of the Mercantile Exchange, I bought 2000 December futures in the Eurodollar market. The clerk standing below me asked, “Why did you just buy those?” Open-ended questions like that one can go so many ways. I could have just assumed that he didn’t understand that I was hedging the 4000 PUT OPTIONS, I had just purchased. OR he could have known exactly why I did it, but had a different approach or hedging style, OR he wanted to hear my thought process. OR he just wondering. Without hesitation, I went into a whole explanation about how the matrices in my head triggers my reactionary responses and I probably should have hedged more, but I had a strong feeling that I made the perfect market….. And it turns out, that is exactly what he wanted to know. He agreed that I had made the PERFECT market. He said, “If you knew you made the perfect market, then why did you just GIVE SO MUCH OF IT BACK?’ Risk, in any business setting, is whatever you deem the value of the loss. I was a very conservative trader because I always wanted complete control of my position. I probably left a lot of money on the table over my short five years there, but I never lost sleep because of a risk I should not have taken.